I really want to know about their "childhoods" and how they came to be who they are as Leaders. This was the best of a Google Search...that seemed to give "snips" of their childhood. Anyone have some other info that might be relevant? Anyway...I'm always curious about what motivates people from childhood to adulthood. Think it's interesting to get background on people that the Media doesn't always give. So just throwing this out here.
(On Edit: it's good to remember that both probably have Public Relations "Spin Meisters" and we need to read with skepticism. But if anyone has better "Bio's" please post.
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"Seyyed Hasan Nasrallah's Autobiography"Ya Lesarat Ol-Hoseyn (Tehran)
August 10, 2006 OSC Translated Text
My father Abdulkarim used to sell fruit and vegetables; my brothers would help him. When my father's financial status improved, he opened a small grocery store in the neighborhood, and I would go there to help him usually. We had a picture of Imam Musa al-Sadr hanging on the wall of the store. I would sit on a chair in front of the picture and stare at it. I wished that I would become like him one day. We did not have a mosque in our neighborhood, which was called Kortina, so I would go to the San Al-Fil, Borj Jamud, or Nob'eh mosques for prayers. I would read any reading material I found, especially Islamic books. Any book that I could not understand, I would put aside to read it when I grew older. I went to a school in the Al-Najah neighborhood for my primary education, and I was among the last group of students who gained the diploma certificate. After that, I went to the San Al-Fil state school to continue my education there, but the flames of the 1975 civil war erupted very soon afterward. Hence, I left Kortina and returned, along with my family, to the village of Bazuyeh, where I was born.
After that, I finished my high school education in one of the state schools of the coastal city of Sur. Earlier, when we lived in the Kortina neighborhood, none of my family members or I was affiliated with any political party. Meanwhile, several political organizations, of which some were Palestinian, were active in the area. But, later on, when we moved back to Bazuyeh, I joined the ranks of the Amal movement. That was a choice that I made very eagerly, because I deeply admired Imam Musa al-Sadr. At that time, I was just 15-years-old and the Amal movement was called and known as the movement of the underprivileged. I was becoming less interested in the village of Bazuyeh, because that village was turning into an arena for the activity of intellectuals, Marxists, and especially supporters of the Lebanese Communist Party. Anyway, my brother Seyyed Hoseyn and I became members of the Amal movement, and, in spite of my young age, I soon became the representative of our village.
Within a few months, I made a firm decision to go to Najaf Ashraf in Iraq. At that time, I was hardly 16-years-old and I faced many restrictions against going. But, since my reliance was on god, one day at the mosque of the city of Sur I met a religious scholar whose name was Seyyed Mohammad Gharavi. He worked there on behalf of Imam Musa Sadr as a teacher. As soon as he heard that I wanted to go to Najaf Ashraf for education, he wrote a letter and gave it to me. Seyyed Mohammad Gharavi was a close and favorite friend of Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Muhammad Baqr al-Sadr. The letter that he gave me was a recommendation for my admission to that dignitary's class. With the help of friends and my father, and by selling some belongings, I gathered some money and flew to Baghdad; from there I took a bus to Al-Najaf.
When I arrived in Al-Najaf, I had no money left in my pockets. But, there are more than a few strangers and lonely people in Al-Najaf. More important, of course, is the fact that a scholar must learn how to live a respectable life with empty hands. My food was bread and water, and my bed was a rectangular piece of sponge mattress. As soon as I arrived, I asked the other Lebanese scholars living there how I could get my letter of recommendation to Ayatollah Al-Sadr, who was considered as a pillar of the religious seminary. They told me that Seyyed Abbas Musavi could do that for me. When I met with Seyyed Abbas Musavi, because he was a little bit dark-skinned, I assumed he was Iraqi. Hence, I spoke to him in plain Arabic. But in response, Seyyed Abbas told me: "Do not bother; I am also Lebanese and I have come here from the Nabi Sheys area!" That was how our acquaintance and close friendship began. Musa was a friend, brother, mentor, and companion for me. We were separated from each other when the Israelis fired missiles at his vehicle from a helicopter and martyred Seyyed Abbas, along with his wife and little child. This incident happened 16 years after the sweet start of our friendship in the city of Al-Najaf. Ayatollah Al-Sadr, after accepting me and reading my letter of recommendation from Seyyed Mohammad Gharavi, asked me: "Do you have any money?" I said: "Not a penny!" The Ayatollah then turned to Musavi and stated: "First, get him a room, then you be his tutor and take care of him." After that, he gave me some money to buy me some clothes and books, as well as some spending money for a month. Musavi got me a room at the seminary near his own house.More of this read at....
http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:iiIy1Y7t1BAJ:www.fas.org/irp/news/2006/08/nasrallah.html+Biography+of+Nasrallah&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=3==============================
EHUD OLMERT:Ehud Olmert was born in 1945 in a training camp for members of the militant Jewish underground known as the Irgun, and grew up in Binyamina, a small town north of Tel Aviv. The Olmerts were a family steeped in the politics of the right-wing revisionist Zionist movement of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and they lived in the largely Irgun neighborhood of Nahalat Jabotinsky. His father, Mordechai, was one of the found-ers of the Irgun. When it was disbanded, he served as a member of the Knesset for Herut, the party named for the Hebrew word
for “freedom,” founded by Irgun leader, Menachem Begin. Like the Irgun, Herut was ideological and uncompromising.
“There are two banks to the Jordan,” went one party slogan. “One bank is ours, and the other is, too.” David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, who led Mapai, the party that was Labor’s predecessor, put Herut on par with the Communists and blacklisted its members.
The prime minister’s Russian-born father and Ukrainian-born mother, Bella, immigrated to Palestine in the 1930s from Harbin, China, where their families fled after the 1917 Revolution. Chinese was the Yiddish of the Olmert household, the language his parents used when they did not want the kids to understand what they were discussing. In 1994, Ehud Olmert said kaddish over his grandfather’s grave in Harbin with Amram, one of his four brothers, who was at the time the science and agriculture attaché at the Israeli embassy in Beijing. When Mordechai Olmert died in 1998, his last words were in Chinese. “Although we did not understand what he said, we knew his heart was tied with Harbin forever,” Olmert told China’s People’s Daily.
Although at one time Olmert served as an infantry officer in the prestigious Golani Brigade, he is no military hero. In fact, he began his national service as a correspondent for the Israel Defense Forces magazine, Bamahane, becoming what Israelis derisively call a jobnik. His interest was politics, which beckoned while he was studying law at Hebrew University. As a student leader of Herut he exhibited considerable chutzpah when, at age 21, he called on Begin to resign for repeatedly losing elections. “Up to now Begin has led the movement as an opposition, but he has not succeeded in leading it to rule. He must accept the consequence and resign,” he said at a party conference. In 1973, Herut and several other rightist parties joined to form what was to become Likud, a Hebrew word meaning “unity.” Olmert, then 28, ran for parliament and won, becoming the youngest Knesset member at the time. He set about making a name for himself tackling crime and corruption, spearheading investigations that turned out to be highly embarrassing for the ruling Labor Party.
After the electoral “earthquake” of May 1977, when Begin and Likud brought 30 years of Labor hegemony to an end, Olmert emerged, with his friend Dan Meridor and Netanyahu, as one of Likud’s young “princes” destined to become leaders. By that time, Olmert was running a successful corporate law practice (Knesset members were still permitted to pursue their own careers) and acquiring a reputation for lucrative deal-making that has never left him. A close friend of some of the wealthiest people in Israel—including CEOs, bankers and lawyers—he became Likud treasurer. He was later charged with accepting illegal donations, but was acquitted.
-snip-
Olmert’s ideological conversion is no less remarkable than Sharon’s, the hawkish old soldier who, for 30 years, did more than any other Israeli to promote Jewish settlement in the territories. Like Sharon, Olmert found his way from a lifelong belief in the ideology of Greater Israel to shoulder-shrugging pragmatism about the need to compromise with the Palestinians. In 2005, he publicly regretted his failure to support Begin’s 1978 Camp David Accords. “I voted against Menachem Begin,” he said. “I told him it was a historic mistake, how dangerous it would be, and so on and so on. Now I am sorry he is not alive for me to be able to publicly recognize his wisdom and my mistake. He was right and I was wrong. Thank God we pulled out of the Sinai.”
“We don’t want to dominate or patronize the Palestinians,” he insisted when I met him in London. “There has been a seismic shift in Israeli public opinion, a realization that we have to adopt practical policies that will lead to a serious peace process with the Palestinians.” And if that meant “painful compromises,” he added, “so be it.” Olmert admits that his views have changed, but insists the turnabout has been exaggerated. As he told The Jerusalem Post, his readiness for a drastic measure like the disengagement plan could be seen much earlier in his career. “The first person to propose ‘unilateral autonomy’ was
Moshe Dayan in 1979. By that time, he had already carefully analyzed the situation and reached the inevitable conclusion that there was no alternative. This was the basis for his leaving Begin’s government, and when he brought it to the Knesset for a vote in 1980, I was the only one in the Likud who supported him.”
One of the most revealing clues to Olmert’s transformation may be found in his own backyard. His wife Aliza, whom he met while a student, is a well-known artist and left-winger who attends Peace Now rallies. This year’s election, she has admitted, was the first in which she ever voted for the party her husband represented. Of her husband’s political transition, she told PBS’s Frontline, “It must make a change if your family and your friends keep pointing a finger on reality from a different angle…. You know, how long can you try the same policies that don’t work? For how many years and with how many casualties?” Theirs is a household where political talk is always lively but respectful, and the prime minister has no coalition partners among the couple’s five children, including an adopted daughter. In fact many of the Olmert children have been outspoken about their dovish political beliefs. One daughter, Dana, is a lesbian involved in monitoring abuses of Palestinians at IDF checkpoints in the territories. Son Ariel was a conscientious objector and is a student in Paris. Their other son, Shaul, who served in the army, is an executive at Nickelodeon TV in New York and also leans politically left.
(EDITED for better link to Olmert's Childhood.)
more at.......
http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:19qY6ULYk14J:www.momentmag.com/olam/Jun06/MOM-2006-06_olmert.html+Bio+of+Ehud+Olmert+Childhood&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=9
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