Mike's Musings

Vital statistics

2012-01-27T08:53:00.000-08:00

A new study shows that 80% of Israeli Jews believe in God. The study by the Gutman Center of the Israel Democracy Institute, conducted on behalf of the Avi-Chai fund, polled thousands of Israelis in the past several years, and discovered that the number of Israeli Jews who believe in God and practice a religious lifestyle is growing.

Studies during the 1990s showed a continuous decline in the level of belief among Jews in Israel, the latest study reveals that 77% of Israeli Jews believe in a ‘divine power’ that guides the world, and that 72% believe that prayer has the power to improve their lives. Further, 67% of Israelis believe the Jews are the chosen people, and 65% believe that the Torah and its commandments are of Divine origin. In addition, 34% believe that Jews who do not observe the Torah are endangering their fellow Jews and Israelis.

An increasing number of young Israelis are coming to faith in Jesus and that thousands of Israelis are using the World Wide Web to find out about Jesus.

Israelis spend, on average, twice as much time on the Internet as Americans, and a massive 94% of Israeli Internet users are active on social networks and spend over 11 hours each month on Facebook, more than double the 5.7 hours spent by the average person worldwide.

In the last two years, a number of Israeli Messianic Jews have begun using the Internet and social networking sites to reach their fellow Jews with the message of Jesus. The website iGod.co.il is aimed at secular Israelis who are looking for something deeper in life, xRabbi.co.il attracts those from an Orthodox background, while another site allows visitors to either download or order a print copy of the New Testament free of charge.

Most Israelis know nothing of the prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures that point to Jesus but adverts on Facebook, Google and other high-traffic websites are attracting thousands of visitors to evangelistic Hebrew-language websites such as TheOne.co.il which presents a childishly simple explanation of God’s plan of redemption.

The statistics are impressive. Every month, Israelis google the name Yeshua (Jesus) more than 25,000 times, while Brit Hadasha (New Testament) is googled over 5,000 times. On average, an Israeli downloads a New Testament in MP3 format every five hours, while a free copy of the New Testament is ordered every 17 hours.

CWI's Israel website carries a wide range of evangelistic and teaching material at

Big White Lies

2012-01-26T09:43:00.000-08:00

The Zionist Federation has written to Amnesty International, urging the organisation to ‘reconsider the appropriateness of promoting Ben White [above],’ whose book launch it is due to host tonight, the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day (get it?).

White's book, Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy, carries a Foreword by the extremist Israeli-Arab Knesset Member Haneen Zoabi who called for a third Intifada against Israel in 2010.

White’s criticisms of Israel, says the ZF, go well beyond the bounds of acceptable conduct. The letter points out that in 2002, White wrote ‘I have just provided a by no means comprehensive list of reasons why I can understand very well that some people are unpleasant towards Jews. I do not agree with them, but I can understand.’ The article is still available on the anti-Zionist Counterpunch website.

In 2007, White wrote in Palestine News, the magazine of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign: ‘Pity the Palestinians, who, in the name of a “social-democratic experiment,” had to endure massacres, death-marches, and ethnic cleansing.’

No Palestinians have been forced to endure death marches or ethnic cleansing. There has been one alleged massacre of Palestinians, which is disputed, as opposed to several documented Arab massacres of Jews.

White’s previous book, Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide, says the ZF letter is ‘full of untruths and inaccuracies. Among the worst of these was his misquoting of Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, as saying “We must expel Arabs and take their places” Ben Gurion had actually said the opposite: “We do not wish and do not need to expel Arabs and take their places.’

The letter claims that White is motivated ‘not by a true concern for the Palestinians but rather an irrational obsession with and hatred of Israel. If he were truly concerned with the rights of underprivileged people, why, in all the time that he spent living in Brazil, have we been unable to find any articles by him on the terrible discrimination and persecution suffered by those in the Favelas and by the native peoples in the Amazon region?’

White has also defended Sheikh Raed Salah, a racist and anti-Semite who claims that the Jews bake the blood of children into their holy bread, that 4,000 Jews were absent from work at the World Trade Centre on 9/11, taunted a Jewish teacher with a Swastika and wrote a poem referring to Jews as ‘monkeys and losers’ and being ‘the bacteria of all times.’

The ZF has urged Amnesty to reconsider their support for tonight’s event or to provide a genuine debate to take place with a speaker who holds a different view to that of White. It looks, however, as though the ZF’s plea has fallen on deaf ears.

Ben White is to be a speaker at the second ‘Christ at the Checkpoint’ conference in March, cynically timed to coincide with the festival of Purim when Jews celebrate their divine deliverance at the time of Esther. Though the event is billed as a ‘Christian Conference of Hope and Reconciliation’, one wonders if, with White as a speaker, ‘Christ at the Checkpoint’ is just another exercise in delegitimizing Israel and undermining Christian support for the only democracy in the Middle East.

Having said that, White may well put his audience to sleep. See him in action here.

And just in case you are planning to go to the launch of Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy, 'Amnesty International UK reserves the right to refuse entry to any person for any reason deemed appropriate by us, including (but not exclusively): capacity limitations, intoxication or any conduct that we consider would be disruptive or offensive...' That means you won't be able to ask any questions White can't answer.

Egypt's threat to Jews and Christians

2012-01-05T08:27:00.000-08:00

Contrary to the grand statements by Egyptian, Israeli and Western diplomats that the Camp David Accords were in no danger, Egypt’s new dominant political force, the Muslim Brotherhood, vowed this week to increase Cairo’s hostility toward Israel and to possibly cancel the Camp David Accords.

In an interview with the Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat published on Sunday, Muslim Brotherhood deputy leader Dr. Rashad Bayoumi insisted that his group will never recognize Israel’s right to exist ‘under any circumstance.’

When he was reminded that the Camp David Accords obligate Egypt’s government to recognize and have peaceful relations with Israel, Bayoumi said he didn’t care: ‘This is not an option, whatever the circumstances, we do not recognize Israel at all …The Brotherhood respects international conventions, but we will take legal action against the peace treaty with the Zionist entity.’

Bayoumi’s remarks followed the first two rounds of voting in Egypt’s first parliamentary election since the fall of former dictator Hosni Mubarak. The Muslim Brotherhood is on track to control 40% of the parliament by the time the third round of voting is completed this week. Allied Islamist party al-Nour will come in second place by winning around 30 percent of the vote.

Western leaders have tried to downplay the fact that Egypt’s next government will be controlled by Islamist parties with ties to Hamas and other terror groups. Last year, US President Barak Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other top American officials dismissed the Muslim Brotherhood a ‘fringe’ movement within Egypt (one Senator even said the Muslim Brotherhood was a ‘secular’ organisation), and was unlikely to win outright control in free elections. Obama insisted in early 2011 that the Brotherhood didn’t have majority support in Egypt.

When it became increasingly clear over the summer that the Muslim Brotherhood was emerging as Egypt’s new dominant force, Obama’s reaction was to ‘engage’ the party that had once been condemned by Washington as a terrorist organization.

This week, the Brotherhood’s second in command told Arab media that, once in power, his group will never recognize Israel and will work to undo the Camp David Accords, a policy that has the potential to unhinge what’s left of regional stability.

Another claim making the media rounds is that Egypt’s revolution and even the rise of the Islamists will be good for the country’s 8-10 million Coptic Christians.

Bolstering this fallacy was a photo (see above)showing a handful of Coptic Christians forming a protective ring around praying Muslims during the first anti-government demonstrations early last year. During the past week, the photo was placed highly on various polls for the best news photos of 2011, perpetuating the myth that Egypt’s revolution was a united Christian-Muslim effort or was not about religion at all.

Since the photo was taken, however, the rising Islamic tide in Egypt has claimed many Christian lives, and Coptic leaders have complained that the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists are leaving them out of crucial decision-making processes that will determine the future of Egypt.

In a recent act of Muslim violence against the Copts, the newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm reported that a number of Coptic homes near the Egyptian city of Asyut were burned by Muslim mobs angered by a local Christian boy who shared a critical drawing of the Prophet Mohammed on his Facebook account.

Police stopped the mob from completely destroying the boy’s house, so they moved to the next village and attacked the homes of two Christian families that had nothing to do with the drawing or its dissemination over the Internet.

In October, an Egyptian court sentenced a young Christian man to three years in prison for posting opinions deemed offensive to Islam and Mohammed on his Facebook account.

It looks as though Israel will soon have a second Islamic Republic to deal with, this time on its very doorstep. And that Republic will be heavily armed with the best weapons America can sell.

Christmas is cancelled in Gaza

2011-12-28T06:20:00.000-08:00

While crowds of anti-Zionists protested at Israel's 'criminal siege of Gaza' outside the Israeli embassy in London yesterday, Gaza's few remaining Christians concluded a very sombre Christmas.

In a report from Gaza City, The Guardian's Pheobe Greenwood said she had been told that by local Christians that after seizing control of Gaza in 2007, Hamas effectively cancelled Christmas, and that any open celebration of the holiday is met with threats of arrest or worse.

The manager of Gaza City's Bible bookshop was brutally murdered soon after Hamas took power.

'People here do not celebrate Christmas anymore because they are nervous,' Imad Jelda, an Orthodox Christian, told Greenwood. Fewer than 1,400 Christians now live among Gaza's 1.5 million Muslims.

Two brothers from another Christian family explained that most of their family had been forced to flee Gaza under threat of Muslim violence.

One of the brothers told Greenwood, 'This is not a Christian environment. There are no good universities [for Christians], there is no opportunity to work, no apartments to rent and so no way we can get married. We have no future here.'

Meanwhile, Israel's enemies continue to blame Israel for the dwindling number of Christians in the Holy Land.

Expect Israel's antagonists to gloss over and dismiss The Guardian's rare truthful report regarding the true reasons behind the disappearance of Christian communities in the region.

Abbas in high profile meeting with child murderer

2011-12-27T00:33:00.000-08:00

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is a controversial figure and some of his remarks about the Israeli-Palestinian situation have been extreme.

Neveetheless, his belief that a genuine peace deal with the Palestinian Authority is not possible at present is justified.

The Islamist takeover in Egypt, the fragility of Iraq's democracy, the ongoing bloodshed in Syria, according to Lieberman, make it clear that now is not to the time to push for a Israeli-Palestinian peace arrangement.

Lieberman asked rhetorically,'In the midst of an earthquake do you start to lay the foundations for a new building?'

As he has in the past, Lieberman suggested that the focus of Israel and the international community should be maintaining the status quo in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while trying to improve economic conditions in Palestinian-ruled areas.

As further evidence that a true peace is currently impossible, Lieberman referred to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' visit to Turkey last week, during which he had a highly publicized meeting with the female Palestinian terrorist Amneh Muna (shown above).

In 2001 Muna used the Internet to lure 16-year-old Ofir Rahum to the Palestinian town of Ramallah, where she and her accomplices brutally murdered the Israeli youth. Muna was released from an Israeli prison in the recent prisoner swap that saw Israel free over 1,000 terrorists in exchange for abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Lieberman pointed out that Abbas had no reason to visit Amneh Muna except to glorify the terrorist murder of Israeli Jews, even when the victims are children. With such people, he said, it is impossible to have truly peaceful coexistence.

'An organised hypocrisy'

2011-12-22T02:41:00.000-08:00

For years a small group of nationalist religious Jewish youth has been carrying out ‘price tag’ acts of vandalism to demonstrate to the Israeli government that it cannot surrender to international demands regarding control of the Land of Israel without causing problems with its own people.

Over the past month those attacks have escalated, culminating in a raid on an Israeli army outpost in the Jordan Valley that had allegedly been tasked with forcibly uprooting a nearby Jewish community.

These attacks are regrettable and they are wrong but they have not so far resulted in a single casualty. However, they have exposed the deep-rooted hypocrisy of the international community and local Arabs when relating to the Israeli-Arab conflict.

Last Tuesday, the four current European members of the UN Security Council – France, Britain, Germany and Portugal – released a statement that included a detailed condemnation of the ‘price tag’ attacks:

One of the themes that emerged was the severely damaging effect that increased settlement construction and settler violence is having on the ground and on the prospects of a return to negotiations.

By contrast, the international community has never viewed Palestinian terrorism, which has claimed the lives of many Israeli Jews, as impeding peace efforts. Terrorist murders of Jews usually galvanizes the world to urge Israeli to make greater concessions.

Deadlocks in the peace process are always blamed on Israel, while systematic Palestinian intransigence and officially-sanctioned violence is swept under the rug.

Israeli Arab lawmakers succeeded in introducing a new Knesset bill demanding harsh punishment for ‘price tag’ attacks. The bill calls for tough punishment for vandalism against any holy sites, be they Muslim, Christian or Jewish. It also stipulates imprisonment for incitement against another religion or its adherents.

The explanatory notes to the bill, however, make clear that the bill is not as unbiased as it would appear. The sole target of the bill is the Jewish nationalist movement:

In the wake of the wave of arson against mosques, this proposal is inevitable and we cannot settle for weak condemnations.

The two MKs who submitted the bill, Ahmed Tibi and Ibrahim Sarsour, have for decades been at the forefront of fomenting hatred for Israel’s Jews and dismissing Arab Muslim violence. Tibi in particular has cried out loudly whenever a Muslim leader is arrested for inciting violence against Jews and has been conspicuously silent when Muslim vandalise Jewish holy sites, such as the weekly defacement of Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus.

Israel, meanwhile, has strongly condemned ‘price tag’ vandalism, demonstrating once again that it is not like its enemies. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to take firm action against the perpetrators, as he would against any criminal, and has condemned their actions as immoral, despite the possible legitimacy of their political concerns.

A group of students from a Torah academy cleaned up a mosque that had been vandalized. Rabbi Yair Ansbacher of the Eitan Academy in Maaleh Adumim told Israel National News:

We discussed the issue and decided to express our total opposition to these acts by going to a mosque and cleaning it up.

Rabbi Ansbacher lamented that the positive actions of his students had been totally ignored by the media which, instead, focused its attention on the Jewish vandals in an effort to paint all Jewish settlers as hostile and aggressive.

The Palestinianisation of Jesus

2011-12-19T04:44:00.000-08:00

Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber turned Jesus into a Superstar, to Kris Kristofferson ‘Jesus was a Capricorn’, to Judy Tzuke, ‘Jesus was a Cross Maker’ and to Sir Elton John, Jesus was (what else?) a ‘super-intelligent gay man’. I've also heard that Jesus was a Buddhist priest, a spaceman and a time traveller. Now he’s a Palestinian hero.

It’s nothing new for the Palestinians to claim that Jesus was one of them. Yasser Arafat used to declare as much every Christmas in Bethlehem. Arafat may be gone but the malady lingers on, as demonstrated last week in a statement from the Palestinian Authority’s ‘moderate’ Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.

'Christmas is an opportunity to celebrate the Palestinian identity of Jesus Christ,’ Fayyad declared when he flipped the switch lighting a 50-foot Christmas tree in Bethlehem's Manger Square last week.

The notion that Jesus was a Palestinian permeates Arab society in the region. In an interview on 3 December last year, the author Samih Ghanadreh was interviewed on Palestinian Authority TV about his book Christianity and its Connection to Islam. Ghanadreh recalled with fondness that Arafat labelled Jesus ‘the first Palestinian Shahid (Martyr),’ to which the host responded that no one denies ‘Jesus was a Palestinian.’

Earlier in 2010, the Communications and Education Authority of Fatah issued a statement on its official website:

If we are proud of the holiness of our land, then we are proud and pride ourselves that the first and most important holy woman among the nations and peoples is from the holy land: The Virgin Mary – the woman of love and peace – is of the nation of Palestine…

In 2009, the Mufti of Jerusalem Mohammed Hussein, who was appointed by Mahmoud Abbas, preached on Palestinian TV:

Jesus was born in this land; he took his first steps in this land and spread his teachings [of Islam] in this land. He and his mother [Mary], we may say, were Palestinians par excellence.

The belief that Jesus, the Messiah of Israel, was a Palestinian and a pre-Islamic Muslim to boot is ingrained into the Palestinian communal psyche. All historic or religious ties between Jesus and the Jews have been severed, just as the Palestinians have severed all historic and religious ties between the Jews and the land of Israel.

But it’s not only Palestinians that are being indoctrinated. Western Christians are very susceptible to Palestinian propaganda. Some years ago I attended a symposium in London at which one speaker recounted that on his first encounter with Palestinian Christians he had asked when they became Christians. There response was one of annoyance. How dare he ask that question? Their people had been Christians since the day of Pentecost!

A biblical scholar I admire very much has stated that on the day of Pentecost, Peter preached in Arabic!

Other western Christians can do even better than that. One evangelical author knows Palestinian Christians who have been faithful to the Saviour since the magi visited Bethlehem, while another knows Palestinian Christians who are descended from the shepherds to whom the angels appeared!

Well, as they say, this is a magic season, so we shouldn’t be surprised that there are conjurors around who can turn Israel into Palestine, Jesus into a Palestinian and Christianity into Islam.

Vote, vote, vote for Hamas. We kill more Jews.

2011-12-16T10:32:00.000-08:00

Last Wednesday, Hamas marked its 24th anniversary by publicising the number of Jews it has murdered. The highly publicized event (and grisly casualty figures) came just months before Palestinians are scheduled to go to the polls to elect a new parliament and president.

In an official statement, Hamas' military wing the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigade, boasted of killing 1,365 Israelis and wounding another 6,411 in 1,117 terror attacks over the past twenty years. The Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigade claimed it had fired over 11,000 rockets and missiles from Gaza into southern Israel.

Hours later, tens of thousands of Palestinians gathered in Gaza City to celebrate Hamas' founding and its successes against the hated Jews of Israel. Speakers at the event reiterated Hamas' dedication to eliminating Israel, and decried ongoing Middle East peace negotiations as a failed experiment.

Many in Israel saw the public event as the start of Hamas' campaign for the next legislative and presidential election, which Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has announced will take place in May 2012.

Hamas leaders expect to score another landslide victory when next the Palestinians go to the polls. The 2006 Palestinian election produced a surprise Hamas takeover of the Palestinian parliament, a result that left clueless Western diplomats baffled.

If recent electoral results in Egypt, with successes for the Muslim Brotherhood which begot Hamas are any indication, the general sentiment on the street has only drifted closer to the Islamist viewpoint in the intervening years.

And what will the international community do in the face of Hamas’ electoral campaign? If Hamas is victorious at the polls, Israel will be urged to talk to Hamas.

Picture this. A group of thugs has murdered all your family and they are threatening to kill you also. You go to the police and the sergeant behind the desk responds, ‘Have you tried talking to these people sir?’

‘They’ve killed my parents, my wife, my children and they are after me too,’ you shout.

‘Well sir,’ says the sergeant, ‘I’m sure these people can be made to think differently if you just have little talk with them.’

Surreal? Of sourse. But that’s essentially what the world has been saying to Israel for the last two decades.

Conspiracy for Dummies

2011-12-14T15:36:00.000-08:00

Some conspiracy theories are sophisticated and compelling while others are so crude you’d have to have the IQ of a walnut to be taken in by them but tens of thousands are duped by such things. I was reluctant to post this because readers might think I doubt their reasoning faculties but sometime in the future you might receive an email with the headline ‘Full Speech Of Rabbi Rabbinovitch Found’ and a ‘Commentary by Rose Rabbinovich’.

Two days ago I received such a message.

The email informed me that a ‘report from Europe carried the following speech of Rabbi Emmanuel Rabinovich before a special meeting of the Emergency Council of European Rabbis in Budapest, Hungary, January 12, 1952: ‘Greetings, my children; You have been called her to recapitulate the principal steps of our new program [a la The Protocols of the Elders of Zion]…’

There is enough in that one short excerpt to tell anyone who knows anything about Judaism that it is a fake. When do rabbis address their fellow rabbis as their ‘children’? Rabbis are not Catholic priests.

‘Emergency Council of European Rabbis’? Oh, please…

A meeting of rabbis in Budapest in the Communist-ruled People’s Republic of Hungary in 1952? I don’t think so.

All the evidence suggests that Rabbi Emmanuel Rabbinovich never existed but if anyone knows anything about the man who supposedly headed up this fictional shadowy group of Elders of Zion, I'd be interested to know about a man who was clever enough to remain hidden until now but not so smart as to make sure his explosive document was never discovered.

‘Rose Rabbinovich’ who sent the speech to Jeff Rense, labels herself a ‘Former Zionist’. She apparently lives in Melbourne, Australia and her email address is listed as rabbinovich@bluemail.ch.

When I received the mail, I strongly suspected that ‘Rose Rabbinovich’ was as non-existent as her rabbinic namesake; today I know it. Though she apparently lives in Melbourne in Australia, I noticed she uses a Swiss email address, so I emailed Ms Rabbinovitch just to ask if she really existed and, as I expected, I received the following message:

Postini rejected your message to the following e-mail addresses:
rabbinovich@bluemail.ch (rabbinovich@bluemail.ch)
Postini gave this error:
550 : User unknown

I decided this morning to try to set up an email account with the Swiss company 'Bluemail', also known as 'Bluewin'. I received this message:

Unfortunately, Bluewin registrations are not possible outside Switzerland.
If you are in Switzerland, this page is unlikely to appear. But if it does, please call our Customer Service (free of charge) on 0800 800 800. Our operators are there to take your call seven days a week. For SME customers 0800 055 055.

Not only is the so-called Rabbinovich speech a fabrication, so also is Rose Rabbinovich. I suspect the flambuoyant Jeff Rense (just look at his picture on his website!) wrote the letter in an attempt to add some kind of authenticity to the hoax.

The fictitious ‘Rose Rabbinovich’ says she received ‘hundreds of emails to her ‘non-existent email address’ after the speech was posted. ‘If any of you had email “problems,” trying to contact me,’ she says, ‘please try again.’

Anyone who used the supplied email address would have had ‘problems’ trying to contact the elusive Ms Rabinovitch because the address is fictitious.

For clarity, I will now place all quotes from Rabinovitch in bold.

One question which was repeated in many of the emails to me was: 'How can we find the full Rabbinovich speech?'

I searched the Internet, but all websites with Rabbi Rabbinovich speech have been 'cleaned up' or blocked (I assume by the Zionists, as usual). Since I remember hearing from my grandfather about this speech already in the fifties, I decided to contact my Rabbi. He searched his favourite website http://www.facebook.com/l/QAQEcG1xDAQHy85IkcrGbodyiAQpAmI508-0sfi0s-1PUVw/abbc.com/ and found the full article. I am enclosing here the full speech by Rabbi Rabbinovich…

Now, let me get this straight. Ms Rabinovich sent the full text of the speech to Jeff Rense, who published it on his website.

'Hundreds' of people who read the speech then asked her where they could find the speech.

Ms Rabinovich couldn't find the speech she had sent to Rense because the nasty Zionists had managed to expunge it from every site on the World Wide Web. She then asked her rabbi to find the speech and he found it not on the Rense website where she'd published it but on a site that sells books…

Am I missing something here? I find Quantum Physics easier to understand than Rabinovich’s account.

In fact, about the only place where you can’t find the speech is at the ‘favourite website’ of ‘Rose Rabbinovich’s’ rabbi. Try it. Just Google ‘Rabbi Rabinovich’s Speech of January 12th 1952’ and in 0.22 seconds your get 33,100 results! Not only are these anti-Zionist bloggers liars; they are stupid to boot. Do they not realise that their readers know how to use search engines? Sorry. That was a stupid rhetorical question.

To tell you the truth, I was surprised at the fantastic reaction of your readers to this speech. After all there is little new in that speech, and most people who read the Elders Of Zion Protocols are already very familiar with this information.

Unfortunately we Jews are NOT allowed to read the Protocols, as the Zionists want to keep us uninformed to [sic] the hidden agenda of Zionism.

‘The Zionists’ don’t allow Jews to read the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’ How on earth can Zionists prevent anyone from reading any book? The book is readily available at Amazon and in bookshops. It is also freely available on Islamic and anti-semitic websites.

Some of the email I received claimed that The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion are [sic] a forgery.

To this I have five comments:

1. If it is a 'forgery', it implies that there is an original somewhere, WHERE IS IT? WHO WROTE IT?

The document was forged by a Russian secret police agent, Pytor Ivanovich Rachovsky, who claimed a secret Jewish network was plotting to take over the world. It was first printed in 1897. But Rachovsky copied it from the nineteenth century novel Biarritz by German author Hermann Goedsche who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Sir John Retcliffe’. Goedsche had stolen the idea from Maurice Joly’s Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu (1864), a satire aimed at Napoleon III.

2. Whether it is a forgery or not IS IRRELEVANT for the simple reason that our Zionist 'Jewish' 'brothers' have already implemented most, if not all of it. That is a fact. Every Jew who reads the Protocols knows that it was written by Jews, NO ONE ELSE could have written them.

First: So it’s ‘IRRELEVANT’ that, since it was published, this gross forgery has caused untold suffering for the Jewish people? The most charitable thing that can be said about the author of the letter is that she/he is a moral pygmy. The author is trying to cover her/his lies with an appeal to pragmatism.

Second: The author first of all tells us that Jews are not allowed to read the ‘Protocols’! Now she/he tells us they know what what ‘every Jew’ who has read the ‘Protocols’ thinks about them.

Third: No one but a Jew could have written the Protocols? Give me a break! If this is so, then Gentiles are not only ‘stupid’ but must also be illiterate!

3. The gentiles are really stupid (sorry), until now, they did not realise yet that the Zionists essentially control them.

Only those who are gullible enough to believe this half-baked, mendacious, anti-Semitic, badly written, amoral, illogical effluence.

4. It is VERY sad that most honest and honorable Jewish thinkers and intellectuals' articles are posted today on Moslem websites only.

If the Muslims are so great, why doesn’t the author become a Muslim? Obviously because ‘the Zionists’ won’t let Jews convert to other faiths.

5. As a person who grew up on Jewish ethics, I am at a great loss and shame to see our Zionist Rabbis justifying the present Moslem holocaust in the name of God and our Jewish religion. One thing I am sure of, if there is God, he is NOT 'Zionistically' Jewish. After reading many non-Zionists Jewish websites, I started believing as do many Rabbis in New York, that Zionism is: Satan hijacking our Jewish religion.

‘Moslem [sic] holocaust’? What is that about?

Some of the emails were complaints that they could not buy The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion. This is true, as we Jews control most of the printing and book distribution in the USA and many other countries. I had to go myself to: http://www.facebook.com/l/DAQFQn4wwAQFmOMgs1gmvx7Sxpeph7VlAWnRwi_n0IX6v8g/churchoftrueisrael.com/protocols/

Then how come I was able to buy a copy?

‘We Jews control most of the printing and book distribution in the USA and many other countries’?

If ‘we Jews’ control The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, the BBC, or The New York Times et al, they have a remarkable talent for shooting themselves in the feet! The only pro-Jewish media mogul was Rupert Murdoch and his empire has just gone down the pan. Even if the empire survives, Murdoch’s son James is no friend of Israel.

These 'Elders of Zion' couldn't organise a booze-up in a brewery, let alone covertly control the world!

As Charles Haddon Spurgeon once remarked: You wouldn't know some people had brains if it wasn't for the fact they had addled them.

Lies, Damned Lies and the Khazar Theory

2011-12-13T03:23:00.000-08:00

In response to my reply to the Facebook posting of a fake quote from Ariel Sharon, I received the following:

… just a quick response to your posting on my wall. I guess it will be impossible to get at the real truth. Even if he did not utter those words exactly as reported, I am convinced he believes them in [sic] anyway. I want to make clear that I am not talking about a man who is from the seed of Israel and a true Jew but a man who is a rabid Zionist who’s [sic] bloodline can be traced to Eastern Europe and is as Jewish as Obama. There is no doubt in my mind that Zionist Israel have [sic] massive control over the USA.

Although the writer guesses ‘it will be impossible to get at the real truth’, he is ‘convinced’ that he actually does know the 'real truth' i.e. that Ariel Sharon (when he was capable of expressing himself) believed Israel controlled the USA and that every American knew it but that the President of Israel, Shimon Peres, did not know it! The truth is that the claim is totally bogus.

In case you are confused about the reference to the ‘rabid Zionist who’s [sic] bloodline can be traced to Eastern Europe and is as Jewish as Obama’, all will be revealed. Read on.

My correspondent (For personal reasons, I’m not going to reveal his name. I’m trying to be totally objective here) goes on:

I want you to understand though, that I make the clear and unequivocal distinction between the two peoples, the true children of Israel, Semites, and the people from Eastern Europe who chose Judaism and flooded in into Palestine after the war from all parts of the World claiming to be of Israel.

This is a reference to the conversion of the Khazars to Judaism in 749 AD. Bearing in mind that every Khazar male convert would have submitted to the rite of circumcision without anaesthetic, we may assume their conversion was not a matter of political convenience.

So what happens when a non-Jew converts to Judaism? He becomes a Jew. It happened at times in the Old Testament as, for example, when the Moabite Ruth accompanied her widowed mother-in-law to Bethlehem, vowing: ‘Were you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.’

Whether Ruth’s ‘bloodline’ was Jewish is irrelevant. She became an Israelite. She married Boaz and became the ancestor of King David and the Messiah. Irrespective of their ‘bloodline’, the Khazars who converted to Judaism became Jews and, as such, inheritors of all the promises made to Abraham and his children.

The claim that Israeli Zionists (‘rabid’ or non-rabid) are not really Jews lacks any internal logic or consistency. If the Jews of Europe and Israel and Russia and the USA and Africa are not Jews, then where are the Jews? What happened to that people whom God said would not be counted among the nations?

Every Passover Seder ends with the wish: ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’ Prayers are offered in the synagogue for the restoration of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland and the restoration of the temple in Jerusalem. What ethnic group feels indissolubly linked to a land they never inhabited?

Not even the Khazars, after their conversion, appeared to feel the need to migrate to the Holy Land, but there are people around the world who have always felt an attachment to the land.

Prior to 1967, when the Arabs were in full control of the ‘West Bank’ and Gaza, the Palestinians’ appeared to feel no intrinsic link to the land itself and had no interest in establishing an independent Palestinian Arab state. Nor, in those years, did the international community seem to care about a Palestinian state. Everything changed only when those territories fell into the hands of the Jews.

Why, if European Jews today are not really Jews, have they over the centuries made hazardous pilgrimages and dangerous journeys to the Holy Land, risking their lives to live and study there? What explains the unquenchable longing for the land, if not the fact that the Jewish people sense they truly belong to the land God promised to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their descendants?

Since the time of Joshua there has always been a Jewish presence in the land of Israel. Under foreign occupation, after Israel was conquered by the Islamic armies and by the Turks, and Jews became a minority in their own country, the land languished and reverted to being desert and swamp.

In the 19th Century, ‘Palestine’ was a poor country. It was largely barren and uninhabited. Hundreds of years of abuse by foreigners had turned the country into a treeless waste, with malaria-ridden swamps and a sprinkling of towns and a desert in the south.

Mark Twain observed in The Innocents Abroad, written in 1867:

Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince … It is a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land … Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies … Nazareth is forlorn; about that ford of Jordan where the hosts of Israel entered the Promised Land with songs of rejoicing, one finds only a squalid camp of fantastic Bedouins of the desert; Jericho the accursed, lies a moldering ruin, to-day, even as Joshua’s miracle left it more than three thousand years ago … Renowned Jerusalem itself, the stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and is become a pauper village … Capernaum is a shapeless ruin; Magdala is the home of beggared Arabs; Bethsaida and Chorazin have vanished from the earth … Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise? Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land?

The first modern wave of Jewish immigration began in the 1880s and in less than twenty years the Jewish population of Palestine had tripled to over 80,000. But why would any people want to emigrate en masse to one of the most inhospitable and infertile lands in the world with a view to making it their home? Why was the Jewish National Fund willing to pay exorbitant sums of money for barren land when they could have bought rich arable farmland in America for fraction of the price?

Also, why did the ‘fake’ Jews of Europe retain their identity during the Holocaust when they could have denied their identity? Why were they willing to die rather than deny their identity?

There is no internal consistency or logic with the ‘Jews are Khazars’ theory. It raises many more questions than it answers. In fact, it offers no answers at all; only questions. And unanswerable questions at that.

Faking it

2011-12-13T01:56:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone. Due to other pressures, I’ve been out of circulation but something I read on Facebook propelled me back into the blogosphere. This was it:

‘Ariel Sharon: “We, the Jewish People, Control America, and The Americans Know it”!’

There are some fake quotes you can spot a mile away, and this is one of them. The fabricated quote originated with the pro-Hamas American group Islamic Association for Palestine in a press release dated 13 October 2001, which claimed its source as Israeli radio Kol Yisrael:

According [to] the Israeli Hebrew radio, Col ...[sic] Yisrael Wednesday, Peres warned Sharon that refusing to heed incessant American requests for a cease-fire with the Palestinians would endanger Israeli interests and turn the US against us. At this point, a furious Sharon reportedly turned toward Peres, saying ‘ . . . I want to tell you something clear, don’t worry about American pressure on Israel, we the Jewish people control America, and the Americans know it.’

Elsewhere in the press release, the quote was repeated, albeit slightly altered to: ‘we control America.’

Kol Yisrael political correspondent Yoni Ben-Menachem, who reports on Knesset meetings, states that there was no such broadcast and that Ariel Sharon never made such a statement.

The misquote also appears on many anti-Israel and hate sites.

Fake quotes are part of the stock in trade of anti-Zionists. For example, in Israeli Apartheid: A Beginners Guide, anti-Zionist Ben White says:

Ze’ev Jabotinski was one of the foremost Zionist leaders and theoreticians, a man who has more streets in Israel named in his honour than any other historical figure. In perhaps his most famous essay written in 1923, Jabotinsky was clear about one thing: “Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population.”

White cites as his source for the quote Nur Masalha’s Expulsion of the Palestinians. But why do that when Jabotinsky’s original document is freely available as a PDF file on the web. The document nowhere has that quote but what Jabotinsky says one the first page is this:

I am reputed to be an enemy of the Arabs, who wants to have them ejected from Palestine, and so forth. It is not true.

Emotionally, my attitude to the Arabs is the same as to all other nations – polite indifference. Politically, my attitude is determined by two principles. First of all, I consider it utterly impossible to eject the Arabs from Palestine. There will always be two nations in Palestine – which is good enough for me, provided the Jews become the majority. And secondly, I belong to the group that once drew up the Helsingfors Programme, the programme of national rights for all nationalities living in the same State. In drawing up that programme, we had in mind not only the Jews , but all nations everywhere, and its basis is equality of rights.

I am prepared to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone. This seems to me a fairly peaceful credo.

At the 16:55 minute mark of the film With God On Our Side, there is a fake quote attributed to David Ben Gurion: ‘The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment to make it happen, such as war.’

The source of the quote we used was The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by the notorious postmodern historian Ilan Pappe. All credit to Porter Speakman Jr, the producer of With God On Our Side, he has acknowledged that quote cannot be found in Ben Gurion’s diary, which Pappe falsely claimed was his source.

According to Speakman, ‘In an effort to be transparent and accurate, the producers have decided to take the extra step of removing [the pseudo quote] from future printings of “With God On Our Side.” We apologize for this change.’

Note, though, that Speakman apologises only for having to make the change, not for using a false quote. On 7 November, I emailed Porter Speakman:

Dear Mr Speakman,

Three questions:

Why is your acknowledgement for the quote falsely attributed to David Ben Gurion (http://www.christiannewswire.com/news/3026318192.html) not on the official With God on our Side website?

Why do you apologise only for ‘removing it from future printings of “With God On Our Side.”‘ and not for using the quote which was known to be false?

Why did you rely on a fundamentally dishonest source for the quote? I reviewed Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine in 2009 and was shocked by his evidently tendentious method of doing history: http://www.e-n.org.uk/4679-The-ethnic-cleansing-of-Palestine.htm.

Porter Speakman has not replied. If he does, you'll be the first to know...

Remembering Kristallnacht. Nazis in liberal clothing

2011-11-09T07:24:00.000-08:00

Hindsight, as they say, is a wonderful thing.

Tonight we remember Kristallnacht, the night in 1938 when Jewish shops and synagogues throughout Germany were vandalised, looted and destroyed. As far as the safety and security of the Jews in Europe was concerned, Kristallnacht was the writing on the wall. It was the harbinger of a terror to come when millions of Jews, not just their properties and possessions, would perish.

The condemnation of the killing of Jews in the past is easy. Seventy years ago the Jews occupied their rightful place in society as the underdogs and we all feel sorry for the underdog. Today, Israel is strong both economically, industrially and militarily. She has risen above the underdog status that Jews should rightfully occupy.

So, seventy-three years on, we lament the night of broken glass while turning a blind eye to the nights, days, weeks and years of broken glass in Israel and blame the Jews for their current woes and, worse, accuse them of perpetrating atrocities on their neighbours in the Middle East.

Tonight, we hang our heads and wipe our moist eyes and ask rhetorically how a catastrophe on the scale of the Holocaust could possibly have befallen the Jews of Europe while, at the same time, we ignore the dark portentious storm clouds of another Holocaust hovering over the Jews of Israel.

Consider this. On 18 October, 1,027 well-fed, well-cared for Palestinian terrorists walked free from Israeli prisons. In exchange, Hamas released a gaunt, pale Gilad Shalit. Israeli officials said he showed signs of malnutrition, Vitamin D deficiency caused by lack of exposure to sunlight, and was still suffering the effects of the wounds he sustained when he was kidnapped more than five years ago.

Hamas has since vowed to abduct more Israeli soldiers. Prominent Saudi Muslim cleric Awad el-Qarni and Saudi Prince Khaled bin Talal have offered generous rewards to anyone who captures an Israeli soldier with a view of his being exchanged for Palestinian prisoners.

Two of the released Palestinian terrorists – Ahlam Tamimi, who masterminded an attack on a Jerusalem pizzeria, and Muhammad Abu Ataya – vowed to continue the fight against Israel. Speaking on Palestinian television, Tamimi expressed satisfaction about the number she killed: ‘You know how many casualties there were? … I would do it again today, and in the same manner.’

A public opinion poll in Egypt has revealed that most Egyptians want to annul the nation’s peace treaty with Israel. Fifty-four percent of Egyptians will support a candidate who advocates annulling the Camp David Accords.

Since the grossly asymmetrical exchange of prisoners, Turkey – whose belligerence toward Israel has been highly publicised – suffered a massive earthquake. Gaza, which Turkey supported by sending flotillas crewed by murderous anti-Israel activists, supplied no aid to Turkey’s earthquake victims. Neither did the Palestinian Authority. Muslim Malaysia and oil-rich Saudi Arabia sent anything to Turkey but their condolences.

But the allegedly Nazi-governed, apartheid Zionist state that massacres Palestinians with monotonous regularity was one of the first countries to supply aid to Turkey’s victims. Meanwhile, a two-ship flotilla has set sail from Turkey to Gaza to break the Israeli blockade.

Dozens of Grad missiles have been fired from Gaza into south-central Israel, destroying buildings and killing an Israeli civilian, while a delegation from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood visited Gaza to meet Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, signalling a major shift in Cairo’s posture toward the Palestinian Islamists.

And when Israel responds to these outrageous acts of war against its citizens, it is condemned by the very media moguls who shed crocodile tears for the six million victims of the Nazis.

As Israel releases over 1,000 Palestinian Nazis (no, that’s not an hyperbolic overstatement made for effect, Mein Kampf is a best seller in Arab countries), armchair experts in the West accuse the Jewish state of perpetrating a holocaust against the Palestinians.

Even as some of these well-fed, well-cared-for former prisoners declare their intention to continue to wage war against the Jews, their supporters denounce Israel as a Nazi state.

As western, left-wing liberals brand Israel a racist state, Islamic clerics teach Moslem children that Jews are pigs and apes, just as the Nazis taught that Jews were sub-human vermin, fit only to be exterminated.

Even as the Palestinian President declares that his vision for a Judenrein Palestinian state, his Arab neighbours and western liberals denounce Israel as an apartheid state.

Dismissing the hail of missiles from Gaza as little more than a nuisance, the West condemns Israel for defending its citizens by killing the perpetrators.

Bob Dylan trenchantly observed almost thirty years ago that Israel is the viewed as the neighbourhood bully of the Middle East:

The neighbourhood bully, he just lives to survive.
He's criticized and condemned for being alive.
He's not supposed to fight back, he's supposed to have thick skin,
He's supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in…

So what's new? The Nazis blamed the Jews for the Kristallnacht riots and fined them for the destruction of their own shops and synagogues.

Have the lunatics taken over the mad-house, or is are we witnessing one of the most compelling evidences for the Christian doctrine of Total Depravity?

History a la mode

2011-11-07T13:29:00.000-08:00

The Rosh Pina Project has revealed that the producers of the anti-Israel film With God on our Side used a known false quote from David Ben Gurion to bolster their claim that the the founders of the state of Israel intended to ethnically cleanse the Arabs from the land. The quote came from Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, a book I reviewed for Evangelicals Now in June 2009. Although widely quoted by anti-Israel writers, Pappe (pictured second from right)is 'fundamentally unsound sir,' as Jeeves would say.

My review is on the EN website but for your convenience, here it is.

In Israel they say ‘it’s easier to throw mud than to clean it up’ and it is far beyond the capability of a brief review to clear up the mess created by Ilan Pappe’s barrage in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. This review must content itself with supplying guidelines to enable potential readers to judge the reliability or otherwise of Pappe’s indictment of Israel.

Pappe is currently a lecturer in the Department of History at Exeter University and a co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies. He is one of a small but influential group of revisionist historians who since the early 90s have challenged the conventional account of the birth of the modern state of Israel, portraying the Zionists as colonialist aggressors and the Palestinian Arabs as their victims.

Pappe, however, is so extreme that some of his fellow revisionists have condemned both his methods of doing history and his conclusions. Pappe’s anti-Israel bias is so extreme that he recently gave an in-depth interview to the German anti-Semitic neo-Nazi paper National Zeitung, in which he repeated his charges against Israel.

The title of the book says it all. According to Pappe, contrary to the received wisdom, Hagana’s ‘Plan Dalet’ (Plan D) was not a strategy to defend Israel from Arab aggressors but a plot to cleanse the newly founded state of Israel of its Palestinian population. One would expect such a radical theory from a senior lecturer in history to be replete with extensive quotations from primary documentary sources, but, as Pappe makes clear in his Preface, he distrusts written Israeli military reports and prefers, instead, Arab sources and oral history (p.xv).

According to Pappe, the execution of Plan Dalet led to the forcible expulsion of more than half the Palestinian population of Israel and the total destruction of half its villages and towns. Pappe himself expresses surprise that a crime against humanity of such a magnitude should have gone unnoticed and unreported for 60 years when it ‘was perpetrated in modern times and at a juncture in history that called for foreign reporters and UN observers to be present’ (p.9).

Most anti-Israel writers at least claim to base their findings on documentary evidence, but Pappe is a self-confessed postmodern relativist for whom historical research is ‘a backward-looking projection of political attitudes and agendas regardless of actual facts’.

Chapter 6 features what is arguably the clearest example of his disdain for historical fact. Here he repeats an allegation of the deliberate massacre of 200 Palestinians in the village of Tantura by the Jewish Alexandroni Brigade. Pappe’s story relies heavily on a discredited doctoral dissertation by Teddy Katz, a graduate of Haifa University, who was found to have ‘gravely and severely’ falsified his evidence.

Nevertheless, in the Spring 2001 issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies, Ilan Pappe defended Katz, insisting that his conclusions were correct, even if his facts were not, since historical research need not be based on facts! ‘The Massacre at Tantura’ takes up five pages of chapter 6 and features about a dozen quotes and citations, only three of which are sourced, one of them being to a previous Pappe publication.

Under the unimaginable stresses and pressures of a struggle to survive, even the most civilised armies are capable of barbaric acts, but Ilan Pappe wishes us to believe that barbarism was the stock in trade of David Ben-Gurion and his cabinet.

If you have half a mind to believe that in the space of six months the fledgling state of Israel was able to wipe out over half its Palestinian population under the noses of international reporters and UN observers and leave no trace, that’s all you’ll need.

Calvin Smith has also put in his own two pennies' worth, which is worth reading.

You can see also Calvin debating Stephen Sizer on the subject 'Has the Church replaced Israel?' this Wednesday at 9.00pm on Revelation TV.

The tell-tale signs of abuse

2011-10-19T01:22:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I drew attention to the thin, pale Gilad Shalit and the well-fed appearance of the freed terrorists.

BICOM today draws attention to the physical state of Gilad:

There were some concerns regarding the state of health of Gilad Shalit, who appeared to be very gaunt - belying claims by his Hamas captors that he had been better treated than Palestinian prisoners in Israel while in captivity.

Obliged to give an interview to the Egyptian media before crossing the border into Israel (a move which has led to anger and criticism in Israel of the Egyptian authorities), Shalit appeared also to have difficulty answering questions. Israeli officials later said that he showed signs of malnutrition. According to reports, Shalit also has Vitamin D deficiency, caused by lack of exposure to sunlight.

In an impromptu press conference outside his Mitzpeh Hila home last night, Noam Shalit, father of Gilad, said that Gilad was also still suffering the effects of wounds sustained during his kidnap, which had been insufficiently treated, and also from the effects of being deprived of sunlight. Noam Shalit likened receiving Gilad from captivity to experiencing the birth of his son anew.

As I look at these pictures, I'm finding it hard not to describe Shalit's captors and all their sympathisers with an expletive that has not passed my lips in the forty-odd years since I became a Christian!

Mercy, Compassion and Revulsion

2011-10-18T10:41:00.000-07:00

The UK’s foremost evangelical critic of Israel today expressed pleasure at the release of Gilad Shalit (pictured embracing his father Noam today).

However, he was also glad that Israel was releasing 1,027 Palestinian ‘political prisoners’.

The release of Gilad Shalit is indeed a cause for joy but not unmixed joy. Among the ‘political prisoners’ exchanged for Shalit is Ahlam Tamimi, the unrepentant female terrorist who allegedly smiled when she learned children had been among 15 killed and 130 wounded as a result of her bomb attack on a Jerusalem pizzeria in 2001.

Also on the list is Khalil Muhammad Abu Ulbah, who in 2001 used his Egged passenger bus to kill eight people. So are the terrorists who opened fire on a bus stop in 2005, killing Kinneret Mandel, Matat Rosenfeld-Edler and 14 year-old Oz Ben-Meir. And the terrorist sniper who killed Erez Rund in 2002.

Abed Alaziz Salaha, who become infamous in 2002 as the young dude photographed while joyfully waving his blood soaked hands after brutally lynching two Israelis is also walking free.

These people are a few of the hundreds of ‘political prisoners’ our evangelical friend if glad to see released.

Michael Ben-Ari lamented the decision and the precedent it sets, telling The Jerusalem Post:

Today every Arab child knows they can murder 20 or 30 Jews and tomorrow they will go free. Israel is sending the message that killing Jews is permissible.

Meir Indor of the Almagor Terror victims’ Organization urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to take part in any celebratory events, since for many Israelis today is a day of happiness for the Shalit family mixed with their own despair.

In a letter to Netanyahu, Indor wrote:

For many Israelis this is a second day of mourning and some see it as a day of submission … There is no victory here.

In Gaza and the Palestinian Authority, meanwhile, celebrations are underway to welcome the killers home.

Our evangelical critic talks of Gilad Shalit as a 'prisoner of war' when, in fact, he was kidnapped during a time of ‘peace’.

In an unusual phrase, he says:

Not withstanding the provisions of the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war, and Islamic teaching on the treatment of prisoners of war, I wish Hamas had released Shalit unconditionally when first captured to provoke Israel into doing the same…

‘Not withstanding the provisions of the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war...’ makes it sound as though the Geneva Conventions are on the side of Hamas and that the terrorist group should have risen above the constraints of the conventions of the civilised nations and been ‘magnanimous’!

The evangelical writer claims that a spokesman for Hezbollah, no less, consulted him as to what Hezbollah should do. His advice was: ‘Release the Israeli captives. Show them compassion and mercy. Show them you are magnanimous.’

You display mercy to undeserving wretches. The only people showing mercy and magnanimity today are the Israelis.

Take a look at the well fed faces of the released terrorists and compare them with the thin, pale former captive of Hamas.

Ignoring the fact that the evangelical blogger could have told Hezbollah to call a halt to killing Israeli citizens and stop sacrificing their own children as suicide bombers, what does it say about Hezbollah that they ignored his advice? That's right: Hezbollah is uncompassionate, merciless and totally lacking in magnanimity.

For anyone to draw a moral equivalence between the release of Gilad Shalit and the release of over 1,000 unprincipled, cold-blooded, murderous barbarians is chilling. But when an evangelical minister does so, it leaves me with a feeling of dread and revulsion in the pit of my stomach.

I recommend the insightful blog by Calvin Smith, Principal and Tutor of Theology
at King's Evangelical Divinity School

One Israeli is worth a thousand terrorists.

2011-10-12T15:17:00.000-07:00

The news that Gilad Shalit is to be released, which broke yesterday, is a cause for rejoicing and comes appropriately the day before the Jewish ‘season of joy’ Tabernacles.

But the release is long overdue. Shalit was kidnapped on 25 June 2006 and has spent five soul-destroying years as a prisoner of Hamas. During Shalit’s 63 months of imprisonment, Hamas has refused to allow the International Red Cross to visit Shalit. Human rights organisations have stated that the terms and conditions of the young soldier’s confinement are contrary to international humanitarian law and since his kidnapping, the only contact between Shalit and the outside world has been three letters, an audio tape, and a DVD that Israel received in return for releasing 20 female Palestinian prisoners.

The price Israel is paying for the release of Shalit is 1000 Palestinian prisoners, almost half of them serving long sentences for some of the worst terrorist atrocities in the Israel’s history. Do not imagine for one nano-second that any of those merchants of terror will have learned the errors of their ways in prison. They will walk free, ready for action once again.

Politics is a difficult business but Hamas, Hezbullah and the PLO have learned once again that terror and kidnapping pay, while the international media will continue to draw an equivalence between the release of one young IDF soldier and a hundreds of terrorists. Releasing 1000 terrorists back to Gaza and the West Bank makes it more likely that Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon too will redouble their efforts to kidnap yet more Israeli soldiers.

In a book published in 1995 BinyaminNetanyahu wrote that prisoner exchanges were
‘a mistake that Israel made over and over again’ and that refusing to release terrorists from prison was ‘among the most important policies that must be adopted in the face of terrorism.’

‘The release of convicted terrorists before they have served their full sentences seems like an easy and tempting way of defusing blackmailed situations in which innocent people may lose their lives, but its utility is momentary at best.

‘Prisoner releases only embolden terrorists by giving them the feeling that even if they are caught, their punishment will be brief. Worse, by leading terrorists to think such demands are likely to be met, they encourage precisely the terrorist blackmail they are supposed to defuse.’

On the other hand, as Melanie Philips perceptively observes, ‘once Shalit comes home the Hamas in Gaza will have lost their most valuable human shield of all.’

‘For five years,’ writes Miss Phillips, ‘they have used their young Israeli captive -- whose fate has been the focus of such public agony within Israel -- to tie the Israelis' military hands. Now, it would seem, all such bets will be off.’

From Antisemite to Zionist

2011-10-10T06:40:00.000-07:00

If I had it in my power, I would make it compulsory to have this article by Kasim Hafeez from this week's Jewish Chronicle printed on the front page of every newspaper in the UK.

In 2003, Pakistan's then President Pervez Musharaff sought to re-examine his country's relationship, or lack thereof, with Israel. He asked: 'Do we have to be more Palestinian than the Palestinians themselves?'

With their new 'Liberation' campaign, it seems that the Union Of Jewish Students has decided to answer that question with a resounding 'yes'.

Rather than being a brave move forwards for UJS, it is a hollow and cynical campaign that smacks of extreme cowardice.

The reality is that there is real anti-Israel and antisemitic feeling on British university campuses. How do I know this? Because until recently I was antisemitic and anti-Israel. Until recently, I was the one doing the hating. It wasn't the evil Zionist Israel that I had been told about.

Growing up in a Muslim community in the UK I was exposed to materials condemning Israel, painting Jews as usurpers and murderers. My views were reinforced when I attended Nakba Day rallies where speakers predicted Israel's demise.

My hate for Israel and for the Jews was fuelled by images of death and destruction, set to the backdrop of Arabic melodies about Jihad and speeches of Hizbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah or Osama Bin Laden.

There was also constant, casual antisemitism around me. My father would boast of how Adolf Hitler was a hero, his only failing being that he didn't kill enough Jews. Even the most moderate clerics I came across refused to condemn terrorism against Israel as unjustified.

What changed?

In Waterstones one day I found myself in the Israel and Palestine section. To this day I don't know why I actually pulled it off the shelf, but I picked up a copy of Alan Dershowitz's The Case for Israel.

In my world view the Jews and the Americans controlled the media, so after a brief look at the back, I scoffed thinking 'vile Zionist propaganda'.

But I decided to buy it, eagerly awaiting the chance to deconstruct it so I could show why Israel had no case and claim my findings as a personal victory for the Palestinian cause.

As I read Dershowitz's systematic deconstruction of the lies I had been told, I felt a real crisis of conscience. I couldn't disprove his arguments or find facts to respond to them with. I didn't know what to believe. I'd blindly followed for so long, yet here I was questioning whether I had been wrong?

I decided to visit Israel to find the truth. I was confronted by synagogues, mosques and churches, by Jews and Arabs living together, by minorities playing huge parts in all areas of Israeli life, from the military to the judiciary. It was shocking and eye-opening. This wasn't the evil Zionist Israel that I had been told about.

After much soul searching, I knew what I had once believed was wrong. I had to stand with Israel, with this tiny nation, free, democratic, making huge strides in medicine, research and development, yet the victim of the same lies and hatred that nearly consumed me.

As an outsider, I ask why so many in the Jewish community are closing their eyes to the constant stream of anti-Israel hated spewed out from all facets of British society.

And while pro-Palestinian organisations burn Israeli flags, urge boycotts of Israel and protest against appearances by Israeli politicians or artists, UJS's response is shameful. It is not the time for UJS or any other group to engage in hollow flag-waving to show their 'progressiveness'. Let Israel's democratic history speak for itself.

Instead of meekly trying to avoid coming across as too pro-Israeli or too Zionist, it is time to make the facts known, to defend Israel against delegitimisation. It is time to stem the tide of Israel bashing before it becomes even more mainstream and consumes even more people like me.

Kasim Hafeez is a British Muslim and the founder of the website theisraelcampaign.org

Atonement

2011-10-07T07:00:00.000-07:00

Pray for the Jewish people tonight as the most solemn day in their calendar commences. Rosh Hashanah, Jewish New Year began at sunset on 28 September and, according to the rabbis and sages of Israel:

Three ledgers are opened on Rosh Hashanah: one for those who are entirely wicked, one for those who are entirely righteous, and one for those who are in the middle. The entirely righteous are immediately inscribed and sealed to live. The entirely wicked are immediately inscribed and sealed to die. The fate of those in the middle is held in balance between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

According to Jewish tradition, therefore, Rosh Hashanah is the Day of Judgement when God weighs the sins of all men: “On Rosh Hashanah all of mankind pass before Him like sheep – they pass by Him one by one, one after the other, yet He scrutinizes them all with a single glance.’

The ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur have come to be known as Yomim Noraim, the ‘Days of Awe’ or the ‘Days of Repentance’.

In the hope of swinging the balances in heaven in their favour, during the Days of Awe Jewish people do acts of kindness and charity. The mediaeval Jewish philosopher and rabbi, Moses Maimonides wrote:

It is the custom of the entire Jewish community to give greater amounts to charity, and [do more acts of] good deeds, and to be concerned with fulfilment of commandments from Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur, than the rest of the year. It is the custom to arise in the night during these ten days to pray ... until the day dawns. (Laws of Repentance 3:4)

Tashlich is a ritual traditionally performed on the first day of Rosh Hashanah. The word means ‘casting off’ in Hebrew and involves symbolically casting off the sins of previous year by throwing pieces of bread or other food into rivers, ponds or the sea, while reciting Micah 7:18-20:

Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of his inheritance? He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in steadfast love. He will again have compassion on us; he will tread our iniquities underfoot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. You will show faithfulness to Jacob and steadfast love to Abraham, as you have sworn to our fathers from the days of old.

At the heart of the rituals for the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16 are two goats. One was sacrificed and its blood spattered on the Ark of the Covenant to make atonement for sin. The other was kept alive so the High Priest, by the laying of his hands on its head, could symbolically transfer the sins of the people to it. The goat would then symbolically carry the sins of the people into the wilderness. After the temple was destroyed in AD 70, Jewish people were taught that God requires only repentance.

Though Jewish people deny that God requires the shedding of blood to atone for sins, it is customary for some Eastern European Jews to take a cock (pictured)and whirl it about their heads three times, and intone a solemn prayer:

This is my substitute, my vicarious offering, my atonement; this cock shall meet death, but I shall find a long and pleasant life of peace.

The bird is than delivered to the ritual slaughterer to be killed and donated to the poor.

The concept of vicarious sacrifice is indelibly imprinted on the Jewish psyche. In an old version of the Mahzor, the prayer book for the Day of Atonement, is a strange prayer. Jewish people do not use this prayer any more but they used to.

He hath borne the yoke of our iniquities and our transgression, and is wounded because of our transgression. He beareth our sins on his shoulder, that we may find pardon for our iniquities. We shall be healed by His wound…

Our righteous anointed [Messiah] is departed from us: horror hath seized us, and we have non to justify us. He hath borne the yoke of our iniquities, and our transgression, and is wounded because of our transgression. He beareth our sins on his shoulder, that he may find pardon for our iniquities. We shall be healed by his wound, at the time that the Eternal will create him (the Messiah) as a new creature. O bring him up from the circle of the earth. Raise him up from Seir, to assemble us the second time on Mount Lebanon, by the hand of Yinnon.

This prayer bears a striking resemblance to the 53rd chapter of Isaiah; a portion of Scripture which, according to many of our ancient sages, describes the Messiah:

But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed … and though the Lord makes his life a guilt offering, he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand. (Isaiah 53:5,10)

If this is the provision afforded by the Almighty, according to the Hebrew Scriptures, then the sacrifice of Messiah is sufficient to make atonement for us all.

Pray that tonight and tomorrow Jewish people will recognise that their repentance and good deeds are inadequate for finding atonement and forgiveness, and pray that they may look to the one spoken of by the Torah and the prophets.

Boycotts, Divestments, Sanctions ... and Jew hatred

2011-10-07T06:08:00.000-07:00

Last night, I experienced a little of what it is like to be a Jew in the UK. In central London, in front of several police, some people loudly accused me of being a Nazi and a War Criminal. One particularly articulate lady wished I would rot in hell. When I smiled and wished her God’s blessing, she became incandescent with rage. She had no desire to be blessed by my God, she yelled; she had a god of her own. The insults were, of course, liberally spiced with the ‘F’ word.

These were not the worst counter-compliments I have ever received, I must confess, but they left a particularly bad taste in my mouth because the people concerned spat their venom at me because I was standing with Jews and, for that reason, they thought I was a Jew.

I was in London yesterday for a meeting with leaders of Jewish missions and also for a prayer meeting for the salvation of the Jewish people at Westminster Central Hall. I received an email early in the morning informing me that the Palestine Solidarity Campaign was holding a demonstration outside Downing Street to call for the arrest of Tzipi Livni, the Leader of the Opposition in the Knesset. The Zionist Federation was holding a counter-demo to express support for Israel.

A number of the people who attended the prayer meeting accompanied me to Downing Street and, for the first twenty minutes or so, apart from the organisers, a counter-demonstration consisted entirely of Christians.

Livni was in the UK to discuss Israeli-British relations and building support for a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians. Two months ago such a visit would have been impossible. The universal jurisdiction law had prevented many high-ranking Israelis travelling to the UK because under that legislation they would have been arrested on charges of war crimes. An amendment to the law last month prevented pro-Palestinian organisations from applying for a warrant for Livni's arrest.

Despite the amended law, pro-Palestinian lawyers had issued a request to the Crown Prosecution Service to have Livni arrested when she arrived in London. The Foreign Secretary William Hague, intervened by issuing a certificate which designated Livni's visit a 'special mission.'

So there I was, just standing with an Israeli flag in my hand, when a lady I had never seen before informed me in no uncertain words that I was a Nazi.

What became clear over the next couple of hours was that the pro-Palestinians were not there to support the Palestinians so much as to denounce Israel. Their hatred was palpable.

As the Palestine Solidarity Campaign logo (pictured) eloquently demonstrates, the organisation does not wish to see a two-state solution to the present crisis in the Middle East (an issue that was being addressed by Livni and Hague).

The logo features what is currently Israel, Gaza and the Palestinian Authority as a single area. The PSC wants a single-state solution; a Jew-free Palestine. Nowhere on its website or on its printed publicity can I find any mention of ‘peace’. The PSC is committed to boycotts, divestment and sanctions. This is a call for destruction, not peace.

But of course the boycotts, divestments and sanctions are all selective. All the boycotters had mobile phones (available only because of technology developed in Israel) and you can bet your bottom shekel they all have laptops and/or PCs with ‘Intel Inside’ (perhaps that should be ‘Israel Inside’). And should these Israel haters become sick, it’s for certain they won’t boycott the numerous medicines available through breakthroughs in Israel. But then, anti-Semites were never all that hot on consistency.

Syria: 'Stay back or Israel gets it!'

2011-10-05T02:36:00.000-07:00

A report from British Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM)today says:

Syrian President Bashar Assad has threatened to carry out an attack on Israel in the event of foreign intervention against his regime, according to the Iranian FARS news agency.

The agency quoted Assad as telling Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu that he would transfer rockets and missiles to the Golan Heights and fire them at Israel, and that Hezbollah would also attack Israel, if NATO forces intervened in Syria.

The FARS report has not been confirmed by other sources. However, the nature of Assad's alleged threat mirrors similar remarks made by pro-regime figures to Syrian opposition sources, regarding the regime's likely course of action in the event of an attack on it by international forces.

Syria analysts have long noted the major difference between the situation in Syria and that in Libya. Whereas Gaddafi was isolated in the region, Assad possesses a network of dangerous allies across the Middle East, most importantly Iran and its client in Lebanon Hezbollah. If the remarks attributed to Assad are correct, they reflect the invocation of this network as a threat. This, in turn, may itself be confirmation of the beleaguered situation of the Assad regime.

Meanwhile, yesterday, a European-drafted United Nations Security Council resolution threatening sanctions against the Syrian regime failed to pass, after Russia and China used their veto to ensure its failure. The resolution was tabled because of the ongoing killing by the Syrian regime of peaceful protesters demanding reform.

More than 2,700 people have been killed in Syria since the uprising against the dictatorial rule of Assad began in mid-April. The vote in the UNSC was 9-2, with Russia and China opposed, and India, South Africa, Brazil and Lebanon abstaining.

Russia's UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said after the vote that his country opposed any 'ultimatum' to the regime in Damascus. French Ambassador Gerard Araud, however, said that no veto could give 'carte blanche' to the Syrian authorities.

US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, meanwhile, expressed US outrage at the use of the veto, and demanded 'tough and targeted sanctions' against Damascus.

On Syria's northern border, as relations continue to deteriorate between neighbours Turkey and Syria, the Turkish armed forces announced yesterday that it would conduct a weeklong series of military exercises in a province along the border. Some Middle East experts interpret the announcement as a warning to Damascus. 'Turkey is sending a signal to Syria,' Lale Kemal, a defence expert and Ankara bureau chief with the Turkish newspaper Taraf, told CNN.

More than 10,000 Syrian refugees have fled across the border to camps in Turkey in recent months, while hundreds of Syrian demonstrators suffering from gunshot wounds have been treated at Turkish hospitals. On Tuesday, Turkey's prime minister stepped up his criticism of Assad. During a state visit to South Africa, Recep Tayyip Erdogan endorsed a Security Council resolution that would demand Syrian security forces immediately suspend their crackdown against anti-government protesters.

'We cannot remain a mere spectator to the developments in Syria,' Erdogan said. 'There are serious deaths against unjustly treated, oppressed and defenseless people. We cannot say "keep going" to this ... we have to fulfill our human task.'

Cut me in St. Louis

2011-10-04T15:20:00.000-07:00

by Chana Ya’ar at Arutz Sheva.

An Iraqi poet who converted from Islam to Christianity, and who expressed pain over the loss of six million Jews in the Nazi Holocaust, has paid the price for his beliefs.

Over a month has passed since Alaa Alsaegh was attacked over his Arabic-language poem, Tears at the Heart of the Holocaust, featured on the Arabs For Israel blog.

The site is run by Arabs and Muslims who believe they can ‘support Israel and still support the Palestinian people.... support the State of Israel and the Jewish religion and still treasure our Arab and Islamic culture.’

But the poem apparently inspired attackers in St. Louis, Missouri to mark the Iraqi immigrant as a target for hate.

On August 14, Alsaegh was trapped by two cars as he was driving in St. Louis, Missouri. One sideswiped and struck his car, forcing him to stop, while the other stopped behind, cutting off contact with anyone else.

The two attackers then quickly hopped out of the cars, jerked open Alsaegh’s door and pointed a gun at the poet, reported FrontPage Magazine.

‘They pushed his upper body down against the steering wheel, stabbed him and pulled off his shirt to expose his back. Then, with a knife, they carved the Star of David on his back while laughing as they recited his pro-Jewish poem,’ the magazine reported.

After the attackers fled Alsaegh was surrounded by witnesses and taken to the local hospital, where his wounds were photographed by a friend, to be given to police and to the media.

Alsaegh told local KMOV TV News 4 last week that he recently posted a poem online expressing support for Jewish people in Israel. He also said that his attackers, who he said may have been Somali Muslims, told him not to publish any more poems.

The FBI has allegedly opened an investigation into the incident, although a spokeswoman for the agency declined to comment. The crime has not been labelled a ‘hate crime,’ though no explanation has been offered. No arrests have been made in the case.

Iranian Christian to be executed for being a 'Zionist'

2011-10-04T09:00:00.000-07:00

The international community was furious when it learned that Iran was going to execute a young man for converting to Christianity and wanting to start a church. So Iran on Sunday altered the charges and said it is instead going to execute Youcef Nadarkhani because, among other things, he loves Israel.

Nadarkhani was arrested and convicted in 2010. Legal documents obtained by CNN accused Nadarkhani of "turning his back on Islam, the greatest religion..."

In Iran, the punishment for apostacy is death.

But with pressure mounting for Iran to cease its brutal repression of religious freedom, Gholomali Rezvani, the deputy governor of Nadarkhani's home province, announced that the charges had been changed.

'His crime is not, as some claim, converting others to Christianity. He is guilty of security-related crimes,' Rezvani told the Fars news agency.

And what kind of security-related crimes had Nadarkhani committed? He 'is a Zionist,' declared Rezvani. And just in case, Nadarkhani also had charges of rape and extortion tacked on to his rap sheet. Both CNN and Fox News later pointed out that the original 2010 court ruling did not contain one mention of rape or extortion.

Israel Today

Durban III: a sick joke

2011-09-27T08:30:00.000-07:00

With all the fuss about the possible UN recognition of a Palestinian state last week, I forgot to say much about the high-level United Nations General Assembly meeting marking the 10th anniversary of the adoption of 'The Durban Declaration and Programme of Action', a.k.a. 'Durban III'.

The theme of the conference was 'Victims of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance: recognition, justice and development'. In fact, Durban III was actually an attempt to distract world attention from racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and intolerance by slinging mud at Israel and the West.

Watch this eloquent, informed, articulate and hilarious 20-minute take on the Durban event by Douglas Murray.

Edinburgh Academic defends Israel

2011-09-26T09:05:00.000-07:00

Last spring,270 students at Edinburgh University voted in favour of a motion which described Israel as an 'Apartheid State' and called for a boycott of goods. The Jewish Chronicle, however, reported that the Edinburgh University Students’ Association (EUSA) had confirmed a proposed boycott of Israeli products will not be enforced.

The following letter by Edinburgh University alumnus, Dr. Denis MacEoin (pictured), arguing against the boycott, is one of the most eloquent and informed defences of Israel I have read. Everyone should read it.

I am an Edinburgh graduate (MA 1975) who studied Persian, Arabic and Islamic History in Buccleuch Place under William Montgomery Watt and Laurence Elwell Sutton, two of Britain’s great Middle East experts in their day. I later went on to do a PhD at Cambridge and to teach Arabic and Islamic Studies at Newcastle University.

Naturally, I am the author of several books and hundreds of articles in this field.
I say all that to show that I am well informed in Middle Eastern affairs and that, for that reason, I am shocked and disheartened by the EUSA motion and vote. I am shocked for a simple reason: there is not and has never been a system of apartheid in Israel. That is not my opinion, that is fact that can be tested against reality by any Edinburgh student, should he or she choose to visit Israel to see for themselves.

Let me spell this out, since I have the impression that those member of EUSA who voted for this motion are absolutely clueless in matters concerning Israel, and that they are, in all likelihood, the victims of extremely biased propaganda coming from the anti-Israel lobby. Being anti-Israel is not in itself objectionable. But I’m not talking about ordinary criticism of Israel. I’m speaking of a hatred that permits itself no boundaries in the lies and myths it pours out. Thus, Israel is repeatedly referred to as a ‘Nazi’ state. In what sense is this true, even as a metaphor? Where are the Israeli concentration camps? The einzatsgruppen? The SS? The Nüremberg Laws? The Final Solution? None of these things nor anything remotely resembling them exists in Israel, precisely because the Jews, more than anyone on earth, understand what Nazism stood for. It is claimed that there has been an Israeli Holocaust in Gaza (or elsewhere). Where? When? No honest historian would treat that claim with anything but the contempt it deserves. But calling Jews Nazis and saying they have committed a Holocaust is as basic a way to subvert historical fact as anything I can think of.

Likewise apartheid. For apartheid to exist, there would have to be a situation that closely resembled things in South Africa under the apartheid regime. Unfortunately for those who believe this, a weekend in any part of Israel would be enough to show how ridiculous the claim is. That a body of university students actually fell for this and voted on it is a sad comment on the state of modern education. The most obvious focus for apartheid would be the country’s 20% Arab population. Under Israeli law, Arab Israelis have exactly the same rights as Jews or anyone else; Muslims have the same rights as Jews or Christians; Baha’is, severely persecuted in Iran, flourish in Israel, where they have their world centre; Ahmadi Muslims, severely persecuted in Pakistan and elsewhere, are kept safe by Israel; the holy places of all religions are protected under a specific Israeli law. Arabs form 20% of the university population (an exact echo of their percentage in the general population). In Iran, the Baha’is (the largest religious minority) are forbidden to study in any university or to run their own universities: why aren’t your members boycotting Iran?

Arabs in Israel can go anywhere they want, unlike blacks in apartheid South Africa. They use public transport, they eat in restaurants, they go to swimming pools, they use libraries, they go to cinemas alongside Jews – something no blacks could do in South Africa. Israeli hospitals not only treat Jews and Arabs, they also treat Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank. On the same wards, in the same operating theatres.

In Israel, women have the same rights as men: there is no gender apartheid. Gay men and women face no restrictions, and Palestinian gays often escape into Israel, knowing they may be killed at home. It seems bizarre to me that LGBT groups call for a boycott of Israel and say nothing about countries like Iran, where gay men are hanged or stoned to death. That illustrates a mindset that beggars belief. Intelligent students thinking it’s better to be silent about regimes that kill gay people, but good to condemn the only country in the Middle East that rescues and protects gay people. Is that supposed to be a sick joke?

University is supposed to be about learning to use your brain, to think rationally, to examine evidence, to reach conclusions based on solid evidence, to compare sources, to weigh up one view against one or more others. If the best Edinburgh can now produce are students who have no idea how to do any of these things, then the future is bleak. I do not object to well documented criticism of Israel. I do object when supposedly intelligent people single the Jewish state out above states that are horrific in their treatment of their populations. We are going through the biggest upheaval in the Middle East since the 7th and 8th centuries, and it’s clear that Arabs and Iranians are rebelling against terrifying regimes that fight back by killing their own citizens. Israeli citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, do not rebel (though they are free to protest). Yet Edinburgh students mount no demonstrations and call for no boycotts against Libya, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Iran. They prefer to make false accusations against one of the world’s freest countries, the only country in the Middle East that has taken in Darfur refugees, the only country in the Middle East that gives refuge to gay men and women, the only country in the Middle East that protects the Baha’is…. Need I go on? The imbalance is perceptible, and it sheds no credit on anyone who voted for this boycott.

I ask you to show some common sense. Get information from the Israeli embassy. As for some speakers. Listen to more than one side. Do not make your minds up until you have given a fair hearing to both parties. You have a duty to your students, and that is to protect them from one-sided argument. They are not at university to be propagandized. And they are certainly not there to be tricked into anti-Semitism by punishing one country among all the countries of the world, which happens to be the only Jewish state. If there had been a single Jewish state in the 1930s (which, sadly, there was not), don’t you think Adolf Hitler would have decided to boycott it? Of course he would, and he would not have stopped there. Your generation has a duty to ensure that the perennial racism of anti-Semitism never sets down roots among you. Today, however, there are clear signs that it has done so and is putting down more. You have a chance to avert a very great evil, simply by using reason and a sense of fair play. Please tell me that this makes sense to you. I have given you some of the evidence. It’s up to you to find out more.

The UN's Triple Whammy.

2011-09-23T16:10:00.000-07:00

This week, in the fight for its survival, the United Nations delivered not a double whammy but a triple whammy to Israel.

First, the UN hosted The World Conference Against Racism, a.k.a. Durban III, at which Israel was singled out as the world’s most racist and abusive state. Thankfully, every Western democratic member of the permanent five powers on the UN Security Council boycotted the conference, which virtually guaranteed that Durban III, and whatever racist conclusions it arrived at, would not be able to claim a trace of moral authority.

The second blow was Iranian President Mahoud Ahmadinejad’s speech, in which he once again took the opportunity to denounce Israel. Israeli Prime Minister struck back powerfully and eloquently:

Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium. To those who refused to come here and to those who left this room in protest, I commend you. You stood up for moral clarity and you brought honor to your countries.

But to those who gave this Holocaust-denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame? Have you no decency?

A mere six decades after the Holocaust, you give legitimacy to a man who denies that the murder of six million Jews took place and pledges to wipe out the Jewish state.

What a disgrace! What a mockery of the charter of the United Nations! Perhaps some of you think that this man and his odious regime threaten only the Jews. You're wrong.

History has shown us time and again that what starts with attacks on the Jews eventually ends up engulfing many others.

This Iranian regime is fueled by an extreme fundamentalism that burst onto the world scene three decades ago after lying dormant for centuries. In the past thirty years, this fanaticism has swept the globe with a murderous violence and cold-blooded impartiality in its choice of victims. It has callously slaughtered Moslems and Christians, Jews and Hindus, and many others. Though it is comprised of different offshoots, the adherents of this unforgiving creed seek to return humanity to medieval times.

Wherever they can, they impose a backward regimented society where women, minorities, gays or anyone not deemed to be a true believer is brutally subjugated. The struggle against this fanaticism does not pit faith against faith nor civilization against civilization.

It pits civilization against barbarism, the 21st century against the 9th century, those who sanctify life against those who glorify death.

Yesterday, a third body blow was delivered to Israel by the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. In his speech, he stated that:

The goal of the Palestinian people is the realization of their inalienable national rights in their independent State of Palestine, with East Jerusalem as its capital, on all the land of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, which Israel occupied in the June 1967 war, in conformity with the resolutions of international legitimacy and with the achievement of a just and agreed upon solution to the Palestine refugee issue in accordance with resolution 194, as stipulated in the Arab Peace Initiative which presented the consensus Arab vision to resolve the core the Arab-Israeli conflict and to achieve a just and comprehensive peace. To this we adhere and this is what we are working to achieve.

Achieving this desired peace also requires the release of political prisoners and detainees in Israeli prisons without delay...

I come before you today from the Holy Land, the land of Palestine, the land of divine messages, ascension of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and the birthplace of Jesus Christ (peace be upon him), to speak on behalf of the Palestinian people in the homeland and in the Diaspora, to say, after 63 years of suffering of the ongoing Nakba: Enough. It is time for the Palestinian people to gain their freedom and independence (emphasis mine).

Note that President Abbas made no mention of the homeland of the Jewish people.

The time has come for our men, women and children to live normal lives ... for our farmers to be able to take care of their good land without fear of the occupation seizing the land and its water, which the wall prevents access to, or fear of the settlers, for whom settlements are being built on our land and who are uprooting and burning the olive trees that have existed for hundreds of years. The time has come for the thousands of prisoners to be released from the prisons to return to their families and their children to become a part of building their homeland, for the freedom of which they have sacrificed (emphasis mine).

The issue of settlements is raised with tedious regularity but, according to the document West Bank Settlements, Communities, and Facts on the Ground:

The release of thousands of prisoners!? Fear of settlers? According to Palestinian and Israeli sources, the built-up areas of Israeli settlements cover 1.7 percent of West Bank land, The scheduled route of the security fence incorporates between 5 and 8 percent of West Bank land. Israel currently administers 60 percent of the West Bank (known as “Area C”) per the Oslo Agreement.

Netanyahu responded in typically robust fashion:

Ladies and gentlemen, Israel has extended its hand in peace from the moment it was established 63 years ago. On behalf of Israel and the Jewish people, I extend that hand again today. I extend it to the people of Egypt and Jordan, with renewed friendship for neighbours with whom we have made peace. I extend it to the people of Turkey, with respect and good will. I extend it to the people of Libya and Tunisia, with admiration for those trying to build a democratic future. I extend it to the other peoples of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, with whom we want to forge a new beginning. I extend it to the people of Syria, Lebanon and Iran, with awe at the courage of those fighting brutal repression.

But most especially, I extend my hand to the Palestinian people, with whom we seek a just and lasting peace.

Ladies and gentlemen, in Israel our hope for peace never wanes. Our scientists, doctors, innovators, apply their genius to improve the world of tomorrow. Our artists, our writers, enrich the heritage of humanity. Now, I know that this is not exactly the image of Israel that is often portrayed in this hall. After all, it was here in 1975 that the age-old yearning of my people to restore our national life in our ancient biblical homeland — it was then that this was braided — branded, rather — shamefully, as racism. And it was here in 1980, right here, that the historic peace agreement between Israel and Egypt wasn’t praised; it was denounced! And it’s here year after year that Israel is unjustly singled out for condemnation. It’s singled out for condemnation more often than all the nations of the world combined. Twenty-one out of the 27 General Assembly resolutions condemn Israel — the one true democracy in the Middle East.

Well, this is an unfortunate part of the U.N. institution. It’s the — the theater of the absurd. It doesn’t only cast Israel as the villain; it often casts real villains in leading roles: Gadhafi’s Libya chaired the U.N. Commission on Human Rights; Saddam’s Iraq headed the U.N. Committee on Disarmament.

You might say: That’s the past. Well, here’s what’s happening now — right now, today. Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon now presides over the U.N. Security Council. This means, in effect, that a terror organization presides over the body entrusted with guaranteeing the world’s security.

You couldn’t make this thing up.

So here in the U.N., automatic majorities can decide anything. They can decide that the sun sets in the west or rises in the west. I think the first has already been pre-ordained. But they can also decide — they have decided that the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Judaism’s holiest place, is occupied Palestinian territory.

And yet even here in the General Assembly, the truth can sometimes break through. In 1984 when I was appointed Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, I visited the great rabbi of Lubavich. He said to me — and ladies and gentlemen, I don’t want any of you to be offended because from personal experience of serving here, I know there are many honorable men and women, many capable and decent people serving their nations here. But here’s what the rebbe said to me. He said to me, you’ll be serving in a house of many lies. And then he said, remember that even in the darkest place, the light of a single candle can be seen far and wide.

Today I hope that the light of truth will shine, if only for a few minutes, in a hall that for too long has been a place of darkness for my country. So as Israel’s prime minister, I didn’t come here to win applause. I came here to speak the truth. The truth is — the truth is that Israel wants peace. The truth is that I want peace. The truth is that in the Middle East at all times, but especially during these turbulent days, peace must be anchored in security. The truth is that we cannot achieve peace through U.N. resolutions, but only through direct negotiations between the parties. The truth is that so far the Palestinians have refused to negotiate. The truth is that Israel wants peace with a Palestinian state, but the Palestinians want a state without peace. And the truth is you shouldn’t let that happen.

Well, as they say, it’s not over till it’s over and there will be much discussion over the next week or so. Now is the time for us to pray more than ever for the peace of Jerusalem.

Demo & Counter Demo

2011-09-21T12:21:00.000-07:00

Earlier this evening I went up to London support a demonstration Downing Street calling for the United Nations to vote against the bid by the Palestinian authority to be recognised as a sovereign state. It was actually a counter demonstration because a pro-Palestinian demonstration had been organised.

The counter demo was well supported with some 350 people in attendance. As with other Zionist demonstration I've attended, the crowd was good-natured, well behaved and without abusive calls or gestures, even when one or two supporters for the other side made aggressive gestures as they passed.

As with all demos, there was noise. All I could hear from the other camp were angry chants initiated by shrill young females. The anger was countered by the singing of Heveinu shalom aleichem (We bring you peace).

Sadly, we had a nutter over on our side, a highly strung character called Paul who thought he was Christ when he was just a pain in the tuchas. Paul was in full flow when I arrived, shouting New Testament verses about 'vain traditions' and so on. I was alarmed because of what the Jewish people would think, so I took him aside to talk to him. What was Paul not preaching his message of judgement to the other side too? Because he’d been sent to the Jews and to the Gentiles, the others’ time hadn’t come yet. One of the organised assured me that no one was upset by Paul's incoherent ramblings, so I stepped back and left him to continue yelling.

If their supporters are anything to judge by, what the Palestinians primarily want is not so much their own state as the demise of Israel.

There are some hopes that the bid for statehood will fail. A joint statement issued on 26 June 2009 by the United States, the European Union, the Russian Federation and the United Nations makes clear:

Unilateral actions taken by either party cannot prejudge the outcome of negotiations, and will not be recognized by the international community.

Also, any unilateral act by either Israel or the Palestinian Authority is in direct contravention of the Oslo Accords of both 1993 and 1995, which specifically call for a negotiated resolution to the permanent status of Palestinian statehood. The Accords, signed by the PLO on behalf of the PA, explicitly forbid either side from acting in the manner that the Palestinians are now threatening. If the Mahmoud Abbas violates those agreements the whole premise of future negotiations will be undermined and even the legitimacy of the PA itself will be called into question.

A final agreement has to be precisely final and that is why it must be reached by negotiation between the parties. Anything else will be a dangerous mirage for the Palestinians. (Former Spanish PM Jose Maria Aznar, 6 September 2011)

The Palestinian action is also a direct violation of UN Resolutions 242 and 338, the main resolutions pertaining to the 1967 borders, as they both call for negotiated agreements leading to ‘secure and recognized boundaries’. As pointed out in my last but one posting, 1967 and all that, the 1967 lines were never seen as international borders but rather as armistice lines from 1948. A Pal;estinian unilateral declaration of statehood based on the 1967 lines is thus in defiance of these UN Resolutions.

If this motion passes the UN General Assembly, it is widely accepted that future negotiations betweeen Israel and the Palestinians will be significantly more difficult and complicated, as it will be harder for the Palestinians to compromise on their positions. The Palestinians will also have less incentive to achieve a negotiated settlement while continuing to attempt to isolate Israel in the international arena.

A unilateral declaration of statehood by the Palestinians at the United Nations can lead to a stalemate between the sides especially when a peace agreement can be achieved through direct negotiations. (Israel President Shimon Peres, 4 September 2011).

To view a video that shows a peace process that is working, view Israelis and Palestinians Make Peace

Jeff Halper: Settlers in danger from Palestinians. Is he bothered?

2011-09-21T05:05:00.000-07:00

In an interview with Russia Today, Santa Claus lookalike Jeff Halper (pictured), says the Israeli Defence Force is preparing settlers for the mass uprising of Palestinians, expected after the UN votes on a Palestinian statehood in September.

The preparations include handing out tear gas and stun grenades to civilians. Military resistance to Palestinians will only bring international sanctions on Israel after Palestine is recognised in September's vote. That's the view of Halper, a political activist and co-founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.

Halper, an Israeli who is able to place an anti-Israel spin on every news item (in an interview with the Church of Scotland magazine Life and Work he was able to castigate his own people for not disliking him!), says every settlement is a military base.

Notice that Halper expects there to be violence against settlers if the UN recognises a Palestinian state on Friday but he doesn’t believe the settlers to be able to defend themselves.

Halper appears to believe that there are no circumstances under which Israel is ever justified in destroying a Palestinian building. Halper has no apparent objection – or at least none that he has ever expressed – however about Israel demolishing Jewish settlements.

And there are several well-defined reasons why Israel has demolished Palestinian homes. Sometimes it is to deter the families of convicted terrorists from continuing to attack Israel. Sometimes homes are demolished in counter-terrorist operations, such as when houses are used as bomb laboratories, or as terrorist headquarters or offices. There are times when homes are demolished because they are booby-trapped. When houses are used as hide-outs or cover for snipers or for launching missiles, they sometimes have to be destroyed. And if homes are in the way or Israeli tanks or armoured personnel carriers, they are demolished.

There may have been times of course when Palestinian houses have been demolished by mistake or even wrongly but the man who opposes the demolition of any Palestinian home for whatever reason would apparently deny settlers (even if they are, in his opinion illegal) the right to defend themselves against murderous attackers.

1967 and all that

2011-09-20T10:10:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of talk about Israel withdrawing to the '1967 Borders'.

Does anybody know what the '1967 Borders' were?

There were no borders in 1967!

Between Israel and Syria, and Israel and Lebanon there were (as now) only Armistce Lines, patrolled by the United Nations. There were no peace agreements between Israel and her northern neighbours.

Today, there are still only two internationally acknowledged borders: the border between between Israel and Egypt and the border between Israel and Jordan. These exist because Israel made peace with those two countries.

The Armistice Lines between Israel and Lebanon, and between Israel and Syria came into existence after Israel’s War of Independence in 1948/9, which was forced on the legally established fledgling Jewish State by the surrounding Arab Islamic nations who remain dedicated to the destruction of Israel.

During the 1948/9 War of Independence, the Gaza Strip was illegally conquered and occupied by Egypt. Judea and Samaria provocatively labelled 'The West Bank' were illegally conquered and occupied by the racist and apartheid Kingdom of Jordan, which has never allowed Jews to live within her borders.

The Kingdom of Jordan also illegally conquered and occupied the Old City of Jerusalem against the stated will of the United Nations, which had said in Resolution 181, that the Old City of Jerusalem would be governed by the UN as an 'International City'

In the infamous Resolution 242 passed by the UN in the wake of the June 1967 'Six Day War', Israel was instructed, among other things, to hand East Jerusalem, including the Old City back to Jordan, which had been ocupying it illegally for the previous 19years, and not to the United Nations, from whom Jordan had taken East Jerusalem! This was hypocrisy on an international scale.

It was not 'Palestinians' who had occupied Gaza, Judea, Samaria and the Old city from 1948 to 1967, but Egypt and Jordan, the supposed allies ofthe 'Palestinian Cause'.

So what now does Mahmoud Abbas want the United Nations to do if/when it votes on Friday?

Abbas wants Israel to return to a time of insecurity, when her ‘borders’ were untenable and she was being attacked constantly.

They want her to return to a time of illegality, when Israel’s 'borders' were illegal according to International Law, even though recognised as legitimate by the UN.

Justice, only justice

2011-09-20T00:53:00.000-07:00

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is planning to address the UN General Assembly on Friday, shortly after Palestinian Authority President Abbas presents his demand for full membership and recognition as a state. Netanyahu holds no illusions regarding the reception he is likely to receive. ‘The General Assembly is not a place where Israel usually receives a fair hearing,' said Netanyahu, ‘but I still decided to tell the truth before anyone who would like to hear it.’

I believe this week will be the most significant week in Israel’s history since 1948.

The Palestinians remain committed to demanding a state formed from Israeli land, and the bottom line is that while a Security Council veto would deny the Palestinians official member status, the Palestinians appear to be fully committed to that demand. If the vote in the Security Council fails due to a US veto they can seek upgraded observer status at the General Assembly as a non-member state.

Such a move could be interpreted as implicit UN recognition of a Palestinian state. The advantage of this option would be that it would require only a simple majority of the General Assembly. Since around 120 countries already recognise the state of Palestine, it would likely win such a vote overwhelmingly.

If ‘Palestine’ receives recognition as a non-member state, its leaders will be able to sign certain international treaties, such as the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The result of such an outcome will be thousands of lawsuits against Israel and isolation and demonization of the State of Israel.

We should all pray that justice will prevail at the UN on Friday.

IDF seeking to prevent casualties ahead of UN vote

2011-09-19T01:50:00.000-07:00

From the BICOM (Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre) website.
The Israel Defense Forces are currently on a high level of alert, in preparation for all possible scenarios as the date for the Palestinian bid for statehood in the UN draws near. The key aim, according to a statement by IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz on Saturday, is to prevent any deaths, Israeli or Palestinian. IDF Central Command, which covers the West Bank, has been reinforced with three additional battalions, according to Israeli media reports. Border Police and IDF reserve forces will also be made available according to need. Both IDF and the Palestinian Authority security forces have been equipped with large amounts of non-lethal crowd control equipment, to best enable the prevention of fatalities. There are particular concerns regarding the possibility of clashes between Jewish settlers and Palestinians. These could take the form of attacks by extremist settlers on Palestinian property, or an attempt by Palestinians to march on one of the settlements adjoining Area A, which is under Palestinian security and political control.

However, not all officials and analysts are predicting Palestinian violence following the statehood bid. Senior PA official Nabil Sha'ath said in an interview with Israel Army Radio over the weekend that he does not foresee an outbreak of violence in the West Bank unless the settlers initiate confrontation. Sources in the West Bank also suggest a lack of enthusiasm among large numbers of the population for the UN bid, indicating that disappointment is unlikely to be intense if it fails to go through. However, protests did take place at the Qalandia Checkpoint near Jerusalem on Saturday, in which rocks were thrown at IDF troops.

Sitting round waiting for the phone to ring

2011-09-17T08:59:00.000-07:00

This afternoon I sat by the phone for 30 minutes expecting the BBC to call me. In vain.

I listened to Any Questions and was frustrated and angry to hear the panel suggest that Israel is the hindrance to peace in the Middle East and that President Obama should therefore not exercise the US veto when the PA President Mahmoud Abbas asks the UN Security Council to recognise a Palestinian State on 23 of this month.

As soon as the programme finished, I called Any Answers to say I wanted to make a point. A young woman who sounded like she was suffering from terminal boredom answered.

‘Any Answers...’

‘Hello. I’d like to respond to the question on Palestinian statehood.’

‘What’s your name?’ I told her.

‘Where do you live?’ I gave her the information.

‘What do you do?’ I told her I was the General Secretary of a Christian charity.

‘What’s your point?’ I said I disagreed with the panel and that Israel has been the one party in the peace process that has actively pursued peace.

‘And what’s point are you’re trying to make? That President Obama should veto any UN vote to recognise a Palestinian state until the Palestinian Authority is willing to make peace with Israel.’

‘Right.... and will you be near your phone between two o’clock and half past two?’ I would be.

‘Alright... stay by your phone and someone from Any Answers might call you.’ Click.

I stayed by the phone but no one called me. As I listened to the programme, listeners wanted to talk about the Euro and its imminent collapse, trade unions, pensions, rogue traders and spoilt unhappy children.

Oh well… And I’d prepared so well.

What I wanted to point out was that Israel has made all the running throughout the peace process. It was the Jews that agreed to the United Nations Partition plan in 1947; the Arabs turned the plan down.

Following the Six-Day War when Israel captured the Sinai from Egypt, she handed it back to Egypt in return for a guarantee of peace. Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat was later assassinated by the Muslim Brotherhood for making peace with the Israelis. Now there is talk in Egypt about tearing up Sadat’s peace agreement.

In 1996, Israel made peace with Jordan.

Israel has withdrawn from Palestinian towns and cities; she has removed checkpoints; she has provided water and electricity to Palestinians and allowed humanitarian aid to be transported into Gaza.

Israel has dismantled Jewish settlement and forcibly removed thousands of its own citizens from Gaza in 2005. The Palestinian response to that major peace effort was to increase aggression against Israel.

Israel Prime Minister announced to the US congress earlier in the year that he will be the first to welcome a Palestinian state if President Abbas is prepared to recognise a Jewish state. Abbas has refused to do so, making it clear that an independent state of Palestine will be Jew-free.

The Palestinian authority must do something to merit statehood. I can think of nothing that the Palestinians have done since Oslo to further the peace process.

However, Mr Abbas knows he is in a win/win situation. Whatever the outcome of his bid for Palestinian statehood he cannot lose. If he fails to persuade the UN Security Council to support him, or if the US vetos a pro-vote, the PA will continue to receive billions of dollars in US aid while the nations step up their boycotts on Israeli goods.

As Barry Rubin observes so perceptively:

Will the United States cut off all aid? Of course not. Will it make them more unpopular at home? No. If it kills talks with Israel? That’s good. They don’t need or want them. If it delays the creation of a real state? Since the PA can’t and won’t negotiate for a compromise agreement it doesn’t matter. The PA will get a huge majority in the General Assembly and that will seem a diplomatic victory. If the United States vetos, the PA has an excuse for not succeeding.

If you don’t confront the reality of why a country or group act the way it does–and why a weak Western policy makes radical behaviour possible – any discussion of the issue is a waste of time.
(Read Rubin’s blog here)

What's Arabic for Hutzpah?

2011-09-13T16:28:00.000-07:00

And another thing, the issue of Palestinian statehood was featured on Newsnight (see my previous blog).

Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal (pictured) has demanded that the US support Palestinian statehood…or else.

To make matters worse, he published his demands on September 11 — the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attack on America. Seventeen of the 19 hijackers that flew the planes into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon were Saudis.

The director of the Saudi intelligence service at that time was none other than Turki al-Faisal, who met repeatedly with Osama bin Laden during the 1990s and personally intervened to block bin Laden’s extradition and execution.

Now al-Faisal writes:

The United States must support the Palestinian bid for statehood at the United Nations this month or risk losing the little credibility it has in the Arab world. If it does not, American influence will decline further, Israeli security will be undermined, and Iran will be empowered, increasing the chances of another war in the region. Moreover, Saudi Arabia would no longer be able to cooperate with America in the same way it historically has.

Al-Faisal is addressing the country that saved him and his entire nation when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991. American blood was spilled, and American dollars were spent to defend him and his ungrateful nation. Now he presumes to lecture the USA on ethics!

The Terrible Twins

2011-09-13T16:01:00.000-07:00

Richard Dawkins was on Newsnight last night, talking about his book for kids The Magic of Reality.

Talk about 'terrible twins'! Dawkins was in typical high dudgeon but the only thing Paxman could find to challenge him about was his contention that science was more 'poetic' than 'myth'.

I was dead tired but I had to dash off a letter to Newsnight and this is what I sent:

I watched Jeremy Paxman’s interview with Richard Dawkins tonight and agree with Prof Dawkins that truth is more important than comfort.

While I have become used to Prof Dawkins supercilious and patronising comments about theists, I was somewhat concerned by Jeremy Paxman’s dismissal of everyone who believes in the essential truth of the Genesis account of creation as ‘stupid’.

There are a significant number of scientists with impeccable qualifications who find the biblical account of creation more scientific than the Darwinian hypothesis.

When I read The God Delusion, I expected to be seriously challenged. Instead, I was struck by the juvenile shallowness of Dawkins’ arguments. He used arguments I abandoned at the age of eighteen.

Moreover, it should not be overlooked that some years ago, on Melvin Bragg’s In Our Time, Dawkins admitted that he believed in spontaneous generation, only he preferred to call it ‘autocatalysm’ (self-creation) because that sounded more scientific.

I have read a number of Dawkins’ books as well as books by other evolutionists, and the more I read, the more I believe evolutionists have got it wrong.

I appreciate that Paxman and Dawkins, for reasons best known to themselves, are able to believe in unintelligent design, that everything came into being because Nothing exploded, that the laws of physics were established by random processes and that life arose spontaneously from non-life. I just don’t have the faith to believe all that stuff.

Dawkins and Paxman are intelligent men and I defend their right to tell me I’m mistaken or that I’m just plain wrong. Both men are entitled to their opinions and, given the opportunity, I could defend my views reasonably articulately. But although I’m certainly not the world’s most intelligent guy, I kind of resent being called ‘stupid’ because I disagree with them.

Now I've gotta get some sleep. Good night.

Those who do not learn from history...

2011-09-13T00:39:00.000-07:00

Last week I sent out an email newsletter in which I explained that although CWI is first and foremost a mission concerned with the spiritual well-being of the Jewish people, we cannot afford to stand by silently when Jewish people and our own friends and colleagues are in danger.

I pointed out that the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has called on the United Nations to support the establishment of a Palestinian state when the UN meets on the 20th of this month. In the lead up to the historic vote, attacks on Israel have increased and as we draw closer to the tenth anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Centre claims that Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks abound on the Internet.

I related how, in May, PM David Cameron had assured Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that 'Britain is a good friend of Israel' while at the same time warning that unless Israel ‘engages seriously in a meaningful peace process’ with the Palestinian Authority, it is more likely that Britain will endorse the “State of Palestine” for which the PA is expected to seek recognition at the UN in September.’

Columnist Melanie Philips asked if Mr Cameron made a habit of threatening his friends. ‘This is not the behaviour of a friend,’ said Miss Phillips, ‘so much as the kind of intimidation that is more reminiscent of a Mafia protection racket.’

I reproduced a letter I had written to Mr Cameron, inviting readers to feel free to adapt it to write their own letter to Mr Cameron, to the Home Secretary and to their local MPs. Here it is:

The Prime Minister
The Right Honourable David Cameron MP
House of Commons
LONDON
SW1A 0AA

Dear Prime Minister,

Although I welcome your assurance to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Britain’s friendship with Israel is ‘unshakeable’, I was deeply concerned to read your warning to Mr Netanyahu that unless Israel ‘engages seriously in a meaningful peace process’ with the Palestinian Authority, Britain will support the PA’s call for the recognition of a Palestinian state at the UN this month.

Your threat concerns me for a number of reasons.

First, you are pressurising the victim in the Israel-Palestine conflict rather than the aggressor. Israel has constantly tried to make peace while their enemies have not, and virtually all Israel’s concessions to the Palestinians have been reciprocated with an increase in aggression.

Second, Mr Netanyahu has stated publicly that he will be the first to welcome a Palestinian state if that state is willing to recognise a Jewish state. Although Mr Abbas wishes the world to recognise and support a Palestinian state, he has stated repeatedly that he will never accept Israel as a Jewish state.

Third, a ‘State of Palestine’ will be a racist state, inasmuch as Mr Abbas has declared on several occasions that not a single Jew will be allowed to live there.

Fourth, Mr Abbas’ Fatah party is in an alliance with Hamas, a terror organisation explicitly committed to the genocide of the Jews and the destruction of the state of Israel. If Britain supports the establishment of a Palestinian state, it will be endorsing a regime committed to a programme of genocide.

Such unreasonable pressure on Israel is nothing less than a demand that Mr Netanyahu negotiate the destruction of his own country. Should Britain support a Palestinian state at the UN later this month, I believe future generations will condemn you as the Prime Minister who stood shoulder to shoulder with genocidal terrorists against their victims.

May I be assured that you will be a true friend to Israel by opposing the establishment of a Palestinian state until such a time as the Palestinian leaders unambiguously recognise the right of the Jewish people to a national homeland?

Yours sincerely,

About six people responded to my email by unsubscribing but three people expressed concerns that CWI was deviating from its core concern: Jewish evangelism.

The following is the essence of my response to one of the respondents:

I did say at the start of the letter that ‘CWI is first and foremost a mission concerned with the spiritual well-being of the Jewish people’. The email was therefore a departure from my usual letters.

I am guessing that you did not receive the daily newsletters I emailed when I was reaching out to Hasidic Jews in August. If you did receive them, you will know that I was rising at 5.00am each day to reach out with the gospel to Orthodox Jewish men when they went to ritually immerse themselves in the sea. It should be evident therefore that CWI is not off-track regarding its ‘core commitment’.

I’m glad that your church member supports ‘the right of all people whether Jew or Gentile to be protected from abusive states’. That was the motivation behind my email because Israel is the target of state-sponsored abuse through terror organisations such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Fatah and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Additionally, the Iranian state continues to threaten Israel with annihilation even as it continues to seek nuclear capability. Things will get far worse if a Palestinian state, presided over by a founder member of the PLO, that refuses to accept or acknowledge the existence of a Jewish state. We should never forget that in 1967, following the Six-Day War, that all the Arab nations resolved at the Khartoum conference: No recognition of Israel; no negotiations with Israel; no peace with Israel. They have never rescinded those resolutions.

I agree totally that ‘Israel is not exempt from its responsibilities to treat Palestinians with dignity.’ When Israel was in control of the so-called West Bank, the Palestinian economy thrived and there was freedom of religion. After the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, the economy of the West Bank plummeted.

In 2010 and 2011, the economies of the PA and Gaza rose sharply as a result of aid from Israel. But the PA and Gaza have continued to bite the hand that feeds them.
I’m not sure what the church member means when he says he supports ‘the right of Palestinians to challenge the status imposed on them by the secular state of Israel.’ By choosing to reject Israel’s control and become a separate entity (the Palestinian Authority) the Palestinians chose their own status.

My friends and colleagues in Israel will suffer greatly should a Palestinian state be estate be established, because a state of ‘Palestine’ will be committed to the destruction not only of the Jewish state but also of the Jewish people.

And, of course, every Jew (or Arab) who is killed is one more person who never gets to hear the gospel.

Most Christians, with hindsight, believe that in the 1930s, the churches in Germany should have stood up to Hitler but seem to think we should remain silent in the face of modern-day Nazism in the Middle East. If that appears too strong a statement, it is worth noting that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which inspired Hitler and Mein Kampf are best sellers in Arab lands. In ten years, I don’t want to find myself wringing my hands and wishing I had spoken up when the world was making straight the way for another Holocaust.

Since the Jewish people began to return to the land from 1897 onwards, they have been the constant victims of Arab aggression. For example, in 1929, without any provocation, hundreds of Palestinian Jews were slaughtered in riots in Jerusalem, Hebron and other places.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the Arabs collaborated with Nazi Germany and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini supported Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’, intending to implement a similar programme in Palestine.

In 1947, the Arabs violently opposed the establishment of a Jewish state even though the Jews were willing to share the land.

When the state of Israel was established in May 1948, the Arab states immediately confiscated the possessions of their Jewish citizens and expelled them. Those same Arab states, on the day Israel became a nation, also declared war on Israel and attacked the fledgling state.

In 1967, by a miracle, in six days, Israel defeated Egypt, Jordan and Syria in a defensive war that was intended to wipe Israel off the map.

In October 1973, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar when Jews in Israel were fasting and praying, Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated surprise attack against Israel.

In spite of all the Arab hostility, Israel’s Arab citizens still enjoy all the legal and civil privileges of Israel’s Jewish citizens. Arabs in Israel have a better standard of living and better health than their brothers in Arab countries. Yet Israel’s Arab neighbours still wish to destroy the Jewish state and its citizens.

Never were the words of Edmund Burke more important: 'Those who do learn from history are doomed to repeat it.'

9/11 in Israel

2011-09-12T03:48:00.000-07:00

The picture above shows an Israeli soldier placing a stone on a memorial just outside Jerusalem yesterday in accordance with the traditional Jewish way of mourning, during a ceremony marking the 10th anniversary of the 11 September 2001 terror attacks (Tara Todras-Whitehill/AP).

Israelis yesterday solemnly remembered the 11 September 2001 terrorist assault on the US, as Americans prepared to mark the 10th anniversary of the largest terrorist attack in history.

Israeli Internet news sites and television news stations provided live broadcasts of memorial ceremonies being held in the US and Israel.

Israeli President Shimon Peres phoned US President Barack Obama to tell him:

"The Israeli nation has shared happy times with you, but has also shed tears with you a decade ago. Today Israel once again bows its head as America mourns the loss."

Though there there are Arab individuals who detested what was done to America on 9/11,in London's Grosvenor Square yesterday, Muslim protesters expressed no remorse for the attrocities that were carried out by their coreligionists. Showing no respect for the dead, they burned a US flag during the minute's silence.

Israel was the only nation in the Middle East to stand by America on that fateful day ten years ago. The surrounding nations, and even the "Palestinian" half of Jerusalem, erupted in celebration when the Twin Towers burned and fell. It was a critical reminder of who America's true friends are in the Middle East.

Why then is President Obama, who yesterday read the 46th Psalm (written by a Jewish psalmist) at the commemoration of the 9/11 attack, so determined to establish a Palestinian state? Does he think that by offering America's only Middle East ally on the altar of appeasement the Arab nations will begin to like the US?

Mr Obama would do well to consider the words of Winston Churchill: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile - hoping it will eat him last.”

If you have half a mind, that's all you'll need...

2011-09-09T09:34:00.000-07:00

Last night I watched TV for the first time in weeks and, boy was it good!

In 9/11: Conspiracy Road Trip, five young confirmed conspiracy theorists were given a free trip to the United States, courtesy of BBC 3, where an attempt was made to introduced them to foreign concepts such as critical thinking, probability and common sense.

Charlotte was a nanny in New York at the time of the attacks and had evidently been traumatised by the experience. Charlie, a former philosophy student, thought the twin towers had been brought down by controlled explosion. Rodney took pride, like so many conspiracy nuts, that he was privy to ‘something that very few people know about.’

Each member of the group was allowed to expound their particular take on the events of 9/11 that persuaded them that the attacks were an inside job. The group was then introduced to experts and witnesses in an effort to resolve the issues that troubled them.

One member of the group doubted that anyone but a trained pilot could have flown a passenger plane into the twin towers. She was given a flying lesson and in less than an hour she flew a plane round Manhattan and successfully landed it, which should have proved that anyone with even rudimentary training could have flown an airliner into the largest building in Manhattan.

A technician and a demolition expert demolished the notion that the collapse of the twin towers was due to a controlled explosion in the building. Charlie, at least, appeared almost astonished to discover there were perfectly reasonable explanations for phenomena he'd previously found baffling. But Charlotte and Rodney were not for turning. The fact that one of the expert witnesses had a commendation from President Bush on his wall was proof positive that he was untrustworthy.

As with most conspiracy theorists, nothing was going to persuade her that Bush and his administration had chosen to kill thousands of American citizens as a pretext for invading Afghanistan.

I was listening closely for when Israel would be brought into the equation and, sure enough, Rodney was of the opinion that Israel was in there.

Well, as we all know, only the Jews are evil enough to pull off such a stunt and we know they are evil because they did it.

Revolution in Libya

2011-08-31T15:15:00.000-07:00

Alan Pritzlaf sent me the following perceptive article on the situation in Libya.

Another dictator in the Middle East is gone, but what will replace him? In the West we don't value history, but we must look at the history of Libya to see what is probably ahead. From 1843 until 1922, Libya was ruled by a radical Islamic group known as the Sanussi, whose founder studied Wahhabi (radical) theology in Saudi Arabia. The Italians occupied the country from 1922 to 1943, when it was liberated by the Allies. After the war the country was turned over to King Idris, a leader of the Sanussi. He ruled as an autocrat until he was overthrown by Qaddafi in 1969.

Libyans therefore have absolutely no experience with anything approaching democracy, and have had much experience with radical Islam. Back in 1995 a Western journalist concluded that "militant Islamists . . . were the best organized threat to his [Qaddafi's] rule." Throughout the rebellion, which started in March, the news media has occasionally noted the presence of people associated with al-Qaeda among the rebels. Last week, during a news broadcast from Libya, I noticed, but the reporter did not, that one of the rebel fighters was wearing an Afghan hat. Where would a Libyan get such a hat? Most likely, either he or one of his friends was an "Arab Afghan," an Arab that went to Afghanistan in the 1980s to help the radical Muslims fight the Soviets. When the Soviets gave up and went home, these "Arab Afghans" also went home and started radical Islamic revolutions in their home countries.

So, who will replace Qaddafi? After a transitional period of several months to perhaps two years, I suspect that a radical Islamic regime will take power. Sharia law will be declared to be in force. The draft constitution being put together by the National Transitional Council already says "Islam is the religion of the State and the principal source of legislation is Islamic Jurisprudence (Sharia)."

Sharia law mandates second class status for women and non-Muslims, and death for those who leave Islam. Soon, Libya will take its place alongside Iran, Sudan and Lebanon as a state ruled by radical Islam. This time we (Americans and Europeans, through NATO) will have had a direct hand in helping it to happen.

Seven devils for every one exorcised

2011-08-31T14:59:00.000-07:00

Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, has raised the spectre that the tottering Assad regime in Syria might lose control of its extensive stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons to Hezbollah terrorists. The Assad government is believed to have killed at least 3,000 of its own people and tortured and injured tens of thousands more in its desperate attempt to cling to power.

The Syrian stockpiles are missile-ready and Hezbollah already has highly accurate D-class Scud missiles capable of striking at any city in Israel. They would simply need to put the two together (a matter of a couple hours of work) and they could launch an attack using deadly Sarin nerve gas, mustard gas, or one of the other illegal chemical weapons Assad is known to possess. As you read the media reports from the Middle East, bear in mind that as one devil is cast out, seven others more evil than the first will come in to take his place.

We saw it in Iran when the Shah was overthrown and in Iraq with the ousting of Sadam Hussein. We will see the same scenario in Egypt, Libya and Syria.

Yet despite this looming threat to Israel and, after it is too late, to the West, the world is hell bent on dividing Jerusalem and forcing Israel to hand over the Judea and Samaria to the Palestinians.

Al Beeb

2011-08-31T00:54:00.000-07:00

When I was at school, we were told the BBC was the most impartial news agency in the world.

Well, I was at school a long time ago and things have changed since then.

Compare these two stories of a Palestinian Muslim terrorist who hijacked a taxi in Tel Aviv after stabbing the driver and then headed to a nightclub filled with Israeli high school kids.

The BBC refers to the Palestinian as a “militant”, not a “terrorist”; it twice claims that terror attacks are rare; it makes no reference to the fact that the terrorists targets were school kids; it makes no reference to his Islamic motivation; it talks about Israel “blaming” Palestinian militants for “the series of attacks near the Red Sea ... on 18 August” and feels obliged to mention that “More than two dozen people died in the week of hostilities that followed, including leaders of Palestinian militant groups killed in Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip.”

Judge for yourself if the BBC deserves the title given to it by some of its critics: "Al Beeb".

Jerusalem Post:

Eight people were injured in south Tel Aviv early Monday morning, when a terrorist from the West Bank carjacked a taxi and rammed it into a police road block protecting a Tel Aviv nightclub, before going on a stabbing spree.

Police said the terrorist, a 20-year-old Nablus resident, entered a taxi near the beginning of Salameh Street, and hijacked the vehicle, stabbing the driver in the hand. He then drove for approximately a kilometer down Salameh Street towards the Haoman 17 nightclub, which was filled with high school children at an end-of-summer party. At the time of the attack, almost all of the teenagers were inside the club.

Border Police had set up a precautionary road block ahead of time at the entrance to the club on Abarbanel Street, in Tel Aviv’s Florentine neighborhood. The terrorist rammed the road block, and struck a number of civilians and a border policeman.

“He then got out of the car, screamed Allah Akbar [God is Great], and went on a knife attack,” a police spokeswoman said.

The suspect was tackled to the ground by Border Police officers and taken into custody. He was taken to the Wolfson Medical Center in Holon after being lightly injured. He was later released and was taken in for questioning under heavy security.

The eight people injured in the attack were all Border Police officers and club security guards. One was seriously injured, two were moderately injured and three were lightly injured. The remaining casualties were released from hospital after receiving medical treatment.

The cabdriver whose taxi was hijacked, Nachman Azi, said that the Palestinian man got in his cab at the start of Salameh Street and asked to be taken to the Central Bus Station, moments later, said Azi “he pulled out a knife and told me to get out of the cab. I grabbed the knife and started to fight him, but it cut my hand very bad and I told him he could take the car.”

Azi, his hand heavily bandaged and his shirt splotched with blood, said that the terrorist let him take some of his personal belongings, and that he believed he only wanted to steal the car.
A police source said that the road block had prevented a far worse outcome.

Israel Radio reported that the attack was coordinated to strike a large youth party being held in the area.

Police Insp.-Gen. Yochanan Danino said Monday morning that over 1,000 teenagers were inside the club which was targeted. He said Border Police preparations “were extraordinary and prevented a big disaster.”

The BBC:
A Palestinian man has wounded seven Israelis near a Tel Aviv nightclub, ramming a car into a checkpoint and stabbing five people, police say.

The man drove a stolen taxi into the checkpoint, injuring two guards. He stabbed two other guards, two passers-by, and the taxi driver.

Attacks by Palestinians in Israeli cities have been rare in recent years.

The incident comes amid heightened tensions after attackers killed eight Israelis near Eilat earlier this month.

Israel blames Palestinian militants from the Gaza Strip, who crossed from Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, for the series of attacks near the Red Sea resort on 18 August.

More than two dozen people died in the week of hostilities that followed, including leaders of Palestinian militant groups killed in Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip.

On Monday, Israeli police spokeswoman Luba Samri said the attacker in Tel Aviv was a Palestinian in his 20s from the city of Nablus, in the occupied West Bank.

He was arrested soon after the early morning attack and taken to hospital with injuries sustained during the arrest. One of his victims was in a serious condition, Ms Samri said.

Attacks by Palestinian militants in Israeli cities were common during the Second Intifada - the Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule - that lasted from 2000 to 2005, but have been rare in the years since.

In May, one person was killed when a lorry driven by an Israeli Arab ploughed into traffic and pedestrians shortly after morning rush hour in Tel Aviv.

Clear and present danger for Israel

2011-08-30T10:17:00.000-07:00

Even while Jewish families were sitting shiva, seven days of mourning for their dead, after the cowardly attack on Israel citizens that took place on 18 August, a pro-Palestinian rally in Trafalgar Square was accusing Israel of war crimes and calling for the death of the Jewish state.

Then, in America, posters which call for the US to halt the supply of weapons to Israel began to appear on buses in San Francisco.

And while the BBC announced that there was a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza, missiles continued to rain down on southern Israel. On the weekend following the attrocity, more than a hundred rockets, mortars and anti-tank missiles were fired from Gaza at Israeli towns and villages along the southern border. At the Israeli-Egyptian border, a suicide bomber blew himself up and on the Jewish Sabbath a rocket hit a home in Beersheva, killing a Jewish civilian and wounding four others. Dozens were hospitalized for treatment of shock.

And in a few weeks, the United Nations looks set to vote for the establishment of an independent sovereign Palestinian state. Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Ron Prossor, estimates that more than 130 of the 193 members of the UN will vote in favour of a Palestinian state, and that most nations that oppose the plan will not have the courage to vote against it but will instead abstain.

Last Friday, President Ahmadinejad of Iran made a public declaration that the creation of a Palestinian state would be “only one step forwards toward the goal of liberating the whole of Palestine.”

Ahmadinejad, who has called repeatedly for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” flatly rejects a two-state solution, saying that the entire land of Israel should be a Palestinian state.

“The Zionist regime”, said Ahmadinejad, is a centre of microbes, a cancer cell, and if it exists in one iota of Palestine, it will mobilize again and hurt everyone. It is not enough for them to have a weak, powerless state in a very small piece of Palestine. They should unite to establish a state, but the ultimate goal is the liberation of the whole of Palestine. I urge the Palestinians never to forget this ideal. Forgetting this ideal is equal to committing suicide. It would be giving an opportunity to an enemy which is on the verge of collapse and disappearance.”

If the vote goes in favour of a Palestinian state, the Arab Spring will become Israeli Winter. Tiny Israel will be surrounded by a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Egypt to the south, a Hamas-governed Gaza to the west, a Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon to the north and a beefed up Palestine, Jordan, Syria to the east. Hamas now has weaponry capable of striking at Tel Aviv and the nearby towns where my colleagues in Israel live.

If you think the Palestinians only want "the West Bank", just look at the logo of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign.

When will world leaders and the media face up to the reality that the Muslim nations really do mean it when they say "Death to Israel".

Have a look at the issues on the 15-minute video Give Peace a Chance.

Terror Rally in London

2011-08-25T00:36:00.000-07:00

Just days after Hamas'cowardly attack on Israeli civilians that left six dead and forty injured, a rally was held in Trafalgar Square, London accusing Israel of war crimes and calling for the destruction of the Jewish state.

The Al Quds Day rally was organised by the misnamed Islamic Human Rights Commission and one of the main speakers was Tony Blair's half sister-in-law, Lauren Booth, who addressed the crowd with these words:

"It is time, Brothers and Sisters, for Al Quds [the Temple Mount in Jerusalem] to be liberated [Does Ms Booth not know that the Temple Mount is under Muslim control and that it is Jews who are not allowed to pray there?]. For Islam and people of the world who wish to pray there to the one God. And we say here today to you Israel, we see your crimes and we loathe your crimes. And to us your nation does not exist, because it is a criminal injustice against humanity. We want to see Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt go to the borders and stop this now. Liberate Al Quds! March to Al Quds!"

Richard Millet has two photo essays - "Lauren Booth: 'Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt must liberate Jerusalem'" and "As Israelis bury their dead, scenes from London..." - on his blog.

View them and be afraid...

Israel exacts vengeance on Eilat terrorists

2011-08-19T06:40:00.000-07:00

Following yesterday’s deadly terrorist assault near Eilat, Israel responded by wiping out the leadership of the terror group believed responsible.

The cowardly attack on Israeli civilains was reported objectively on TV except for the fact that once again the killers were referred to as "militants" rather than "terrorists". A Reuters executive revealed some years ago that the media eschew the "T word" out of concern for the safety of their staff on the ground in the region.

Once again, I couldn’t help wondering how the incident would have been reported had Israel perpetrated an atrocity on the Palestinians. There would have been widespread condemnation and an outcry from the international community.

Last night, Israeli aircraft targeted and attacked installations belonging to the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), a group affiliated to Hamas. At least six PRC terrorists were killed, including the group leader Kamal Nirab.

Israeli officials said intelligence had confirmed that Nirab was directly involved in planning and ordering Thursday’s triple terrorist attack, which left eight Israelis dead and dozens wounded, by crossing into the Egyptian Sinai and then infiltrating Israel near its southern tip.

In a televised address on Thursday evening, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu informed the nation that those responsible for the shocking terrorist assault were “no longer living.”

Israel continued its retaliatory action this morning, with an aerial assault on Hamas targets in Gaza. Palestinian sources claimed collateral damage, including civilian casualties.

Hamas responded by firing long-range GRAD missiles at cities in southern Israel. One missile landed in the courtyard of a yeshiva (Jewish seminary) in the port city of Ashdod. Ten Jewish religious students were injured, two seriously.

Other missiles landed in open areas in and near the cities of Askhelon and Beersheva causing no damage or injuries.

Yesterday’s attack began when at least three terrorists riddled a passenger bus with bullets. The bus continued to drive and the terrorists pursued in their own vehicle. Israeli soldiers traveling on the bus reportedly exchanged fire with the terrorists as the two vehicles continued toward Eilat.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat accused Israel of using the Eilat terrorist attacks as a “pretext” to commit what he called “war crimes” against Gaza. Erekat, however, did not consider the Eilat attacks – which targeted innocent, unarmed civilians, many on their way to a summer holiday – to be war crimes.

Has Bob Dylan changed his way of thinking?

2011-08-17T09:32:00.000-07:00

In May, I posted a blog about Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday, in which I expressed agnosticism about his spiritual condition.

On 20 June, Dylan played Ramat Gan in Tel Aviv, his first Israel gig for almost 20 years ago. Two decades ago, he upset some in his audience by performing “In the Garden” and other “born-again” period songs.

In June, he opened with another of his born-again songs: “Change my Way of Thinking”. I didn’t post a blog because the lyrics, even though they had been changed were pretty much indecipherable and there was little to comment on. The first verse alone remained unchanged.

Gonna change my way of thinking,
Make myself a different set of rules.
I’m gonna change my way of thinking,
Make myself a different set of rules.
Gonna put my best foot forward,
Stop bein’ influenced by fools.

Thanks to my good friend and Bobphile, Rev Alex MacDonald of Buccleuch Free Church of Scotland in Edinburgh, I have the lyrics and, as Alex says, they are “interesting”:

Gonna sit at the welcome table,
I’m as hungry as a horse.
Sitting at the welcome table,
I’m so hungry, I could eat a horse.
I’m gonna revitalize my thinking,
I’m gonna let the law take its course.

Jesus is calling,
He’s coming back to gather His jewels.
Jesus is coming,
He’s coming back to gather His jewels.
Well, we live by the Golden Rule,
Whoever got the gold, rules.

The sun is shining,
Ain’t but one train on this track.
The sun is shining,
Ain’t but one train on this track.
I’m stepping out of the dark woods,
Trying to jump on a monkey’s back.

Yes, I’m all dressed up,
Goin’ to the country dance.
I said I’m all dressed up,
Goin’ to the country dance.
Every day you got to pray for guidance,
Every day you got to give yourself a chance.

There are storms on the ocean,
Storms out on the mountain too.
Storms on the ocean,
Storms out on the mountain too.
Oh Lord,
You know I have no friend without you.

I’ll tell you something:
Things you never had you’ll never miss.
I’ll tell you something:
Things you never had you’ll never miss.
Tell you something else: a brave man will kill you with a sword,
A coward with a kiss.

Middle East Christians stuck in the Dark Age

2011-08-03T02:51:00.000-07:00

In an article published in the Jerusalem Post, Oxford student Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi
reveals that anti-Semitism is rife among the churches in the Middle East. As the various Arab revolutions have increasingly taken on an Islamic flair and become discriminatory against their Christian populations, some Israelis have tried to identify more closely with their fellow Bible-believers.

Al-Tamimi, who has family in Baghdad, writes that Arab Christians in general view the turmoil caused by the "Arab Spring" as another chapter in the ongoing Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.

According to Al-Tamimi, Middle East Christians believe that all the deadly attacks on their own communities over the past decade have been perpetrated by "Zionist forces" intent on sowing discord, and not by Muslim fundamentalists, even if all the evidence points to Islamic terror.

These are not fringe accusations, warns Jawad, pointing out that major Christian figures in the Middle East have been repeating ancient blood libels against the Jews.

He concludes that most Middle East Christians simply have not moved beyond the Dark Age of Christianity, when the words of Scripture were twisted to demonize the Jews and turn them into the enemies of God.

Read Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi's post here.

The Usual Scapegoats

2011-07-28T08:53:00.000-07:00

I just received a very interesting email from Rolf Heittman, the CEO of the Norwegian Lutheran Mission, relating to Anders Behring Breivik.

Rolf says his "fundamentalist Christianity" and "pro-Israel" symathies are non-issues in Norway.

Rolf says in his message:

"We register that the terorist internationally has been described as "Christian". This is simply not a topic in Norwegian media.

"There has been no focus on the killer as 'Christian' or 'Pro-Israel', but rather a focus on an extrene right-wing terrorist with neo-Nazi symphathies.

"Yes, we know that he has established (together with British fellows) a 'Knights Templar' organization, but no Christian group in Norway (at least) will identify with such an ideology, nor with the Crusaders' methods and misuse of power."

So why is the media outside Norway obsessed with Breivik's supposed "fundamentalist Christian", "Zionist" convictions? Breivik is a gift to the western media. His deranged claims give the news outlets something to self-righteously bluster about while they sharpen their knives for the slaughter of a couple of sacrificial lambs.

Norway Shooter no Fundamentalist Christian

2011-07-28T07:46:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to find time to sift through Anders Behring Breivik's 1,500 page apologia for his murderous spree last weekend in order to present the evidence that whatever else Breivick was, he was not a Christian. Other pressures prevented me from doing so. However, someone just sent me this article by Chuck Missler who does what I intended to do but with more style and eloquence than I could. Here it is.

When Anders Behring Breivik shot and killed 68 people at a Labour Party summer youth camp on Norway’s Utoeya island and killed another eight in a bombing in Oslo on July 22, the media immediately began bellowing that a right-wing Christian fundamentalist had just committed the most deadly attack in Norway since WWII. The slaughter of dozens of children under any banner is not simply tragic, but abhorrent. Media outlets spoke too quickly when they asserted that Breivik was a fundamentalist Christian, however. Regardless of what Breivik’s Facebook page might have claimed, his actions and words demonstrate no relationship with fundamental Christianity, “right-wing” or otherwise. He in fact supports Darwinism and human logic, demonstrating a rationalist worldview rather than a Christian one.

As we consider the Norway shooting, we first and foremost must pray for the families and friends of those who lost their loved ones. We especially grieve for the families of the teenagers – unarmed kids – whom Breivik murdered in the name of freeing Europe. This man did not come upon armed enemies. He came to an island filled with children, dressed as a police officer to gain their trust. He called them to himself and then began to shoot them down at close range, following them to where they hid in tents and where they fled to the lake to escape. The grief felt in Norway right now is unimaginable, and our hearts and prayers go out to all the living victims of the rampage.

It is a horrific shame that the news outlets immediately began proclaiming that Anders Behring Breivik, the Norway Shooter, is a Christian fundamentalist. Breivik has willingly admitted that he has no personal relationship with God or Jesus, and his actions have nothing to do with what Jesus Christ taught.

What Breivik Believes:

On Friday, Breivik released a pdf file describing his beliefs and motivations for his attacks. His major complaint is against the Muslim invasion of Europe, along with the Marxists and multiculturalists he believes are letting it happen.
Breivik’s stated goal was to, “cause maximum amount of damage to the Labour Party to stop its recruitment” and to stop “a deconstruction of Norwegian culture and mass-import of Muslims.”

Breivik is not pro-Christianity. He is simply anti-Muslim. He possesses a desire to preserve the historical Christian culture of Europe, as though he were preserving apple pie and baseball in America or wieners and schnitzel in Germany. In fact, while the papers declared Breivik to be a Christian fundamentalist, he specifically placed himself against a government based on Christian fundamentalism.

He writes: “It is therefore essential to understand the difference between a ‘Christian fundamentalist theocracy’ (everything we do not want) and a secular European society based on our Christian cultural heritage (what we do want).”

Breivik’s version of Europe’s Christian culture has nothing to do with faith in God at all. It’s all about the non-Islamic cultural legacy of Europe.

He says: “So no, you don’t need to have a personal relationship with God or Jesus to fight for our Christian cultural heritage. It is enough that you are a Christian-agnostic or a Christian atheist (an atheist who wants to preserve at least the basics of the European Christian cultural legacy (Christian holidays, Christmas and Easter)). The PCCTS, Knights Templar is therefore not a religious organisation but rather a Christian ‘culturalist’ military order.”

While seeking to preserve Europe’s cultural heritage, Breivik envisions a perfect Europe coming about through ‘Logic.’ He states, “‘Logic’ and rationalist thought (a certain degree of national Darwinism) should be the fundament of our societies.”
Ah. Rationalist thought. That’s just it.

Breivik did not kill those kids because of any verse in the Bible or because he believed God told him to. He’s a believer in the human mind. He killed those teenagers and set off a car bomb in Oslo because, according to his rationale, it was the first step in achieving his purposes. He used his perfectly decent, albeit twisted, reasoning ability to justify the slaughter of dozens of unarmed human beings.

Many will argue that Breivik is insane, but Breivik’s writings are not the ravings of a lunatic. His writings are lucid and practical. He has simply taken the human ability to make logical choices and has removed from his equations all morality and the value of individual human life. Breivik, like the Nazis or Communists or any other group that justifies mass murder, demonstrates where human logic can lead in the absence of moral absolutes.

Fundamentalism

Islamic fundamentalists have been repeatedly guilty of using violence in their efforts to bring humanity into submission to Allah, and there is a general world assumption that religious fundamentalism always eventually leads to violence in God’s name.

True Christian fundamentalism, however, would never lead to the shooting of teenagers. It couldn’t, because true Christian fundamentalism bases itself on the teachings and person of Jesus Christ. The real problems we Christians sometimes cause do not come from obeying Jesus, but from not obeying Jesus. Joshua took over the Promised Land, and David killed Goliath, but Jesus Christ never told his disciples to go out and commit violence in his name.

Jesus said:

“But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you. And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take thy coat also. Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again. And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise,” (Luke 6:27-31).

That’s what Jesus taught.

Jesus told his followers he would send them the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth (John 14:17, 15:26, 16:13), and the Holy Spirit truly sets those who love Jesus apart from the members of all of the world’s religions. The Spirit of God does not promote evil and destruction. As Paul the apostle told the Galatians, “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law,” (Galatians 5:22-23).

The problem we Christians have is not that we are too filled with the Holy Spirit or too in love with God. If we were, we would obey God. We would be filled with the fruit of the Spirit, full of the wisdom and love of Christ. We Christians cause problems not when we stick to the fundamentals, but when we are not fundamentalist enough.

Norway shooter Anders Behring Breivik is definitely not a fundamentalist Christian, and his justifications for murdering 76 people on Friday should give pause to any who think that human rational thought will ultimately lead to utopia.

The UN's hostile obsession with Israel

2011-07-27T14:46:00.000-07:00

From Israel Today

In September, two important events, both dangerous to Israel, will take place at the United Nations headquarters in New York City.

The first is the Palestinian Authority's effort to win international support for its unilateral bid for statehood.

The second is closely related: the third World Conference Against Racism, dubbed "Durban III."

The first such conference was held in Durban, South Africa. Both that and the second Durban conference quickly disintegrated from legitimate discussions on racism into orgies of anti-Israel sentiment.

The question both of those gatherings raised, and which Durban III is certain to raise again, is why the world has such an unnatural obsession with bashing Israel?

This enormously informative video presentation put together by the Messianic-led Jerusalem Institute of Justice explains how an organization that claims to protect human rights is doing just the opposite when it comes to Israel.

This clever little video explains why.

Hamas Hangs Two Arabs for ‘Collaborating’ with Israel

2011-07-26T23:28:00.000-07:00

Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu reports that Hamas has hung two Gaza Arabs for allegedly collaborating with Israel. Such executions are legal under Palestinian Authority law.

The Hamas Interior Ministry announced the executions after appeals were rejected for convictions handed down in 2004. Human rights activists have not commented on the executions.

Earlier this year, a Hamas firing squad executed one man convicted for helping Israel, and three others are on death row.

The IDF routinely relies on collaborators for information on the location of terrorists, smuggling tunnels and weapon storerooms.

The Palestinian Authority law allows a death sentence for the offenses of collaborating with Israel, murder and drug trafficking, but execution orders must be signed by PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, whom the de facto Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh does not recognize.

Abbas also has previously approved executions, mainly for the crime of selling property to Jews, an offense punishable by death from the time of the Jordanian occupation of most of Judea and Samaria.

Mountains of speculation from molehills of fact

2011-07-25T09:26:00.000-07:00

Within hours of the attacks on the World Trade Centre ten years ago, stories that every Jew who worked in the twin towers was absent from work on September 11 were spreading on the web like a virus.

It didn’t take long for anti-Zionists to try to pin the massacre in Norway on Israel. The theory began with a way-out blog but has now reached Al Jazeera, reports Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu.

Because Neo Nazi Anders Behring Breivik made statements favourable to Israel, anti-Israeli elements have tried to find a convoluted line of evidence that could link Breivik’s crazed rampage with Israel’s secret service, Mossad.

The initial anti-Israeli reaction began with a self-styled investigative journalist’s blog in the United States but gained more prominence on the Al Jazeera website in a column written by Wayne Madsen, who claims to be a former U.S. military analyst.

The fervently anti-Israel website “American Veterans Today” carried a post that claimed “it is after all, pretty clear that a car bomb of such magnitude, and an operation of such sophistication is not exactly something a layman can put together with such apparent ease: it would surely take some specialist knowledge, and the question here is, who could provide such knowledge, and such a vast amount of lethal explosives?

Al Jazeera published an article by Gilad Atzmon, an Israeli-born jazz saxophonist and political activist known for his criticisms of Zionism, Jewish identity, and Judaism. According to Atzmon :“The [Norwegian] Labor Party Youth Movement have been devoted promoters of the Israel Boycott campaign. Many of the children who were gunned down by Breivik earlier had held up anti-Israel signs."

“I am not in a position at present to firmly point a finger at Israel...” Atzmon said cautiously, “but assembling the information together, and considering all possibilities may suggest that Anders Behring Breivik might indeed, have been a Sabbath Goy."

“Within its Judaic mundane-societal context, the Sabbath Goy is simply there to accomplish some minor tasks the Jews cannot undertake during the Sabbath. But within the Zionised reality we tragically enough live in, the Sabbath Goy kills for the Jewish state.”

Atzmon’s concluded, “The full facts of the Norwegian tragedy are, as yet, unknown, but the message should by now be transparently and urgently clear to all of us: Western intelligence agencies must immediately crackdown [sic] on Israeli and Zionist operators in our midst, and regarding the terrible events of the weekend, it must be made absolutely clear who it was that spread such hate and promoted such terror, and for what exact reasons.”

Never let it be said that Israelophobes allow facts to get in the way of their deranged fantasies.

True colours?

2011-07-23T04:00:00.001-07:00

I hold my hand up and confess that when I heard the news of the killings in Norway yesterday, I thought "Muslims". I was shocked this morning to hear Anders Behring Breivik, the 32-year-old suspect in Friday's attacks, described as "a fundamentalist Christian".

The first comment on the "Freethinker" website came from "Miltz": "Still at least we see the christian community showing their true colours".

Breivik's Twitter account, however, has only has one post, a quote from Utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill: "One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests."

His Facebook page apparently reveals very little about him except an interest in libertarianism and a clear belief in the power of the individual. As far as I can tell, there are no quotes from Christ.

So why does the media insist Breivik is a "Christian" instead of a libertarian or a disciple of J S Mill?

Can't you guess?

More on Stephen Sizer's Malaysian interview

2011-07-15T17:25:00.000-07:00

Stephen Sizer’s eccentric understanding of the Bible raises a number of questions.

First: he was interviewed by a Malaysian reporter for a Malaysian paper. As Malaysia is a Muslim country, the reporter was presumably a Muslim and the vast majority of her readers would be Muslim. Why is Rev Sizer telling a Muslim country that the vast majority of Christians don’t understand their own holy book? Why is he telling Muslims that most Christians believe “absolute rubbish”? Sizer is undermining the credibility of Christians in the eyes of Muslims.

Second: Sizer doesn’t appear the least bit concerned about the “slightly provocative” nature of the article. In fact he appears pretty chuffed that his interviewer, who is more than likely a Muslim, writes with such evident alacrity and glee that an Oxford-educated Christian cleric thinks most of his co-religionists are a bunch of Charlies.

Third: Stephen says that being one of God’s chosen depends on “faith”. I note he isn’t more specific about what “faith” is or who the object of saving faith is. The implication is that Jews don’t have “faith”, which is why they are not the people of God. But Muslims do have “faith”. Could it be that the lady interviewer was so pleased with the Christian cleric’s answer because it affirmed her in her Islamic “faith”?

At a meeting in Dundee earlier this year, Stephen Sizer declared that he doesn’t get involved in politics; he is primarily an evangelist. He has told me that he has visited Iran, Lebanon and other Islamic states in order to be a witness. But telling a Muslim that “faith” identifies you as one of God’s people is irresponsible. “Faith” never saved anyone. What saves is faith in Jesus the Messiah as Saviour and Lord and Son of God. Muslims believe none of those things. If that was an attempt on Stephen’s part at being a witness to a Muslim lady, he needs to take a crash course in personal evangelism.

I suspect that if he had told the interviewer that the people of God are those who believe in the crucified Son of God, the interview would not have appeared in print.

Sizer says he can't help it if the media misrepresents him. But there is no suggestion on his blog that the article is anything other than accurate. In fact, Sizer appears quite pleased by the interview.

I am drawn to the conclusion that in spite of his pleas, Stephen Sizer went to Kuala Lumpur to bash Israel and to bash those who believe the Jewish people in some way remain the people of God.

Are the Jews God’s Chosen People?

2011-07-15T09:24:00.000-07:00

Not according to Rev Dr Stephen Sizer (pictured).

A few weeks ago, the vicar of Christ Church, Virginia Water was in Malaysia participating in a lecture tour organised by Muslim organisation Viva Palestina Malaysia. Shahanaaz Habib of the Star Newspaper interviewed him and he was so impressed by her “rather provocative article” that he posted it on his blog:

“‘Absolute rubbish’, replies Reverend Dr Stephen Sizer when asked about the popular Christian view that Jews are the chosen people and that Israel is the Holy Land which gives them the right to return.

“The senior pastor of Christ Church in Surrey, England, who has a master’s in theology from Oxford University, stresses that the New Testament never once mentions that the Jews are the ‘chosen people’ nor does it say that the land belongs to the Jews.

“In fact, he adds, the Hebrew scripture doesn’t say that either.“‘God’s chosen people are not based on race but based on faith,’ he insists.”

So both Jews and Christians have been getting it wrong for thousands of years. We thought the Bible – both Old and New Testaments – taught that Israel was “the people of God”. But they’re not.

How does the claim that the New Testament “never once mentions that the Jews are the ‘chosen people’” stack up against the New Testament itself?

Well, in one sense Rev Sizer is correct; there is no verse that says “the Jews are the ‘chosen people’.”

But does it need to? If the Old Testament teaches the Jews are God’s chosen people, why should we assume that the silence of the New Testament means they no longer enjoy “favoured nation” status? Should we not, instead, expect to find – if Sizer is right – an announcement that the Jews are no longer persona grata with God?

But, says Sizer, even in the Tanakh we find no evidence that the Jewish people are God’s chosen. It’s all based on faith. Really? How about these verses?

Ex 3:10: “Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.”

1Sam 9:16: “Tomorrow about this time I will send to you a man from the land of Benjamin, and you shall anoint him to be prince over my people Israel. He shall save my people from the hand of the Philistines. For I have seen my people, because their cry has come to me.”

2Sam 7:10: And I will appoint a place for my people Israel and will plant them, so that they may dwell in their own place and be disturbed no more.”

Ps 81:11: “But my people did not listen to my voice; Israel would not submit to me.”

Ezek 34:30: “And they shall know that I am the LORD their God with them, and that they, the house of Israel, are my people…”

It is possible, of course, that Stephen Sizer will say that the actual term “chosen people” does not appear in any of these verses. Well, try these verses for size…

Dt 7:6: “For you are a people holy to the LORD your God." The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth.”

Dt 14:2: “For you are a people holy to the LORD your God, and the LORD has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth.”

1Chron 16:13: “O offspring of Israel his servant, sons of Jacob, his chosen ones!”

Ps 33:12: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage!”

Ps 105:6: “O offspring of Abraham, his servant, children of Jacob, his chosen ones!”

Ps: 105:43: “So he brought his people out with joy, his chosen ones with singing.”

Is 43:20: “The wild beasts will honour me, the jackals and the ostriches, for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people…”

“God’s chosen people are not based on race but based on faith”, insists Stephen Sizer, but the verses listed above are applied indiscriminately to all the Jews. If Sizer wants explicit statements, where does God ever say that only those Israelites who possess faith are his people?

In Amos 3:2, God warns Israel: “You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.”

With privilege comes responsibility. Not every Israelite loved God with his whole heart but, because he was an Israelite and because he was chosen, his punishment would be more severe. To whom much is given, much is required.

But what about the New Testament? Is Sizer correct when he claims the New Testament is silent about the Jews being the “chosen people”?

The objection is a smoke screen. It’s similar to the one raised by those who deny the deity of Jesus: “Jesus never said he was God.” Well he may not have said “I am God” in so many words but if someone is accorded all the titles of God, and if he speaks like God and acts like God, the chances are pretty high that he is God. Jesus didn’t need to go around declaring his deity any more than the Queen of England or the President of the United States needs to constantly jog our memories about their status.

The New Testament, of course, never states explicitly that the Jewish people are “the chosen people” but the evidence is there.

Mt 2:6: “And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel.”

Addressing a crowd of Christ-rejecting Jews, Peter states in Acts 3:25: “You are the sons of the prophets and of the covenant that God made with your fathers, saying to Abraham, ‘And in your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed.’ God, having raised up his servant, sent him to you first, to bless you by turning every one of you from your wickedness.”

In Romans 9:3ff, Paul writes in the present tense about his “brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh”:

“They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises. To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen.

In Romans 11:28f, he says of the Jews: “As regards the gospel, they are enemies of God for your sake. But as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.”

God called Israel because he chose to, and he will not revoke that call or the gifts he bestowed on them. That is why Paul could say in Romans 2:9: “There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first …”

He is repeating what Amos said centuries before: “You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.”

That is why the gospel, although it is “the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes”, it is (present tense) and remains, “to the Jew first” (Rom 1:16).

Does the New Testament teach that Jewish people are still the chosen people? You bet!

Whose afraid of the big, bad Jews?

2011-06-22T14:21:00.000-07:00

I’ve just returned to normality after being out of circulation for the best part of a month, and what greeted me in my email inbox? A link to Laura Durkay on Mondoweis who announces – at a time when Syria and Libya are slaughtering their own citizens – that from July 8-16 she is going to do something “creative and daring” in the region.

Is she going to those countries to protest the massacre of Syrian and Libyan innocents?

No. Ms Durkay is going to join “hundreds of internationals for aweek of solidarity actions in coordination with 15 Palestinian civil resistance organizations in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.”

While “Freedom Flotilla 2” is going to put “the spotlight on Israel’s cruel blockade of Gaza”, she and her friends “intend to show that Israeli repression in the rest of historic Palestine—the West Bank, Jerusalem, and what is now Israel—is no less important and is part of the same project of ethnic cleansing and colonization.”

On July 8, “hundreds of internationals and Palestinians living abroad will fly in to Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport and perform one simple but radical action: refuse to lie about the fact that we are there to travel to the Occupied Territories and visit Palestinians.”

How daring!

And what will the “cruel” Israelis do to these visitors who dare to declare that they are going to visit Palestinians? Shoot them? Imprison them? Hang, draw and quarter them?

If these same people landed in Tripoli or Damascus to demonstrate solidarity with suffering Libyans or Syrians, I would respect them. Instead, they are acting as though it is illegal to pass from Israel to the “West Bank”.

Stephen Sizer, who provided the link to Mondoweiss in his latest blog, knows it is perfectly permissible to cross the border into the West Bank: he’s done it enough times.

Gaza had been called “a humanitarian crisis on the scale of Darfur” and the “biggest concentration camp in the world”.

This wicked nonsense makes me want to disgorge the entire contents of my gastric system.

For pictorial evidence of what life in like in the hell hole that is Gaza, take a look at this video and then visit the Holy Falafel web site.

For such a time as this

2011-05-27T23:59:00.000-07:00

Last Tuesday (24 May), Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu delivered an electrifying speech to the US Congress. According to M J Rosenthal, the speech was “a series of insults to Palestinians and their national aspirations”.

In the opinion of Rosenthal, “Netanyahu's appearance itself was an insult”.

Furthermore, says Rosenthal, “The prime minister unambiguously stated that he had no intention of making peace with the Palestinians.”

You can read Rosenthal’s views here and see Netanyahu’s speech here and read the text here. Judge for yourself if Rosenberg is right.

Here’s what I think.

In years to come, Binyamin Netanyahu’s address to the US Congress on 24 May may come to be regarded as one of history’s greatest speeches, on a par with Winston Churchill’s “We will fight them on the beaches” oration and Martin Luther King Jr’s 1963 “I have a dream” speech.

When President Barack Obama declared a week before the Prime Minister’s speech, that “The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps”, he must have known that Netanyahu could never accept such a proposal. A Palestinian state within “pre-1967 borders” would leave Israel a mere nine miles wide at its narrowest point, making the Jewish state completely indefensible.

When the Netanyahu boarded the plane for America two days after Obama’s comment, he did so knowing the future of his country was in his hands. He needed to convince Congress to support Israel. And it seems he did, receiving standing ovation after standing ovation.

“Israel has no better friend than America”, declared the Prime Minister. “And America has no better friend than Israel. We stand together to defend democracy. We stand together to advance peace. We stand together to fight terrorism.”

“In an unstable Middle East”, said Netanyahu, “Israel is the one anchor of stability. In a region of shifting alliances, Israel is America’s unwavering ally. Israel has always been pro-American. Israel will always be pro-American.”

Israel, he pointed out, has “a free press, independent courts, an open economy, rambunctious parliamentary debates. You think you guys are tough on one another in Congress? Come spend a day in the Knesset!”

Referring to the political turmoil in the Middle East, Netanyahu reminded Congress that “Courageous Arab protesters, are now struggling to secure these very same [democratic] rights for their peoples, for their societies … Of the 300 million Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, only Israel’s Arab citizens enjoy real democratic rights … Of those 300 million Arabs, less than one-half of one-percent are truly free, and they’re all citizens of Israel!”

The speech might well be remembered as the charismatic leader’s finest hour. As more and more nations line up to support the creation of a Palestinian state governed by leaders who refuse to recognise Israel’s right to exist, Netanyahu – whose name means, “The Lord has given” – may indeed prove to be God’s gift to the nation.

Blowin’ in the Mind: Bob Dylan at 70

2011-05-27T12:13:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know this is late but I’ve had a busy week. Anyone who doesn’t know that Bob Dylan was 70 last Tuesday must be living on Desolation Row or something.

The BBC ran a number of programmes on the man who arguably changed an entire generation. The Beatles – in particular John Lennon – were all influenced by Dylan. Without him I seriously doubt that Revolver or Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band would have ever come into existence. Dylan himself drew inspiration from those who had gone before. Listen to Dylan’s early albums and you can’t miss the echoes of The Carter Family, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie and Chuck Berry. Poets, novelists, artists and mystics are there too; T.S.Eliot, Rimbaud, Picasso, Salvador Dali and William Blake.

It was in the summer of 1965 that I first heard Bob Dylan. I had heard his name but never heard him until Subterranean Homesick Blues came on the radio while I was at a friend’s house: “Johnny’s in the basement mixin’ up the medicine/I’m on the pavement thinkin’ about the government...” Then came Like a Rolling Stone, a song so long you wondered how it fit on a 45rpm single (if you can remember those things). Positively Fourth Street went boldly where no pop song had gone before; it was a venomous, vitriolic tirade against an unnamed false friend with which millions of teenagers could readily identify.

Until Dylan, almost all pop songs were two and a half minutes long and about how the singer was going to love the girl of his/her fancy forever. Dylan, as is well known, changed all that.

Dylan, it is said, kept an open Bible on a lectern in his study/workroom. When Paul Stookey of the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary was going through severe personal problems and called on Dylan for advice, Dylan’s counsel was, apparently, “Read the Bible, man.”

It is interesting to see how the Bible, including the New Testament, has always had an attraction for the Jewish boy from Hibbing , Minnesota (as it has for Jewish artists such as Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon and Neil Diamond). Dylan’s eponymous first album featured Gospel Plough and In my time of Dyin’, and biblical imagery has been a constant feature of all his best songs from Blowin’ in the Wind to Thunder on the Mountain.

I can never make up my mind if Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands is a Picasso portrait of his first wife Sarah, or if it is Dylan’s “Song of Songs”. Maybe it’s both.

The early eighties was Dylan’s “born again” period and Christians still ask me (as though I have inside knowledge) if Dylan still is, or ever was, a true believer. I don’t know.

All I do know is that some remarkable and moving songs come from that period. Every Grain of Sand touches me deep inside and never fails to moisten my eyes. I find it hard to understand how someone devoid of true faith could have composed songs like Serve Somebody, which is like a J C Ryle sermon set to music.

It is interesting to see that Jesus and Christian imagery still feature in his music. In his 1984 post born-again, retrospective, under-appreciated album Real Live, Dylan performs Masters of War in which he omits the verse in which he assures the Masters: “There's one thing I know/Though I'm younger than you/That even Jesus would never/Forgive what you do.”

Towards the end of the eighties, I saw a recording of an Australian concert in which he informed the audience that the song In the Garden was about his hero: “When they came for Him in the garden, did they know/ …He was the Son of God, did they know that He was Lord? When He rose from the dead, did they believe?/He said, ‘All power is given to Me in heaven and on earth.’/Did they know right then and there what that power was worth?”

Those are remarkable words for an “unbeliever” to sing.

About the same time, I saw Dylan perform I Shall be Released with modified lyrics. Instead of “I see my light come shining from the west unto the east”, he sang, “I don’t need a doctor or a priest.”

Was it a statement that his relationship with God was in good shape or was it a signal that Dylan had turned his back on Christianity? Who knows? Dylan has always been as enigmatic as his lyrics and will probably remain so.

I pray that as "his Bobness" has reached the significant biblical “threescore years and ten”, in his mind he will recall that almost half a lifetime ago he sang that he was going to change his way of thinking and get himself a “different set of rules”.

The Consolations of Conspiracy Theories

2011-05-19T10:48:00.000-07:00

When you arrive at the core of any conspiracy theory, you can be as certain as make no difference that the Jews are behind it, whether it be the two World wars or 9/11.

What explains the extraordinary appeal of conspiracy theories? According to an article in the Budapest Times by Péter Krekó, they provide psychologically comforting explanations for unexpected and shocking events that are otherwise difficult to explain.

Conspiracy theories allow us to believe that the world is essentially just. If people living in Arab countries take the view that the governments of Israel and the United States carried out the September 11 attacks, then they can avoid facing up to the problem of Islamic fundamentalism burdening their own communities.

Conspiracy theories help to explain adverse social events, reconstruct the past and predict future events, call attention to threats to our own group, spur the members of our own group to collective defence, and provide moral justification for cruelty and violence towards external groups.

The villains in conspiracy theories are the Jews. Conspiracy theories about them sprang up in the Middle Ages. They were blamed, for example, for the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in 1009 and the Rome earthquake of 1020. Jews were also held responsible for the famine that struck Europe in the 14th century, leading to repeated pogroms on French soil. Some people even ascribed the Black Death that claimed the lives of almost a third of the population of Europe to a Jewish conspiracy designed to wipe out Christian communities despite the fact that the Jews were also among its victims.

Conspiracy theories are also indispensable ideological and political props for radical groups, as demonstrated by the longevity and persistence of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Hadassa Ben Itto is the author of The Lie That Wouldn’t Die, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. She served for 31 years as a judge at all levels of the Israeli courts, including as an acting justice of the Supreme Court. She has also served as an official representative of Israel in various international forums, including UNESCO and the UN General Assembly, and is currently the honorary president of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists.

In a recent Jerusalem Post article, she points out that in the demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, there were placards of Hosni Mubarak with a Star of David on his face. Lara Logan, an American journalist, was sexually molested in the middle of the square and was called a Jew, although she is not Jewish. She does not have to be Jewish. The word “Jew” has become an accepted insult in the public square. A well known Egyptian preacher stood up and talked not about freedom but about the Jews, about what is going to happen to the Jews when the masses take over. So Israelis are rightfully worried.

Why is The Protocols – a proven lie and forgery – important today? Because it is being published around the world, with new editions in Arabic almost every year, and in Persian and Turkish. These publications are financed by government money and distributed not only in Arabic-speaking countries, but also to Muslim minorities around the world.

New editions are necessary because the introductions are updated every year. The introductions say if you do not believe that the Jews are really planning to take over the world, look at what is happening in your country and region. Everything that is happening is rooted in The Protocols, an implementation of the “Jewish conspiracy.” If there is a financial crisis, an AIDS or a flu epidemic, a terrorist attack, an upheaval or a catastrophe, one can always point to a chapter or page in The Protocols because it is such a devious document that everything is there. There is a whole detailed plan of how to take over the world.

The Protocols is not only a forgery, it is plagiarism. It was actually written in France in the last decade of the 19th century. During the preparation for the Russian Revolution, Bolshevik cells could not operate openly in Russia, so they were active elsewhere in Europe, including France. A special envoy of the Russian Secret Police was sent to France to uncover the Bolshevik cells. The Russian Secret Service and the Black Hundreds, an ultra-nationalist movement in Russia whose slogan was “Beat the Jews and Save Russia,” were trying to convince the czar that the Jews were behind the Bolshevik Revolution. The czar was already convinced, but they needed proof.

The Protocols is not just a libel, it is also a political document describing a Jewish criminal conspiracy to dominate the world, and almost the first leader outside Russia who picked it up was Adolf Hitler. As a strategic step, the Nazis decided to use The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a central part of their ideology, as we know from correspondence between Hitler and Goebbels. A German historian describes in his book how Hitler used The Protocols on the way to the Final Solution, but he had already mentioned it in Mein Kampf. The Nazis were masters of the “Big Lie” and their tactics have been adopted by the Muslim world. The theory is that the bigger the lie, the better success of brainwashing the public.

The Protocols is a central issue in Arab and Muslim propaganda, even in what we call moderate countries, including countries that made peace with Israel. The Protocols is everywhere, at every Arabic book fair, more in Egypt, less in Jordan. It is in public discourse, in newspapers, even in TV soap operas. It describes world history from beginning to end, including the French Revolution, as part of the Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. Until the end of World War II, the problem was the Jews, but after the establishment of the State of Israel, the target has become Israel.

There may be no Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world, but there is certainly an anti-Jewish conspiracy that seeks to demonise the Jewish people and delegitimise the state of Israel.

Fondly remembering Hebron

2011-05-18T23:11:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, Arabs demonstrated against the 1948 “disaster” inflicted on them by the creation of the state of Israel. Arab press watchdog the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has released a video that was broadcast on Hamas-Gaza TV, which places the Arab claims in perspective.

In the video, a 92-year-old Arab woman, originally from Hebron, glowingly recalls on Hamas-Gaza TV how in 1929 – almost 20 years before the 1948 “Nakba” – without provocation the Arabs of Hebron, including her father, massacred the peaceful Jewish neighbours they had lived beside for years. In the film, she makes it clear that she wants a repeat of the Hebron massacre.

On 24 August 1929, sixty seven Jews were massacred in an orgy of sadistic violence. Jewish children were murdered in front of their parents, limbs were severed, women were brutally raped and Jews were burned alive.

The British High Commissioner, Sir John Chancellor, issued a statement following the massacre, in which he stated:

“I have learned with horror of the atrocious acts committed by bodies of ruthless and bloodthirsty evil-doers, of savage murders perpetrated upon defenceless members of the Jewish population regardless of age or sex, accompanied as at Hebron, by acts of unspeakable savagery, of the burning of farms and houses in town and country and of the looting and destruction of property.

“These crimes have brought upon their authors the execration of all civilized peoples throughout the world.”

Lest it be considered that only elderly Arab ladies still desire Jewish blood, in an interview on Hamas Al Aqsa TV, Yunis al Astal, a member of the Palestinian Authority parliament, spelled out his organisation's vision for the genocidal annihilation of the Jewish people.

Al Astal described the ingathering of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel in terms of a divine plan that would give the Arabs “the honour” of annihilating “the evil of this gang.”

In a few years, he predicted, the Zionists will understand that they were brought here for the purpose of being slaughtered in “a great massacre.”

In terms reminiscent of Adolph Hitler’s anti-Jewish rants in the 1930s, al Astal said the Jews were more dangerous than all of the world's lethal birds of prey, dangerous reptiles and lethal bacteria put together.

Meanwhile, an official of the “moderate” Hamas party, said that the political programmes of both Fatah and Hamas were identical. This statement should cause concern in that the Hamas charter calls for the destruction of Israel and Yunis al Astal wants to exterminate the Jews.

The Full-Blown Return of Anti-Semitism in Europe

2011-05-17T10:26:00.000-07:00

Guy Millière has written a revealing and chilling article. Read the full article here.After World War II, anti-Semitism seemed to disappear in Europe. It is back, to a very disquieting degree.

Although it is not exactly the same anti-Semitism that in the 1930s, it is not fully different.

The new, current anti-Semitism now adds on to the old kind, the demonization of the State of Israel. The Islamic view of Israel is now the dominant view of Israel in Europe. The idea that Israel is a “colonial power” that has “robbed” people of their land, and is an “artificial State”, even though the Jews have been on that land for three thousand years – and even though many states in the area, such as Jordan and Libya, and Iraq are even more illegitimate, their borders having been drawn on paper by the British in the 1920s – is a commonplace among journalists.

Hatred towards Israel is now the most widely shared sentiment among Europeans, whatever their place on the political spectrum. It is now through hatred of Israel, that hatred of Jews as annoying “troublemakers” can again express itself.

In the 1930s, Jews were accused of not being full members of the country where they lived. Today, the same criticism rises in a slightly different form: Jews are accused of the existence of a Jewish state, and are suspected of being too tied to that state to be full members of the country where they live.

More deeply, the Jews of Europe might feel that if they can paint the Jews as evil, then perhaps what their parents and grandparents did to them during World War II was not really so bad after all; you could even say they deserved what they got. As some Scandinavians put it, The Jews killed Christ; at least the Muslims did not do that.
The anti-Semitism of the 1930s led to the Holocaust, which led the Jews to flee to Israel, the only country that would take them in and not let shiploads of fleeing Jews sink at sea. Now, European anti-Semitism accuses the Jews of Israel's existence and of reminding them of the Holocaust by remembering it themselves.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of Europeans seem quite ready for another Holocaust: one that would be the annihilation of Israel.

If sacrificing Israel allowed non-Muslim Europeans to see Muslim anger disappear, they would be willing to make the sacrifice immediately. If, in order to accept the sacrifice with a clear conscience, non-Muslim Europeans have to caricature Israel ignobly, they will – and do. Anti-Israel cartoons fill European newspapers from London to Spain, and even receive awards. The Israeli army is often compared in European media to the Nazi army. The comparison is fully playing its role: if the Jews are Nazis today, it means that the Europeans did the world a favour in killing six million of them, and that the Europeans are not really guilty.

If Israel can be portrayed as a Nazi state, its destruction is acceptable, maybe even legitimate, maybe even desirable. The fact that Mein Kampf is a bestseller in the Palestinian territories and in most countries of the Muslim world is totally left out, just like the fact that many Jews living in Israel are survivors of the Holocaust committed in Europe sixty five years ago.

A survey conducted last year for the Friederich Ebert Foundation, a German think tank linked to Germany's Social Democratic Party, was eloquent. To the question: “Do you think that Jews abuse their status as victims of Nazism?” positive responses reached proportions hardly imaginable: 72.2% in Poland, 48% in Germany, 40.2% in Italy, 32.3% in France. Another question, “Do you understand why people do not like Jews?” generated results that must be faced. Number of positive responses: 55.2% in Poland, 48.9% in Germany, 40.2% in Italy. The question was not asked in France. In several polls conducted in Europe over the last decade, Israel was identified as the most dangerous country for world peace, tied with Iran.

The question: “Are you anti-Semitic?” was not asked anywhere. I have no doubt that, if asked the question, those who understand that “People do not like Jews”, and who probably do not like them either, would have said that they were not anti-Semitic.
The question, “Do you think that Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians?” was asked. Positive responses : 63% in Poland, 47.7% in Germany.

Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, called the poll “very disturbing. The governments of Europe, and the European Union," he said, "would do well to wake up to this problem before it is too late.”

A minor catastrophe day

2011-05-16T10:11:00.000-07:00

At least one person was killed and dozens were wounded as IDF soldiers tried to prevent nearly a thousand Syrian Arabs invading the Golan Heights during Nakba Day protests. Syrian troops at the border did not prevent the infiltration.

Analysts had predicted that Syria might allow the crossings to draw the attention of its citizens attention and participation away from the ongoing rebellion in the country and the regime’s harsh crackdown on civilian protestors.

At the same time of the Nakba protest, Syrian soldiers a shot and killed a women and wounded five others, including a Lebanese soldier, during a protest against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Hundreds of Syrian Arabs have crossed into Lebanon to flee Assad’s security forces who have already killed nearly 800 demonstrators.

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas marked “Nakba Day” by reiterating his hard-line positions on future control of Jerusalem.

Abbas, who is praised as a “moderate” and Israel’s best hope for peace, played to the West’s view of him on Saturday by declaring he believes in the two-state solution. However, he told a group of Palestinian dignitaries in Ramallah on Saturday that he would never accept a Palestinian state without Jerusalem as its capital.

Abbas demands the “right” of millions of “Palestinian refugees” to take up residence both in a future Palestinian state and within the borders of sovereign. “The Palestinian leadership will never give up the right of return”, he said.

Flooding Israel with millions of Arabs claiming refugee status was a goal his predecessor and mentor, Yasser Arafat, readily admitted. If successful, such a strategy would demographically destroy the Jewish state.

So long as Abbas clings to these demands, no Israeli government will ever sign a final status peace agreement with him.

Marking Nakba Day in Tel Aviv, an Arab truck driver went on a rampage through the streets of Tel Aviv, killing one person and injuring at least five more.

The 22-year-old driver reportedly smashed into parked and moving vehicles in the heart of Tel Aviv for more than a mile before coming to a halt when he rammed a bus (pictured).

A 40-year-old man who was sitting in one of the parked cars that was hit died of his injuries.

Witnesses said that after hitting the bus at the end of his rampage, the driver leapt from his truck and began shouting and hurling objects at people nearby. In the process, he injured a young Jewish girl.

Following his arrest, the driver told police that the incident was a simple traffic accident caused by a blown tyre.

Some commentators say the violence was not as great as expected.

Doesn't the fact that we can breath a sigh of relief that a day of violence, on which less people are killed and injured than we expected, tell us something about the Palestinian people?

Am Yisrael Chai!

2011-05-13T16:18:00.000-07:00

This Sunday, 14 May, demonstrations will be staged across the Palestinian Authority to mark the “Nakba” (the “catastrophe”), the Arabic term used to describe the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

Jews in Israel are planning a Zionist response to the planned activities. Had the state of Israel been established earlier than it was, the real “catastrophe” – six million Jews murdered in the Death Camps of Europe, who had nowhere to escape to – would have been avoided.

Activists from the Samaria Residents’ Council plan to stand at major intersections throughout Israel and hand out Israeli flags to drivers, stating:

“This Sunday, we will all raise with pride the flag of Israel.

“‘Nakba Day’ is translated into Hebrew as Yom Hashoah [Holocaust Remembrance Day].

This is how the ‘Palestinian’ Authority leadership has chosen to refer to the establishment of Israel. Indeed, it is not surprising, since at the head of that terror authority is Holocaust denier Abu-Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas].

“This year the Authority is trying to intensify the events of that day, as a propaganda step on the way to their one-side declaration of a state in September.

“The hysteria which the PA and its PR people from the far left are trying to inflict on the citizens of Israel is nothing but a balloon filled with hot air.

“They too know very well that according to international law, only whoever is controlling an area can establish a state, and to our delight Israel is the one controlling it. Those PR people who are trying to frighten the public in Israel remember well that the UN already voted in 1988 in favour of the establishment of a ‘Palestinian’ state (by a majority of 104 against 2) and Arafat even officially declared it. All this had no meaning since Israel controls most of Judea and Samaria, the cradle of the Jewish people, and protects the whole country from there [ the high ground of Judea and Samaria overlooks the entire coast of Israel, its most populated urban area which, in other hands, would make that part of Israel vulnerable to missile attacks].

“On Sunday, we will all raise the Israeli flag everywhere: on cars, on our homes and on our Facebook accounts.

“Hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens in cities across the country will raise the flag along with us.

“We will raise the flag proudly, and say to the world: ‘Am Yisrael Chai’[the people of Israel live]!”

Of course, the establishment of the Jewish state was a catastrophe for Arabs living in the land. But the Jews were not the cause of the Nakba; it was the Arab leaders who refused to recognise the Jewish homeland and launched an attack on Israel the day it was founded. If the Arab nations had been prepared to concede land, the catastrophe of loss of life on both sides of the conflict could have been avoided.

Happy Birthday to a Great Country

2011-05-09T10:44:00.000-07:00

Sixty-three years ago today, on 5 Iyar in the Jewish calendar (14 May 1948), the state of Israel was reborn. Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day celebrates the day in 1948 when Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion publicly read the country’s Declaration of Independence.

If the 5 Iyar falls on a Friday or Saturday, the celebrations are moved to the preceding Thursday. If the date falls on a Monday (like it does this year), the festival is postponed to Tuesday. Today, Monday 9 May, is 5 Iyar and so Yom Ha’atzmaut will begin at sunset tonight, when 6 Iyar begins.

Israel has much to be proud of. It is the hundredth smallest country in the world, with less than one thousandth of the world’s population, yet what that small country has achieved in 63 is unprecedented. Here are a few facts about Israel (for an even longer list, click here).

Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.

Israel has more scientists and engineers per capita than any other country and Israeli scientists publish more scientific papers than any other nation. Israelis hold more patents per person than citizens of any other nation. Israel is one out of eight countries capable of launching its own satellites into space.

An Israeli company has developed a revolutionary new drug that could solve the problem of Colony Collapse Disorder that has been wiping out bee communities around the world.

The first cell phone in the world was developed in Haifa, Israel and Israel holds the most High-Tech industries per population. It was there that the first camera chips were used in cell phones, and Israeli companies invented SMS texting and voice mail systems.

The “Xaver 400” and “800” devices show images below rubble and are used after earthquakes to search for survivors, and in hostage situations where the police need to see inside buildings.

“Earthquake Alert”, a home device to give early warning of earthquakes, was developed in Israel, as was “Safety Centre”, a device to assess driving habits and improve them, which has helped cut traffic accidents.

Computers
Most of the components of the Windows operating system were developed in Israel. The first PC anti-virus programme was invented in Israel and an Israeli company invented the network security technology behind PC firewalls.

The algorithm code used for sending e-mails was devised by an Israeli who worked at the Ben-Gurion University in Beer-Sheba, and USB flash drives were developed by MSystems.

Medicine
The world’s first blood bank was built at Beilinson hospital, ten years before Israel was reborn.

Israelis invented a camera that patients swallow to help doctors diagnose digestive tract diseases and save lives.

Babysense, a system that protects babies from the sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) was invented in Israel.

Israel has been responsible for huge breakthroughs in treatment of AIDS.
Israeli scientists have created new ways to fight cancer, they have increased the efficiency of anti[cancer medicines and have developed the first radiation-free method to discover breast cancer.

Researchers at Ben Gurion University are working on a new delivery system for drugs used in cancer and Parkinson’s disease. The drugs are delivered directly to the affected part of the body and, in so doing, eliminates unwanted side effects.

Environmental protection
More than 85% of solid waste in Israel is treated in an environmental sound manner.
Drip irrigation system- invented by an Israeli almost 40 years ago. A major part of resolving the water crisis. Used around the world.

Israel has the record for most solar-powered water heaters per capita- 95% of homes have this technology and solar powered street and garden lamps are very common in Israel. The solar plate recharges throughout the day and at night it illuminates cities and parks.

An Israeli company was the first to develop and install a large scale solar power plant in the Mojave Desert in order to supply enough clean electricity to power 400,000 homes in central and northern California.

Disaster Aid
Israeli teams have often been among the first on the scene after natural disasters across the world. Israel’s significant contribution to relief efforts include earthquakes in Turkey (2000) and El Salvador (2001), and floods in Venezuela (1999) and in Mozambique (2000).

Within 48 hours of the 2004 tsunami off the Indonesian coast in the Indian Ocean, Israel airlifted massive amounts of emergency supplies, together with a team of fifty medical and rescue personnel. The supplies included tens of thousands of bottles of drinking water, 12 tons of food, 17 tons of baby food, nine tons of medicines, blankets, mattresses, beds and electricity generators.

Following the earthquake in Haiti in January 2010, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) were the first to set up a field hospital, from which were treated 1,111 victims, including dozens of children. Israeli doctors performed 317 surgeries and delivered 16 babies in the hospital’s maternity ward; the mother of one of the newborns called her son Israel. Four Haitians were rescued with the assistance of the IDF search-and-rescue team. The 236-member IDF disaster relief delegation left 30 tons (27,216 kg) of medical equipment before departing Haiti.

Altogether now… Three cheers for Israel!

Did Jesus reinterpret the Old Testament?

2011-05-07T11:04:00.000-07:00

A colleague just showed me an article he has written addressing the issue of anti-Zionism in the Christian Church and the claim that the Old Testament promises of land made by God to to the Jewish people were “reinterpreted” by Jesus and the Apostles. In the article, he asks where that leaves 2 Timothy 3:16, which says “All Scripture [by which Paul means the Old Testament scriptures] is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.”

That set me thinking.

What I’m expressing here are my embryonic thoughts and I need to think more deeply about them but, for what they are worth, here are my first observations.

What do Colin Chapman, Stephen Sizer and other anti-Zionists mean when they tell us that Jesus and the Apostles “reinterpreted” the land promises found in the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures? The implications of such a claim are very serious.

If we can understand the Old Testament only through the lens of Jesus and the Apostles, as Chapman and Sizer claim, in what way can the Hebrew Scriptures be said to be “profitable … for teaching” in their own right? Why bother to read them at all? Why not just read the New Testament?

The claim that Jesus and the apostles reinterpreted the Old Testament Scriptures implies the promises of a land for Abraham’s physical descendant had one meaning before Christ (i.e. a literal meaning) but now they mean the opposite (i.e. they have a spiritual meaning). Either the promises always had a spiritual meaning (which no one, not even Moses understood) or they continue to mean what they always meant.

If the promise of land to Israel no longer means a promise of land, the implication is that we can no longer take the Old Testament at its face value.

If, however, we still read those “God-breathed” Scriptures at face value, we cannot do so with “profit” because although the promise of “land” may have meant what it said on the tin to the original readers, it no longer has the same meaning because Jesus and the apostles supposedly “reinterpreted” the promise.

The anti-Zionist claim also presents us with another problem. If the reinterpretation of the land promises by Jesus and the apostles is true, the new interpretation must have always been the way to understand them. So we are faced with a problem of God promising material blessing to Israel when, in fact, he is really talking about spiritual promises to “the Church”.

We cannot therefore use the term “reinterpretation” without doing damage to the New Testament doctrine of Scripture.

We can talk about Jesus and the apostles exposing “deeper meanings” to the land promises. We can say the New Testament uncovers “fresh layers” or draws out previously unknown “implications” to Old Testament texts but we cannot talk about reinterpretation.

The New Testament itself recognises that the meaning of some Scriptures was previously unknown or misunderstood until the coming of Christ but that is not the same as saying Christ “reinterpreted” the meanings.

And nowhere does Jesus imply the land promises did not really mean the promise of land.

The safest and most common sense approach to the promises God made to Abraham and his descendants of land is to accept that although there may be deeper layers to the promises and greater implications behind the texts, the basic face-value meaning of the “land” passages remains inviolate.

A Scandinavian Messiah

2011-05-05T01:36:00.000-07:00

I grew up reading Marvel comics and still retain an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of the brand’s output from 1960 to 1970. I’ve been fascinated by the spate of Marvel superhero films that have hit the big screens over the last ten years or so. Some (notably the three Spiderman films) remain faithful to the original comics in both letter and spirit whereas others are true largely to the spirit of the originals.

Almost fifty years ago, three secular American Jews (Stan Lee, his brother Larry Lieber and artist Jack Kirby) recreated Thor, the Norse god of thunder, for a comic book. Lee’s writing, with its cod King James Bible/Shakespearian dialogue, and the imaginative artwork of the late, great Jack Kirby were a winning combination.

Mild mannered, lame and weedy Dr Donald Blake could, when circumstances demanded, turn into the thunder god by striking his walking cane on the ground. When he wasn’t doing battle with villains like “The Cobra” and “Crusher Creel” (an escaped convict who could absorb the attributes of whatever he touched) Thor was fighting his evil half-brother Loki.

Thor has now come to the big screen in an adaptation directed by Kenneth Branagh (no less) which retains only the basic concept of the original comic book.

In the film, Thor is stripped of his supernatural powers and banished to earth from Asgard for rebelling against his father Odin. Here, among mortals, the thunder god quickly learns humility and gains wisdom, making him worthy to once again wield his mighty hammer Mjölnir and save himself, his faithful friends and (of course) the world from the evil schemes of Loki.

What I’ve also noticed about the superhero blockbusters (both Marvel and DC) is the shameless borrowing of Christian concepts: Superman’s death outside his Fortress of Solitude, his death, resurrection, ascension to heaven and second coming in Superman Returns; and Spiderman’s “conversion and baptism” in Spiderman 3.

In Thor, the parallels with the Messiah come thick and fast.

Just as Jesus is the Son of God, Thor is the son of the “All-Father” king of the gods, Odin.

Jesus was sent to earth by his Father (John 3:16), albeit not for rebellion, where he learns obedience (Hebrews 5:8).

Jesus, in an act of self-humiliation, laid aside his glory as the Son of God only to be exalted by God after he accomplished his Father’s mission (Philippians 2:5ff). In the movie, Thor is humbled by Odin but is granted his powers and his hammer after he has proved himself worthy of them.

While he was on earth, only a few recognised Jesus for who he was, and though Thor speaks with the dignity of the son of Odin, no one recognises him as such until he saves a small town from a devilish (I choose the word deliberately), fire-breathing machine.

In battling his demonic adversary, Thor dies only to be revealed as the son of Odin with power by his resurrection, reflecting what is said of Jesus in Romans 1:4.

Having conquered his enemy and saved the world, Thor returns to Asgard, promising Jane Foster (the love interest, played by Natalie Portman) that he will return for her. At the end of the film, Jane is still waiting but believes “with perfect faith” that the Norse messiah will come and, though he tarry, she will wait for him.

Are all these parallels intentional or am I just reading Jesus into the movie? At least some of the parallels were intended for one good reason: Thor’s hammer Mjölnir bears the symbol of the Christian Trinity! And when Thor is banished to earth to become a mortal, the symbol fades, only to return following Thor’s “resurrection” which reveals him to be the son of Odin.

It is the “gospel” spin that makes Thor such a satisfying film, as it does with The Matrix, Superman Returns and Spiderman 3. The CGI special effects are stupendous but without a strong storyline the film would fail to satisfy. Which is why, increasingly, screenwriters seem to be borrowing from the plot of The Greatest Story Ever Told.

Bin Laden: The Israel Connection

2011-05-03T09:35:00.000-07:00

I’m no conspiracy theorist but I can’t help thinking there’s something fishy about the United States claiming to have killed Osama bin Laden and then dumping the body in the sea while claiming they have acted in accordance with Islamic law.

Muslim clerics said Monday that Osama bin Laden’s burial at sea was a violation of Islamic tradition.Bin Laden’s "burial" at sea “runs contrary to the principles of Islamic laws, religious values and humanitarian customs”, said Sheik Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand Imam of Cairo’s al-Azhar mosque, Sunni Islam’s highest seat of learning.

A number of senior Islamic scholars interpreted it as a humiliating disregard for the standard Muslim practice of placing the body in a grave with the head pointed toward the holy city of Mecca.

Meanwhile, Hamas chief Ismail Haniya hailed bin Laden as “a holy warrior”.
Despite Hamas’ support of bin Laden and Al Qaeda, and the continued and repeated terrorist attacks against Israel, the Obama Administration continues to regard them as a partner for peace in the Middle East. The agreement of Hamas last week to create a unity government for Palestine with the Fatah party means the leadership of the Palestinian Authority is composed of people who deny Israel’s right to exist and refuse to renounce violence against Israel. It is these people to whom the UN and the US want to hand over the Holy City of Jerusalem.

Israel Today reports that Israel has congratulated America on finally catching up to and eliminating bin Laden, and noted that the targeted killing was very reminiscent of Israeli counter-terror operations for which Israel is so often criticised.
Israeli lawmaker Shaul Mofaz, head of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, suggested that in future the US refrain from criticism when Israel takes such action in the future.

Mofaz noted that the strategy of assassinating terrorist leaders had been first adopted by Israel following the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, in which nine Israeli athletes were abducted and executed by Palestinian terrorists.

Since then, Israel has repeatedly targeted and eliminated the heads of various Palestinian terror groups, including Hamas in Gaza. Each time, Israel has been harshly criticized by the international community, even its allies in Washington.
Israeli media outlets said that the way Obama chose to go after bin Laden validates Israel’s policy of targeted killings.

While bin Laden was America’s primary target in its war on terror, there was an Israel connection.

Bin Laden and his top deputies have made repeated references to the Palestinian Arabs and pledged their support to the goal of defeating Israel, along with America. Various terrorist cells in Israel and especially in the Gaza Strip claim to be working under the banner of Al Qaeda.

A detainee report from the American prison in Guantanamo Bay revealed that a senior Al Qaeda terrorists held there had raised funds for terrorist attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets.

There are also concerns that terrorist organizations will try to retaliate for bin Laden’s death by attacking American targets in Israel. Israeli security forces have accordingly gone on high alert.

Death in Nablus

2011-05-03T09:32:00.000-07:00

I have to confess that at times I am almost swayed by anti-Israel rhetoric and am tempted to think that the Israelis are hard on the Palestinians. And then I come to my senses and regain my sense of proportion. Let me explain.

How do you feel when you read this report?

Nablus, 3 AM: At over 90 miles per hour a convoy of six cars races through the dark streets of this former stronghold of terrorism. In the vehicles are a number of Muslims of the Sunni sect. Their goal: an ancient grave in the town centre.

There are very few people in the country who understand why, for nine years now, these Palestinians have been laying their lives on the line, week after week, to pray at the tomb of one of their revered sheiks. This year, during Ramadan, something went wrong. This time Israeli security forces caught the group praying at the tomb. The result was a hot pursuit that ended in a hail of bullets that killed 24-year-old Jamal bin Laden .

How do you feel? Sickened? Angry? Outraged? Do you find yourself thinking the members of the security forces who committed this atrocity should be brought to book? Are you demanding to why this was not widely reported in the international media?

That story was untrue. See if you feel as outraged by the real account.

Nablus, 3 AM: At over 90 miles per hour a convoy of six cars races through the dark streets of this former stronghold of terrorism. In the vehicles are a number of Orthodox Jews of the Breslav sect. Their goal: an ancient grave in the town centre.

There are very few people in the country who understand why, for nine years now, these Jews have been laying their lives on the line, week after week, to pray at Joseph’s Tomb. This year, during Passover week, something went wrong. This time Palestinian security forces caught the group praying at the tomb. The result was a hot pursuit that ended in a hail of bullets that killed 24-year-old Ben Yosef Livnat.

An evening meal with the 144,000

2011-04-19T09:57:00.000-07:00

On Sunday morning, just before leaving for church, two smart young “Jehovah’s Witnesses” called to invite me to attend their annual celebration of “the Lord’s last evening meal”.

Apparently, it “made their day” when I turned up. If the sign outside had not announced that the building was a “Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses”, it could have been an evangelical church building.

People were friendly, the piano playing was about as proficient as that at any Gospel Hall and the congregation lacklustrely sang turgid, dogma-saturated songs. Prayers were perfunctory and the “Talk” was interesting, at least the speaker kept my attention.

Mike the speaker informed us that Jesus has two flocks of sheep; a “little flock” and a “big flock”. The little flock is the 144,000 of revelation 7 and 14; and the others are the “great crowd” of Revelation 7. The “little flock” will spend eternity in heaven as “spirit creatures, while the rest live forever on a “Paradise earth”.

Only the 144,000 are in the New Covenant, so only they are allowed to eat the bread and drink the wine at the “Lord’s evening meal”. Last year, out of all the millions of JWs around the world, only 11,202 took the bread and wine. The 144,000 apparently know who they are because “holy spirit” reveals it to them.

I don’t think anyone at the meeting ate or drank but I have to confess that I was sorely tempted to do so.

It turned out that the young lady who invited me to the meeting was the niece of the speaker. Mike was as delighted as she was that I had turned up and he came to speak to me. After a little light-hearted banter, I asked if he was one of the 144,000. He told me he was not.

So Mike was not in the New Covenant? No.

According to Jeremiah 31, then, Mike didn’t have God’s law written in his heart, he didn’t know Jehovah and his sins were not forgiven. He assured me that even though he was not in the New Covenant, he certainly knew Jehovah and his sins were forgiven.

But if those are New Covenant blessings, how could anyone outside the covenant experience them?

By now, we had an audience, which included Mike's niece, and Mike was becoming noticeably uncomfortable. He tried to explain the anomaly in terms of Israel’s exodus from Egypt. When Israel left Egypt, a large number of non-Jews left with them and enjoyed the blessings of the covenant.

I pointed out that, according to Jeremiah 31, the New Covenant was not like the covenant God made with Israel at Sinai.

There were other points I could have made, such as how non-Jews can enjoy the blessings of a covenant promised to “the house of Israel and the house of Judah”.

Also during his talk, although Mike told us that the 144,000 were the first generation of believers in Jesus, he also informed us there was “a remnant” of them around today and that the great tribulation out of which the 144,000 had come was yet future!

The 144,000, he told us, were Christ’s “little flock” in heaven, while the “great crowd” was his other flock on “Paradise earth”. A little reflection on this cornerstone of JW teaching, however, is quite instructive.

Revelation 7:1-8 reads:

After this I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds of the earth, that no wind might blow on earth or sea or against any tree. Then I saw another angel ascending from the rising of the sun, with the seal of the living God, and he called with a loud voice to the four angels who had been given power to harm earth and sea, saying, “Do not harm the earth or the sea or the trees, until we have sealed the servants of our God on their foreheads.”

And I heard the number of the sealed, 144,000, sealed from every tribe of the sons of Israel: 12,000 from the tribe of Judah were sealed, 12,000 from the tribe of Reuben, 12,000 from the tribe of Gad, 12,000 from the tribe of Asher, 12,000 from the tribe of Naphtali, 12,000 from the tribe of Manasseh, 12,000 from the tribe of Simeon, 12,000 from the tribe of Levi, 12,000 from the tribe of Issachar, 12,000 from the tribe of Zebulun, 12,000 from the tribe of Joseph, 12,000 from the tribe of Benjamin were sealed.

Now considering that the 144,000 are supposed to be in heaven, is it not curious that “the earth” is mentioned five times in just eight verses and heaven is not mentioned once?

Now consider the “great crowd” in verses 9 and 10:

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!”

According to JW teaching, this mass of people is supposed to be on earth, yet the text says they are standing before the throne of Jehovah!

Mike assured me he could answer my questions but he would need to write it all down so, not wanting to cause him further embarrassment, I agreed to read what he would send me and that we should meet to discuss this further.

As I listened to Mike try to wriggle out of a tight spot, it struck me forcefully that so much of Jehovah’s Witness teaching is devoted to making the Bible say the opposite of what it actually says.

No wonder their founder, CT Russell, had to inform his followers that if they read his writings alone , they would be in light but if his followers read Bible alone, within two years they would be in darkness.

Mike and I have arranged to meet up in a couple of weeks. I’ll keep you up to speed with how the discussions go.

Four Questions, Five Sons

2011-04-19T01:59:00.000-07:00

Passover 2011 (Jewish year 5771) starts today and continues for 7 days until next Monday (25th April).

The Jewish Board of Deputies is encouraging Jewish families this year to remember the plight of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit as the “fifth son” this Passover.

The Hagaddah, or Passover Order of Service, tells of four sons: the first is wise, the second is evil, the third is simple and the last doesn’t know enough to be able to ask questions. A tradition of a fifth son has developed; the absent son, the child who has no interest in Torah and the commandments and is not even aware of the Seder and the miracles it recalls.

Due to the influence of persecution a fifth son, a son who was absent from the Seder through no fault of his own, was introduced to the Seder. In each generation, the fifth son has taken on a different identity. In the 19th century, he was the persecuted Jew of Czarist Russia. In the 1940s, he was the child perishing in the Death Camps of Europe. A spokesman for the Board of Deputies this week told the Jewish Chronicle: “For our generation, that fifth son is Gilad Shalit and all the captive soldiers who are absent from their families’ Seder tables.”

Gilad Shalit was kidnapped by Hamas operatives on 25th June 2006. Although human rights organisations have stated that the terms and conditions of Shalit’s detention are contrary to international humanitarian law, Hamas has refused to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross to visits to him. Since his abduction, the only contact between Shalit and the outside world has been three letters, an audio tape, and a DVD. This Passover will be the 23 year-old soldier’s fourth Passover in captivity.

The board hopes that the “Gilad Shalit – Fifth Son” project will result in Jewish families praying for him and other Israeli troops at their Passover Seders. We should pray for him also.

Visit the Board of Deputies website for more details.

During the Passover Seder, the youngest person present at the meal asks four questions. The general preliminary question is Mah nishtanah ha-lahylah ha-zeh mi-kol ha-layloht, mi-kol ha-layloht? “Why is this night different from all other nights?”

Then follow the four questions:

• Why is it that on all other nights during the year we eat either [leavened] bread or matzoh [unleavened wafers], but on this night we eat only matzoh?

• Why is it that on all other nights we eat all kinds of herbs, but on this night we eat only bitter herbs?

• Why is it that on all other nights we do not dip our herbs even once, but on this night we dip them twice?

• Why is it that on all other nights we eat either sitting or reclining, but on this night we eat in a reclining position?

In answer, the story of the Exodus is told, after which the assembled family is told of four sons who also ask four questions.

The Wise Son asks: “What are the testimonies, the statutes, and the laws that God, our God, has commanded to you?”

The answer is given in the words of Deuteronomy 6:20ff: “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt . . .” The son must also be instructed in all the laws of Passover, up to and including the final command, which says that after eating the Passover offering, one should not conclude the meal with dessert for that would wash away the taste of the Passover offering.”

The Wicked Son asks: “What is this service of yours?”

The Hadaggah points out that by asking, “What is this Passover Seder of yours?” the son is implying that the Passover is not for him. By so doing he excludes himself from the community because he denies the essential principle of Judaism, the obligation to fulfil the commandments of the Torah.

The Simple Son asks: “What is this celebration about?”

He is to be told: “We are commemorating the fact that with a strong hand God took us out of Egypt, from the house of slaves” (Exodus 13:14).

The fourth son does not know how to ask a question and that he must be told: “It is because of this that God acted for me when I left Egypt” (Exodus 13:8).

Quaint as all this may sound, the Passover Seder serves as a multi-sensory teaching experience which inculcates lessons about Jewish history, Judaism and duty to God in the minds of Jewish children. Stories, songs, symbols and symbolic actions, riddles and food all help to keep the children awake and attentive. Christians can learn lessons in communication from Passover.

According to one Jewish commentator, every Jewish person is a composite of those four types of Jews. To some extent, he says, like the first son, all Jews long for meaning; they are searching and thinking. Yet sometimes Jewish people treat life as though it were a joke and, like the second son, they rebel. Sometimes, like the third son, he observes, it takes something dramatic to arouse us to think and change. At other times we are like the apathetic fourth son.

As those who believe “Messiah, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed” for us, these thoughts are worthy of our own contemplation. “Paul urges us to “Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened”, adding, “Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Corinthians 5:7f).

Teenage Terrorists Confess to Fogel Murders

2011-04-19T00:06:00.000-07:00

Two teenagers have been arrested for the murder of five members of the Fogel family in Itamar on 11 March.

Hakim Awad and Amjad Awad are members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and were were assisted by at least six others, four of them from Awad’s family. The two said they acted out of nationalist motives and expressed no regret for their crime.

In March, the two killers broke into the Fogel home, found the bedrooms of 11-year-old Yoav and 4-year-old Elad and stabbed them to death. They then entered the parents’ bedroom, where they struggled with and overcame Rabbi Udi Fogel and his wife Ruth before stabbing them to death.

Amjad told officials that after leaving the house he could not resist going back to kill 3-month-old Hadas, who was left crying, wet with the blood of her parents. He also said that had he known there were two other children in the house, he would have killed them too.

Investigators said they were shocked by the dispassionate confessions.

In the Palestinian Authority, the killers of Israeli Jews, and especially Israeli “settlers,” are hailed as martyrs and national heroes, which increased the motivation to engage in such violence.

The father of one of the murderers of the Fogel family at Itamar had served in jail for terror, and an uncle involved in the 2002 terror attack on same community.

Meanwhile, two Grad missiles struck near the southern port city of Ashdod last Friday afternoon on the eve of the Sabbath, breaking another in a countless number of ceasefires announced by the de facto Hamas government in Gaza. In response, the Israel Air Force bombed two terrorist sites in northern Gaza on Friday night.

Foreign journalists cover complex Middle East negotiations, and news outlets often characterize lulls in hostilities as “armistices” or “cease-fires”, reminiscent in western minds of the end of hostilities in World War I.

However, the western media often ignore the nuanced Arabic words. David Bedein, Director of the Israel Resource News Agency and Attorney Beryl Dean have put together a guide to what Hamas means when it is said to have offered a “cease fire”:
• Hudna: a tactical pause intended only for rearmament.

• Tahida: a temporary halt in hostile activity which can be violated at any time.

• Hudaybiyyah: there will be no fighting for ten years, a term taken from the “treaty of Hudaybiyyah” in 628 AD.

• Sulch: a total cessation of hostile activity.

The hudna, tahida and hudaybiyyah offered by the PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad bear no relationship to the mu’ahada peace treaty Egypt signed with Israel in 1979, or the mu’ahada peace treaty Jordan signed with Israel in 1994.

Blitz!

2011-04-15T08:23:00.000-07:00

The Blitz was a sustained strategic bombing of Britain by Nazi Germany between 7 September 1940 and 10 May 1941 during the Second World War. For 76 consecutive nights the city of London was bombed by the Luftwaffe and many towns and major cities across the country followed.

We admire the fortitude and courage of our parents and grandparents who endured those long eight months of constant bombardment, and quite rightly so. However, who gives a thought to the fact that a small town in southern Israel has been under bombardment for ten years!

On 16 April 2001, Gaza terrorists fired the first rocket at southern Israel, aiming for the town of Sderot. Tomorrow, ten years will have passed since that first missile landed. Rocket fire remains a serious concern in southern towns which, as recently as last week, were hit by a barrage of rockets and mortar shells.

Terrorists began their blitz with short-range Kassam rockets, manufactured in Gaza. In the first years, rockets hit with no warning. Even after the installation of the “Colour Red” rocket warning system, residents had, at most, 15 seconds to run for shelter.

In Sderot alone, several people have been killed, among them four children. Others have bee badly wounded, including an eight-year-old boy who lost a leg.

Prior to Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and the expulsion of Jews from the area, many of the rocket attacks targeted Jewish communities in Gush Katif in Gaza. In 2004, Jewish communities in Gaza were hit by rockets more than 280 times.

In 2005, 170 missiles hit Jewish towns. Following the ethic cleansing of Gaza’s Jewish communites, however, terrorists began to strike far more frequently, hitting towns in southern Israel 946 times in 2006 and 2,048 in 2008. After the Hamas takeover of 2007, when United Nations observers fled the border, Hamas smuggled in more advanced medium-range rockets and expanded its attacks beyond Sderot and the Gaza belt.

Ashkelon, Be'er Sheva, Ashdod and Ofakim all fell victim to rockets as well. “Operation Cast Lead”, in which Israel destroyed much of Hamas' infrastructure and weapons supplies, and killed an estimated 700 Hamas terrorists, led to a temporary reprieve. However, Hamas recently went on the offensive again, firing Grad rockets on Netivot, Ofakim, Be'er Sheva and Ashkelon.

In your prayers this weekend, pray not only for the peace of Jerusalem but also for the peace of Sderot.

Rancid Camera

2011-04-13T10:08:00.000-07:00

They say the camera never lies but Norman Finkelstein, the controversial author of The Holocaust Industry and supporter of the now discredited Goldstone Report, demonstrates it is incapable of telling the truth.

In a recent blog “Deutschland uber alles”, Finkelstein (who has never set foot in Israel) sets disturbing pictures of Jews and Nazis alongside Israelis and Palestinians.

Some of the pictures are truly sickening, not simply because of the terrible scenes they depict but because Finkelstein would have us believe they prove modern day Israelis are on a par with the Nazis. “The grandchildren of holocaust [sic] survivors from World War II are doing to the Palestinians exactly what was done to them by Nazi Germany...” says Finkelstein.

None of the pictures of Israelis and Palestinians are set in any frame of reference other than similar shots of Jews in Nazi Germany.

We know the context of the black and white Second World War photos but there is no context other than that in which Finkelstein constructs. There are pictures of Israel soldiers pointing guns at Palestinian toddlers; there are shots of dead Palestinians with Israeli soldiers and civilians standing round (one in which an Israel civilian appears to be gleefully gloating); there are shots of fences alongside images of ghetto walls and concentration camp fences.

No doubt there are Israelis who hate Palestinians; doubtless there are rogue soldiers; there are probably Israelis who would like to exterminate the Palestinians.

Israel, like every other nation has those who are mad, bad, sad, or a mix of all three. But Israel is not Nazi Germany, and Finkelstein’s blog tells us far more about him than it does about Israel.

A One-Sided Attack on Zionism

2011-04-01T03:22:00.000-07:00

With the assistance of Stephen Sizer, Porter Speakman’s biased documentary on Christian Zionism, http://withgodonourside.com/index.htmlhas been doing the rounds of UK churches.

The prestigious Christianity Today gave the DVD a four star rating, announcing that “...Christian Zionism is officially on notice”.

To the credit of TC, the website features a response by Guest Blogger Gerald McDermott, the Jordan-Trexler Professor of Religion at Virginia’s Roanoke College. I’ve watched the film and agree wholeheartedly with Prof McDermott. Read his blog and the responses to it online at Christianity Today.

The documentary With God on Our Side is anything but balanced. It does not give “both sides their due” but instead interviews only Israelis on the far left and ignores Christian Zionists who defend the rights of Palestinians. The result is a one-sided attack on Israel that treats social and political realities with the same ideological insouciance which the documentary assigns to John Hagee and his band.

One interviewee in the film claims—without rebuttal—that Jews did not live in the land for two thousand years. The truth is that Jewish communities have lived in the land through all this time, flourishing in Jerusalem, Galilee and coastal cities in the 9th and 11th centuries, and then rebounding after being massacred by Crusaders in the 12th century. By the early 19th century, long before the rise of Zionism, more than ten thousand Jews lived in what is now Israel.

Viewers are told of Jews expelling Arabs from villages in the 1948 war for independence, but not that the war was started by Arabs, or that Arab armies from neighbouring countries targeted Jewish civilians, or that the war was unnecessary because the UN had offered a two-state partition that the Jews accepted and Palestinians rejected.

The documentary states that Israel started the 1967 war “pre-emptively” but fails to provide the context: after months of threatening war against Israel, Egypt’s President Nasser announced (just days before Israel struck) that “the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon . . . are arranged for battle, the critical hour has arrived.”

The film then proceeds to charge Israel with “illegal occupation” of the West Bank after the 1967 War on the grounds that Israel failed to comply with UN Resolution 242.

According to this resolution, Israeli withdrawal was to take place in the context of mutual recognition of the right to exist and territorial adjustments to achieve secure boundaries. Withdrawal was ordered from "territories," not "the territories."

Both Arthur Goldberg and Lord Carrington, the primary authors of this resolution, have said that the word "the" was purposely omitted because it was not intended for Israel to give back all of her territories, since they recognized that some were needed for secure boundaries.

Despite the fact that most Arab states have refused to recognize Israel's right to exist (a condition of Resolution 242), Israel has implemented the principles of the Resolution three times. When Egypt terminated its claims of belligerency in 1979, Israel returned the Sinai. When Jordan signed a peace agreement, Israel returned land claimed by Jordan. Then in September 2005 Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, only to be met with new attacks on her civilians launched from that territory.

Illegal occupation? Hardly. Israel has made repeated efforts to comply with UN stipulations for the territories, while its Arab neighbours have not.

When the Palestinians appeared to accept Israel's right to exist during the Oslo negotiations, Israel turned over control of major West Bank cities to the Palestinian Authority (PA). But when the PA showed support for terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens in 2000, Israel resumed control of those cities.

In that same year Israel offered to return 92 percent of the West Bank, which this documentary dismisses as ungenerous because, it charges, Israel never owned the land in the first place. Yet Jews have lived in ancient Samaria (the West Bank) for over three thousand years. Jordan unilaterally renounced all claims to this area in 1988 and released legal ownership to Israel at that time.

This video suggests Jews should remove all settlements from the West Bank, leaving it entirely for Palestinians. That would be as unreasonable as insisting that no Arabs can live in Judaea.

Besides, what other country has been required to give up land that it won in a defensive war? Do Germans displaced from Koenigsberg clamour and agitate for that German city to be returned to them by the victorious Russians?

The film concentrates attention on suffering caused Palestinians by the new wall. The wall is indeed tragic in many ways. But there is only a passing reference to the attacks on citizens which prompted its building, and the fact that this wall has prevented many such attacks.

Perhaps most disturbing, this video leaves unchallenged one man’s denunciation of Israel as “apartheid on steroids.” This accusation is not only inflammatory but egregiously unfair. South African apartheid was based on race. "Blacks" and "coloureds" could not vote and had no representation in the South African parliament. But Israeli citizens of all races—Arabs and Jews alike—can vote, be represented in the Knesset, and have recourse to the courts.

Apartheid was also a legal system that restricted participation to a minority that had control over a majority. In Israel the majority give equal legal rights and protection to Arab citizens, who make up 20% of the population of Israel. Irshad Manji, a Muslim, has written, “At only 20 percent of the population, would Arabs even be eligible for election if they squirmed under the thumb of apartheid? Would an apartheid state extend voting rights to women and the poor in local elections, which Israel did for the first time in the history of Palestinian Arabs?”

There are also theological problems with this film. First, we are shown only Christian Zionists who use biblical prooftexts to support Israel’s rights to the land. There is no sign of the vast numbers of Israelis and evangelicals who believe that modern Israel is a miraculous work of God fulfilling biblical prophecy while at the same time supporting Palestinians’ rights to self-determination in the land. In other words, viewers never hear of another kind of Jewish and Christian theological Zionism that takes seriously both prophecies of Israel’s return and the biblical mandate of social justice for Jews and Arabs alike.

The second and more serious theological problem is that the end of the documentary suggests that God’s covenant with the Jews (Gen. 12.1-3 et al) was eclipsed by the new covenant for Christians. This is the familiar replacement theology that does not do justice to Rom 11.28-29, and that helped create an atmosphere that required Zionism in the first place. In other words, it was this sort of supersessionism (the belief that the Christian covenant replaced the Jewish covenant) that taught Christians for millennia that Judaism was no longer significant theologically, which then encouraged the belief that Jews were no longer important in a Christian world.

Petition calls for Royal Visit to Israel

2011-03-31T23:26:00.000-07:00

An online petition has been launched requesting a change in official British policy regarding the nation of Israel. The petition calls for an official apology to be offered to Israel for our country's mistreatment of Holocaust survivors and requests that, at long last, the Queen and Royal Family undertake an official visit to Israel. In the early twentieth century, Britain was mandated by the League of Nations to provide a homeland for the Jewish people in what was then Palestine.

The Jewish people were promised not only what is now the state of Israel but also Gaza, the West Bank and Jordan. Due to Arab pressure, Britain turned against the Jews and broke its promise to them, reducing the size of the land originally allotted by almost 70%. Britain now appears to be at pains to reduce the land to a mere 17% of what was originally promised.

The petition charges that during the Holocaust, Britain limited the number of Jews who could return to Palestine to a mere 15,000 a year. At the time Jewish people needed our country's help most desperately, British gunboats turned back ships full of Jewish refugees from the shores of Palestine.

Some historians have estimated that up to one million lives could have been saved if Jews had been allowed to return to their ancient homeland during the War years. The petition protests a specific act of cruelty in 1947 when the SS Exodus (pictured), carrying Holocaust survivors from Germany, was commandeered off the coast of Palestine and the passengers forced to return to a British concentration camp.

The petition protests Britain’s policy appeasement towards the Arabs, the harming of British-Israeli diplomatic ties in favour of British-Arab ties, and the anti-Israel bias of the British media.

Finally, the petition calls for an official Royal Visit to Israel. In spite of numerous invitations by Israeli governments, the Queen has never visited Israel.

Although the petition is not well worded, it deserves the support of all who care about Israel and our own nation. Sign the petition here.

Who's afraid of the Messianic Jews?

2011-03-31T09:33:00.000-07:00

Most Israelis tend be indifferent at best toward Messianic Jews, but the attitude and behaviour of the Orthodox Jewish community has resulted in “secular” Israelis coming to the defence of Jewish followers of Jesus.

Over the last few years, the Israeli media has on several occasion portrayed Messianic Israelis in a positive light.

On Wednesday evening, Israel Channel One’s Second Look aired a programme which contrasted Messianic Jews to the anti-missionary group Yad L’Achim, which has dedicated itself to harassing and driving Jews who believe in Jesus out of Israel.

In the opening segment of Second Look, the presenter noted that Yad L’Achim likened Messianic Jews to Hitler. A young Jewish organist who is not a believer in Yeshua told the programme that the only place she could practice her music was a monastery Jerusalem.

She recounted how her parents had received an anonymous written warning from Jewish “anti-missionaries” who told them that their daughter was being “preyed upon” by Christians.

The girl continued to accept the hospitality of the monastery but began receiving anonymous phone calls, and was sure she was being followed and watched. “I felt like I was in a suspense movie,” she said. “I was constantly looking over my shoulder.”

The girl said that neither the priest nor his staff had ever pressurised her to accept Jesus but Yad L’Achim had advised Israel’s Ministry of the Interior to revoke the residency visa of the priest overseeing the facility. Yad L’Achim director Rabbi Shalom Dov Lifschitz told Channel One that if the “missionaries” were not stopped, there would soon be no Jews left in Israel.

The report interviewed several Messianic Jews, including Avner and Rachel Boski who, the presenter said, “believe that the Messiah has already been here, and that his name is Yeshua. They believe there is no problem believing in him and remaining Jews.”

Avner Boski explained, “When we were immigrating, and we came through the Ministry of the Interior, everything was going fine. Then, one day, we were told that there is a problem, that information had come from Yad L’Achim – she said this three times.”

Yad L’Achim views believers in Yeshua as “soul snatchers” who want to turn Jews into “Christians”, thus spiritually destroying the Jewish people.

A promo video, produced by Yad L’Achim, teaches that there are two current efforts to destroy the Jews: the physical, and the spiritual. Messianic Jews are the spiritual killers.

Boski noted that Yad L’Achim has now gone far beyond just targeting those believers in Yeshua who openly evangelise: “Just believing in Yeshua makes us dangerous enough in their eyes.”

However, anyone who drives a car in Israel can testify to how often Israelis are approached by proselytizing Orthodox Jews at stop lights throughout the country.

A number of other Messianic Israelis were interviewed and given a chance to tell their stories, including Pnina Conforti whose popular bakery has been repeatedly targeted by Yad L’Achim.

Following the interviews, the presenter debated with two Israeli lawmakers: Michael Ben-Ari of the religious National Union party, and Nitzan Horovitz of the secular Meretz Party.

Horovitz and the presenter were clearly agitated by the Ben-Ari’s defence of Yad L’Achim’s actions and his insistence that believers in Yeshua pose a threat to the Jewish state by simple virtue of their faith.

“I receive far more complaints about missionary activity by Orthodox Jewish organisations!” Horovitz exclaimed.

The second half of the report was interspersed with clips of Yad L’Achim and its supporters holding hostile and heated rallies, while Messianic Jews were shown praying calmly for Israel at their places of worship.

The message was clear: Messianic Jews are not a threat to Israel or the spirit of the Jewish nation. But Yad L’Achim just might be.

Mountains of speculation; molehills of fact

2011-03-30T23:25:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday night I watched the third and last of Francesca Stavrokopoulou’s mini-series, The Bible’s Buried Secrets.

Titled “The Real Garden of Eden”, the programme set out to prove that that the real Garden of Eden was actually the temple in Jerusalem. Not having had internet access for the last few days, I’ve not been able to post anything until now but the best thing I can say about the programme was that Miss Stavrokopoulou was very easy to watch (and both she and the BBC know it!).

I found it frustrating, however, that although there was much of value in what we were told, the facts were given fanciful and erroneous interpretations. Although Miss Stavrokopoulou coyly informed us several times that she was telling us what she thought, it was clear that we were expected to take what she thought as undeniably correct.

Her starting assumption was that Genesis chapter 3 could not be taken at face value, and we were introduced to a “Creationist” (Yes, folks, these intellectual curiosities really do exist!) who was allowed less than a minute to tell us that he believed the Bible from Genesis to Revelation (Tee hee. Such foolishness!).

The programme made clear that the Christian understanding of Christ’s atonement cannot stand without the historicity of the fall of man and the reality of Original Sin. The agenda was therefore transparent: undermine the foundations of Christianity so that, like Christ’s “house built on the sand”, the entire edifice will collapse.

Miss Stavrokopoulou’s second assumption was that Genesis is a late composition, written only 2,500 years ago, and predated by the book of Ezekiel.

The presenter not only has looks; she is clever. By demolishing crude misunderstandings of the story of the fall of man, she knew that most viewers would imagine she was pointing out errors in the biblical text itself. For example, she placed the biblical teaching that the serpent was Satan on the same level as the unbiblical notion that the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was an apple.

Though she told us that four rivers, including the Tigris and the Euphrates, flowed out of Eden, Miss Stavrokopoulou picked on just one of the rivers – the Gihon, of which we know nothing outside the biblical text – and simply assumed it was a reference to the Gihon spring outside Jerusalem.

Although her goal was to prove that the Garden of Eden was nothing more than the temple in Jerusalem, Miss Stavrokopoulou neglected to inform us that the Gihon did not flow out of the temple.

She referred to Ezekiel 28, in which we are told that the king of Tyre was a “cherub” in Eden but then took that line of thought no further because the idea of the garden of Eden being in Lebanon would not have fitted her theory.

There are certainly parallels between the temple and the Garden of Eden but the temple is based on Eden, not vice-versa. The Jerusalem temple was “the garden of God” but it was not the king that “walked” in it; the priests walked in the temple. The king was not even allowed to enter the temple, and certainly not the Holy of Holies.

Miss Stavrokopoulou made the bizarre claim, in an attempt to rehabilitate the serpent of Genesis 3, that the seraphim were “flying serpents”, when in Isaiah 6 they cover their faces and their feet with their six wings!

The fatal flaw in all this speculation, however, is that Francesca Stavrokopoulou does not take the Genesis account in its context. Genesis 3 cannot stand alone. It is part of a seamless account that begins with the creation of the heavens and the earth and is followed by the account of Cain and Abel, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, the calling of Abraham, the births of Isaac and Jacob, and the founding of the Hebrew nation.

Everything that follows in the biblical narrative looks back to the Fall of man in the garden. The temple was a divinely sanctioned way to “get ourselves back to the Garden”. Jews and Christians have always understood Genesis 3 to be about the entrance of sin into the world and the loss of human innocence.

Why would the Bible, which in Kings, Chronicles, Jeremiah, Daniel and elsewhere carries plain and detailed accounts of the fall of the Jerusalem temple and the reasons for it carry an account so heavily disguised that it would not be understood for another 2,500 years?

This pick and mix approach to the biblical text is unsound and utterly unscholarly. Miss Stavrokopoulou obviously wishes to be regarded as an uncommonly clever lady. The irony is that although she wants to get Eve and the serpent off their respective hooks, she appears to have sunk her own teeth firmly into the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and, courtesy of the BBC, has held the fruit out for us to do the same.

As the Crow lies

2011-03-26T07:57:00.000-07:00

On Radio 4’s Any Questions last night, the question of whether David Cameron should press for no-fly zones in Syria, Bahrain and Yemen to protect their citizens came up. Bob Crow (pictured), the General Secretary of the Rail and Maritime Union, thought Gaza should be a no-fly zone for Israel. Crow was, of course, likening Israel to Libya and when his egregious comparison was challenged on Any Answers today, Jonathan Dimbleby defended Crow by claiming that over a thousand civilians were killed by Israel during Operation Cast Lead.

The caller was a little flustered by Dimbleby’s figures, obviously unaware (like Dimbleby, presumably) that on 1 November 2010, the interior minister of Hamas, Fathi Hamad, had confirmed Israel’s claim that most of the casualties in its assault on Gaza were combatants rather than civilians.

In an interview with the London-based Al-Hayat, Hamad stated: “It has been said that the [Palestinian] people were harmed by the war, but is Hamas not part of the people? It is a fact that on the first day of the war Israel struck police headquarters and killed 250 members of Hamas and the various factions, in addition to the 200-300 operatives from the [Izz al-Din] al-Qassam Brigades. In addition, 150 security personnel [members of the internal security forces] were killed, and the rest were from the people [i.e., civilians].”

According to Israel, during Operation Cast Lead, 1,166 Palestinians were killed. Six hundred and nine were terrorist operatives who belonged to Hamas’ military wing and its security forces, while 100 more were operatives from other terrorist organizations involved in the fighting. The overall number of terrorist operatives killed in Gaza was 709 (about 60% of the total number of deaths). Of those 709 terrorists, 232 belonged to Hamas’ internal security forces. Of the 457 non-combatant casualties, most of them were harmed by mistake.

The data provided by Fathi Hamad was in accordance with Israel’s very precise figures.

Did you see those figures on BBC News or on the BBC website? Me neither.

Tamar Fogel on Israel TV

2011-03-26T06:40:00.000-07:00

Tamar Fogel is a remarkable young lady. The 12-year-old girl from the Jewish settlement of Itamar who discovered the bodies of her parents and three siblings after they had been mercilessly slaughtered was interviewed by Israel’s Channel 2 while sitting her shiva, the traditional Jewish seven-day mourning period for close relatives.

Watching the heart-wrenching interview, it is hard to believe that Tamar is just twelve years old. Her maturity, inteligence and composure are truly astonishing. She shows no trace of bitterness about the deaths of her parents. What is evident is a commitment to her peopel and to the land and a determination to follow the example set by her parents.

Pray for Tamar. At the scenes of the funeral of her family there is expressed a longing for the coming of David ben Yeshai (David the son of Jesse), the Messiah. May Tamar and the remaining members of her family, and all in Israel find peace, joy and fulfilment in Messiah Yeshua.

Intifada on Facebook

2011-03-25T15:10:00.000-07:00

Writing in Commentary (23 March 2011), Alana Goodman asks if Facebook will remove a page which calls for a third Intifada. She writes:

It’s not exactly news that there are anti-Israel and anti-Semitic groups on Facebook, but one of them has the Israeli government particularly concerned. The Minister of Diaspora Affairs Yuli Edelstein sent a letter to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg today, asking for the removal of a page that calls for a third Intifada, because he believes it could incite violence against Jews. He writes, “There is no need to explain what the outrageous incitement on the page in question can cause – from harming innocent Jews and Israelis and through to an armed struggle against Israel.”

According to YNetNews.com, the Facebook group has attracted nearly 250,000 members since it was created less than a month ago. It calls for the launch of a third Intifada on May 15 (Israel’s Independence Day, which is sometimes called Nakba, or “catastrophe” day by the Palestinians).

Edelstein is the most high-profile figure to ask for the page to be taken down, but will Facebook actually remove it? The third Intifada group has also warned the social network that it will launch a Muslim boycott of the site if the page is removed – probably an empty threat, but it could potentially have some ramifications for Facebook.

According to the website’s terms of service, members can’t post content that is “threatening” or “incites violence.” However, Facebook’s decisions about when to enforce this policy have been pretty arbitrary in the past.

The social network removed (and later restored) the official “Everybody Draw Mohammad Day” page, after complaints from Muslim groups. And there are countless pages that can be perceived as racist, sexist or violent that are still up on the site.

But not only does the third Intifada group violate the terms of service, it also has the potential to be a dangerous organizing tool. In light of the terrorist attacks in Israel over the past few days, Facebook should take the necessary precaution and remove the page.

The president of the British Messianic Jewish Alliance, has sent out the following e-mail:

"A Facebook page was created calling for a third Intifada on Israel. They are calling for the Arab world to take over Israel. The number of people clicking on the “Like” button is increasing every hour (currently 300,000). We MUST have Facebook take action and remove this page. Please click [this link] and scroll down the left side of the page where you will see (under where it shows how many people like it) a “Report Page” link. Select that option and choose “Violence or harmful behaviour” and then “Credible threat of violence”.

"If you don’t have a Facebook account, you should still forward this to others."

Terror returns to Jerusalem

2011-03-23T11:45:00.000-07:00

By now, you wil have see the reports of the bomb at a crowded bus stop in Jerusalem, which killed one and injured dozens.

Police said it was a Palestinian "suicide attack" and is the first such bombing in Jerusalem in seven years.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast, which police said was caused by a bomb planted close to the city's main conference hall and central bus terminal.

There are already suggestions that the bomb was planted in retaliation for the Israeli Air Force attack on Gaza terrorist that tragically reulted in the death of an innocent family.

Melanie Philips has the following astute observation on the Spectator web site:

An interview transmitted a few minutes ago on BBC World with the Editor-in-Chief of the Jerusalem Post, David Horowitz, established what I’m sure will be the signature motif of moral imbecility with which this latest atrocity will be reported by the British and western media. The interviewer asked whether this bomb attack was most likely in response to the recent Israeli attacks on Gaza in which eight civilians, four of them children, had been killed.

After a small but perceptible intake of breath, Horowitz replied correctly that the recent atrocity of note had been the cold-blooded massacre of the Fogel family including a three-month old baby, who had had their throats slit. This had been followed by an enormous rocket and missile barrage from Gaza into southern Israel. The Israeli bombing of Gaza's terror infrastructure had been an attempt to deter further such attacks; regrettably, some Gazan civilians had been killed in the process.

Clearly, there is currently a huge upsurge in murderous violence by Arabs from the disputed territories, of which this bus bombing is but the latest example. It therefore takes a particular degree of bone-headed malevolence to view this latest attack instead as a ‘tit-for-tat' response to Israeli violence. But then, the BBC and other British and western media have all but ignored the rocket attacks, and minimised the Fogel massacre. As usual, Israeli victimisation is thus denied in an obscene moral equivalence – which invariably turns Israel from a victim attempting to defend itself into the aggressor.

But the media’s culpability does not end there with its mere perversion of journalism. The fact that it can be relied upon to blame the Israelis for their own slaughter means that the slaughterers believe they can murder Israelis with impunity – better still, that the more Israelis they murder, the more Israel will be blamed; and if Israel should take military action to stop the attacks, the world will punish Israel and reward its attackers even more.

Thus the western media is not just an observer but an active player in the Middle East tragedy. And Israel should say so.

Gene Simmons kisses Israel

2011-03-23T02:01:00.000-07:00

Israeli daily Ha'aretz recently reported that Kiss' Israeli-born lead singer Gene Simmons (above) has called fellow artists who refuse to perform in Israel "fools".

The legendary bassist spoke to The Associated Press in Jerusalem on Tuesday, after he arrived in Israel for what he described as an emotional homecoming.

"I'm Israeli. I'm a stranger in America. I'm an outsider," he said. "I was born here and I'm proud of it."

Simmons said artists who avoid Israel - such as Elvis Costello, the Pixies and Roger Waters [see my blog for Friday 18 March], who joined the movement after appearing in Israel in 2006 - would be better served directing their anger at Arab dictators.

"The countries they should be boycotting are the same countries that the populations are rebelling," he said. "People long to be free ... And they sure as hell don't want somebody who's a ruler who hasn't been elected by them."

Simmons was making his first visit to Israel since he left the country more than 50 years ago.

Earlier this month Roger Waters of the iconic Pink Floyd voiced support for a cultural boycott of Israel.

While situations on the show are generally lighthearted, he said his stop in Israel has deep personal significance. "Coming back to Israel is a homecoming."

Simmons was born Chaim Witz and spent his childhood in northern Israel before moving to America. He recalled his father, a carpenter, taking his assault rifle and heading off to military service on weekends. His mother, a Holocaust survivor, taught him that "every day above ground is a good day."

The family was "dirt poor," scraping by on meagre bread and milk rations available in what was then an underdeveloped country. He earned money by selling fruits he collected from cactuses.

Simmons moved with his mother to the United States but still considers Israel his home.

He made local headlines during Israel's 2006 war against Lebanese guerrillas by sending a televised message to a wounded Israeli soldier, calling him a "hero."

Simmons insisted that his busy schedule has been the only reason he never made it back to Israel before.

The war on Israel's civilians

2011-03-23T01:20:00.000-07:00

While the eyes of the world are fixed on Libya and other parts of the Arab world (and rightfully so), once again aggression against Israeli civilians is overlooked.

According to the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), In the last few days Palestinian terror groups in the Gaza Strip have sharply escalated rocket and mortar attacks into Israel with fifty mortar shells being fired at Israel on Saturday alone. This has led to increased violence over the Gaza-Israel border. An Israeli shell fired at the source of a Palestinian rocket launch on Tuesday 22 March inadvertently killed four Palestinian civilians, whilst four Palestinian militants were reported killed in a separate strike.

Whilst Hamas is not believed to be seeking a full-scale escalation, its intentions remain unclear. The organisation faces grassroots pressure for the reunification of Palestinian factions, having rejected President Mahmoud Abbas's call for new elections in September.

Israel's policy is balanced between wanting to avoid escalation, whilst at the same time maintaining the deterrence which has kept the border relatively quiet and protected Israeli civilians since the end of Operation Cast Lead in January 2009.
For a full report, go to the BICOM web site.

Just a few minutes ago, I received the following message from a colleague in Israel:

"...scuds have been shot on Beersheva [pictured]and Ashdod, all the schools and kindergartens in Beersheva are closed today. A family in Gaza, including two children, was killed by an erring missile, which hit their house instead of the scud launching pad in a nearby grove. Things seem to be escalating.

"A newspaper article today reads "Israeli communities near the border are receiving a daily dose of mortars and rockets, and the Israel Air Force has been attacking Gaza. What began as a local escalation is steadily transforming into a broader conflict that the sides will apparently have difficulty stopping, though it's doubtful either side has an interest in reaching that point."

"Please pray for a restoration of peace in our area, and for the protection of innocents on both sides of the green line."