some guy in lebanon

The AFP is reporting that Olmert claimed he ‘phoned in’ America’s vote on the UN Security Council’s resolution calling for a cease fire in the Gaza Strip. Olmert claimed Secretary Rice was ‘shamed’ and was forced to abstain when President Bush called her after he was phoned by Olmert. How spineless can America be in the face of the wholesale destruction of a people? How more complicit can our government be in the deaths of hundreds, soon to be thousands, of Palestinians in Gaza at the hands of Israel? The full story from the AFP:

Occupied Jerusalem: US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was left shame-faced after President George W. Bush ordered her to abstain in a key UN vote on the Gaza war, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Monday.

“She was left shamed. A resolution that she prepared and arranged, and in the end she did not vote in favor,” Olmert said in a speech in the southern town of Ashkelon. The UN Security Council passed a resolution last Thursday calling for an immediate ceasefire an an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Fourteen of the council’s fifteen members voted in favor of the resolution, which was later rejected by both Israel and Hamas.

The United States, Israeli’s main ally, had initially been expected to vote in line with the other fourteen, but Rice later became the sole abstention.

“In the night between Thursday and Friday, when the secretary of state wanted to lead the vote… we did not want her to vote in favor,” Olmert said.

“I said ‘get me ‘President Bush on the phone.’ They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care. ‘I need to talk to him now.’ He got off the podium and spoke to me. ‘I told him the United States could not vote in favor,’” Olmert added. “It cannot vote in favor of such a resolution. He immediately called the secretary of state and told her not to vote in favor.”