#never mind the fact that palestinian jews and christians are being killed too

[rumplestiltrin]

must it take white people to report to you that what we say about our own queer experiences is correct? or will you get your head out of your ass and listen to what poc have to say about their own god damn experiences.

[jewishvitya]

A pro-Palestine Jew on tiktok asked those of us who were raised pro-Israel, what got us to change our minds on Palestine. I made a video to answer (with my voice, not my face), and a few people watched it and found some value in it. I'm putting this here too. I communicate through text better than voice.

So I feel repetitive for saying this at this point, but I grew up in the West Bank settlements. I wrote this post to give an example of the extent to which Palestinians are dehumanized there.

Where I live now, I meet Palestinians in day to day life. Israeli Arab citizens living their lives. In the West Bank, it was nothing like that. Over there, I only saw them through the electric fence, and the hostility between us and Palestinians was tangible.

When you're a child being brought into the situation, you don't experience the context, you don't experience the history, you don't know why they're hostile to you. You just feel "these people hate me, they don't want me to exist." And that bubble was my reality. So when I was taught in school that everything we did was in self defense, that our military is special and uniquely ethical because it's the only defensive military in the world - that made sense to me. It slotted neatly into the reality I knew.

One of the first things to burst the bubble for me was when I spoke to an old Israeli man and he was talking about his trauma from battle. I don't remember what he said, but it hit me wrong. It conflicted with the history as I understood it. So I was a bit desperate to make it make sense again, and I said, "But everything we did was in self defense, right?"

He kinda looked at me, couldn't understand at all why I was upset, and he went, "We destroyed whole villages. Of course we did. It was war, that's what you do."

And that casual "of course" stuck with me. I had to look into it more.

I couldn't look at more accurate history, and not at accounts by Palestinians, I was too primed against these sources to trust them. The community I grew up in had an anti-intellectual element to it where scholars weren't trusted about things like this.

So what really solidified this for me, was seeing Palestinian culture.

Because part of the story that Israel tells us to justify everything, is that Palestinians are not a distinct group of people, they're just Arabs. They belong to the nations around us. They insist on being here because they want to deny us a homeland. The Palestinian identity exists to hurt us. This, because the idea of displacing them and taking over their lands doesn't sound like stealing, if this was never theirs and they're only pretending because they want to deprive us.

But then foods, dances, clothing, embroidery, the Palestinian dialect. These things are history. They don't pop into existence just because you hate Jews and they're trying to move here. How gorgeous is the Palestinian thobe? How stunning is tatreez in general? And when I saw specific patterns belonging to different regions of Palestine?

All of these painted for me a rich shared life of a group of people, and countered the narrative that the Palestininian identity was fabricated to hurt us. It taught me that, whatever we call them, whatever they call themselves, they have a history in this land, they have a right to it, they have a connection to it that we can't override with our own.

I started having conversations with leftist friends. Confronting the fact that the borders of the occupied territories are arbitrary and every Israeli city was taken from them. In one of those conversations, I was encouraged to rethink how I imagine peace.

This also goes back to schooling. Because they drilled into us, we're the ones who want peace, they're the ones who keep fighting, they're just so dedicated to death and killing and they won't leave us alone.

In high school, we had a stadium event with a speaker who was telling us about a person who defected from Hamas, converted to Christianity and became a Shin Bet agent. Pretty sure you can read this in the book "Son of Hamas." A lot of my friends read the book, I didn't read it, I only know what I was told in that lecture. I guess they couldn't risk us missing out on the indoctrination if we chose not to read it.

One of the things they told us was how he thought, we've been fighting with them for so long, Israelis must have a culture around the glorification of violence. And he looked for that in music. He looked for songs about war. And for a while he just couldn't find any, but when he did, he translated it more fully, and he found out the song was about an end to wars. And this, according to the story as I was told it, was one of the things that convinced him. If you know know the current trending Israeli "war anthem," you know this flimsy reasoning doesn't work.

Back then, my friend encouraged me to think more critically about how we as Israelis envision peace, as the absence of resistance. And how self-centered it is. They can be suffering under our occupation, but as long as it doesn't reach us, that's called peace. So of course we want it and they don't.

Unless we're willing to work to change the situation entirely, our calls for peace are just "please stop fighting back against the harm we cause you."

In this video, Shlomo Yitzchak shares how he changed his mind. His story is much more interesting than mine, and he's much more eloquent telling it. He mentions how he was taught to fear Palestinians. An automatic thought, "If I go with you, you'll kill me." I was taught this too. I was taught that, if I'm in a taxi, I should be looking at the driver's name. And if that name is Arab, I should watch the road and the route he's taking, to be prepared in case he wants to take me somewhere to kill me. Just a random person trying to work. For years it stayed a habit, I'd automatically look at the driver's name. Even after knowing that I want to align myself with liberation, justice, and equality. It was a process of unlearning.

On October, not long after the current escalation of violence, I had to take a taxi again. A Jewish driver stopped and told me he'll take me, "so an Arab doesn't get you." Israeli Jews are so comfortable saying things like this to each other. My neighbors discussed a Palestinian employee, with one saying "We should tell him not to come anymore, that we want to hire a Jew." The second answered, "No, he'll say it's discrimination," like it would be so ridiculous of him. And the first just shrugged, "So we don't have to tell him why." They didn't go through with it, but they were so casual about this conversation.

In the Torah, we're told to treat those who are foreign to us well, because we know what it's like to be the foreigner. Fighting back against oppression is the natural human thing to do. We know it because we lived it. And as soon as I looked at things from this angle, it wasn't really a choice of what to support.

[mikhalsarah]

RIP Open Orthodoxy, eaten alive by parasitic “Wokeness”...

There are already three streams of Judaism where women can be rabbis (Conservative/Masorti, Reform, and Reconstructionist), I should know, I belong to one of them. I’ve never entirely understood the Orthodox commitment to sidelining women in this day and age, but the simple fact is, people who are unhappy with Orthodox halakhah in this area have other places to pray, and the stubborn refusal to pray in any of “those places”, yet fighting tooth and nail to make their own shuls become just like them, smack of a weird sort of snobbish attachment to the word “orthodoxy”....even though the rest of Orthodox is but a hair’s breadth from considering them a treif liberal “fake” Judaism like the rest of us already.

As difficult, but possible, as the issue of female rabbis would be to bring about, (seeing as it is a rabbinic prohibition based largely on cultural attitudes no longer in play in western society), the issue of getting the Orthodox to accept gay couples is another matter. Again, not an insurmountable issue, Centrist Orthodox Rabbi Schmuley Boteach has written quite openly about the need to find a place in Orthodox shuls for gay and lesbian Jews. However Orthodox culture is never going to let them hold hands during service or kiddush, for the simple reason that public displays of sexual/romantic affection, even between heterosexual married couples, are frowned upon everywhere from the sanctuary to the grocery store, due to the strong feeling that sexuality should be put aside, or sublimated, when encountering certain kinds of holiness (engaging in prayer etc). Of course, that does not mean that in Judaism sex is the opposite of holiness in some way, or else it would be forbidden to have sex on Shabbat. Since marital sex is a mitzvah (commandment, meritorious act) on Shabbat, better to understand it as a different kind of holiness, one that is not compatible with some other mitzvot (like prayer) or with public life in general. Sexuality itself is a sort of holiness surrounded by taboos and necessitating the utmost privacy in Judaism, so this is ironically probably the hill Orthodoxy would die on, not figuring out how to tolerate the gays.

I heartily agree that it’s time to stop being racist to the Palestinians. Strange though that a “Woke” rabbi still can’t bring himself to call them what they call themselves, and in typical Israeli/Zionist  fashion emphasizes their Arab otheness, rather than their indigenousness...thus making it seem rather like a favour being granted to them out of the goodness of his Woke heart, rather than an acknowledgement of their intrinsic belongingness. (This kind of stuff is typical for Woke social justice, which consistently cares far more about virtue-signalling and screaming at “white people”, or whomever else is deemed an Oppressor in the situation, than listening and paying attention to those who are actually oppressed.)

I spent decades of my life as a vegetarian, years of that as a vegan. Even though for medical reasons I had to adopt a diet which relies on meat for sufficient protein, I still try to limit my meat consumption. I am very pleased that so many people are seeing the value of vegetarian and vegan diets, and that even regular omnivore folk are adopting “meatless Mondays” and so forth. I’d be even better pleased with governments helping to encourage it by working to make it less expensive if/where possible. I’d nod my head approvingly if rabbis suggested meat-eating be reserved for Shabbat, if one didn’t feel able to give it up entirely. However, even when I didn’t practice (Judaism) and was secular it would never have occurred to me to ban it wholesale. I’m just not Puritan enough for banning things, I prefer the Quakerly ways of  “convincement”. The Woke, on the other hand, are full-bore Puritan, convert-the-heathen-masses.

This is perhaps the strangest part of entire essay. This newly minted “rabbi” is publicly expressing the desire to not just overhaul a big chunk of halakhah in order to make Judaism less restrictive and bring it further into line with the mores of the gentile world... a process that has been going on forever, whether excessively quickly (Reform) or excruciatingly slowly (Haredi)... but is calling to make Judaism more restrictive in other ways, by banning things permitted by halakhah which happens never or so infrequently that I can’t recall an instance offhand. And he’s willing to use secular governments to achieve it by force.

I recall hearing conservatives decades ago saying “Inside the heart of every liberal is a fascist screaming to get out” and laughing derisively at how they could think that. I laugh no more, though I contend that it is a particular species of illiberal liberal, known as the progressive activist, that is to blame rather than liberals in general. Still...there it is, and the regular liberals are generally no help opposing their own extremists because deep down they harbour that intrinsic liberal guilt that they are never doing enough or being enough to be truly authentic and useful. For authenticity and “real change” they look ever to the fringes, on the assumption that the more wildly opposed to society in general an ideology is, the better it is, if only they weren’t too cowardly and comfortable to join up and suffer like the “real” activists. 

I have to add here, how nice it is despite not having set foot in any shul in over a year, to still have something of the religious Jewish mindset, which makes impressive demands on your time, money, and moral fastidiousness, but at the same time reminds you constantly that you’ll never be perfect and will never accomplish everything you want or that God asks of you and God already accepts that as a given. “It is not yours to complete the task (of repairing the world), but neither are you free to desist from it.” -Pirkei Avot 2:21. Despite the reputation Judaism has for being guilt-inducing, at least we are free from the overwhelming and psychologically destructive levels of guilt induced by secular liberalism, which now has decided, via Wokeness, that merely existing in a society that is imperfect is a damnable offense, even if it is, on balance, one of the least imperfect societies around. This is how Jews like me know that Wokeness is not just a new religion, it’s an offshoot of Christianity, where just being born damns you to a state of perpetual sin.

This authenticity-of-the-extremists mindset blinds them to the fact that while the fringes are the birthplace of some excellent critiques and paradigm-changing ideas that have been of great benefit, those benefits most often only come when those ideas are tempered by counter-critiques and more pragmatic people who can tolerate the loss of ideological purity required to make them work in practice. Also invisible to the liberal mind are those historical moments when progressives have backed ideas that were...well, the term “clusterfucks” springs to mind.

 Progressives less than a century ago were enamoured with ideas ranging from Eugenics to Italian Fascism (less so with Naziism, but even that had its adherents until the war and the atrocities of the camps coming home to roost). They backed Communism to such a degree that it took Kronstadt to shake most of them loose, and they still idolize Che Guevara, the gay-hating, probably racist, illiberal who put people to death without trial and “really liked killing” (his words) and can’t hear a word against Communist China (”That’s racist to the Chinese!”) or Islamic extremists (”That’s Islamophobic!), despite the fact that Communist China is “re-indoctrinating” the Muslim Uighers and using them as slave labour (in part for the profits and in part because keeping the men and women separated prevents them breeding more Muslim Uighers), and despite the fact that the Islamists throw gay men off roofs in public executions. When you do get a left-liberal to admit something on the Left has gone wrong at all, they immediately shift to rationalizing it as somehow really being the fault of conservatives all along...even in a case like Eugenics where religious and other conservatives were fighting it tooth and nail.

(NB: This is not an endorsement of conservatives, who have their own sets of problems but who, when they finally do change their mind on an issue, don’t try to rationalize their former wrongheadedness by claiming it was really the fault of left-liberals that they ever believed such things in the first place)

And that brings us back to Zionism and the Woke. The Woke cannot for the life of them admit that it was secular, and often quite far left, Jews that birthed Zionism directly out of the leftist “liberation” traditions of the day (albeit with a healthy side of pro-Western colonialism-admiring fervour for being “an outpost of the West” shining the light of rationality on the barbaric, backward, religiosity of the Middle East). They don’t want to see it. It disturbs their comfortably simple narrative, which prefers to maintain that it was the “whiteness” of the original Zionist Jews and their early followers that was the problem, not their politics.

But Zionism is merely the predictable result of what happens when you take an oppressed people and tell them that their oppression entitles them to do whatever they need to in order to end their oppression and that violence is not violence when perpetrated by the oppressed. That the world owes them, and their descendants, something in perpetuity for having oppressed them, some sort of special treatment, and that it must never withdraw that special dispensation because that itself would be oppressing them again. The fact that what the Jews would feel like they needed to do was ethnically-cleanse their former homeland of people who had once shared it with them (both Jews and Palestinians can be traced to a shared ancestry in the region going back about 50,000 years) and necessitating a whole new liberation movement to free them was an unintended consequence of th\e liberation movement, but a consequence nonetheless.

The Woke cannot admit that Zionism is, in large part, a direct consequence of the leftist liberation project, and Woke Jews (who are almost invariably “white”) can’t admit that the rest of the Woke movement hates them. They truly deserve each other.

Ah, well, at least this “woke” rabbi isn’t trying to qualify for the cognitive dissonance finals by being Woke and a Zionist at the same time like the current rabbi of my (rapidly sinking) former synagogue. We’ve had rabbis that horrified the congregation by being too right-wing (mostly on halakhic issues rather than politics), and we’ve had rabbis that horrified (the older portion of) the congregation by being too left-wing and running off to march in Selma. Thanks to this rabbi haranguing the congregation daily about LGBTQ issues to the point that even the LGBTQ Jews got tired of hearing him (our sexuality is NOT our whole fucking existence...no pun intended) and marching around the Sanctuary with the Israeli flag on Shabbat (an honour reserved for the Torah even by the most fervently Zionist among us, none of whom are yours truly) we now have the dubious distinction of being a congregation horrified by a rabbi being both too left-wing and too right-wing simultaneously. 

Apropos of nothing, there is now a “For Sale” sign on the front lawn of my former synagogue and the membership at the Orthodox synagogue has grown with astonishing rapidity. We can extrapolate from this that in 4 years time, should the U.S. Republicans run any candidate remotely sane, they will sweep the election.

[militant-holy-knight]

Islamophobia: A “Zionist Plot”?

In response to Hating Muslims, Loving Zionists: Israel a Far-Right Model, where Al Jazeera gets everything wrong

Al Jazeera penned an opinion piece trying to lump anti-Muslim terrorism, rational critics of Islamism with Zionism of all things. The “logic” goes that “x Israeli politician is a far-righter”, many leading political figures in far-right politics that criticize Islam have expressed affection and approval for Israel; Palestine is oppressed by Israel and as such all of these things are related to each other. They even used the censored picture of Brenton Tarrant to drive the point home that “See? if you hate Islam, you are also just like this guy and oh, you support Israel too”. 

I can’t even begin pointing out what is wrong with this “some x are y, some y are z, therefore x are y” fallacy, I am even more surprised that right-winged critics of Israel didn’t even try to debunk it. In one hand, it’s pretty observable that support for Israel is strong among mainstream conservatism than other movements across the political spectrum. On the other hand, there is one figure who is never discussed when the topic of alt-right and Zionism overlap, being very little-known outside of Israel.

This is Meir Kahane, a ultra-Orthodox Jewish rabbi from the USA who migrated from to Israel and was a co-founder of the Jewish Defense League and the Kach political party. Also known as “Israel’s Ayatollah”, he urged the establishment of a Jewish theocracy codified by Maimonides (a Reconquista-era Spanish Jew), the immigration of all American Jews to Israel before a “second Holocaust” could take place and was very vocal about advocating the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, violence against Palestinians and those he deemed as “anti-semites”. He was extremely divisive: there were people who found his Jewish supremacist rhetoric intolerable and equated him to the Nazis, while in other camp you had those who supported him largely because of Arab aggression as The Los Angeles Times reported that “[he] is a reaction to the wanton murders of innocent men, women and children in Israel” (which you can find many parallels with modern day politicians supported by the alt-right). Kahane was arrested at least 62 times by Israeli authorities for inciting hatred.

While in prison, Kahane wrote a manifesto titled “They Must Go” where he advocates the complete exile of Palestinians and the necessary process how to do it arguing that if they didn’t they’d begin outbreeding the Jewish population and take over Israel in 20 years (he wrote it in the 80s). His manifesto reads a lot like the anxiety Europeans feel about Muslim migrants which isn’t alleviated in the slightest by them speaking out in the open how they will establish a European caliphate.

Kahane was popular enough with the Israelis that he was elected with one seat to the Knesset. However, he was never really popular with his fellow parliamentarians, whom he regarded as “Hellenists” (Jews who assimilated into Greek culture after being conquered by Alexander the Great), since Kahane thought they weren’t Jewish enough. Most of his proposed laws included: imposing compulsory religious education, stripping citizenship status of all non-Jewish citizens (including Christians) and demanding that relations with Germany and Austria being cut but monetary compensation for the Holocaust being kept.

In 1990, Kahane was assassinated by an al-Qaeda member (it’s believed he was one of the first victims of the terrorist group), who was initially cleared of the murder, but was arrested later for being implicated in the 1993 WWC bombing attempt, where he confessed his first crime and was jailed to life imprisonment. His death made him a martyr leading to Kach member Baruch Goldstein to swear revenge and in 1994, he walked into the Cave of the Patriarchs on the West Bank and shot up the place, killing 30 Muslims before being lynched by the survivors. Given the Cave of the Patriarch status as a important religious site to Islam, this atrocity would have provoked probably worse reactions than Christchurch.

While researching about these things, I couldn’t help but see so many parallels between that and the Christchurch mosque incident. Kahane’s manifesto reads a lot like Tarrant’s own. Even if they were not familiar with Kahane’s own views, it was probably not lost to those that really read into Tarrant’s manifesto that not once he denounces the State of Israel for the current state of Europe - instead he blames Angela Merkel, Reccep Erdogan and Sadiq Khan, straight up calling for their deaths. This seemed enough for many people to conclude Tarrant was an Mossad agent.

To those reading this you may be asking: you listed so many things in common with the alt-right, Islamophobia and Zionism, so what did Al Jazeera get wrong?

Ah, if you actually paid attention to the fringe discourse, you realize that nothing discredits you faster than declaring yourself far-right and voicing support for Israel. I sincerely doubt that white supremacists would have liked a Jewish supremacist like Kahane, specially his demands that Germany to continue paying reparations forever. The fringe right actually finds lots of solidarity with Palestinians and common ground with the liberal left than either side cares to admit. Sure many right-wing politicians happen to be Zionists, but those are the mainstream old guard. 

I also observed that they also are overwhelmingly in support of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in large part because he is an authoritarian model that stands up against Israel. Does it mean that all people who support Assad are also the same? No. Many support Assad because he is considered a bulwark against Islamism (even though he is a Muslim himself, albeit not considered one by terrorist extremists because he is Alawite). Despite his many flaws, normal people are willing to stand up for him because he represents stability in Syria.

I also take huge issue with Palestinians being referred to as exclusively Muslim because it erases their small and long-suffering Christian minority, which is never on anyone’s minds every time someone discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, despite the fact that Palestinian Christians played a huge role in resistance against Israel before the rise of Islamism ended up alienating them and Christians across the Middle-East aren’t necessarily thrilled about Israel either, not even Israeli Christians themselves.

It’s probably no coincidence that Al Jazeera, who denounces both Israel and the Assad regime who are antagonistic to each other, also happen to be big Islamist apologists which explains why they insist in portraying the Palestinian cause as a religious struggle rather than a nationalist one. It’s in their interest to denigrate critics of Islamism who run across the board in the political spectrum from atheists like Bill Maher and Sam Harris, Christians like David Wood, Brother Rachid and Zacharias Botros and Muslims like Majid Nawaz, Ed Hussein and Mohammed Tawid and many, many, many people worried about the dangers of Islamism, which they use so vociferously the term “Islamophobia” coined by the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist organization disguised as political party. This way they can lump all the opposition into one camp and paint them as Zionist Islamophobes.

With all that said, the rise of conservatism and nationalism across the world is co-related with the modern liberal left’s weakness to confront the Islamist Question. One of the key reasons that led to Donald Trump’s election were fears of Hillary Clinton increasing immigration as observed by the skyrocketing of sexual abuse cases in Western Europe. Even though he is a more despotic and authoritarian figure than Trump, Erdogan from Turkey is subjected to much less scrutiny from the Western media when he locks up more journalists anywhere in the world.

And this isn’t contained to the West either, the Bharatiya Janata Party characterized as Hindu nationalist and anti-Islamic continues being elected into power because of India’s spats with Pakistan and being formed in the first place because of Indian secularists appeasing to Muslims. And if the future is any indication, you can expect more persecutions of Muslims in Sri Lanka by Buddhists and Christians after the Easter bombings from this year. Those has less to do with Zionism and more with the fear of Islamism.

There is a good reason why I brought up Kahane into this editorial: much like modern day politicians, he was considered too radical by the status quo of the time yet gained the support of a silent majority like modern day because the current status quo proved intolerable. The same thing happened in my country with Jair Bolsonaro, who was already saying absurd things as early as the 90s and would never be considered as President of Brazil yet here we are, though Kahane was assassinated before he got the chance of being Prime Minister.

How many times are we going to deflect the problem like Al Jazeera before we confront it straight in the eye?

[suntitties]

.... many jobs require service. But think of the future and think of what your service means for palestinians who can't even live. I think helping them fight for their freedom and supporting that fight by not serving is much more important. Thank you.

I'm gonna reply to all of the anons that I got from you just in this reply, so listen carefully.Who do you think you are, trying to tell me what my country is? How do you know what we do and what we don't? Do you think you are entitled to call Israel a war criminal just based on some internet research you did, while I am living that reality every day? The internet is filled with fake information and twisting of events, and there's no possible way for you to know what's really going on if you don't live here and understand that people in here live in fear, too. I hope you never know what it's like to be here while there's a war, to be afraid to leave the house. And even when there's no war, you'll still be afraid to go to public places or just take a bus simply because something might happen any second. But it's so convenient calling us criminals and asking me not to go to the army to stop supporting the murder of innocent children because "many people do it", from your nice living room in a safe house and town somewhere in the states or in Europe, which haven't been in war. Did you know that for refusing to join the army one goes to jail? Of course the right thing to do, for you, from where you live, is to go to jail and refuse to support the occupation. But things aren't that easy.In your asks you accused Israel of being an apartheid, ethno-based country. WHERE did you get that information? Unless you live here or have studied Israeli politics all your life, you have no basis that claim. You have no way of knowing excpet again, doing an internet research. In the internet, things aren't always what's happening.I'll give you an example I saw happening. In one of the many knife attacks we had last summer (and trust me, we had plenty), 3 ISRAELI PEOPLE WERE KILLED. Eventually, the attacker got hit hard by people on the streets until police arrived and could handcuff him. What was the article in a British newspaper site stating? something about ABUSING A PALESTINIAN CITIZEN. Just a quick example of how you are never told the whole truth just because it is easy for the outside media (outside as in, not Israeli) to side with the higher number of casualties. Even though Israel too has lost about 23,000 soldiers in its wars, and 3000 innocent people in all sorts of terrorist attacks.Back to the israeli-Palestinian situation, in Israel, there's a wide arc of opinions about what should be done. Most of us are trying to make a change in the army's policy by voting for different parties in the kneset. But of course, there's the radical people who say, "kill all the gazans". Nobody sides with them BUT THEMSELVES. they are about 20% of this country.Hamas, on the other hand, NOT THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE but Hamas, has a saying in Arabic that says "itbah eil yahud", which means "slaughter the Jews". It is their goal not to live in a common land, but to extinct the Jewish people. So the land of "christians, Muslims and Jews" you so conveniently claimed should happen here, will not happen until this organization is exterminated. I will say again that if we want true peace - and believe me, all sides do because nobody goes to war for the fun of it even if it's convenient for the media to claim - we must fight Hamas. Nobody wants casualties and nobody wants war. But imagine the side you're fighting against has a huge stock of bombs in a public school in Gaza. You can't just kindly ask them to remove the bombs which are planned to be aimed at your country, right? So you give Palestinian people a 3 day notice to clear the area, because again, YOU DON'T WANT CASUALTIES, but it's Hamas that asks them to stay, and we have no way of knowing wether they have cleared out the area or not. I don't support the killing of innocent people on any side, nor I will ever, but for the killing to stop, both sides have to stop, and we must extinct the terrorist organization Hamas, and that should be our common goal. As someone who is soon to be in the army, I can safely say the ideology of the army is solely to take down Hamas, not to "occupy" Gaza or Yehuda and shomron, but to stop the organization which rules Gaza with fear and pure hate from existing. Claiming that Israel is an enemy, a war criminal, just because it pulls the trigger and it seems like the Palestinian people are the only ones suffering, is just based on a simplistic narrow-minded world view which can probably point on the fact that the knowledge you think you have is from what you've heard. Please, don't try to educate me on my country that I've lived in my entire life.My ideology is that we need to take down Hamas and only Hamas in order to live and peace. Israel is making that happen, and trying to do so with as little harm done as possible. Only when Palestinian people are freed from the control of Hamas, shall we all live peacefully. Our enemy is not Palestinian people. Or Israeli people. Our enemy is Hamas.

[salixj]

I came into my feminist destiny in 1967, both as an academic and as an activist. Our original feminist vision was radical and transformative. We believed in universal human rights. We envisioned multicultural diversity but we were not multicultural relativists. We called out misogyny when we saw it and did not exempt a rapist, a wife-beater, or a pedophile because he was poor (his victims were also usually poor); or a man of color (his victims were often people of color); or because he had an abused childhood (so had his victims).

Like other American radical feminists, I was active in the civil-rights and anti-war movements. Unlike other feminists, I had “once lived in a harem in Afghanistan.” This is the opening line of my book, An American Bride in Kabul. Quite unexpectedly, I lived in a polygamous household in very posh purdah—which meant I was not allowed out without a male escort. Quite surprisingly, my father-in-law had three wives and 21 children—facts my Westernized husband failed to mention during our long American college courtship.

When I was 20, I saw Afghan women stumbling around in burqas—sensory-deprivation isolation chambers, ambulatory body bags. These ghosts were forced to sit at the back of the bus. This was long before the Taliban arose. I remembered that sight even when I critiqued American sexism, racism, homophobia—and imperial overreach.

Phyllis Chesler in Israel, 1972. (Photo courtesy Phyllis Chesler)

Between 1967 and 1975, I joined NOW, went to meetings, joined a CR group and a class-action lawsuit, founded women’s studies at CUNY, co-founded the Association for Women in Psychology—and the National Women’s Health Network. In 1970, I delivered a fiery speech at the annual American Psychological Association meeting in Florida. I demanded reparations for the women who had been misdiagnosed, pathologized, drugged, and institutionalized by the psychological and psychiatric professions. Two-thousand people laughed at me—but nervously. Some accused me of “penis envy.”

I began writing what would become Women and Madness on the plane back to New York. My speech made world headlines. I was deluged by publishing offers. At the end of 1972, Adrienne Rich reviewed the book on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. My book became a bestseller, a “landmark,” a classic.

In the early to late 1970s, I delivered feminist speeches in Israel, began working with Israeli feminists; led a delegation of left-wing and feminist journalists to Israel; obtained signatures opposing the UN’s “Zionism=racism” resolution; co-organized a press conference and then a legendary conference about feminism and anti-Semitism and about women and Judaism; co-founded the first feminist Passover Seder which we held in my Manhattan apartment—and created Jewish-feminist life-cycle events. I also worked with Muslim dissidents and artists from Israel, Egypt, Kuwait, Iran, Lebanon, etc. During this time, I published three more feminist books.

In 1981, I convened a panel at the annual meeting of the National Women’s Studies Association in Storrs, Conn., about anti-Semitism and Feminism. For the second time, Aviva Cantor interviewed me for Lilith on this very subject. However, I did not become a professional Jew, I did not turn my Jewish identity or my concern about our survival, into a career or a calling.

Between 1981 and 2002, I researched and published six feminist books. I conducted campaigns on behalf of mothers losing custody, birthmothers being forced to surrender their genetic children against their will (aka surrogacy); a woman’s right to self-defense; and Jewish women’s religious rights in Jerusalem at the Kotel. (Yes, I prayed in the ezrat Nashim that first time in 1988, co-founded the International Committee for Women of the Wall, was a name plaintiff in our original lawsuit, and, after a quarter-century of grassroots and legal struggle, joined the Original Women of the Wall “Tfilat Nashim Bakotel.”)

I can tell you that anti-Semitism—Jew-hatred—is not new among feminists. I first encountered it in the early 1970s among radical feminists and lesbians and, together with Aviva Cantor and Cheryl Moch, immediately began exposing it.

However, a new and what I describe as a “faux feminism” has arisen in the last 30 years, a postmodern and postcolonial feminism that passionately condemns Christianity and Judaism as the greatest danger to women’s rights but dares not critique religiously supremacist Islam for this same reason; an intersectional “faux feminism” that condemns only Western imperialism and refuses to acknowledge the long history of Islamic imperialism, colonialism, slavery, anti-black racism, and religious and gender apartheid; a “faux feminism” that is far more concerned with the alleged occupation of Palestine than it is with the occupation of women’s bodies, faces, minds, and genitalia world-wide–including those women who are being forcibly face-veiled, death-threatened, and honor killed in the disputed territories.

Women’s studies associations, national feminist organizations—many feminist Jews—are not merely “politically correct”; they have become “Islamically correct.” They are currently more concerned with the religious sanctity of head and face veiling than they are with FGM, forced face-veiling, honor-based violence, polygamy, child marriage, and honor killing in the West. Not only have faux feminists betrayed the Jews—in the name of anti-racism, they have also abandoned tribal and immigrant women of color—Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus—to barbaric misogyny. Above all, they have abandoned the most heroic ex-Muslim, Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu feminist dissidents, both in the developing world and in the West.

And that’s the tragedy—that so many Western feminists have become such conformists. They are no longer independent thinkers. Faux feminists have also been persuaded that Islam is a “race,” not an ideology or a religion; that America’s historic enslavement of black Africans, and South Africa’s apartheid regime, is exactly the same as alleged Israeli discrimination against Arab Palestinians, including Jew-hating bomb makers and terrorists with blood on their hands.

Fundamentalists are trying to destroy what feminists have accomplished.

Feminists in America exposed, condemned, and analyzed rape. We began rape-crisis counseling and changed the laws about rape. Today, Western professional feminists—our women’s studies professors, politicians, journalists, human-rights activists—are not rescuing rape victims in Islamic communities, either in the Middle East or in the West. Feminists are too nervous about being called “Islamophobes,” “racists,” or “colonialists.”

We may not be able to personally, physically, rescue the raped girls of ISIS or Boko Haram or those in refugee camps across Europe. But American feminists can fund those who do; we can also call barbarism (beheading, stoning, crucifixion, public gang-raping, the destruction of our human cultural heritage) by its rightful name. We can finally understand that the leaders—not the people—of Iran and all the Caliphates in formation are dangerous to America and to a Western way of life. American-style feminism is also on the line.

We can help girls and women who live here and who are being beaten, stalked, and death-threatened by their own families because they refuse to veil or to marry their first cousin. Their blood should not be on our hands. We must create shelters or extended families that understand what honor-based violence is about. We must prosecute honor killers and their accomplices.

The battle for women’s rights is central to the battle for Western values. It is a necessary part of true democracy. Here, then, is exactly where the greatest battle of the 21st century is joined.

***

We live in dark times. We can feel it in our bones and see it written on the sky. Early in the 21st century, Jews were blown up, stoned, stabbed, and car-rammed to death in the Jewish state. The West refused to take note—and has now inherited the whirlwind. Think London, Madrid, Nice, London again, Barcelona; think Sept. 11, Fort Hood, San Bernardino, Orlando.

Like many people, I had assumed that the world’s hatred of Jews had ended, that Jewish history would never again repeat itself. I was wrong. Those who still believe that Jewish history can never again repeat itself must dispense with that illusion. Jewish history has always repeated itself and may continue to do so until the coming of the Messiah.

One of the things that’s new about the “new” anti-Semitism is that it is coming to us both from the Islamic world and from the Western intelligentsia—and this time it’s global, and 24/7, via videos, the internet, cable vision, doctored footage, etc..

Feminists are too nervous about being called ‘Islamophobes,’ ‘racists,’ or ‘colonialists.’

Anti-Semitism has, incorrectly, been viewed as solely a right-wing phenomenon. It is not. In fact, genocidal anti-Semitism has been perpetrated against Jews by ancient pagans, by Christians—both Catholic and Protestant, by Muslims—both Sunni and Shia, by Nazi-pagans, and by criminal psychopaths. We have recently been horrified by genuine, bona fide, American Nazi freaks in Charlottesville, chanting “Blood and Soil,” “Jews will not replace us,” and holding aloft flaming torches. This evokes terrible collective memories. Yet these hundreds of white Nazis on American soil are not nearly as numerous as Muslims who have been religiously, politically, and socially indoctrinated to hate and kill Jews and other infidels.

In 2003, I published the first edition of The New Anti-Semitism. I wrote that anti-Zionism is the new-Anti-Semitism—and I held the Western intelligentsia responsible for their alliance with Islamic-style Jew-hatred. My Berkeley-based editor fought with me about this. Back in 2003, what I was saying was considered heresy. It still is.

For the first time in my career, the increasingly left-(and no longer) liberal media was not interested in reviewing my work or publishing what I had to say. I was shunned by many of my feminist friends on the left but welcomed by conservatives, libertarians, and Zionists who had long viewed me and my cohorts as dangerous to Judaism and to Zionism. I sometimes needed police protection when I spoke on American campuses. But it was also as if I had not spoken. I was “disappeared.”

After publishing The New Anti-Semitism, I went on to write six more books, two not yet published, and nearly a thousand articles. I also conducted and published four studies about honor killing. This pioneering feminist research about femicide enabled me to submit affidavits on behalf of Muslim and ex-Muslim girls and women in flight from being honor killed in immigrant communities in Europe, North America, the Middle East, Asia, India, and Africa. This research has also been used in honor killing prosecutions in the United States and Canada.

The fact that I am also a passionate Zionist has been used to marginalize my feminist work. Like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, I have been disinvited as a keynote speaker at conferences. I have “made” some death lists. I have seen American classrooms being invaded by American totalitarians, fascists who, in the name of “free speech” and “academic freedom,” are verbally and physically violent. They mean to censor all objective truth, but especially the truth about Israel and Islam, and to redact history.

Today, my closest allies are not faux-feminists for Palestine. I work with genuine dissidents. Therefore, none of us are politically correct. We are anti-Islamists or anti-Sharia-ists: As the feminists of yore, we share one universal standard of human rights. We support post-Enlightenment Western values such as individual, human, and women’s rights, free speech, the right to dissent, freedom from and freedom of religion, the separation of religion and state. These dissidents comprise the major resistance movement of our time. Many write under pseudonyms and live with 24/7 police protection.

I can no longer work with Jew-haters. It is too painful. Therefore, my allies and I all support Israel’s right to exist and flourish.

Gender apartheid and honor-based violence are human-rights violations and cannot be justified in the name of cultural relativism, tolerance, anti-racism, diversity, or political correctness. Why are so many good feminist Jews confused about any of this?

Our tribes are, as ever, at war with each other. How may we best understand this? Rabbi Hillel is known for his three questions.

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” “If I am only for myself, what am I?” “If not now, when?”

Jewish conservatives, Zionists, and many Orthodox Jews are trying to answer his first question: “If I am not for myself …” Jewish liberals and leftists are trying to answer only his second question, “If I am only for myself….” As a people, we need to answer both questions, and as the rabbi asked: “If not now, when?”

Adapted from a speech, “The New Feminism and Anti-Semitism,” delivered at the UJA Federation in Manhattan on Sept. 12, 2017, in acceptance of the “Defender of Women’s Rights Award.”

***

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[vegas-glitz]

Governments, Terrorism and Faux News

http://topicsofnote.com/?p=1721&utm_source=SocialAutoPoster&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Tumblr

"Authorities of the people today, by the men and women, for the individuals, shall not perish from the earth."

Regrettably, these days people terms and plans are nonetheless not carried out and likely never will be. There are too numerous interests associated in establishing these types of an perfect government. Also significantly moi, prejudice, and economic, social and several other and conflicting interests are included in the essential ingredients for melding these kinds of a authorities. It's possible it need to be like this in the identify of democracy and flexibility of preference probably the persons really don't deserve such an ideal governing administration.

The significant challenge is building the preferred balance between all individuals beliefs and needs. The two extraordinary opportunities are a federal government with much too much electricity and a weak, divided government that is not able to make crucial conclusions. A authorities or an corporation with sufficient means can do virtually something. Not only that, they can even publicly justify their steps in the identify of preserving and protecting the democracy. They will guidance their actions, which may be unlawful, immoral or even legal in the title of justice, for the people today and country. To stability amongst a completely open up society wherever every little thing is transparent, seen and recognized to all people and a closed modern society where specified actions and facts are recognised to couple of is a really complicated undertaking. "People today never have to know every thing," may have justification in particular conditions. Polls have presently proved that the mood of individuals can be very easily manipulated and improve directions with time, occasions and publicity.

Governments can, if they would like, do away with sure teams or persons who, in their impression, oppose and are hostile to their procedures. The elimination of a terrorist or a political opponent is as straightforward to obtain as it is quick to cover from the general public. The loss of life or disappearance of this kind of people is discussed below types this kind of as organic will cause, accidents, psychological hospitalization or death for the duration of unexpected emergency medical procedures.

All agencies, unofficial and formal, these kinds of as the CIA, MI5/6, KGB and the Mossad, were and will be executing "it" in the identify of nationwide stability. The preferred community explanation may perhaps be: "In buy to shield, maintain or even implement Democracy." In certain cases those people steps could possibly be really justified the challenge is exactly where to established the restrict. Several people today have disappeared worldwide in the name of nationwide stability.

The rationale of nationwide safety for not disclosing selected details or imprisoning an undesired subject matter is utilized way too often by quite a few nations and corporations. Governments work predominantly at 3 stages. Although amount one particular is the cleanse and white level of activities, reserved for heads of states and extremely uncovered political figures, degree two is the grey region. This is an unethical spot of exercise which smells negative but is nevertheless authorized. Killing, eliminating, removing and falsifying are component of degree a few. Usually, "we the men and women" are uncovered to level a single and at times to level two, but hardly ever to stage three.

At stage 3, I can mention for case in point, Gerald Bull, the Canadian engineer who formulated the Babylon or "super-gun" extended-vary artillery for the Iraqi govt. Bull was assassinated in Brussels, Belgium in March 1990.

It is really fascinating to be aware the language evolution with regard to using politically right terminologies. The phrase-laundering is rather intriguing. Phrases these kinds of as "Terrorists" or "liberty fighters," "guerrillas", "political assassination" or "getting rid of from power" all relies upon on which facet you question or chat to.

The United states is a tremendous-ability with around the globe existence and intervention. In normal, they are a stabilizing factor. Numerous Americans will not have an understanding of the value of their assistance for specific nations and at the identical time numerous supported nations around the world only despise their presence.

To far better realize the higher than, consider to imagine a planet without the U.S. involvement. Let's think that the U.S. is not a tremendous-power or they evolved from an Empire to a common Republic interested generally in their inside affairs.

What would the environment search like devoid of U.S. intervention?

Oil is 1 of the big electricity sources of most contemporary nations around the world. Oil was a person of the main motives for wars and the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein. It was not a territorial dispute it was about oil. The Us citizens are one particular of the biggest oil consumers, so it is evident why the U.S. was intrigued in assisting Kuwait.

Even so, this is not the entire image. The U.S. involvement all in excess of the entire world is not only for oil and financial passions. Most folks believe that that there are other factors. In the era of a globalized financial state, planet steadiness is important and in accordance to the Chaos concept, even a tiny issue in the Middle-East, for instance, can crank out a chain response which has an effect on the U.S. in several parts. Most persons believe that the global American intervention is also due to the fact they treatment. They treatment about creating and retaining Democracies and enabling independence for most people just about everywhere attainable. Clearly there are other factors and passions so what are they?

China is getting a main participant in the earth arena. They are the second premier oil customers. The route of oil to China is secured and enabled by the U.S. Navy. China's extensive term target could be to be equal the U.S. and they can accomplish it.

Without the U.S., Taiwan would stop to...exist as a Democracy and may well be annexed to mainland China. With out the U.S., Japan would have to get nuclear capabilities if they preferred to keep on being impartial. They have experienced a continuing dispute with China since 1937, and the Chinese will in no way ignore the Japanese invasion. The U.S. assisted Iran indirectly by eradicating Saddam Hussein, who experienced fought Iran over a border dispute for eight years. Saddam Hussein was interested in producing Iraq an influential power in the Persian Gulf region. He invaded Iran not only simply because of the very long record of border disputes, but also to enlarge Iraq's oil reserves. Europe desires and desires oil, but they are not prepared to pay out the whole rate to get it. They loathe the American presence and will not accept that without having the U.S., they wouldn't get the oil they want.

Europe's mind-set toward Israel is incredibly hypocritical. They have a limited memory on the other hand what unites Europe from Israel or the Jews is Anti-Semitism.

Given that March 2003 when Recep Tayyip Erdogan grew to become Turkey's Prime Minister, their plan toward Israel has changed. Erdogan was unsatisfied with Israel's reaction to Hezbollah's kidnapping of troopers in 2006 he was vital when Israel carried out the Gaza War he asked to examine Israel's nuclear facilities beneath IAEA inspection and he has criticized Israel for its a lot of defensive actions.

The stress in between the nations has escalated subsequent the Gaza flotilla raid. The query is what his motives are and if he has a concealed agenda that may perhaps reveal his overzealous focus to Israel. His reactions have received Turkey impact and sympathy among the his Arab neighbors. Significantly, he could have obtained certain pros among the his domestic political get-togethers. His exclusive collaborative notice and meetings with Syria and Iran should stress the West and especially Israel.

The Kurdistan Workers' Occasion or PKK, started in 1978, is a Kurdish business which fights against Turkey. Their purpose is to establish an independent Kurdish state. There is a assert by Germany that the Turkish military has utilized chemical weapons towards members of the PKK.

Lebanon is a puppet state controlled by Syria and Iran. Hezbollah or "The Bash of God" is a Shi'a Islamic group concerned in Lebanese politics, supported by Syria and Iran. Really, they are considered by most of the globe as a terrorist organization. Their forces are trained and structured by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Their primary intention is to remove the colonial entity in Lebanon and to establish an Islamic routine.

To achieve that, the Iranians with their supporters all are united underneath the hatred towards Israel and their want to eliminate the Zionist entity from the region.

A top magic formula CIA document unveiled on April 2004 lists the a lot of achievable suspects for the assassination of Elie Hobeika, former Lebanese Forces Commander.

Achievable culprits involve fellow Christians, other users of the Lebanese elite, Palestinians and Israelis.

According to a Western information agency, a formerly unidentified anti-Syrian group, "Lebanese for a Free and Impartial Lebanon." has claimed responsibility. The assert may possibly be connected with rightwing Maronite Christians, who bore a grudge versus Hobeika because he betrayed the Lebanese Forces and the Israelis by switching allegiance to the Syrians in the mid-80. Hobeika also was active in Christian infighting for the duration of Lebanon's civil war.

Palestinians despise Hobeika mainly because he allegedly directed the massacre of about 1,000 Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla in 1992.

An Israeli fee in 1983 accused Hobeika of carrying out the massacre and held then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon indirectly responsible for the assault.

Several Lebanese suspect Israeli involvement due to the fact Hobeika experienced reported he would testify in opposition to Sharon if the Belgians went ahead with a trial accusing Sharon of genocide and crimes versus humanity for his function in Sabra and Shatilla.

A Belgian court docket up coming thirty day period will rule on whether a judicial investigation into Sharon's function can commence.

President Lahud claims Hobeika was killed to quit him from testifying, in accordance to press stories, a sentiment echoed by other authorities officials.

There is no immediate proof of Israeli involvement in the assassination, but highlighting an Israeli relationship could assist the Lebanese steer clear of the inner friction that would come up if a Lebanese group had been blamed.

Any individual who thinks that the Israel-Palestinian conflict is over territories is totally wrong.

Israelis are willing to give back sure territories and make peace in trade for a piece of paper... Regretably, dependent on history, those signed agreements have a pretty brief life time. In the risky area of the Middle-East Israel will encounter numerous issues without having U.S. help. In the 1980s Soviet navy forces in Afghanistan confronted a different form of war than they experienced expert in the earlier. The resistance forces combating them had been the mujahedeen.

The Makhtab Al-Khidamat (MAK) was established by Osama Bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam, which led to the institution of Al-Qaeda in 1988. At the conclude of the Soviet profession they preferred to prolong and justify their functions, so they experimented with to contain other Islamic triggers. It is quite apparent that Al-Qaeda benefited from the U.S. funding and teaching offered to the Afghan mujahedeen preventing the Soviet invasion.

There are a lot of Al-Qaeda cells which are operative globally. Devoid of united cooperation they will continue on their terrorist operations which include their attempt to get nuclear linked weapons.

Source by Dr Giora Ram

[delwray-blog]

YOU’VE BEEN LIED TO

AMERICA YOU’VE BEEN LIED TO Written here is a critical re-examination of presumed historical facts and existing historiography. America you’ve been lied too, history has been a lie and has become the engine of man’s demise. Corrupt beliefs have become the truth. “Mainstream History is Entirely False” What we’re up against is bigger than any country. In fact, it’s bigger than all the countries in the world. The ruthless powers that be have decided that only they can declare what is true and that it is against the law to disagree with them. The human mind is being locked up for the final time. Amazon, Google, and Facebook are all Jewish entities, and all prohibit objective discussion about the lies told about the World Wars. Utterances that describe the events of World War II that are not approved by the Jews are now called “hate crimes”. Jews most definitely cannot prove what they say about WWII — but we can. Six million! Baloney! 296,081 is Germar Rudolf’s 2003 count, following the International Red Cross count in October 1980 of 273,905. How many billions of dollars have the Jews stolen from the world with this falsehood they have inflicted on everyone with their incessant and fallacious media propaganda? Think about the 66 million, mostly Christians, that the Bolshevist Jews murdered in Russia from 1917-1957. Jews can’t prove there were gas chambers at Auschwitz or anywhere else. The thousands of hysterical Jewish testimonies about concentration camp horrors remain totally refuted by the International Red Cross visits during the war which found German treatment of prisoners far superior to the way Americans treated the Japanese prisoners they interned during WW II. Think about why Ursula Haverbeck, age 89, would risk prison to tell the real story of WW II, in which three Jewish controlled countries, Britain, the USSR, and the USA conspired to eliminate the last viable challenger to Jewish financial control of the world, which was the German economic miracle devised and deployed by Adolf Hitler. Would Mrs. Haverbeck do this because she was insane, or because she was telling the truth? It is even more puzzling, why would the German government insist on jailing an old woman who questioned a simple detail of history unless they were trying to cover up a gigantic lie? For those with eyes to see, the answer is clear. Think too about Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gadhafi, both of whom treated their citizens much more kindly than the Jewish-run countries of the West. They followed Hitler’s example of treating their own people well. And they were murdered by the Jewish Deep State using their favorite weapon, the American war machine. Most Americans simply have not realized that all contemporary media, movies, music, TV, even books are controlled by Jews. Those outlets not owned by Jews are statistically insignificant and generally ignored. But now, the Jewish onslaught of trying to erase independent thought from the world has intensified. A whole category of history has been expunged by the Jews from all the electronic media they own, which is practically everything. And honest people are being lined up for incarceration and silence so the Jews may more easily make their fabricated history become the de facto history of the world. Imprisoned by lies Everyone in the world is now prevented by financial blackmail from even contemplating the truth. Jews control all your money, no matter how many non-Jewish intermediaries exist between you and them. Even as you read this, the vise grips clamped around your head begin to tighten. Play ball and you have nothing to worry about. Blow the whistle on these child-eating maniacs and you’re going down hard. They’ll kill your children. A Congressman whose questions were a little too sharp just resigned because of that threat. Remember what happened to Paul Wellstone. Revisionists tend to be idealists. They observe objectively. What they write tends to be clear. They don’t make things up unlike the purveyors of the lies they seek to revise. I’m like everybody else. I believed the propaganda I heard most of my life (or at least since the late 1960s). Took me to middle age to be jarred into realizing I believed in some obvious lies. What if telling the truth will cost you your job? What if your wife and family call you a beast and throw you out of the house for harboring such horrendous ideas? Jews own your soul because they own your money and also have the ability to take it all away from you at any time. They want you to be afraid, to tell the truth. As a replacement, they want you to believe their truth, which is invariably at variance with what actually happened. Both World Wars, 9/11, the fouling of the sky with chemtrails, the poisoning of humanity with Glyphosate, and the capture of the world’s media, these are all Jew poisons you ingest daily. God help you if you start telling people that Adolf Hitler was actually the good guy. It won’t matter to them that it happens to be the truth, because they’re so scared of what will happen to them should they choose to stop living their lie. Mainstream history is entirely false In case you don’t know by now, the Jewish truth is an oxymoron. There is no such thing existing in the world. The Jews’ holiest books command Jews to lie to non-Jews in all situations. Now they’ve swindled the money of every country in the world, which all dance to the puppet’s tune while their leaders steal most of the money. The penetration of Jewish lies in the world mind is nearly complete. Most of what people have been tricked into believing is false. Regarding the empirical facts of World War II, we can prove what we say and they can’t. They can only cast aspersions, trap you in blackmail, or if all else fails, hire some hungry poor person with sociopathic tendencies to murder you. If your offense is somewhat less bothersome, they use the courts, the law, the legal profession, the cops, and the TV stations which will tell everyone what a bad person you are because you disagree with the Jews. In the European Union courts, when it comes to Holocaust disputation, they say the truth is no defense. They put you in jail merely for attempting to tell the truth. How silly is that? Pick an adjective. Insane would be a good one. Jewish scripture urges Jews “to kill the best Gentiles”, which they do, constantly. A game we can’t win The measure of Jewish control of Britain was amply demonstrated by the arrest and continuing harassment of singer Alison Chabloz. This self-appointed Jew organization had to browbeat the government four times before charges were finally pressed. She could have lampooned any other ethnic group and no one would have lifted an eyebrow. And then they staged this phony arrest of Tommy Robinson supposedly protesting the Muslim rape epidemic to make sure Alison got no media coverage. (By the way, why have British authorities allowed the Muslim rape epidemic to continue for more than ten years?) We’re playing a Jewish game with the media, and it’s a game we can’t win. Jez Turner was put in jail for worse. He described Jewish control of British history perfectly and got slammed into jail during a particularly fruitful roundup of Revisionist activists. Now the Schaefer’s are in jail and Arthur Topham, who had been devoutly monitoring the daily status of the recently arrested, remains silent. And this is what these anti-Semitism laws are all about: to prevent discussion of Jewish crimes. Jewish soldiers kill Palestinians for fun. Jewish food producers poison Americans by the millions. Jewish drug manufacturers have addicted the whole world to their poison pills. All Jews are sociopaths because they follow the insane commands of the Talmud. Jews are not allowed to report crimes by their fellow Jews. How can they be good citizens anywhere? They have turned America into a sociopathic country, using the promotion of blacks to retard the culture of whites. People are being lied to. The U.S. is the chief force for evil in the world, mostly because they are doing the bidding of rich Jews who control the world’s money supply. Besides Israel and the Jews in the City of London, I defy you to tell me another power in the world that can make the U.S. military go anywhere in the world and murder those they are ordered to eliminate. Mindless obedience to murderous policies Tell the truth and go to jail! It’s the new party toast. Everything has been reversed. Leave those child molesters alone; they’re the ones in charge of the world. How in the world is anyone supposed to deal with a legal system that declares the truth is no defense. What would Thomas Jefferson say about that? Everything has been reversed. The good people are being put in jail. The bad people are making the laws. So that the freedom of speech and thought once guaranteed to all Americans are no longer in effect. Today, we can no longer criticize Jews for their manic criminality that negatively affects everybody on Earth. We will be arrested if we do. But if we don’t the future promises only mindless obedience to murderous policies from which we may never be able to protect ourselves. Refuse to Believe the Lies the Jewish-Programmed Media “Monsters” want you to believe! It is no more anti-Semitic to expose Jewish Zionist gangsters than it is anti-Italian to expose the Mafia. The Sicilian Mafia and the Jewish Zionist Cabal is basically the same sort of organizations built on tribal loyalty, tribal cronyism, murderous ruthlessness, and secrecy to advance their criminal designs. The true criminals have to be exposed to the majority... Are you afraid to tell the truth? You ought to be: Offend the Jews and your future is in jeopardy. How ironic that the group known as the world’s greatest liars now control the entire world’s media? Recognizing ‘something above your own nature’ helps detoxify the lies you’ve been told. No doubt if you have studied history beyond the mainstream abortion of it, you have had occasion to tell certain people something they simply refuse to believe, because it goes against what they’ve learned in their lifetimes through schools, newspapers, and TV — which mostly echo the lies of scheming politicians and their pathological theoreticians who conveniently shape history to fatten their own financial portfolios. Utterly deceived by the political lies our government tells us every day, we actually have no idea about our own actual history nor, in this useless overproduction of knowledge we are required to master that actually prevents us from thinking at all, do we have any idea what our government is doing at this present moment. We don’t find out later, either, because no matter who is in charge, they lie about everything they say, and insist it’s in the best interests of the people. Is this a species that can be trusted, or relied upon to do the right thing? The evidence says otherwise. Think about it. What is happening in the world is usually 180 degrees out from what our government SAYS is happening. Example, we are bombing Syria because we are fighting ISIS; yet, we are funding ISIS through third-party stooges Qatar, Bahrain, and the evil Saudis. We invented al-Qaida to answer the question of who knocked down the World Trade Center towers, and just today the government was telling us we had to look at al-Qaida, now tens of thousands strong and positioned all over the world, as a positive force in America’s war on Syria. https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/09/12/17-years-after-911-us-backs-al-qaeda-in-syria.html And of course the entire sordid drama is overseen by the Israeli puppet masters, who are immune to all logic and laws with their financial stranglehold on most of the politicians in the world. Law enforcement in the United States is a complete joke when the highest officials in the land commit crimes openly and a lapdog press corps constantly looks the other way while feeble police kill innocent bystanders for no reason but their own incompetence and even if they are charged is seldom convicted. Yet still, Americans have yet to understand that what psychopathological criminals do to their enemies they will do to their friends, and this is what everyone is experiencing right now as our society prepares for its final shakedown. The abuse of innocence Which are you? You’re cynical and razor-sharp self or a bruised ego on a mission to nowhere? In any case, you’re likely to trust your own poorly informed ego; you’re not likely to admit your comprehension of history is totally erroneous. Ancient Greece’s great leader, Pericles, spoke of this in his famous Funeral Oration. . . . It is hard to speak properly upon a subject where it is difficult to convince your hearers that you are speaking the truth. On the one hand, the friend who is familiar with every fact of the story may think that some point has not been set forth with that fullness which he wishes and knows it to deserve. On the other, a stranger to the matter may be led by envy to suspect exaggeration if he hears anything above his own nature. For men can endure to hear others praised only so long as they can persuade themselves of their own ability to equal the actions recounted: when this point is passed, envy comes in and with it incredulity. Praise of other people is tolerable only up to a certain point, the point where one still believes that one could do oneself some of the things one is hearing about. Once beyond that point, people become jealous disbelievers. But perhaps Pericles’ best remembered piece of advice is this. One’s sense of honor is the only thing that does not grow old, and the last pleasure when one is worn out with age, is not, as the poet said, making money, but having the respect of the people who have known you best. For it is only the love of honor that never grows old; and honor it is, not gain, as some would have it that rejoices the heart of age and helplessness. Though deemed out of fashion in a Wall Street world, this lost honor is what keeps humanity distracted from their own lives by the chains of chaos. Society has been overtaken by its own promiscuity One of the ironies of the creative process is that it partly cripples itself in order to function. I mean that, usually, in order to turn out a piece of work, the author has to exaggerate the emphasis of it, to oppose it in a forcefully competitive way to other versions of the truth; and he gets carried away by his own exaggeration, as his distinctive image is built on it . . . . The problem is to find the truth underneath the exaggeration, to cut away the excess elaboration or distortion and include that truth where it fits. Ernest Becker, the Denial of Death, 1974 The false cry of SIX MILLION DEAD Echoes across time like a nightmare from the mind of a madman. You’ve no doubt seen the story of the history detailing the use of this freighted phrase since the late 19th century, six million Jews in jeopardy of starving by one evil government or another, forever 6 million! Jewish newspapers kept running these stories right up until they could pin it all on Hitler in a triumphant public relations strategy. Becker, a Jewish cultural anthropologist, described the danger of exaggeration correctly. He also inadvertently described the situation of so-called Jewish persecution by the Germans, which was triggered by a Jewish declaration of war against the Germans nine years before World War II ever started. The Red Cross death toll from German camps researched in 1980 came to around 270,000. How much of a Jewish exaggeration is 6 million? And where do the 12 million Germans who were murdered by the ‘allies’ after the war ended fit into your calculations? Also, the blood libel of the Jews wanting to suck the blood of gentile children was falsely blamed on the Germans, who actually were scrupulous in their conduct of prisoners. Because of kosher public relations excellence, virtually the entire world believes the Jewish lies about Hitler, who in fact was the world’s most beloved leader of the 20th century. Name a U.S. president who was so beloved, if you care to try. This habit of overwrought exaggerations is also constantly present in all American rhetoric about Russia, which has been ingrained into our minds as an evil menace as surely as Hitler was demonized, but only by Jewish media and not as a rule by ordinary people around the world, especially now after the heroic Russians saved Syria from American and Israeli perfidy. I’m saying public political palaver today is lost in its own exaggerations which obscure the actual content of what is being said. After all the sensational charges, the fact remains America has propped up Russia throughout the 20th century so that the moneymaking tension keeping us on the verge of constant war kept on generating maximum profits for the Rothschild’s and their weapons manufacturers. This process applies to the two greatest tragedies in recent times — World War II and 9/11 — in which total lies are accepted as fact by a majority of people in the world. Far removed from the time it happened, people are today being slammed into jail for challenging propagandistic lies now called “The Holocaust” that justify the crimes of the Deep State maniacs who seek to turn the world into a giant prison. And the obvious hoax of steel skyscrapers being destroyed by fire is by now seen by all those who care to contemplate the absurdity of the government’s 9/11 hype and the blanket immunity given to Israelis caught by the cops on their way to blow up the George Washington Bridge as classic smokescreens in the fog of war. How can a population be deemed sane when its own government (the USA) has its main enemy (Russia) surrounded by military bases, and yet, Americans are told Russia remains the greatest threat? There are no Russian military bases surrounding the U.S. You know, of course, that back in the days of the czars, Russia was America’s best friend, but that was before the obvious emergence of Jewish power in America. By the time the 19th century turned into the 20th, Rothschild henchman Jacob Schiff had engineered the Japanese defeat of Russia in 1905, not only betraying a reliable old friend but setting up a new patsy for future wars. The cause of the blindness How can it be we’ve been unable to see the scam that continues to be played on us, always it’s the rich get richer and the poor disappear to the impartial ruthlessness of poverty? It hasn’t been by accident. Its one thing to talk about nationhood but quite another to talk about what is best for the human species. From that tangent develops every revolution and every invention known to humanity, as the struggle for personal gain collides with simple facts that keep us alive, such as air to breathe and water to drink. Is it best for our children to hear of our role inflicting cholera on a large part of the population of Yemen for the purpose of securing shipping lanes and oil fields? This is who we are as Americans. But is it who we are as humans? The human tendency is to revel in the misfortunes of others, and there are plenty of sources around to provide them for us. In fact, all commerce is based on strife, the amelioration of desires, which is why, I guess, the cleverest among us have seized upon constant wars as the best moneymaking opportunity out there. It is your choice to let this strategy be the epitaph of an extinct human species. The current political climate might as well be a script for some mindless TV sitcom where the truth is nowhere to be found, only the propaganda programming of perverts trying to turn people into robots, a venomous project which has largely succeeded. The Jews founded all three TV networks and they called it diversity. None of this will be important when we are dead. But the point is to avoid this eventuality for as long as possible, and the first step is doing this is to perceive the world as it really is as best we can, and refuse to accept the hollow lies the Jewish-programmed media monsters command us to believe. John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida, constantly trying to figure out why we are destroying ourselves, and pinpointing a corrupt belief system as the engine of our demise.

[newstfionline]

Trump’s Hard-Line Israel Position Exports U.S. Culture War Abroad

By Max Fisher, NY Times, Jan. 21, 2018

Within a foreign policy otherwise characterized by its haphazardness, the Trump administration has pursued one issue with single-minded intentionality: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

President Trump’s actions have consistently expressed a particularly American notion of being “pro-Israel.” But it is one rooted less in the conflict itself than in the United States’ own culture wars.

Bitter debates over terrorism and tolerance, polarized along demographic and partisan lines, have primed a faction of Americans to express their identity in part through solidarity with Israelis and opposition to Palestinians.

Politicians have long catered to this view, but Mr. Trump is first to make it official policy. Recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and threatening to close the Palestine Liberation Organization office in Washington, though never quite explained in foreign policy terms, resonate domestically.

“We pay the Palestinians HUNDRED OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS a year and get no appreciation or respect,” Mr. Trump tweeted this month, presaging a decision to withhold $65 million in funding from a United Nations agency that provides relief to Palestinian refugees.

Vice President Mike Pence, an Evangelical Christian, visits Israel this week, the culmination of his years of support for the country on religious grounds. But the Trump administration’s policies, while lauded by American Evangelical groups, are opposed by Palestinian Christians and have been questioned by Pope Francis.

Those policies, in other words, align poorly with either the religious solidarity or foreign policy realism that supposedly animated them, but align perfectly with American identity politics.

How a Mideast Conflict Divided Americans. Americans, more polarized than at perhaps any other point in their modern history, tend to be less divided on foreign policy. But they split on Israel as if it were a domestic issue, suggesting that, whether they realize it or not, they experience it as such.

Asked whether they sympathize more with Israelis or Palestinians, Republicans answer the former nearly seven to one, according to a Pew survey. Democrats sympathize with the groups about equally. Within the parties, conservatives tilt more pro-Israeli.

That partisan gap is at its widest since Pew began asking the question in 1978. And it applies to nearly any policy question related to Israelis and Palestinians, suggesting that Americans derive their views by identifying with one side over the other.

Picking sides has long been taboo in American policy, with presidents asserting that the United States must remain neutral in order to negotiate peace. Mr. Trump, breaking with this practice, answers a major conservative demand.

When Evangelical Christians organized as a political bloc in the 1980s, they made Israel a priority. Some interpreted the Bible as asserting Israel’s right to control the Palestinian territories. In the 1990s, as Democrats pushed for social changes, Evangelicals sorted into the Republican Party.

“Israel isn’t an ‘issue’ for evangelicals in the same way that deregulation and a better tax policy are issues,” Robert Nicholson, who leads a Christian advocacy group, said in an email. “It is a matter of identity.”

While this bolstered Republicans’ pro-Israel attitudes, the parties did not polarize on the issue. Many Evangelicals expressed their support as a matter of spiritual kinship rather than prevailing over Palestinians. After all, a number of Palestinians are Christian themselves. And Mr. Trump, though popular with Evangelicals, is hardly one himself.

Research by Amnon Cavari, an Israeli political scientist, found that hard-line views on Israel had spread among conservatives only recently, and largely because of partisan polarization over domestic issues. Though conventional wisdom often suggests that Evangelical and Jewish groups charged conservative views on Israel, in fact it was the other way around.

That began with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which divided Americans over issues of terrorism, torture and inclusion, particularly of Muslims.

This became the basis of a culture war that, largely by chance, aligned almost perfectly with a real conflict just then unfolding between Israelis and Palestinians.

A period of terrible violence known as the second intifada--in which Palestinian militants launched shocking terrorist attacks and Israeli military actions killed scores of civilians--resonated with Americans. Israeli leaders, seeking Washington’s support, encouraged Americans to see their conflicts as one and the same.

Being tough on terrorism became a core conservative value that was expressed, in part, as support for Israel--specifically, as support for harsh Israeli policies toward the conflict. This also aligned with increasingly negative attitudes toward Muslims. And an atmosphere of us-versus-them politics equated supporting Israelis with opposing Palestinians.

Though George W. Bush, then the president, encouraged both inclusion of Muslims and neutrality on Israel, polarization pulled some conservatives toward a zero-sum view of the conflict, in which maximally opposing Palestinians became a matter of identity.

Trump Exports the Culture War. This opened a gap between the identity politics of the Republican base and the policies of its leaders--precisely the sort of gap that Mr. Trump would exploit in his presidential primary bid. As he rose by saying what others would not, he supercharged the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’s salience to identity issues among what would become his base.

Mr. Trump advocated severe restrictions on legal and illegal immigration, particularly from Muslim-majority countries whose citizens he said posed a threat. In doing so, the president aligned fear of demographic change with fear of terrorism.

There is no reason that those positions must necessarily line up with support for Israel, but Mr. Trump leveraged culture war passions to try to bring them together.

“Horrible killing of a 13 year old American girl at her home in Israel by a Palestinian terrorist.” Mr. Trump tweeted in 2016, adding, in a line that became his slogan for a travel ban on people from several majority-Muslim countries, “We must get tough.”

Mr. Trump also exploited polarization over Israel to rally supporters against Barack Obama, whom he repeatedly suggested was foreign-born, Muslim and suspiciously hostile toward Israel.

“Is President Obama trying to destroy Israel with all his bad moves?” Mr. Trump asked on Twitter, also in 2016. “Think about it and let me know!”

In office, this is one of a handful of issues, along with sharply curtailing legal immigration, on which Mr. Trump has taken concerted, unilateral action. He is now pressing to move the United States Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem as early as next year.

These policies meet rising conservative demands that the United States abandon its traditional neutrality on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and instead side overtly with Israel.

While some say pro-Israel groups are responsible for this shift, Mr. Trump appears to be following the Republican base. In 2014, 51 percent of Republicans said the United States should lean toward Israel in peace talks. That number has since grown to 58 percent.

Mr. Trump represents the culmination of a trend that pro-Israel groups resisted for years: the loss of Jewish support. Even as Jews grew more liberal, many supported strongly pro-Israel policies. But as “pro-Israel” becomes synonymous with “conservative Republican,” Jews are drifting away. They oppose moving the embassy by almost 3-to-1.

Party politics started this process. In 2015, Republicans invited Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s right-wing prime minister, to address Congress in opposition to Mr. Obama’s policies on Iran. Though intended to turn American Jews and others against Mr. Obama, it had the opposite effect, polarizing them against Mr. Netanyahu.

Mr. Trump has taken it drastically further. He has indulged hard-core conservative instincts to a degree that, deliberately or not, attracted support from a white nationalist fringe that also tends to be hostile to Jews.

He is moving the idea of being “pro-Israel” even further right, separating it even from the Jewish support that is ostensibly critical to Israel’s long-term survival.

Revoking aid from refugees to punish Palestinian leaders, for instance, aligns with Mr. Trump’s nationalist tendencies to treat foreign populations as monolithic blocs. This, too, has its roots in American culture wars over immigration.

Like his immigration restrictions, Mr. Trump’s Israel policies can be unpopular outside his base. A December poll by the Brookings Institution found that only 31 percent of Americans support moving the embassy. But the base has shown itself often able to overwhelm party leadership.

Mr. Pence’s religiosity may embody the old mode of American support for Israel, driven by groups with strong views on the conflict itself. That still exists, but is increasingly subsumed by a broader, blunter worldview that treats the Israeli-Palestinian issue as an extension of another conflict that can seem just as intractable: American partisanship.

[cfijerusalem]

THE WORD

LORD, how they have increased who trouble me! Many are they who rise up against me. Many are they who say of me, "There is no help for him in God." Selah. But You, O LORD, are a shield for me, my glory and the One who lifts up my head. I cried to the LORD with my voice, and He heard me from His holy hill. Selah. I lay down and slept; I awoke, for the LORD sustained me. I will not be afraid of ten thousands of people who have set themselves against me all around. Arise, O LORD; Save me, O my God... Your blessing is upon Your people. (Psalm 3)

...For my soul trusts in You; And in the shadow of Your wings I will make my refuge, until these calamities have passed by. I will cry out to God Most High, to God who performs all things for me. He shall send from heaven and save me; He reproaches the one who would swallow me up. Selah. (Psalm 57:1-3)

POINTERS FOR PRAYER:

This week’s report comes from Westminster at Lobby Day. Even though this day will be finished by the time you read this report, there is still so much to pray into here. 2017 is already bringing great challenges not only to the nation of Israel itself but also to those who stand with her. With Jerusalem celebrating her 50th anniversary of reunification, and the Belfour 100, we can only wonder at what the rest of this year will bring. Pray that we would see much fruit for all the discussions held with our Members of Parliament. Pray that more UK MPs would come to an understanding of the truth regarding Israel, and pray for those MPs who already support the nation of Israel would be encouraged and strengthened in their stand.

The 27th January is Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK. We must never be allowed to forget the evil of the Holocaust. Please bring all the events happening over the next few weeks before the LORD in prayer. Pray events will be well supported – especially where schools and youth are involved.

Remember too, the thousands of Holocaust Survivors still alive today. May those Survivors, even now, find comfort, strength, and the LORD's blessing on their lives. Do uphold in your prayers and support all of the work CFI do with Holocaust survivors in Israel. To bless this work, click here 

We believe God is calling Christians to come alongside Israel and cry out to God on Israel's behalf, to take the deep heart cry of the nation into our own hearts; to intercede against her enemies, and to believe in the promises of God for Israel. The inarticulate heart cry of the nation of Israel may well be that of David in Psalm 57 (part included above), and we need to be able to express that cry to God with her. Please continue to pray that the Lord God would indeed shelter Israel in the shadow of His wings. Pray for protection over the borders around Israel! (Psalm 121:3-4)

YOU ARE CALLED ZION FROM WHOM NO ONE CARES.

A powerful word from the Scriptures really hit home recently. It is taken from Jeremiah 30:17 where we read, ‘But I will restore you to health and heal your wounds,' declares the LORD, 'because you are called an outcast, Zion for whom no one cares.' Seventy two years might seem a very long time, yet seventy two years after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen by the British, attitudes towards the Jewish people – and in particular to Israel as a nation – have taken on yet again a dark and ugly shadow. Sometimes that shadow is unseen, and sometime the hostility against Zion is very subtle, yet the shadow remains. Seventy two years after the liberation of another concentration camp – Auschwitz – this time liberated by the Russians - the soil surrounding the former Nazi death camp remains so polluted by the ashes of those who were murdered and burned there that little will grow in that area. Some even say that birds don’t sing in that place - even today. On January 27, 1945, Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by the Soviets, nearly eight months before the war officially ended. By the time they arrived though, many of the inhabitants had been sent out on a death march. When the Soviets arrived at the camp, around 7,000 people, all sick and dying, remained. In the five years it was open, an estimated 1.1 million* people were murdered at the concentration camp, around 90 per cent of whom were Jewish. Sadly, it is often heard in today’s Middle East that the Islamic hatred that terrorises Israel will finish what Hitler started.

*In the late 1980s the Auschwitz Museum calculated that at least 1.1 million prisoners were killed at the Auschwitz group of camps and that 90% of these were Jews. However, this is a deliberately cautious figure. Most modern Holocaust scholarship suggests figures in the range 1.1 to 1.5 million, with over 1 million being Jewish men, women and children. Much of the difficulty arises from the fact that before the Soviet troops arrived, the SS destroyed most of the records at Auschwitz. Rudolf Hoess, the first commandant of Auschwitz, stated that the number was 'up to 3 million'.

The Holocaust was of course a systematic, state-sponsored murder of six million Jews and many other victims (another five million) by the Nazi-Germans and their collaborators during World War II. However did you know - the Holocaust is one of the most thoroughly researched periods of history? When my wife and I first set up the Christian Friends of Israel Holocaust Exhibition (which currently can been seen in Hawick in the Scottish Borders), the head Librarian was thrilled to have the photographic exhibition in her Library, and commented on how much it angered her that people could actually deny the Holocaust took place. The amount of existing research is enormous and growing constantly as historians pour through archives full of surviving documents and artefacts. While important questions remain to be researched, nearly all trained historians who have studied this period agree on the basic facts: The Nazi's ‘Final Solution’ was an official, systematic program of extermination of the Jewish race involving mass murder on an industrial scale which ‘succeeded’ in killing around six million Jews, or approximately half of the Jewish population of Europe, before it was ended by the Allies' victory over Germany in 1945. It is indeed therefore a mystery as to how anyone could even suggest that the Holocaust never happened. So with this in mind, why on earth during Obama’s final three days as President of the USA name an aide who bragged of whitewashing Iran's Holocaust-denying regime to the Holocaust memorial council?

Indeed, in the last three days of Barack Obama’s presidency, it would appear that Obama wanted his legacy to be seen as some form of ‘distaste’ against Israel and the Jews. Obama declared that before he left the Whitehouse that he would be remembered for being the President who created the ‘two state solution’ and who brought peace to the Middle East between Jew and Arab – this of course he failed spectacularly at and ended his presidency a million miles away from any peace agreement. Was this the reason he spent his final three days in office making many cynically bad decisions? His final appointments to administration positions, including adding 10 members to the Holocaust Memorial Council including the one and only Ben Rhodes, whose role as Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications came to an end last Friday with the inauguration of President Donald Trump. Rhodes was a leading advocate of the Iran nuclear deal and a vocal critic of Israeli settlement policies, declaring the Israel settlements as “illegal” (even though they are clearly not illegal). In response, American Spectator Managing Editor Melissa Mackenzie tweeted: “So Ben Rhodes, who is a veritable enemy of Israel, Obama appoints to Holocaust Memorial Council. The man is a spite machine.” U.N. Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer tweeted, “No joke: Obama names aide who bragged of whitewashing Iran’s Holocaust-denying regime to Holocaust memorial council.”

But it didn’t end there. Even as the ceremony of inauguration for Donald Trump as President was about to begin on Friday, Barack Obama handed the Arab Palestinians $221 million (£177 million) literally hours before he left office. The U.S. State Department under Obama released the funds to Mahmoud Abbas, who still allows his PA authority to teach hatred towards Israel in his schools, on PA controlled TV, and who gives money as rewards to families of suicide bombers, and blesses Islamic terrorist in jails with a life time supply of cash. So even as President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden were walking through the Crypt of the Capital for Donald Trump's inauguration ceremony, in Washington on January 20, 2017, the State Department was handing over to the Palestinians 221 million dollars. However, the payment itself has been frozen by the State Department under President Trump. The money came from federal aid the US provides to the so-called ‘West Bank’ and Gaza, aid that totalled about $355 million in 2015. The sum released by Obama during his last hours in office had been held up by a group in Congress that included Reps. Ed Royce of California and Kay Granger of Texas. Dr. Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defence of Democracies stated, “The easiest way to sum it up is that Congress had been looking at various behaviours from Palestine — unilateral attempts at statehood, corruption, incitement of violence, and paying salaries to people in jail for terrorism — and that's why the hold has been there.” Schanzer characterized the move by Obama as both shocking and “a strange message to send.” Schanzer stated, “I was tracking President Obama's 11th-hour moves on the Palestinians, and this issue never came up once ... Most analysts and observers didn't think Obama would or could do this.”

When we consider the above, along with what we have witnessed recently with the UNESCO votes and the plans of the Paris UN conference, it’s almost as if the Word of God above in Psalm 3 and Psalm 57 was written solely with today in mind. The Word of God is a living Word of course and certainly can speak into our lives today, and I'm aware we need to be careful of taking sections of Scripture out of context; however these two Psalms really spoke to me regarding the battles Israel is facing today. The nation of Israel is surrounded by Islamic countries, indeed the Middle East is made up of 99.9% Arab/Muslim countries, leaving Israel with 0.1% of land mass, and even this tiny amount is being fought over by both the Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, who has repeatedly spoken of the importance of 'implementing the principles of Yasser Arafat' (to wipe Israel off the map) and the Islamic militant Hamas group. So why is it that the majority of British MPs want a ‘Two-State solution’, and completely ignore or deny the laws which have already been decreed regarding Israel?

As I mentioned last week, in countering bias and misinformation about the Arab-Israel conflict, it is impossible to understand the complex legal implications of the Arab-Israel conflict without an acquaintance with the basics of context of the 1920 San Remo Resolution. Both the San Remo Resolution and the Balfour Declaration charged Britain with the duty to facilitate Jewish immigration and settlement by Jews in the territory which then included Transjordan, which had already been adopted by the other Allied Powers. As a trustee, Britain had a fiduciary duty (the highest standard of care) to act in good faith in carrying out the duties imposed by the Mandate. Furthermore, as the San Remo resolution has never been abrogated (repealed, revoked or do away) it was and continues to be legally binding between the several parties who signed it. It is therefore obvious that the legitimacy of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and the Jewish state all derive from the same international agreement at San Remo. So if the British Members of Parliament, along with the United Nations are reneging on their part to Israel, then they must do likewise to Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. 

Apart from all that is written above, if the United Nations, along with Britain did succeed in creating an Arab Palestinian State in the heartland of Israel (Judea and Samaria), did you know that a Islamic Palestinian state would be just 70 metres from the main road artery running through Central Israel? This photo was send to me form Barry Shaw in Israel - picture taken from his drone. With Abbas in charge of a potential State of Palestine, it would be bad enough. But imagine if Abbas was kicked out and Hamas took over – as happened in Gaza? Is it not time to scrap all talk or plans of a Two State Solution? Yes, we would like our government to make a ‘pledge for peace (#Pledge4Peace) but seeing as the Palestinians have refused negotiations and refused dialogue and co-existence, can we really see peace anytime soon?

LOBBY AND BRIEFING DAY AT WESTMINSTER

The Lobby and Briefing day – jointly hosted by CFI UK and the Zionist Federation – took place on 25th January and was once again led by ZF’s Eric Moonman and CFI’s Jacob Vince. Without doubt, this is a unique occasion as many people met together to be better informed about how to challenge concerns and specific issues to the UK government. We were really encouraged by the large turnout of supporters – both Christians and Jews – in fact on the afternoon in the committee rooms in the Houses of Parliament, some 30 supporters couldn’t access the room due to being over capacity, and we kept having to ask people who had heard many MPs to leave the room to allow other  the chance to listen. Apart from our CFI Office being represented with Jacob Vince, Robin Lane and Julia and myself – we also had some of our Area Reps come along. As happened last year, we also had a large group of about 30 people (including our Norfolk Reps) come on a coach from Norwich that had been organised especially for the occasion. Many supporters and advocates of Christian Friends of Israel had also travelled the length and breadth of the UK. As much of the day for me was taken up with taking the photos for CFI and passing the microphone around to the audience wanting to ask questions, along with trying to record certain areas, I left CFI’s Julia Soakell to take the notes throughout the day. We are hoping for a full report to be featured in the second addition of the CFI ‘In Touch’ magazine.

On the morning at the Briefing at Marsham Street, Westminster, we were thrilled to have Israel’s Ambassador to the UK, Mark Regev speak. Regev, who has been in post in the UK since March 2016, has hit the ground running since his arrival, making a point of speaking at challenging venues and engaging with the unexpected, including having a head-to-head debate with the PLO representative in Britain, Manuel Hassassian. Mark Regev previously served in Israel’s embassies in Beijing and Washington, and most recently as international spokesperson for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Lobby Day followed in the wake of UN Resolution 2334, which was widely regarded in Israel as a harmful attempt to impose final status conditions, as well as disincentivising the Palestinian Authority from returning to the negotiating table. Regev stated, “The International community must demand the Palestinians return to peace talks without preconditions.”

We also heard from Bassem Eid, founder and director of the Jerusalem-based Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. Eid commented on the attempt by Obama in his last hours of office to send millions of dollars of aid to the PA – and questioned whether the PA will be ever held accountable to for funds sent to them. CFI’s Chief Executive Jacob Vince stated that, “Obviously as Christians we have to believe in God’s timing and that the promises made to Israel about the land and people are all written for us in the Bible.” He said that in the political sphere these things are not always in a straight line – and responsibility also rests on the government of Israel – as they are accountable. We are friends of Israel – friends with views –but regards the issues, we must try to do what we believe but also allow God to work it out.

The ZF’s Lobby Day for Israel, run every year in partnership with Christian Friends of Israel UK, brings activists from across the political and religious spectrum into parliament, where they speak directly with their elected representatives. Lobby Day for Israel 2017 encouraged politicians to back a ‘Pledge for Peace,’ consisting of three principles that they stated would ‘better facilitate positive, pragmatic and pro-active engagement in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’. The three principles of the pledge were: 1) Direct Negotiations, 2) Dialogue Not Boycotts, and 3) Support Coexistence. The ZF stated, “Endorsing the principles would be an opportunity for politicians to display a balanced and realistic approach to the conflict.” A social media campaign (#Pledge4Peace) on the day encouraged people to share photos of themselves with the pledge card. Tweets and Facebook posts were also made on the CFI social media.

The various speakers invited at the Lobby day included MPs from most parties. The list included Lord Stuart Polak CBE (Conservative); Bob Blackman (Conservative, Harrow East); David Burrowes (Conservative, Enfield, Southgate); Joan Ryan (Labour, Enfield North); Louise Ellman (Labour, Liverpool, Riverside); Theresa Villiers (Conservative, Chipping Barnet); Baroness Ruth Deech (Independent Peer); Ian Austin (Labour, Dudley North), Matthew Offord (Conservative, Hendon Central), and Caroline Ansell (Conservative, Eastbourne). In addition to those listed above, there were also speeches by Jerry Lewis, UK Correspondent for Israel Radio, and Arieh Miller, Chief Executive of the Zionist Federation.

Compiled by David Soakell

E-mail david@cfi.org.uk Website: www.cfi.org.uk ~ January 26, 2016 ~

[militant-holy-knight]

Why the Palestinian Cause is So Hard to Support

I'd usually stay clear off from getting involved in the debate regarding Israel and Palestine because you are guaranteed to offend all sides of the political spectrum if you stand with either. You get labelled a fascist by liberals and "pro-kike" by the far-right if you say anything positive about Israel, or being accused of supporting terrorism if you stand with Palestine. I know that many of my Christian brothers and sisters will easily support Israel because its the only place in the Middle-East where Christians are safe and protected. It's a very convincing argument... One that Palestine cannot make for itself unfortunately in effort to gain the hearts and minds of the people. Let me explain why.

Palestinian nationalism is often erroneously associated with Islamism due to the massive support and sympathy Palestinians receive from the Muslim world because several holiest sites in Islam - the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Cave of the Patriarchs and the Dome of the Rock - are within Jewish control and they can’t abide that. Also because Arab = Muslim in the minds of many people in the West, nevermind that not all Palestinians are Muslims. Here is a little known fact: the Munich terrorist attacks were carried out by a group of Palestinian Christians. The operation was titled “Iqrit and Biram”, named after two Christian settlements seized by Israeli Defense Forces and their terrorist leader used the codename Isa (Jesus in Arabic) was a Christian born from a Jewish mother and a Christian father. Back during the cold war, Palestinians were mostly a mostly secular movement in part because they were backed by the Soviet Union and they believed that regardless of your faith - whether Christian or Muslim - you were fighting to liberate yourself from Israeli oppression.

However, this changed in the 80s with the foundation of Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Nationalism had been viewed as an ungodly ideology by early Islamic thinkers, substituting "the nation" for God as an object of worship and reverence. The struggle for Palestine was viewed exclusively through a religious prism, as a struggle to retrieve Muslim land and the holy places of Jerusalem. While 90% of Palestinians are Sunnis, there has been a conflict between secularism and adherence to Islam. In the case of Hamas, Palestinian nationalism has almost completely fused with the ideologically pan-Islamic sentiments originally held by the Islamists.

The Islamic bitching about the Palestinians suffering oppression under the Israeli occupation doesn't convince me because for every Palestinian there are ten more Copts and Assyrians that do not enjoy equal rights. Muslim land is under occupation? The holy Christian sites of Alexandria and Constantinople are in the hands of the Muslims for centuries now. You could argue Antioch is also under Islamic occupation since Lebanon is now a Shia majority though this is only a recent development and Lebanon used to be the only Christian majority country in the Middle-East, and to be technical, the President of Lebanon is always a Maronite Catholic.

The occupation of Constantinople is particularly lamentable.  Itself It wouldn't be so bad if Turkey was a pluralistic society that respected the rights of other peoples, but its sham of secularism (which is pretty transparent to anyone observing current events) showed they never actually committed themselves to it even after abolishing the Ottoman caliphate. Consider the Christian Holocaust they have committed in the early 20th Century against the Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians (which they still deny it while at the same time boasting about it in private) and that now Turkey has less of half a percent of Christians. By contrast, Iraq under Saddam Hussein had at least a million Christians though this number has obviously went down because of its civil war. Let me ask you: what kind of secular society is this where the brutal dictatorship that is guilty of genocide actually treats its Christian minority better in comparison? And there are people that still use Turkey as the model of democracy for Muslim countries. Lets not pretend its the USA is the same way in regards to Islam demographics: there was a sizable Christian presence in Turkey before they discovered too late the appeal of pan-Islamism and decided their gavour subjects needed to die. 

The reality is that Turks don’t pray in the Hagia Sophia because mosques are lacking in Constantinople, they do it to rub it in the faces of the Greeks - and by extension - all of Christendom. Its a symbol of Islam prevailing over Christianity never mind that we were ahead of the curve, technologically and scientifically.

The reality is that Islamists can’t take infidels being in control of something they can’t have. Just like how Osama bin Laden denounced Sudan and Indonesia for granting independence to the Roman Catholic countries of South Sudan and East Timor - both of whom considered insignificant by the world community - because he believe any sort of land that was owned by the ummah should never be given to infidels. This is why these dipshits lay claim to Spain and Greece as theirs by right.

The reality is that whether you like it or not, Muslims are poised and eager to be biggest aggressor against Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu is quoted as saying  “If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more ‎violence. If the Jews put ‎down their weapons ‎today, there would be no ‎more Israel”. I certainly don’t like the man and you certainly don’t have to, but to say he is incorrect would be a bold-faced lie. Even back in the day when the State of Israel was established, the General Secretary Abdul Rahman Azzam of the Arab League has been quoted as saying this genocidal threat:

"I personally wish that the Jews do not drive us to this war, as this will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Tartar massacre or the Crusader wars. I believe that the number of volunteers from outside Palestine will be larger than Palestine's Arab population, for I know that volunteers will be arriving to us from [as far as] India, Afghanistan, and China to win the honor of martyrdom for the sake of Palestine … You might be surprised to learn that hundreds of Englishmen expressed their wish to volunteer in the Arab armies to fight the Jews.

"This war will be distinguished by three serious matters. First—faith: as each fighter deems his death on behalf of Palestine as the shortest road to paradise; second, [the war] will be an opportunity for vast plunder. Third, it will be impossible to contain the zealous volunteers arriving from all corners of the world to avenge the martyrdom of the Palestine Arabs, and viewing the war as dignifying every Arab and every Muslim throughout the world …

"The Arab is superior to the Jew in that he accepts defeat with a smile: Should the Jews defeat us in the first battle, we will defeat them in the second or the third battle … or the final one… whereas one defeat will shatter the Jew's morale! Most desert Arabians take pleasure in fighting. I recall being tasked with mediating a truce in a desert war (in which I participated) that lasted for nine months…While en route to sign the truce, I was approached by some of my comrades in arms who told me: 'Shame on you! You are a man of the people, so how could you wish to end the war … How can we live without war?' This is because war gives the Bedouin a sense of happiness, bliss, and security that peace does not provide! …

"I warned the Jewish leaders I met in London to desist from their policy, telling them that the Arab was the mightiest of soldiers and the day he draws his weapon, he will not lay it down until firing the last bullet in the battle, and we will fire the last shot …"

"I foresee the consequences of this bloody war. I see before me its horrible battles. I can picture its dead, injured, and victims … But my conscience is clear … For we are not attacking but defending ourselves, and we are not aggressors but defenders against an aggression! …"

Granted the authenticity of this quote has been questioned and many have accused it of being taken off context. But that is largely irrelevant because the discourse about Jews in the Muslim world would have been considered unacceptable by Western standards. Children over there are indoctrinated to be intolerant and hateful, the exact opposite of what us Westerners are taught. Rather than enjoying childhood, their kids are taught the glories of martyrdom and to die in the name of defeating Israel.

And that lead us to Hamas, a political party that was democratically voted into power and it’s explicit in wanting to exterminate all Jews - not just the ones in Israel though, but in the entire world. In case you don’t believe me, just read their Covenant, which is a official political document they established.

Article 7 mentions a prophecy attributed to Muhammed. 

The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree (evidently a certain kind of tree), would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.

Article 22 states that the French revolution, the Russian revolution, colonialism and both world wars were created by the Zionists or forces supportive of Zionism:

You may speak as much as you want about regional and world wars. They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.

Article 32 of the Covenant refers to an antisemitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion:

Today it is Palestine, tomorrow it will be one country or another. The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.

I know that not all Palestinians support Hamas since the PLO doesn’t recognize them, but enough Palestinians voted to get them into power - they are not a fringe movement. Following the 2007 coup, the Gaza Strip had exhibited the characteristics of Talibanization, a process whereby the Hamas government had imposed strict rules on women, discouraged activities commonly associated with Western or Christian culture, oppressed non-Muslim minorities, imposed sharia law, and deployed religious police to enforce these laws. While their PR wing denied efforts of Islamicizing the Gaza Strip, they have also added they don’t oppose it and believe in “persuasion”. One woman complained that women were not free to speak their minds or travel alone, and added:

"Hamas want to force themselves onto the people. They want the people to submit to them, this is their cover. They destroyed the reputation of Islam, by saying we're doing this because it is religion. This is how they won the elections."

Despite this, Hamas is somewhat aware of the weight of their words considering they have completely different rhetorics differing in the audience. When talking to an Arab crowd, they are explicitly anti-Semitic as one deputy member said on the Al-Aqsa TV:

If the enemy sets foot on a single square inch of Islamic land, Jihad becomes an individual duty, incumbent on every Muslim, male or female. A woman may set out [on Jihad] without her husband's permission, and a servant without his master's permission. Why? In order to annihilate those Jews. ... O Allah, destroy the Jews and their supporters. O Allah, destroy the Americans and their supporters. O Allah, count them one by one, and kill them all, without leaving a single one

When talking towards the international audience, they slightly alter their tune to being simply anti-Zionist when talking to CBS:

We are not fanatics. We are not fundamentalists. We are not actually fighting the Jews because they are Jews per se. We do not fight any other races. We fight the occupiers.

What Hamas may not realize it is that their adherence to fundamentalism and marginalization of Palestinian Christians, who would have once fought on their side are now on the verge of extinction, plays directly into the hands of Israel’s PR. I am sure you have already heard this being said many times that Israel is the safest place for Christians in the Middle-East - a rather dubious claim given only two percent constitutes the Christian population in contrast to Lebanon’s 40%.

Of course this is a shrewd plan that Israeli politicians play to gain the support of the United States and Christendom at large, including the current President of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro, a Roman Catholic like yours truly. This helps hide the more uncomfortable, darker reality around Israel: that far-right Jewish gangs regularly vandalize churches with price tag attacks, Orthodox Jews regularly spit on Christians when they come across in the streets or how some of them might have sympathies for extremists like the followers of Meir Kahane. I’ve also have personal criticism of Israel tolerating Islamist parties in the Knesset which is really galling considering that the MB is banned in certain Arab countries like their long arch-enemy Egypt (despite what their political enemies in the Islamic world would like to pretend, Zionism isn’t necessarily anti-Islam). Of course none of this can be even comparable to what Christians are facing in the Islamic world itself.

"Christians, natives of Arab countries, are escaping their countries of origin. This is a common statement nowadays everywhere and it is correct one hundred percent. Statistics show that a large number of them have emigrated to safer countries for them and for their children, like the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe. The reason is the harassment to which they are subjected to by government agencies on the one hand and extremist groups on the other hand in countries they have inhabited for thousands of years…

"The Christians have lived in the territory currently referred to as [the Arab countries] for centuries alongside other religious groups, and particularly with Muslims who shared with them the afflictions of life. But the Christians have lost their partners for many reasons, including religious extremism among some Muslims, the demographic increases out of religious reasons, and the acts of discrimination, coercion, and individual and collective expulsion of Christians, and the pressures placed upon them even when they were serving their countries. There are many examples of that in Palestine, Iraq, Sudan, Lebanon, Egypt, and other countries.

"Approximately 4 million Lebanese Christians have emigrated from their country as a result of the pressures placed upon them by others. About half a million Iraqi Christians have left their country for the same reasons… The situation gets worse today because of the discrimination by salafi [Islamic fundamentalist] extremists. In Palestine, the Christians are becoming almost extinct as a result of the control of extremist Muslims on the Palestinian issue and the marginalization of the role of the Christians, apart from the negative impact of the Intifada, which is led by Islamist organizations, on the Christians of Palestine. With regard to Christians in Egypt, the Copts, what happened and is happening to them equally on the part of the state and the Islamists will suffice to fill pages of books and newspapers to explain the coercion, discrimination and persecution. What is happening in Algeria, Mauritania, Somalia, and others is too long to explain.

"This situation is also reflected in non-Arab [Muslim] countries. In Islamic countries like Pakistan, Indonesia and Nigeria, Christians suffer from persecution. In Pakistan, Islamist [spiritual leaders] have issued a fatwa [religious opinion] permitting the killing of two Christians for every Muslim killed by the American attacks in Afghanistan, as though the Americans represent Christianity in the world. In other countries they [Christians] live in fear, under the shadow of threat, and face a growing cycle of assaults whenever the United States and its allies carry out a military operation against any country.

"Christians are afraid of what might happen to them in these countries. The situation is quite critical and requires urgent attention. It is difficult for us to imagine any other time in which the Christians have felt a greater danger than the danger they feel today in these countries…"

Keep in mind, this report I shared was from 2004. Things surely must have gotten worse like in the wake of the Arab Spring. But this brings me back to my original point... While our brothers in Christ have their priests killed, their churches bombed, their women raped and their people forced to flee, don’t expect me to take the Palestinian cause seriously, if even their own Christians are being persecuted. If Muslims argued that the Palestinians have lived in this patch of land that is now occupied by the Jews, remember the Copts, Assyrians, Armenians and Greeks have lived in these lands long before Muslims arrived, but that is just my Christian perspective. 

As a long Islamist saying goes “before Sunday, comes Saturday”.