Posted on 11/27/2006 11:27:05 AM PST by Cinnamon Girl
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Monday that the release of Israel Defense Forces soldier Gilad Shalit, held since June by Gaza militants, would lead to the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
"With Gilad Shalit's release and his return safe and sound to his family, the Israeli government will be willing to release many Palestinian prisoners, even those who have been sentenced to lengthy terms," Olmert said.
The prime minister, speaking at the grave of Israel's first premier, David Ben-Gurion, in Sde Boker, said that he was extending his hand in peace to the Palestinians, and that he hoped his offer would not remain unanswered. (Click here for Olmert's full speech) "I hold out my hand in peace to our Palestinian neighbors in the hope that it won't be returned empty," Olmert said.
"We cannot change the past and we will not be able to bring back the victims on both sides of the borders," he said. "All that we can do today is stop additional tragedies."
He called on the Palestinians to renounce violence and give up the insistence on the refugees' right of return to territory within Israel's borders, which has long been a major sticking point in peace negotiations.
"You, the Palestinian people, in the south and east, in the Gaza Strip and Judea and Samaria, stand, these very days, on the threshold of an historic crossroads," he said.
If the Palestinians did decide to choose peace talks, Olmert promised, Israel would quit large swathes of the West Bank, ease checkpoints and release frozen funds to Palestinians.
"We will agree to leave large territories and dismantle settlements that we established," he said. "We will be willing to do this in exchange for real peace."
(Excerpt) Read more at haaretz.com ...
Actually in the latest poll Likud was in the lead with Kadima losing lots of their seats in second place. However, in the Knesset Labout/Kadima still holds the majority and so Olmert can continue with his wrecking policy for another couple of years.
BTW wonder what Lieberman, who just joined the coalition, says about olmerts speech and his promises to the terrorists?
The present Israeli policy is absolutely insane.
Just once, why can't the bad guys capture GENE Shalit??
Olmert is a wussy at best description - you do not put violent criminals back on the street - you eliminate them via high speed lead poisoning or through a hemp gravity test.
I agree about the complacency.
Here is a post I found at LGF. Note Olmerts popularity figures (!!):
Clio 11/27/2006 08:28AM PST
....
To MGlazer (No. 17)
The clumsy and dysfunctional electoral system in Israel makes it hard to get rid of a rotten government. Olmert seems to be able to buy enough votes in the 120-seat Knesset to stave off a vote of No Confidence, that would require 61 votes.
I doubt he wants to go into an election at a time when his popularity rating with the public is 9%. (That is not a typo. It really is a single-digit rating.)
The best chance of getting him out is through one of the numerous charges against him of serial corruptions. That depends on whether the Leftist Attorney General Mazuz is willing to indict him for at least one of his crooked deals or bribe-taking.
But even if Olmert has to resign, that will not necessarily bring down the government of the Kadamite Party. The premiership might just go to the party No. 2, Foreign Minister Tzippi Livni who is an incompetent diddling moron.
The other evening I was talking to some friends who started to daydream about which past leader they wish we had back. Some said Golda Meir. Some said Menahem Begin.
I said: "If you are going to daydream, do it big. The one we need now is King David."
Good night, nurse! Olmerde must be wearing the world's biggest "kick me" sign! I think he' surpassing Chamberlain and Daladier. How he got elected is beyond me. The wolves are howling and peeking over the fence drooling, and he's just sitting on the porch whittling and whistling.
November 26, 2006
Today was Israel’s Munich.
by Jerry Gordon
Today was Israel’s Munich. Remember the date: November 25, 2006. The news wire headlines blared; “Israel accepts Palestinian groups offer of ceasefire.” Israel was sacrificed by its own leaders under pressure from a beleagured Bush Administration in Washington. A Bush Administration anxious to bring about any shred of progress in the war torn Middle East with bloody gory civil war in sectarian strife torn Iraq and another murderous civil war about to erupt in Lebanon following the assassination of young Maronite Christian leader, Pierre Gemayel.
Bush is pre-occupied with an Amman, Jordan meeting with Iraq’s shia PM al Maliki trying desperately to bolster a derelict government careening out of control unable to provide its citizens with day to day security. The ‘green zone’ in Baghdad and even its international airport aren’t safe for this discussion. After all, didn’t Dr. Rice circle the same airport last month for an hour until she was assured of security to meet with al Maliki and what passes for the Iraqi government?
This grand ‘agreement’ reported in the Jerusalem Post and the AP and accepted by PM Olmert is out and out taqqiyah-Islamic religiously condoned disimilitude. A hudna to trick the infidels. Probably won’t last the Koranic 10 years. A nanosecond is more like it. And the fact that this comes from faltering Abbas is a total farce. Here we have Israel and the U.S. supplying the guns and ammo for Fatah to foment the inside war with Hamas and , who else,? Why Israel of course. And those Hamastan Qassem terror weapons? They’ll keep falling on poor beseiged Sderot-you watch.
Worse yet, Hamas Military wing leader Mashaal in Damascus puts in his two cents, too. Must be the result of his Baathist keepers under young ‘reckless’ Bashir Assad trying to impress, Israel’s ‘best friend’ Bush family consigliere, Jim Baker, III and his Bi-partisan Commission. After all don’t they believe that peace in the Middle East lies in solving the insoluble Palestinian Israel conflict? The fools. They don’t realize there is no conflict. It’s just Islamists out to kill Christians and Jews to cleanse the region. It’s not about the land. After all they consider it dar el Islam taken away from them by al Naqbah, don’t they?
The 21st Century ‘desert queen’ of diplomacy, Dr. Rice is revealed as an irrelevent naif now made into mush under the thumb of the Baker boys like her boss, W. We hope that she’s spared the fate of her fabled 20th Century predecessor, British Colonial Office Arab expert who created artificial Iraq, Gertrude Bell-a purported suicide in 1926 for recognizing her failure aborning. It was Bell who opined that it would be the ‘very devil” if religious fanatic Shia governed her artificial creation. Prescient, wasn’t she?
Israel is now effectively “lost.” Done in by the ‘optimism’ of its citizens and by its traitorous government. This is same failed Israeli government that couldn’t stop the rain of Qassem rockets from falling inside the green line killing its citizens. And as night follows day, the sequestered hundreds of millions of shekels of tax revenues will now be released by the Bank of Israel to the Hamas led government, you watch.
These are the bumblers in Jerusalem who gave us the botched min-war with Iran’s proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon of this summer, right? Where is the resolve of those IDF reservists spoiling for fight to vanquish Hezbolleh in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, while their families lanquished in unspeakable squalid bunkers? Squandered. They remind me a lot of the documentary movies of Czech reservists called up in the summer of 1938 to do battle with the Wehrmacht behind their moutain redoubts in Sudeutenland-suddenly taken away from them in Munich by appeasing Brits and French in order to secure a ‘peace in our time ‘ with “terpich fresser” Herr Hitler and his Nazi killers resulting in the dismemberment and death of pre-WWII Czechoslovakia.
In Lebanon we have Hezbolleh posed currently to foment civil war with the faltering anti-Syria government in Beirut in the wake of Pierre Gemayel’s assassination this week. A civil war perhaps worse than the decade long war in the mid 1970’s to 1980’s. Doubtless the UNIFIL forces in southern Lebanon will skedaddle. After all they’re there only to shoot down IAF planes, aren’t they?
The U.S. is scrambling to salvage a bloody civil war in Iraq, if it can, with the aid of, who - Syria and its mafiosi killers along with Hezbolleh of Falangist Christian in Lebanon Pierre Gemayel and Iran-master puppeteer and Mad Mahdists out to wipe Jews off the map of the world.
We blew it when we let Shia Hezbolleh look alike Muktar al Sadr keep his guns and the Militia and become the swing vote in what passes for the Iraqi parliament. But then, the civil war was inevitable given the slaughter of the Shia after the first Gulf War. That leaves the Kurds. What of their quest for a ‘free Kurdistan, eh?”
One wonders cynically whether Saddam Hussein will be hung or brought back as a strong man, once again, to keep the artificial country from spinning out of control completely, if it already hasn’t done that. After all the ‘realistic’ Baker boys will probably recommend that, too, as they did in 1991, as I recall. Remember their favorite expression: ‘better the wolf of the south versus the wolf of the north.” This time the new Democratic Congress will be the amen choir in the corner uttering the mantra: “cut and run, cut and run.” Once more the Kurds will be sacrificed.
I see nothing but chaos and the advance of the black flag of Jihad, Shia supremacy and internicine Muslim wars across the Middle East along with the ultimate denoument of the suicide of Israel.
Today was Israel’s Munich with its acceptance of this Hudna.
What was Churchill’s comment after the first Munich when another country was dismembered-pre-WWII Czechoslovakia: “‘we have shame, now will come war.”
Do you know what the source of that 9% approval rating is?
Think about this, a leader watches his people suffer under thousands of rockets being hurled at them and then offers the launchers extra soil where they can do so again.
Sure, that will do it. Why wasn't this thought about before? It surely would have worked then.
Wouldn't it have? (sarc)
No, but I've seen one recent poll that gave Kadiam about 12%, so given that Kadima possibly is slightly more popular than Olmert (Olmert popular , what an oxymoron!) the 9% figure does not seem totally unlikely.
What happened? In the generation around WWII people experienced evil first hand, and knew it existed whether they were religious or not. Now, only the religious, for the most part, know there is good and evil in the world and recognize that fighting evil requires sacrifices.
http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/13820
Likud First, Kadima Second in Israel
November 17, 2006
- Likud is now the most popular party in Israel, according to a poll by Teleseker published in Maariv. The results suggest Likud, led by former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, would win 29 seats in the next election to the Knesset.
The governing Kadima party of prime minister Ehud Olmert would finish second with 16 mandates, followed by the Labour party of Amir Peretz with 15 mandates, and Israel Our Home under Avigdor Lieberman with 14 seats.
In March, Israeli voters renewed the Knesset. Kadima, founded by former prime minister Ariel Sharon and led by Olmert, secured 29 seats. Labour, the Retired People’s Party (Gil) and the International Organization of Torah-observant Sephardic Jews (Shas) joined Kadima in a coalition. Last month, the Israeli cabinet approved the addition of Israel Our Home to the government. Olmert’s coalition now has the support of 78 of the Knesset’s 120 members.
On Oct. 18, at the Knesset’s opening session, Netanyahu criticized the current administration, saying, "Three months ago, we received our wake-up call with the outbreak of war in Lebanon and the massive rocket fire. Did anyone learn the lessons from the Lebanon war? The answer, I am afraid to say, is no. (…) Today we understand the thing my comrades and I were talking about, that Iran is a real threat to our existence, and that its allies in the south of Israel and in the north of Israel are a threat to our cities and communities."
Netanyahu served as prime minister from June 1996 to July 1999, and resigned from Ariel Sharon’s cabinet—where he held the finance portfolio—after opposing the "Disengagement Plan."
FRmail me to be added or removed from this Judaic/pro-Israel/Russian Jewry ping list.
Warning! This is a high-volume ping list.
What an idiot he is. What is up with Israel. This guy should be run out on a rail. Where is M. Begin when you need him!
OH SHUT UP Olmhet how about pressuring PLO to release IDF soldier I think dude is in Iran already or SYRIA
High Volume. Articles on Israel can also be found by clicking on the Topic or Keyword Israel. or WOT [War on Terror]
----------------------------
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.