Former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami –who in the late 1990s many thought could restore sanity to his Islamic nation’s foreign policy – just bowed out of his country’s June Presidential elections, Reuters news service reported today.

Mr. Khatami served in his country’s top elected position from 1997 to 2005, a period which saw a thawing in relations with the West. But since the election of his successor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, those ties have sharply deteriorated. Mr. Ahmadinejad, a populist who never missed an opportunity to inflame, clearly wants to keep his job for a second five-year term.

It’s hard to read the tea leaves from Tehran as to what Mr. Khatami’s move means. In my view there are two likely scenarios: First, it could signal that Iran’s true leader, whose title says it all – Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini—is uninterested in reform. Had he been of such inclination, Mr. Khatami would be a candidate. After all, in Iran only approved candidates are allowed to run for elected office, which is why many of Mr. Khatami’s reformist allies were disqualified in recent elections.

Alternatively, Mr. Khatami might be helping the cause of unseating the current president. That’s because he has announced his support for former Prime Minister Mirhossein Mousavi, who is seen as more moderate – moderation, of course, being relative when discussing Iranian politics. There is, then, the possibility that Mr. Khatami is solidifying opposition forces by helping Mr. Mousavi.

This is important because many analysts are saying this will be a year of decision for the West and Israel when it comes to a potential military strike on Iranian’s numerous nuclear installations, part of a network that surely is building nuclear weapons for the nation’s radical Islamic leaders.

Iran’s political maze is far from simple. Any alternative force to Mr. Khatami – which could express to Ayatollah Khamani popular resistance to Iran’s international position, would be welcome. Americans and Jews in particular should keep a close eye on the Iranian elections.

Pope Benedict XVI issued a strange apology yesterday in which he admitted to having mishandled the noxious affair regarding the rehabilitation of a Holocaust-denying bishop. (For his full letter: CLICK HERE

He in no way said that he would reconsider putting the ban back on at least that one individual.

Basically, the pontiff acknowledge that what was intended to be a reconciliation to a renegade sect of the Catholic Church – unity being a key focus of his papacy – backfired because it aroused the intense ire of Jews and a number of Catholics who, go figure, were upset that a Holocaust denier who is very public with his views was being welcomed back into the fold.

Now some Catholic friends have urged me to acknowledge and recognize that the rescinding of this excommunication did not mean that Bishop Richard Williamson can now perform Catholic rituals for congregants. Of course, I argue, that doesn’t really matter because he’s doing it anyway. The Church didn’t recognize those moves before January 12, 2009 when Williamson and other leaders of the Society of Pius X were unconditionally welcomed back, so what’s difference now other than Williamson is no longer, to borrow a phrase, glatt treife?

For certain, ever since the flap arose, Vatican spokesmen and the Pope himself have gone out of their way to criticize Holocaust deniers. Still, it’s not as if Williamson and his fans either had their welcome made conditional or were asked to give up their views.

But here’s the really amazing thing – the one that shows me that this Pope and his office are way out of touch. The Pope wrote in his letter “I hear that closely following the news available on the Internet would have made it possible to obtain knowledge of the problem in time. I learn from this that we at the Holy See have to pay more careful attention to this news source in the future.”

OK, so I’m glad the Pope now knows that the Internet is for more than finding good local movie reviews. I probably shouldn’t comment any more on this sad footnote to an already very sad affair.

A final point: Jewish groups have rushed to praise the Pope’s statement and basically say, “It’s behind us now.” It’s not. This touched the rawest of chords and Jewish outrage – and that of their Catholic friends – must continue to be heard until the Pope stands up and specifically says, “Bishop Williamsons’s views on the Holocaust are not welcome in the Church and neither is he until he sees the error of his ways and apologizes.”

That’s exactly what Jews have done to many in our own sordid past, including the late racist Rabbi Meir Kahane.

And a final, final point that exhibits how much has changed in such short time: Can anyone imagine this having happened on Pope John Paul II’s watch?

The Reform movement – currently the largest denomination in Jewish life (unless you count “unaffiliated”) – today said that the next Israeli government must stop expansion of West Bank settlements. (The movement also called for an end to Hamas’s Gaza rocket fire, the release of Israeli captive Gilad Shalit and favored the $900 million in U.S. aid to rebuild the West Bank and Gaza.)

Rabbi David Saperstein of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center http://rac.org/index.cfm?”> CLICK HERE said in a statement, ““Israel must demonstrate its stated commitment to that goal by ending the expansion of settlements in accordance with prior commitments made to the United States government.”

This is nothing new for the Reform movement, having said something similar in 2004. However, it is likely to gain a lot of visibility now because the peace process has its highest level actors involved in the past eight years. Indeed, one can expect SOMETHING to happen with Hillary Clinton, George Mitchell and Dennis Ross involved.

That aside, this is an important issue that touches on several matters:

• the right of American Jews to criticize Israel and how they go about it;
• the reality that the last two Israeli prime ministers have agreed to take down settlements it defines as illegal, but have not done so;
• and the lack of action by the United States on this issue, despite the last two Secretary of States saying that settlements are a problem (not the problem).

As I’ve written in the past, Israel needs to take down those illegal settlements and the United States need to push it do so. There is heavy domestic political cost for any Israeli government, but much to gain as well.

However, I do not agree that current settlements cannot be expanded. It’s how they go about it that counts. They should be expanded for “natural growth,” but that is a term that has been inflated by Israeli governments. “Natural growth” does not call for adding hundreds of new homes to a settlement that might only have hundreds of homes. Nor does it call for the unilateral appropriation of large swaths of land used by Palestinian farmers.

The legal issues involved are complex – but not as deep as the emotional ones.

Bottom line: Israel needs to disband illegal settlements to strengthen the major settlement blocks it already has, such as in Gush Emunim and around Ariel. Those areas will stay Israeli in any future treaty (we can no longer call the agreements a “peace deal,” “peace” being something mythical, indefinable concept.)

Even though the United Nations now admits its own repeated bungling in one-sided accusations against the State of Israel, one should not expect a new era of fairness. Most recently, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) falsely accused Israel of targeting its school in the Gaza Strip during the recent Gaza War with Hamas, which was prompted by the terrorist organization’s multiple rocket barrages at Israeli towns.

On Jan. 6, went the U.N. version of events, Israeli mortars hit an UNRWA school in Jabaliya, killing 43 civilians seeking shelter. John Ging, UNRWA’s Gaza operations director, accused Israel of deliberately carrying out a “horrific” attack and claimed that Israel knew it was targeting a U.N. facility. UNRWA’s leadership decried Israeli “atrocities” that may be “war crimes.” A week later, investigations showed the number of dead at 21 and that the UNRWA school was not hit. Any death is tragic and cannot be shirked off. More recently, the number has plunged even lower. Likewise, blaming innocent parties for those deaths and inflaming already boiling passions is inexcusable.

For the record, recently the U.N. humanitarian coordinator issued a clarification “that the shelling, and all of the fatalities, took place outside rather than inside the school.” It garnered an infinitesimal amount of coverage when compared to the original accusations.

That all prompted American Jewish Congress Acting Co-Executive Director Matthew Mark Horn to respond, “As was the case with U.N. reports of massacres in Jenin in 2002, these latest accusations reflect a willingness to enlist in a propaganda war against Israel with no regard for the facts.”
His organization called for the U.N. “to draw the appropriate conclusions about the serious accusations.”

Perhaps the UNRWA was too busy to do that. On Feb. 2, it announced the suspension of its humanitarian aid in Gaza. That was to protest Hamas’s seizure of UNRWA’S warehouses, which included the theft of 200 tons of food and supplies. Hamas returned the stolen property and the UNRWA aid program restarted. Of course, there was no international outcry – as would have surely followed had Israel done the same.

The recent “apology” of Bishop Richard Williamson for his comments minimizing the Holocaust falls far short of acceptable. In fact, it furthers the case as to why Williamson’s association with the Catholic Church is rightly viewed by many as a stain on that body.

Williamson, recently kicked out of Argentina, told the Zenit Catholic News Agency last week “The Holy Father and my Superior, Bishop Bernard Fellay, have requested that I reconsider the remarks I made on Swedish television four months ago, because their consequences have been so heavy. Observing these consequences I can truthfully say that I regret having made such remarks, and that if I had known beforehand the full harm and hurt to which they would give rise, especially to the Church, but also to survivors and relatives of victims of injustice under the Third Reich, I would not have made them.”

If that’s an “I’m sorry,” then Pope Benedict XVI will be leading Yom Kippur services next year at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. In other words, Williamson really feels bad that he upset people. But what he said? He obviously still believes it. Oh, for good measure he’s consulting with professional Holocaust denier David Irving to see if he can learn more about the most documented crime in history.

This is all happening because Pope Benedict sparked a furor last month when he reinstated Williamson and three other excommunicated bishops, all members of the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X. That came just days after Williamson told Swedish TV that he believed “that the historical evidence is hugely against 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler.” I guess the Jews were accidentally gassed, right? And they fell into those mass pits the Nazis forced them to dig before gunning them down and then going off to drink beer.

For good measure, Williamson tossed in that no more than a few hundred thousand Jews died in Europe during World War II.

Catholic Church officials, including Baltimore Archbishop Emeritus William H. Keeler, have said that the Pope would not have moved to welcome Williamson back into the fold had he known of the remarks. The Pope, and other leading Catholic officials, have since that time forcefully criticized those who would deny the enduring pain of the Shoah.

But the Pope has welcomed Williamson and his anti-modernization crew—which includes 500 priests and tens of thousands of followers—back on board as a first major step toward reconciliation. Mind you, this was done unilaterally, without the Pius X people needing to do anything other than continuing to hate the reforms of the famed 1965 Vatican II Council.

Now it’s time for the Pope to directly and forcefully and personally address Bishop Williamson and the like-minded. To not do so, remains a lasting insult to the Jewish people and their many Catholic friends who have spent recent decades seeking to bridge the chasm created by the faiths’ painful historical relationship.