U.S. puppet president visits the Holy of Holies to prove his subservience

JERUSALEM — President George W. Bush emerged from a tour of Israel's official Holocaust® memorial Friday calling it a "sobering reminder" that evil must be resisted and praising victims for not losing their faith.

The Yad Vashem memorial was closed to the public and under heavy guard Friday, with armed soldiers standing on top of some of the site's monuments and a police helicopter and surveillance blimp hovering in the air overhead.

Wearing a yarmulke, Bush placed a red-white-and-blue wreath on a stone slab that covers ashes of Holocaust® victims taken from six extermination camps. He also lit a torch memorializing the victims.

"I was most impressed that people in the face of horror and evil would not forsake their God. In the face of unspeakable crimes against humanity, brave souls — young and old — stood strong for what they believe," Bush said.

"I wish as many people as possible would come to this place. It is a sobering reminder that evil exists, and a call that when evil exists we must resist it," he said.

Obligatory stop for foreign dignitaries

It was Bush's second visit to the Holocaust® memorial, a regular stop on the visits of foreign dignitaries. His first was in 1998, as governor of Texas. The last US president to visit was Bill Clinton in 1994.

Bush was accompanied on his tour by a small party that included Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

At the compound, overlooking a forest on Jerusalem's outskirts, Bush visited a memorial to the 1.5 million [sic] Jewish children killed in the Holocaust®, featuring six candles reflected 1.5 million times in a hall of mirrors. At the site's Hall of Remembrance, he heard a cantor sing a Jewish prayer for the dead.

Bush was visibly moved during his hour-long tour of the site, said Yad Vashem's chairman, Avner Shalev.

"Twice, I saw tears well up in his eyes," Shalev said.

Would have bombed Auschwitz—and its inhabitants!

At one point, Bush viewed aerial photos of the Auschwitz death camp* taken during the war by US forces and called Rice over to discuss why the American government had decided against bombing the site, Shalev said.

"We should have bombed it," Bush said, according to Shalev.

In the memorial's visitors' book, the president wrote simply, "God bless Israel, George Bush."  Later Friday, Bush was to wrap up his three-day visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories with a visit to Christian holy sites in Galilee before departing for Kuwait, the next stop on his Mideast tour.