ON THE WORLD SCENE
HONECKER FORCED TO SCRUB TRIP; STRAUSS IN ALBANIA; OTHER KEY ELECTIONS; MORE ON THE "TEMPLE PLOT"
Bowing to severe and unremitting pressure from Moscow, East German Communist Party boss Erich Honecker has cancelled his plans to visit West Germany in late September. This latest development deflates the hopes of those in both Western and Eastern Europe that the cautious rapproachment between East and West Germany could provide a partial thaw in the otherwise chilly "Cold War II." For now, Moscow has made its point that, during the current crisis, the satellites must follow its path into the deep freeze.
The turn of events could damage Herr Honecker's carefully contrived image as a strong leader among his own people. As it stands now, most East Germans will believe, despite official propaganda blaming West Germany for the breakdown, that Mr. Honecker has been winched back into line by "Big Brother." Mr. Honecker's problem is that his countrymen will get the whole story of what happened over West German TV, which nearly all of them view.
Making matters even worse for the East German leader is that East Bloc colleagues such as Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania, Todor Zhivkov of Bulgaria and even Leonid Konstandov of the Soviet Central Committee have all announced that they will be visiting West Germany in coming weeks. It all confirms once again the very deep concerns the U.S.S.R. has about any hint of German togetherness. The East Germans as yet cannot get away with as much as their "fraternal brothers " elsewhere in the Bloc.
Still, despite the sudden chill, there remains considerable movement in the "empire" to cause Moscow to worry about the future. Here are excerpts of an article by Dan Cook which appeared in the September 2 LOS ANGELES TIMES:
When Carl Lewis dashed 100 meters in 10.05 seconds in a Budapest stadium last week to add a Hungarian medal to his four Olympic golds, there was a lot more to it than just athletic entertainment for Hungary, which had reluctantly joined the Soviets in boycotting the Los Angeles Games. The invitation to Lewis and other Western participants in Los Angeles to come to Budapest while Moscow was staging its Friendship '84 games in Lenin Stadium was yet another example of the tough time the Soviet Union is having with its Eastern European allies in trying to impose some kind of Cold War freeze on East-West relations....
The Hungarians have always been firm loyalists to the Soviet Union on foreign-policy questions, while at the same time the most active economic reformers of their Communist system at home — a stance that is directly the reverse of the Romanians. But now they are showing an independent line in a variety of ways — of which Lewis' Budapest appearance was symbolic.
The week before the Budapest track meet, they concluded a new 10- year trade agreement with West Germany, currently on Moscow's enemies list. Then, last Monday, Hungarian Vice Premier Jozsef Marjai arrived in Peking to talk about improving trade and friendly relations. He was the first senior Hungarian minister to visit the People's Republic of China in 20 years. And the Hungarians have just announced that they are going to reintroduce private banking into the economy on small scale....
East German Communist leader Eric Honecker...turned up in Bucharest to stand on the platform with President Nicolae Ceausescu at a ceremony marking the 40th anniversary of the overthrow of Nazi rule in Romania, on Aug. 24. But no other East Bloc leader was there, and Moscow sent only a Soviet Politburo member. Why? Because the Nazis were deposed by King Michael, long before the Red Army arrived to "liberate" Romania, and this was not one of the anniversaries that the Kremlin observes. Yet Chinese President Li Xiannian was there along with Honecker....
Even Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski's Poland is getting out of step, letting all of its political prisoners out of jail to huddle with Lech Walesa, leader of the still-smoldering Solidarity. And Poland is about to take up membership in the International Monetary Fund along with Hungary and Romania. All of this is going on while Moscow is clamping new harsh disciplines on its own citizens who, legally, cannot even talk to a foreigner about the weather without risking arrest....
None of this...in any way presages any decay in Communist control over Eastern Europe or any weakening of Soviet hegemony over its European sphere of influence. But it does seem to reveal that the Soviet Union, for the first time, is encountering unexpected limits in its power to dictate to its allies. Editorials in Pravda and Izvestia are no longer-read with trembling hands....
And then, on its Far Eastern frontiers there is China, modernizing for a major economic breakthrough, while improving its relations with London, Washington, Tokyo and other capitals around the world. Meanwhile Moscow sits and faces another poor grain harvest. If Moscow sulks, it expects its allies to sulk — but this time things seem to be different.
Meanwhile, look where Franz Josef Strauss, a key figure in inter-German affairs, has been lately (he travels quite frequently). Here is a report from the August 22 CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR:
An unexpected visit to Albania by West German politician Franz Josef Strauss has produced a significant meeting with one of the country's top leaders. The meeting Monday between Mr. Strauss and Albanian Deputy Premier Manush Myftiu confirmed speculation that the West German's surprise presence in Albania, disclosed over the weekend, was for something more than sightseeing.
Albania's interest in Strauss, and the possibility that his visit might help to renew relations with Bonn, is the strongest pointer yet to an apparent new turn in Albanian foreign policy away from isolationism. Strauss is the first prominent West European politician to visit Albania since World War II.... The Bavarian conservative fancies himself to be an unofficial trouble-shooter in matters of Bonn's Ostolitik.... The Albanians are aware of the role Strauss has played in West German relations with Romania and EastGermany, two Communist states within the Soviet bloc.
Many people were surprised when Strauss, an anti-Communist hard-liner, personally delivered the first of two sizable government bank loans from the Federal Republic to East Germany. Even some of his own right-wing supporters in Bavaria were shocked and angered. Said Strauss at the time, justifying his actions: "I can switch corners faster than your eye can follow."
Canada to the Right, New Zealand to the Left, and Britain's Labour Party — Way, Way, Way Left
Voting returns after Canada's September 4 federal elections confirmed what the polls had been predicting — and even more so: A dramatic landslide victory for Progressive Conservative candidate Brian Mulroney (pronounced Mul ROO-ney). Early returns showed that the Tories, as they are popularly called, picked up 211 of the 282 seats in Parliament. The Conservatives won 50% of the popular vote to 28% for the Liberal Party of Prime Minister John Turner and 18% for the leftist New Democratic Party led by Ed Broadbent. The Liberals were even buried in Quebec, their traditional stronghold.
The Prime Minister Elect said he would propose policies to combat Canada's 11.2% unemployment and punishing interest rates and strengthen the Canadian dollar, now valued at less than 80 U.S. cents. (However, Canada's extensive and expensive welfare state system won't be touched.) The 45-year-old Mulroney had campaigned on a promise to improve relations with the United States, often strained during Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's nearly 16- year tenure. The U.S. State Department and the Reagan administration are quite happy over the election outcome.
Washington, on the other hand, is not pleased at all over the July 14 election results in New Zealand, which brought a left-wing government, headed by David Lange, into power, ending the long tenure of pragmatic Prime Minister Robert Muldoon, who was saddled with blame for the country's faltering economy. The new leader, in one of his first statements, promised to implement a plank in his Labour Party's campaign platform whereby New Zealand would no longer welcome atomic-powered or atomic-weaponed U.S. warships in its ports. The U.S. State Department warned that such an attitude could spell the end to the ANZUS defense pact, linking Australia and New Zealand with the United States. As further evidence of New Zealand's shift to the left, Mr. Lange announced his government would seriously reconsider cutting diplomatic ties to South Africa. Pretoria didn't waste any time in its response. It announced it was closing down its mission in Auckland right away, rather than waiting six months or so to be kicked out.
Finally, in Britain the Labour Party, on July 27, took its long-expected lurch to the left in foreign policy. The party leadership decided to go into the next general election unreservedly committed for the first time to a policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament. The party's National Executive Committee agreed — without even a vote — that in government it would scrap the present Polaris and cancel the future Trident nuclear submarines, throw NATO cruise missiles out of Britain, and shut down the American nuclear bases. Never before had Labour gone so far.
Should Labour resume reigns of power and actually implement such policies, it could be the death knell of NATO. The American commitment to Europe could not survive such a program. And Britain herself would be naked before her enemies.
"The Temple Mount Plot"
Finally, we present excerpts from a fascinating article in the June 18, 1984 issue of THE NEW REPUBLIC. Entitled "The Temple Mount Plot," it contains more information on the growing mood in Israel to establish some sort of Jewish presence on the Temple Mount. The authors are Barbara and Michael Ledeen. She was formerly assistant editor at BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGY REVIEW, and he is now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. They specifically draw attention to the backing given to the Temple Mount movement by so-called evangelical Christians in the U.S.:
A casual observer might be excused for believing that nearly all of the recent violence in Israel has been part of the usual cycle of Arab-Israeli conflict. The observer would be wrong.... Much of the destructive intent is fueled by a mixture of nationalist politics, messianic longing, and the search for roots. In fact, some of the current extremism is a direct outgrowth of the ancient forecast of the Apocalypse.
The targets of the most spectacular incidents over the past months have been Muslim authorities and the area they control in Jerusalem, but for the most part the people who planned or participated in the attacks are the violent fringe of an informal movement that — stretches from the United States To the Middle East, and encompasses millions of evangelical Christians as well as some Israeli Jews. This unlikely coalition rests upon-a common belief that the Final Days are upon us. For the Christians, this means that the Second Coming of Christ is imminent; for the Jews, the Messiah is about to arrive. Both believe that the crucial spot for the fulfillment of the Biblical prophecies is the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, because that is where the Temple of Solomon is to be rebuilt. According to the fundamentalist understanding of Christian prophecy, three great events are required for the Second Coming: Israel must be a Jewish nation; Jerusalem must be a Jewish city; and the Temple must be rebuilt. Today only the third condition remains to be met. Though most Jews believe that the building of the Temple will occur after the arrival of the Messiah, a growing number of deeply religious Jews believe that efforts to rebuild the Temple, and other steps for its proper functioning, should be made before the Messianic Age.
Yet the Temple Mount is under Muslim control, and, according to a common archeological view, the Dome of the Rock stands on the site of the Temple itself. To make matters worse, the Muslim political-religious trust which administers the Mount area — the Wagf — does not permit members of other religions to pray on the Temple Mount; they are permitted access to only a part of the area, and only for a few hours. On Fridays and Muslim holy days, the Mount is closed to all but the Islamic faithful. The refusal of the Muslims to grant Jews and Christians the right to any sort of religious activity on the Mount has intensified the already strong passions of the messianic groups, prompting some of them to violence.
On March 10, 1983, more than forty Jews suspected of planning to penetrate the Temple Mount were arrested in Jerusalem. Four of them were armed youths caught trying to break through an underground passage to the Mount. Their legal fees — amounting to $50,000 — were paid, by wealthy Christian evangelicals from Texas. Less than a year later, on last January 27, Israeli security forces thwarted an assault on the Mount and seized eighteen grenades and over thirteen pounds of explosives that had been smuggled onto the Temple site. The police later found a secret cache of arms outside Jerusalem that included 107 Claymore mines, 6 anti-tank rockets, and a large quantity of high explosives. There is good reason to believe that the money for this group, the so-called Lifta Band, also came from Christian sources in America....
Except for a few years during the Crusades, the Temple Mount has been under Muslim control since the conquest of Jerusalem almost fourteen hundred years ago. This control was reaffirmed as recently as 1967, after the Israeli conquest of the Old City, when General Moshe Dayan, in a remarkable gesture of toleration and largesse, ordered the removal of Israeli flags from the Islamic buildings on the Mount. He promised that there would be no tampering with Muslim control over the area. The promise has been kept....
Political pragmatism, however, is unlikely to withstand the messianic passions that are directed at the Temple Mount, and even the ancient rabbinical and more modern governmental injunctions that have kept observant Jews from going up to the Mount are now being reconsidered. All Jews are regarded by Jewish law as "unclean," and are therefore forbidden to go onto the Mount. The most sanctified place on the Mount in the days of the Temple was the Holy of Holies, where the Ark of the Covenant, containing the Ten Commandments, was kept. Since it is difficult to specify precisely where the Holy of Holies was located, and lest someone step on that place even inadvertently (incurring an automatic death penalty, according to ancient law), the injunction against stepping there was extended to the entire area.
The Israeli courts have generally denied the right of Jews to pray on the Temple Mount, but there are signs of change there, too. In 1983 the High Court reaffirmed that the Temple Mount is a holy site for Jews and that, accordingly, Jews not only have the right of access, but a right of worship as well. Nevertheless, the court insisted that because of the delicate and complex situation stemming from Muslim opposition to any Jewish presence on the Temple Mount, the issue has become political....
The driving force behind the Temple Mount movement, however, is the American evangelical community, some 45.5 million strong. The evangelicals met regularly with former Prime Minister Menachem Begin over the years, reportedly urging him to rebuild the Temple, and they raced to Washington this spring to endorse the proposal to move the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, citing Biblical prophecies of the day in the near future when Jerusalem will become the capital of the world.... The most visible link between the evangelicals and the drive to rebuild the Temple is found in the Jerusalem Temple Foundation in Los Angeles, the latest of several organizations (and the only such group in the United States) designed to put pressure on the Israeli government to limit the Waqf's control....
A few years ago, anyone in Israel who talked about rebuilding the Temple, or advocated freedom of prayer on the Temple Mount, was considered to be a lunatic. Today, according to a poll published in the newspaper HAARETZ, 19 percent of the Israeli public believes there should at least be freedom of prayer on the Mount. The chief rabbinate has created a special committee to "prepare a theological, archeological, and architectural report concerning the location of the Holy of Holies on the Temple Mount," and some members of the committee — Rabbi Dov Lior from Kiryat Arba and Rabbi Mordechai Eliahu, the Sephardic chief rabbi — are known to support the building of a synagogue on the Temple Mount. There are groups studying the rituals of the Temple, others studying the manufacture of priestly garments for the Temple, and a growing yeshivah [a school for Talmudic studies] — the Yeshivah Ateret Hacohanim — that is not only training priests (in a fifteen-year course!) for service in the Temple, but is also slowly buying houses in the Arab Quarter of Jerusalem — all of which are located along the routes leading to the Temple Mount.
In keeping with the Jewish-Christian symbiosis that characterizes the Temple Mount movement, though the yeshivah and its students are all Jewish, much of its funding — for the yeshivah itself as well as for the houses they are buying and living in — comes from evangelicals, mostly in the United States.
Some of the members of these committees, yeshivahs, and groups are simply interested in the historical or scientific aspects of the Temple Mount. But many — and their number is growing — are working for a Jewish presence on the Mount, and eventually the rebuilding of the Temple. Some of these people are highly orthodox, and firmly believe that the Messiah will soon arrive. Others are primarily Israeli nationalists, who view Muslim control of the Temple Mount as an insult to the Zionist dream. But in the end the religious and nationalistic themes are hard to distinguish from each other, and the effect is the same: Waqf control over the Temple Mount is being challenged.
By far the most dynamic of the challengers is the Israeli section of the Jerusalem Temple Foundation, headed by Stanley Goldfoot, a South African Jew who came to Israel in the '30s and fought in the Stern Gang during the postwar period. A passionate nationalist, a highly skilled rhetorician, and a man of demonstrated activism, Goldfoot believes that the Temple Mount belongs to Israel, and to Israel alone....
Goldfoot sees the Christians as logical allies.... In Goldfoot's view, it is the Christians above all who realize that "we are coming to a crucial period in earth's history, and they want to help fulfill prophecy and thus hasten the coming of the Messiah."
It is thus not so surprising that those who planned to sabotage the Temple Mount in January carried Christian versions of the Old Testament, for the Temple Mount movement is based on a messianic vision that, at least in its first stages, is common to both Jewish and Christian religions. To be sure, there is a basic disagreement, but it is one that will only be resolved in the Final Days. As one Jewish leader put it to us last summer in Jerusalem, "They believe that once the Temple is built, Jesus will come again. We expect the Messiah to come for the first time. Let's build the Temple, and see what he looks like."
Both the evangelical Christians and the activist Jews are in for a shock. Whether there is to be a literal Temple building or not, Christ will be coming back this time to a spiritual Temple (I Cor. 3:16-17: II Cor. 6:16), which is now, unperceived by the world, under construction by means of the education and training of God's begotten children today.
— Gene H. Hogberg, News Bureau
