Petition calls for Royal Visit to Israel

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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.