Norwegian ambassador to Saudi Arabia has compared ‘operation cast lead’ to the Nazi Holocaust

Norwegian Envoy: Israel, Nazis the Same

Hanan Awarekeh Readers Number : 505

21/01/2009 A Norwegian diplomat based in Saudi Arabia has sent out e-mails from her Foreign Ministry e-mail account equating Israel’s offensive against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip with the systematic mass murder of six million Jews by the Nazis.   The e-mail, sent out by Trine Lilleng, a first secretary at the Norwegian Embassy in Riyadh, includes a juxtaposition of black-and-white pictures from the Holocaust with color images of “Operation Cast Lead”.   “The grandchildren of Holocaust survivors from World War II are doing to the Palestinians exactly what was done to them by Nazi Germany,” the e-mail states.   A copy of the e-mail was obtained by Israeli daily The Jerusalem Post. The 40-plus pictures included as attachments in the e-mail include the famous image of a Jewish boy with his hands raised as a German soldier points his gun at him, next to an image of an Israeli soldier aiming his weapon at a Palestinian boy.   Another depicts a German soldier firing his weapon, next to an Israeli soldier shooting his, while others juxtapose the barbed wire surrounding ghettos and concentration camps to the fence around Gaza, and the West Bank security barrier. The e-mail asks recipients to forward the message to others.   Reached on her cellphone in Riyadh, Lilleng told the Post she had sent the message to “a few friends” in a “private e-mail,” and had not sent any copy to the Post.   She would not say whether it was proper for her to use her ministry e-mail account for such a controversial message. “I am not interested in saying anything about that,” she said.   The Oslo-based Center Against Anti-Semitism in Norway, which has filed an official complaint with Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr St?re, said it was appalled by the distribution of “clearly anti-Semitic propaganda” by a ministry official.   “The Center Against Anti-Semitism regrets that Norway’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is thus contributing to the intensification of anti-Semitic tendencies, which lately have been quite visible in the Norwegian media, and which have been reproved by both us and by international experts,” the center’s director, Erez Uriely, wrote to St?re.   The center noted that the Norwegian government, along with other European governments, has sought to play a role as a mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as part of an Egyptian-proposed agreement.    “We fail to see that the distribution of anti-Semitic pictures is compatible with such a role,” the letter states.   The center has asked the Norwegian Foreign Ministry to recall the disseminated pictures immediately and to apologize publicly for the incident. The letter was hand-delivered to the ministry in Oslo on Tuesday.   “This demonization of both Israel and the Jews must stop,” said group spokeswoman Dr. Rachel Suissa.

Norway sheltering Chechen family after human rights lawyer Stanislav Kungayev and freelance reporter Anastasia Baburova assassinated

Norway protecting Chechen family after lawyer’s murder in Moscow
		16:12 | 20/ 01/ 2009

MOSCOW, January 20 (RIA Novosti) – Norwegian police have placed the Kungayevs under protection following the murder of the Chechen family’s lawyer, father Visa Kungayev said on Tuesday.

“They have heard reports that my lawyer was killed in central Moscow in broad daylight and have taken us under protection,” he said in a telephone conversation.

The family’s daughter, Elsa, was murdered in Chechnya in 2000 by a Russian military officer and their lawyer, Stanislav Markelov, was shot dead in downtown Moscow on Monday.

Kungayev said that he was summoned to a police station on Tuesday morning to discuss Markelov’s murder and the Kungayevs’ safety, after which the police have been watching their house and movements.

Kungayev said his family was forced to move from Russia to Norway after receiving threats over the Yury Budanov case.

Budanov, who commanded a tank regiment during the second military campaign in Chechnya, was convicted in the summer of 2003 of strangling 18-year-old Elsa Kungayeva three years earlier and was sentenced to 10 years in jail. He was paroled earlier this month.

Markelov handled the family’s appeal against Budanov’s early release, claiming he “was still threatening the Kungayev family,” but a court rejected their plea last Thursday just hours after the former officer was released.

Kungayev said earlier on Tuesday he would hire a new lawyer to appeal the killer’s early release. “Definitely, I will pursue the case to its end,” Kungayev said in a telephone interview.

Kungayev said on Monday that he had no doubts that the shooting of Markelov was directly connected with the Budanov case.

“We are all shocked. We did not expect this. I am sure that he was killed for his professional activities, particularly for the Budanov case,” he said.

Markelov was shot in the back of the head while walking along a Moscow street shortly after finishing a news conference devoted to Budanov’s release. Novaya Gazeta journalist Anastasia Baburova, 25, was wounded in the shooting and died in hospital later on Monday.

Budanov has flatly denied any involvement in the lawyer’s death.

“This is a dirty provocation that has nothing to do with me,” Budanov was quoted as saying by popular Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda.

Besides representing Kungayeva’s family, Markelov had started an independent investigation into an attack on Mikhail Beketov, editor-in-chief of the local Khimki Pravda newspaper.

Beketov, who fought a campaign against the construction of a toll expressway through a forest in Khimki, a city northwest of Moscow, was found unconscious in the street on November 13 after being badly beaten near his home.