Israeli investigators grilled Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for an hour and a half at his Jerusalem residence on Friday, leaving some to wonder if this might finally ruin his political career. Of course, Olmert has already survived numerous other investigations, as well as a disastrous war effort in Lebanon—not to mention abysmal approval ratings—so you’d be forgiven for thinking he will survive yet another crisis.

But despite the gag order placed on the details of the investigation, Israeli news outlets on both sides of the political spectrum are citing sources who say this time it might be different. One senior law enforcement agent told an Israeli TV station that Olmert was in a “grave situation” and would probably not survive it politically. According to the left-wing Haaretz, several Knesset members have called on Olmert to “suspend himself pending the investigations.” The Likud party chairman urged Labor to withdraw from the coalition, saying,

Olmert is the prime minister who has been investigated more than any other in the history of Israel. The Labor Party is responsible for the survival of the coalition and if it stands to present values, control of law and clean hands, it needs to quit immediately.

The Jerusalem Postquoted a Kadima member who came to Olmert’s defense: “From past experiences, we know that all the investigations started with a lot of noise and ended with nothing.”

Whatever might come from this, as an editorial at Ynetnews points out, the timing of this investigation could not have been worse:

Just when it appeared that he controls the situation and the bad winds are calming a little, and just when more people were willing to give him another chance – he is hit with the investigation, which ruins everything he built and reminds us of all the bad thoughts about him. That’s the last thing he needed.

Dr. Death and the Nazi Underground

Last week, the Simon Wiesenthal Center produced its annual list of the 10 most wanted Nazi war criminals. Topping the list is Dr. Aribert Heim, who was responsible for murdering hundreds of Jewish prisoners at the Mauthausen concentration camp during World War ii.

Karl Lotter, a prisoner who worked at the Mauthausen hospital, vividly remembers the gruesome details of the first murder he witnessed at the hands of Dr. Heim.

It was 1941, and an 18-year-old Jew had been sent to the clinic with a foot inflammation. Heim asked him about himself and why he was so fit. The young man said he had been a soccer player and swimmer.Then, instead of treating the prisoner’s foot, Heim anesthetized him, cut him open, castrated him, took apart one kidney and removed the second, Lotter said. The victim’s head was removed and the flesh boiled off so that Heim could keep it on display.”He needed the head because of its perfect teeth,” Lotter, a non-Jewish political prisoner, recalled in testimony eight years later that was included in an Austrian warrant for Heim’s arrest uncovered by The Associated Press. “Of all the camp doctors in Mauthausen, Dr. Heim was the most horrible.”

Aribert Heim disappeared in 1962 and is believed to be still living at the age of 93.

We have written before about the tens of thousands of Nazis who escaped prosecution after World War ii. Notice what Herbert W. Armstrong wrote in the Plain Truth as far back as September 1948:

Even before the end of this war, I revealed to you the Nazi plans for a Nazi underground movement, to go underground as a secret organization the very moment they lost the war—to lay low a few years during Allied and Russian military occupation, then to come forth when least expected, restore Germany to power, and go on to finally accomplish their aims in a World Wariii.

Nearly 50 years after Mr. Armstrong wrote that, a declassified U.S. intelligence document confirmed it. The 1996 document, my father wrote in his booklet The Rising Beast, detailed

an August 1944 meeting between top German industrialists, reveals a secret post-war plan to restore the Nazis to power. Several of Germany’s elite industries were represented, including Messerschmitt and Volkswagenwerks. These companies, the document asserts, were to “prepare themselves to finance the Nazi Party which would be forced to go underground.”

Download a free copy of The Rising Beasthere.

Who’s Doing the Dividing?

Barack Obama’s pastor of 20 years, Jeremiah Wright, roared back onto the scene this week with several public appearances in which he seemed determined to confirm the fiercest criticisms against him. As the Economistreported,

[Wright appeared] at the National Press Club on April 28th before a massed throng of reporters …. He surrounded himself with some of the most divisive figures in black America: Marion Barry, Washington’s disgraced former mayor, Malik Zulu Shabazz of the New Black Panther Party, Cornel West of Princeton University and a posse of security guards supplied by the Nation of Islam. And he hurled a succession of rhetorical bombs.He defended his remark about “chickens coming home to roost”. He called Louis Farrakhan “one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century”. He talked about whites worshipping in church in the morning and putting on white Klan sheets at night. He defended his assertion that the American government invented the HIV virus to decimate blacks (“Our government is capable of doing anything.”). He even argued that blacks and whites have different learning styles, further proof that he endorses the racist theory that blacks and white have differently wired brains. …He dismissed Mr Obama’s attempt to distance himself from his former pastor as a politician doing what he had to do. He announced that, if Mr Obama becomes president, he will be “coming after him” because he will represent a government “whose policies grind under people.”

The comments moved Obama to finally do what he refused to do a month ago: “disown” Wright. “Whatever relationship I had with Rev Wright has changed,” he said. Obama’s defenders insist that any further discussion of Wright is off the table—that it represents “race-baiting” (in the words of a New York Timeseditorial, and Howard Dean in a Fox News Sunday interview this morning) since Wright’s views are completely unrepresentative of the presidential candidate.

But as Charles Krauthammer points out, the specific views Wright spoke about this past week that Obama now says are beyond the pale—so “divisive and destructive” that he needed to speak out—are the very views that came to light a month ago.

What were Obama’s three citations? Wright’s claim that AIDS was invented by the U.S. government to commit genocide. His praise of Louis Farrakhan as a great man. And his blaming Sept. 11 on American “terrorism.”But these comments are not new. … Obama decided to cut off Wright not because Wright’s words or character or views had suddenly changed. The only thing that changed was the venue in which Wright chose to display them—live on national TV at the National Press Club. That unfortunate choice destroyed Obama’s Philadelphia pretense that this “endless loop” of sermon excerpts being shown on “television sets and YouTube” had been taken out of context.

George Will also wrote this excellent column explaining why Wright’s views are relevant to the presidential campaign.

The battle lines in the Jeremiah Wright kerfuffle are growing more stark. On one side are people who consider Obama’s choice of pastor a relevant indicator of the candidate’s character and consider Wright’s racism destructive and unacceptable. On the other side are people who apparently believe that the only reason Wright is a problem is because those on the other side insist on making him into one.

The issue has potential to do enormous damage to race relations in America. We at the Trumpet see this as an important story to watch because of the Bible’s prophecies of race-based violence breaking out in America. You can read about those in the fourth chapter of editor in chief Gerald Flurry’s booklet Ezekiel: The End-Time Prophet.

Elsewhere on the Web

After five long weeks, Zimbabwe’s official election results have finally been released, and Robert Mugabe lost. His challenger, Morgan Tsvangirai, received 47.9 percent of the vote to Mugabe’s 43.2. Trouble is, the narrow victory margin requires a run-off, and you can be sure the incumbent government will ramp up the pressure to ensure the second round leaves no doubt as to the winner.

Jimmy Carter’s policy of engaging terrorist leaders and their state sponsors might be catching on. According to the Independent, “The big powers have formally acknowledged for the first time that the policy of isolating Hamas through an economic blockade of Gaza is not working.”

On the front page of this weekend’s Asia Times: “Iran moving into the big league.” Kaveh Afrasiabi writes, “From the Persian Gulf to the Caspian region, the Caucasus, Central Asia, South Asia and beyond, Iran thanks to its geographical location is an ideal connecting bridge that has not until now fully exploited its advantageous equidistance from India and Europe.” This is exemplified in the us$7.6 billion gas pipeline that will flow from Iran to Pakistan to India, and which is finally close to reality. Tehran is ambitiously moving from regional power to global power.

Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer is now joining top military officials in calling for German troop deployment in south Afghanistan. As a new U.S. president takes office next year, America’s role in foreign peacekeeping operations will likely decrease as the Bundeswehr fills the void.

In another move of utter negligence and will to defend its own people, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has given orders to remove three critical anti-terror checkpoints.

And Finally …

After al Qaeda terrorists bombed the USS Cole in 2000, President Bill Clinton vowed to hunt down the perpetrators. “Justice will prevail,” he said.

According to today’sWashington Post, “all the defendants convicted in the attack have escaped from prison or been freed by Yemeni officials.”