Lebanon, Brando and Shoah marches
Britain backs Israel’s air strikes in Lebanon
• Britain lined up squarely with Israel this week as Jerusalem hit back at Hizbollah guerrillas who had been firing Katyusha rockets into the Galilee. Anger mounted as Lebanese casualty figures rose — more than 35 people have been killed in the Israeli air and artillery strikes — and thousands of civilians, on both sides of the border, fled the fighting. The US and France conducted behind-the-scenes diplomacy to bring an end to the fighting. Washington proposed a six-point plan to end the hostilities, which included Lebanese and Syrian guarantees of the security of northern Israel. The main stumbling-block is an Israeli and US insistence that Hizbollah be disarmed in exchange for an Israeli commitment to pull out of south Lebanon… As a result of the fighting, the majority of Kiryat Shemonah’s 23,000 residents have left the city. British Prime Minister John Major made it clear that the Iranian-backed Hizbollah was to blame. He told visiting Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri: “The key to resolving the situation lies in an end to the Hizbollah attacks.”
Brando apologises
• Actor Marlon Brando, who sparked a storm of criticism for saying Hollywood was run by Jews, broke down and wept when he met Jewish leaders last week to apologise for his comments. The actor blamed the uproar on a misunderstanding due to the nature of TV talk-shows.
Young Poles join Jews in Auschwitz remembrance
• From the red-brick barracks of Auschwitz to the gas chambers where the Nazis killed 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, some 6,000 Jewish young people marched sombrely this week to remember the suffering of the Holocaust. The “March of the Living” — which has been held every two years since 1988, but will now become an annual event — retraced the steps of many Holocaust victims to preserve the memory of the six million Jews who died in Hitler’s death camps. Under cloudy skies, in the cold, the Jewish youths, dressed in blue jackets bearing a white Magen David, marched in silence the three kilometres from Auschwitz to the ruins of the gas chambers at Birkenau. They were joined for the first time by some 500 Poles, young and old… Construction of a mini-mall had begun across the street from the former death camp, causing angry protests …On April 6, a group of skinheads marched at Auschwitz to object to what they said was Jewish pressure on Polish authorities to halt the mall project.