Remember JSPAN in your end-of-year giving!

As we approach January 27th, the United Nations Designated International Day of Commemoration in Memory of Victims of the Holocaust, we are confronted once more by the inflammatory actions of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, who used his Holocaust Conference this past week as a platform to spotlight deniers and to spout his anti-Israel rhetoric. In his efforts to achieve political status both at home and among Middle- East countries, President Ahadinejad has attempted to manipulate history with the conference's examination of the veracity of the Holocaust as well as the validity of Israel's right to exist.

President George Bush joined the leaders of Germany, France, the Vatican, Great Britain and other countries in denouncing the objectives of such a conference at which sixty-seven Holocaust revisionists and deniers from thirty countries were in attendance.

The White House issued a statement stating, "the gathering of Holocaust deniers in Tehran is an affront to the entire civilized world as well as to the traditional Iranian values of tolerance and mutual respect. The Iranian regime perversely seeks to call the historical fact of those atrocities into question and provide a platform for hatred."

The Wiesenthal Center, in an act of protest, held a videoconference during the same time-frame, with seventy survivors giving eye-witness testimony of their shattering experiences during the years of the Shoah.

The Tehran conference has ended but no doubt the efforts of this fanatical and dangerous leader to distort history will continue. He plans to establish a Research Center on the Holocaust that will continue to spread the deniers' distorted truths in the Arab/Muslim world, In response, Deborah Lipstadt, the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University has assembled a research team that will create a series of Q and A on Holocaust denial. It will be a one- page fact sheet which will answer the most basic charges deniers make. If you wish to see what the project will look like go to http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~dleshem/guides/.

As this generation of Holocaust survivors dwindles in numbers, it is incumbent upon all of us to keep the factual history and events of the tragic years of the Holocaust in the forefront of our collective memory and in the memory of future generations, so that we, and those who follow us, not only honor the lives of all of those who perished, but keep eternal vigilance over the Holocaust's historical truth.

This can be our only response to such hate-mongering.

It is incumbent upon all people of decency to always recall where hatred of our fellow human beings has led and to vow that their memory will be an inspiration to approach all with love and compassion.

Reverse Both the Linkage and the Logic

The following is an article written by Yossi Alpher, co-editor of bitterlemons.org. Mr. Alpher served as a special advisor on the peace process to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2000 and was previously head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University.

The Iraq Study Group, or Baker-Hamilton report, is not for the most part about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Rather, it is a last-ditch attempt to generate new American policies in the Middle East that can somehow avoid a tragic US defeat in Iraq. By the by, it acknowledges that the diverse conflict situations in the region are linked and suggests a series of policy initiatives in the related conflicts that might positively influence America's situation in Iraq. In so doing, it gets not only the linkage wrong, but also the recipe for progress between Israelis and Palestinians.

The ISG asserts that, "the United States will not be able to achieve its goals in the Middle East unless [it] deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict". Thus it buys wholeheartedly into the theory that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the source of much of the unrest in other parts of the Middle East. We witnessed similar assertions in recent weeks by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and British PM Tony Blair. The latter, incidentally, went so far as to tell an audience in Pakistan that an Israeli-Palestinian peace would reduce jihadi terrorism there!

There can be little doubt that peace or even the rudiments of an active peace process between Israelis and Palestinians would be beneficial for the Middle East as a whole. Nor do Israelis and Palestinians need the incentive of reducing jihadi terrorism in Pakistan in order to apply themselves to solving their conflict. But would the mess in Iraq look any different today if, three years ago, the Arab-Israel conflict had not existed? Would Lebanon? Would Iran have ceased to develop nuclear weapons, seek regional hegemony or support Hizballah? There is simply no basis in fact or regional logic to support this approach, which gratuitously accepts the most handy Arab excuse for avoiding democratization and for not confronting the region's real problems.

"The United States", notes the report, "does its ally Israel no favors in avoiding direct involvement to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict". There is merit to this statement, which in Baker's case is based on the successful attempt back in 1991 to bring Israel and its neighbors to Madrid, where a peace process was launched.

But the report ignores at its peril the heavy contrast between America's status in the region then (victory over Iraq and "pax Americana" in the post-Cold War Middle East) and now (failure in Iraq and in virtually every other avenue of American endeavor in the region). Its writers seem to believe that if they just list the all too obvious issues the conflicted parties have to talk about and call for "sustainable negotiations", the fragmented leadership in Gaza and Ramallah and the mafia-like Assad family in Damascus will salute and comply. In fact the Iranians, Syrians, Hamas and Hizballah appear to view the report as confirmation that they have won the day against America. Witness the statement two days ago in Tehran by the ostensibly "moderate" Palestinian PM Ismail Haniyeh: "Iran is our strategic depth".

ISRAEL POLICY FORUM:

Deconstructing -- and Not Demolishing -- the Baker Report

By David Dreilinger and IPF Staff.

Most Israelis have not rushed to embrace the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group report released last week in the United States.

The report, whose recommendations are designed to help ameliorate the troubled situation in Iraq and rebuild America’s standing in the Middle East, calls for a renewed push in Washington for Israeli-Arab peace.

To this end, the report recommends engaging Syria and Iran to calm the sectarian violence in Iraq and expediting the training of Iraqi troops. The report also recommends restarting Syrian-Israeli peace talks over the Golan Heights and pushing for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations toward a two-state solution.

No matter that the Israel-Arab recommendations take up only five pages of the nearly 100-page report; many people in Israel and the US have cried foul and lambasted the report’s authors, former Secretary of State James Baker and former Congressman Lee Hamilton, for implying that there is any link between the resolution of the Israeli-Arab conflict and the situation in Iraq.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, for one, said: “The attempt to create a linkage between the Iraqi issue and the Mideast issue – we have a different view,” he said. Many others in Israel and the United States, including foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and a host of pundits and columnists, echoed these sentiments.

Nevertheless, the issue is not as cut-and-dry as that. According to Ethan Bronner of the New York Times, “Israeli leaders, while publicly complaining about Mr. Baker’s linkage of all Middle Eastern problems, are acting as if there is a connection, and seeking common cause with Arab states over Iran and the Palestinian question.”

There is some truth to this. In the face of the growing Iranian threat – a threat that was magnified by the invasion of Iraq and subsequent developments there – Israel is increasing its contacts with moderate Arab regimes, and has even reached out to Saudi Arabia, a country that shares Israel's regional concerns. While the linkage between the conflicts may not be direct, both Israelis and moderate Arabs (most notably the Saudis) understand that the unraveling of Iraq has put them all in the same boat: facing a growing Iranian threat. For the Arabs, movement toward resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will make it infinitely easier for them to work with Israel for regional stability. That is precisely what Baker-Hamilton envisions.

On December 13, 2006, Florida executed Angel Nieves Diaz by lethal injection. The execution took 34 minutes. While differing explanations have been offered as to why the execution took that length of time, it is clear that the method of administering the lethal cocktail and perhaps the formulation of the cocktail itself did not produce the intended effect. Witnesses to the execution stated that Mr. Diaz appeared to be in pain and distress for a good part of the 34 minutes. However, because the procedure causes paralysis, Mr. Diaz was unable to communicate verbally any pain he may have experienced. As a result of the Diaz execution, on December 15, 2006, Florida Governor Jeb Bush announced a moratorium on all executions in Florida until March 1, 2007, pending a report by a commission appointed by the Governor to come up with a protocol that would make execution by lethal injection painless.

On the same day, United States District Judge Jeremy Fogel extended an order he had previously entered also imposing a moratorium on execution by lethal injection in California. The original order had been entered after the botched execution of Stanley “Tookie” Williams in 2005. Judge Fogel found that the method used by California for lethal injection caused such pain and distress to the condemned person as to constitute cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. However, Judge Fogel also stated that he believed the problems with lethal injection as a method of execution could be fixed.

Opponents of current methods of lethal injection have asserted that the formulation used in the 37 states that use lethal injection has been rejected by the American Veterinary Medical Association for euthanasia of animals in a 2000 report. However, the Association has issued a statement claiming that its position has been misrepresented. According to the AVMA, “The guidelines in this report are in no way intended to be used for human lethal injection.”

While JSPAN supports the moratoria in California and Florida, it continues to believe that the real issue should be the abolition of the death penalty, not how it is administered. It remains JSPAN policy that we oppose the death penalty as currently applied and press for its immediate abolition.

SOLDOTNA -- A Christian school has won back some of the federal dollars it lost last year when officials decided it misused tax dollars for religious indoctrination of its Alaska Native students.

The $100,000 federal grant comes after Alaska Christian College filed a plan with the U.S. Department of Education pledging to separate some academic and religious functions and put the money to secular uses. It also comes as a surprise to church-state separation advocates who succeeded in revoking $450,000 in funding to the school last year.

In an era of increasing federal support for so-called faith-based initiatives, corrective plans such as the one approved for Alaska Christian College are becoming commonplace, said Derek Gaubatz, an attorney representing the school. The money, originally set aside in earmarks proposed by Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, must go toward activities such as tutoring, writing, mathematics or other academics, Gaubatz said.