Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert vowed yesterday to do everything necessary to protect Jewish institutions after nine Israelis were killed in assaults by Islamist militants in the Indian city of Mumbai.
“Israel is doing, and will continue to do anywhere, whatever it takes to protect Jewish institutions,” Olmert told a weekly Cabinet meeting.
“The images of the Jewish victims ... are horrifying and send us back to times and places we thought had passed,” he said in allusion to the Holocaust in World War II and other acts of anti-Semitic violence. “The hatred of Jews and the hatred of Israel and the hatred of Jewish symbols still continue to be a source fueling these acts of murder.”
PHOTO: AFP
Israeli embassy officials in India have said that they did not believe that Chabad House, a cultural center run by the ultra-Orthodox Lubavitch movement where eight of the Israelis were killed, could have been targeted by accident.
“We will act, also in cooperation with the Indian government, to protect as much as possible the many Israelis and Jews in these areas who want, and are entitled to, full security,” Olmert said. “The Israeli government hopes India will know how to recover from the trauma. I send my condolences to the families of all the victims and of the Jewish and Israeli victims of the terror attacks.”
Meanwhile, Israeli defense officials say two high-ranking security men have been dispatched to India to assist with the investigation into the Mumbai attacks.
One is a representative of the Israeli Defense Ministry and the other is from the Shin Bet security service.
Israelis sadly familiar with the threat of attack came to grips with new vulnerability on Saturday as at least seven Israeli families prepared to bury loved ones slain at a Jewish center tucked quietly at the end of an alley in India.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry said the Israelis were killed at the Chabad House. Indian commandos stormed the building, but none of the hostages was found alive.
Two of the victims ran the five-story center. Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg, 29, a dual US-Israeli citizen, and his 28-year-old Israeli wife, Rivkah, were members of the New York-based Chabad-Lubavitch sect.
The couple’s toddler son Moshe, who celebrated his second birthday on Saturday, was spirited out of the five-story building by a center employee, unharmed but his pants soaked with blood. Another son, who was ailing, was in Israel.
Three other victims at the Chabad House had been identified: Bentzion Chroman, a dual US-Israeli citizen, Rabbi Leibish Teitelbaum, a US citizen who lived in Jerusalem, and tourist Yocheved Orpaz.
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
RSS