The Jerusalem Post writes that
Syrian President Bashar Assad has pledged to support Russia in its conflict with Georgia and said that Damascus was ready to consider deploying Russian Iskander missile systems in its territory, in response to the US missile shield in Europe.
Assad made the comments in an interview for Russia's Kommersant newspaper, on the eve of his official visit to Sochi for discussions with Medvedev.
(via Mark Pettifor.An important book has been published on all these machinations. It is titled Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, by Alex Goldfarb with Marina Litvinenko. One of the most important passages in the book, for Americans, is the passage where Akhmed Zakayev explains the origins of the Second Chechen War: “We wanted to build a secular, democratic, pro-Western Muslim state, something along the lines of Turkey,” Zakayev is quoted as saying. But Russian-speaking Arabs flooded into Chechnya with Russian visas. “They were all experienced fighters,” he said, “but they had nothing to do with … the American-trained jihadists that fought the Soviets in Afghanistan. They were all Arabs who spoke Russian, the old KGB cadre from the Middle East. And we knew that their money came not from Saudi Arabia, but from Moscow.”
That is important information coming from an exiled Chechen leader. The civil war in Chechnya was a staged provocation, organized by the FSB and the presidential administration in Moscow. Vladimir Putin, in fact, was a leading organizer who profited from this operation. The Arab terrorists in Dagestan and Chechnya caused his appointment as prime minister, triggering a war to facilitate his subsequent elevation to the Russian presidency. The political maneuvers and conspiracies involved in the elevation of Putin, as detailed by Goldfarb, are must reading. For the first time, testimony from several sources is put together to form a larger, coherent picture of FSB (KGB) strategy involving the use of controlled Islamic terrorism.
Israelis stood silently for two minutes to remember the victims of the Holocaust, as sirens wailed throughout the country on Monday morning.
Israel marked Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day with vocal concern for the plight of aging survivors, many of whom are living in poverty in Israel.
“We must never accept a reality in which even one of the Holocaust survivors in Israel is living without dignity,” Acting President Dalia Itzik declared at the opening ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, referring to reports that a third of the Holocaust survivors living in Israel live below the poverty line.Hundreds of people, many of them Holocaust survivors, sat in rows at the central plaza at Yad Vashem for the ceremony Sunday evening, bundled up against the cold weather. A youth choir sang, and Israeli leaders addressed the somber gathering. Itzik said at the beginning of the ceremony that "the Holocaust is not only a stain on the history of Germany, not only on the history of European peoples, but a mark of Cain on all of humanity."
