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An orthodox priest in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia says he was forced to resign after giving a sermon about the importance of honoring the Jewish roots of Christianity and praying for Israel.
The Canadian Jewish News (CJN) reports that on August 12, Father Vladimir Tobin, the head priest of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Church in Halifax, was told he must leave the church due to the “Jewish twist in your ministry.”
Tobin told CJN he received the letter calling for his resignation from Orthodox Church in America Archbishop Irénée, the archbishop of Ottawa and Canada.
“I’ve always been straightforward,” Father Tobin, 77, told CJN. “Have always spoken my mind.”
Tobin’s grandmother was Jewish but he was baptized into orthodox Christianity. He earned a doctorate in Egyptology at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University in 1985. He recently visited Israel in May for the first time since he graduated more than 30 years ago.
During his time in ministry, Father Tobin refused to ignore the anti-Semitism he saw in the church.
“I was happy in Orthodoxy, but felt there was some anti-Jewishness there. I wrote a piece for publication, but was told by my superiors that it was ‘too Jewish.’ That increased my determination that Christianity grew from Judaism. My own theology recognized a faith that started with Abraham and grew through the centuries through Christ,” he said.
Father Tobin received a letter from Archbishop Irénée in April telling him to resign after hearing complaints that he regularly prayed for Israel during his church services.
Read more @ CBN News
Every day when Palestinian girls enter their high school in Bethlehem the Palestinian Authority reminds them that the suicide bomber who was their age, 17-year-old Ayyat Al-Akhras who murdered 2 and wounded 28, is their role model.
At the entrance to this PA school is a sign in memory of the “Martyrs” of the PA terror campaign (the second Intifada, 2000-2005) in which more than 1,100 Israelis were murdered, many in suicide bombings. The memorial, which was established in cooperation between the Education Directorate under the PA Ministry of Education and Fatah’s Shabiba Youth Movement, specifically names suicide bomber and Fatah member Ayyat Al-Akhras who blew herself up near a Jerusalem supermarket on March 29, 2002:
Text on sign: “This memorial was established in cooperation between the Education Directorate (i.e., branch of the PA Ministry of Education) and the Fatah Shabiba [Youth Movement] organization, in order to commemorate the Martyrs of the Al-Aqsa Intifada at the Bethlehem High School for Girls for the anniversary of the outbreak of the Palestinian revolution Jan. 1, 2003.
Martyr Ayyat Al-Akhras (i.e., suicide bomber, murdered 2, wounded 28)
Martyr Nida Al-Izza (i.e., Palestinian who apparently was accidentally shot by Israeli soldiers)”
Promoting terror in this PA school is likewise found in the school activities. At a school exhibition honoring former PA chairman Arafat, Fatah’s Shabiba Youth Movement glorified several terrorist murderers by prominently displaying their pictures. These included: Dalal Mughrabi – who led the murder of 37, 12 of them children, Abu Jihad, responsible for the murder of 125, Marwan Barghouti, convicted of planning three terror attacks in which 5 people were murdered, and Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin, responsible for the murder of hundreds in Hamas suicide bombings.
PMW has documented that the PA and Fatah have turned both arch-terrorist Abu Jihad, who killed more than 125, and Dalal Mughrabi, who led the murder of 37, among them 12 children, into role models for Palestinian society, including naming schools and sporting events after them.
Read more @ PMW
Many students who claim to support the Palestinian cause actually know very little about the Israel-Palestinian conflict, according to a recent survey conducted at the University of California, Berkeley.
Ron E. Hassner, the Helen Diller Family Chair in Israel Studies at UC Berkeley, conducted a survey of 230 students at the university. Despite most of the respondents purporting to care “deeply” about the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, “75% of those students cannot locate those territories on a map and 84% cannot name the decade (let alone the year) in which that occupation began,” Hassner wrote in an essay detailing the results.
Shockingly, 25 percent “of these students placed the Palestinian Territories west of Lebanon, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea,” added Hassner.
Most students also had no idea how many people actually lived in Israel. Only 17 percent of the students gave the correct answer, while others made guesses that ranged from 100,000 to 150 million.
Read more @ Israel Hayom
The lower house of France’s parliament is scheduled to vote on a draft resolution that calls hate of Israel a form of anti-Semitism.
The 577 members of the National Assembly are set to vote Tuesday on the draft, which also calls on the government to join other European nations in adopting the definition of anti-Semitism of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.
The IHRA definition states that some forms of vitriol against Israel, including comparing it to Nazi Germany, are examples of anti-Semitism, though criticizing Israel’s policies is not.
Lawmaker Sylvain Maillard of President Emmanuel Macron’s ruling LREM centrist party with his draft resolution has touched off weeks of debates in the French media.
Read more @ JTA
An experienced Hollywood screenwriter and film director in Israel shows how the directing and producing of the “Our Boys” series purposefully created a blatantly prejudiced anti-Israel movie.
In addition to laudably denying Democratic congresswomen who hate Israel to enter the country, the Israel Ministry of Interior should consider revoking the Israeli citizenship of the Israel haters who made the HBO TV movie series, “Our Boys,” which deliberately twists the events surrounding the 2014 kidnapping and murder of Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaer, and Naftali Fraenkel, into an anti-Israel propaganda film.
The 10-episode movie, skillfully crafted by a team of Jewish and Arab filmmakers, will surely aid the enemies of Israel in arousing world sympathy for the Arab struggle against the so-called “oppressive Israeli occupation” of “Palestine.”
But for the purposes of this article, I would like to focus not on the unquestionable injustice committed against the victimized Jewish families, but rather on the production itself, from the point of view of an experienced Hollywood screenwriter and film director in Israel.
The first thing a screenwriter and director must do is to decide where to start their story. This is a very deliberate decision which will shape the rest of the drama. In “Our Boys,” the creative team decided not to begin the story in the natural chronological place – following the life of the Jewish families and the three innocent yeshiva boys, leading up to their kidnap and killing. Instead the filmmakers chose to begin their account after their disappearance.
Following the young Jewish boys would have created sympathy for the Jews as victims of a horrible triple murder. Dramatizing the agonizing worry of the families during the almost three-week search for their children would have also automatically created overwhelming empathy for their plight.
All of this, the very heart of the drama, is purposefully omitted.
In addition, absolutely nothing is shown about the Arab terrorists who committed the crime. They are never seen or mentioned.
Read more @ Arutz Sheva
Eighteen years ago, on August 9, female terrorist Ahlam Tamimi smuggled a bomb in a guitar case into Jerusalem and led a suicide bomber to the crowded Sbarro pizza shop in Jerusalem’s city center.
Suicide terrorist Izz Al-Din Al-Masri ate a slice of pizza and then blew himself up, murdering 15 people, seven of them children, and wounding close to 130 others.
“I have no regrets,” Tamimi told Channel 1 TV in an interview that was recently rebroadcast on Palestinian Authority TV. “No Palestinian prisoner regrets what he or she has done.”
Since that fateful day, in which two Americans – Malki Roth and Shoshana Yehudit Greenbaum – were among the murdered, the PA has paid the seven terrorists who helped orchestrate the attack as well as Al-Masri’s family $910,823 (3.2 million shekels), according to a report released Thursday by Palestinian Media Watch.
These payments include monthly salaries paid to the terrorists in prison; payments to the family of the dead terrorist; and payments to the terrorists, like Tamimi, who were released in the 2011 Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange deal, brokered between the Israeli government and Hamas.
Today, the PA pays $7,321 (NIS 25,800) per month to the Sbarro terrorists and their families, according to PMW.
Al-Masri’s family has received a total of $53,689, PMW reported. The bomb maker, Abdullah Barghouti, has received $213,848 and Tamimi received $51,836 until she was released and fled to Jordan.
Read more @ The Jerusalem Post
Islamophobia, like much Muslim discourse, is based on an appropriation and inversion of Jewish experience and precepts.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), the Somali-born congresswoman, who has made a number of anti-Semitic remarks, is currently embroiled in controversy over her marriage history. When claims against her of bigamy and immigration fraud first emerged in 2016, Omar accused the journalists involved of “Islamophobia.”
Omar has also made a claim being heard more and more: that Muslims are called anti-Semites only because they are Muslim. In other words, anyone who calls out Muslim anti-Semitism is Islamophobic.
This twisted claim is a way of making Muslim anti-Semitism unsayable. The claim is being heard alongside the message that Islamophobia is the equivalent of anti-Semitism – an equation made by the leadership of Britain’s Jewish community, as well. This is dismaying because it’s a morally bankrupt and dangerous equivalence.
While some people are truly prejudiced against Muslims – just as some hate or fear anyone not like themselves – Islamophobia was invented by the Muslim Brotherhood as a way of silencing legitimate discussion of any fault in the Islamic world.
A relentless campaign is currently being waged to outlaw Islamophobia in the West – and thereby shut down that vital discussion. The United Nations is working with the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation to prohibit all speech that Muslims consider offensive.
A few days ago, Pakistan ramped up the pressure. Backing the UN’s initiative, Pakistan’s Ambassador Maleeha Lodhi said Islamophobia was “today the most prevalent expression of racism and hatred against ‘the other.’”
This is totally untrue. Apart from the fact that Islam is not a race but a religion, the true hatred of “the other” that really is most prevalent today is anti-Semitism. And those principally spreading this poison are the political left in tandem with the Muslim world.
Read more @ IsraelHayom
Remains, along with a grenade and 82 mm caliber gun-mortar, found near area where, in 2010, archaeologists discovered a mass grave for over 100 Jews killed by Romanian troops during World War Two.
Archaeologists have unearthed “many human remains” in northeast Romania near an area where, in 2010, they discovered a mass grave for more than 100 Jews killed by Romanian troops during World War Two, military prosecutors said on Tuesday.
The archaeologists, who are supported by the Elie Wiesel Institute and have been scouring the area since 2010 for other possible mass graves, also discovered a grenade and an 82 mm caliber gun-mortar at the site.
“Notified by the Elie Wiesel Institute… we launched a criminal probe regarding the June 29 unearthing of many human remains during archaeological research work in the proximity of an area where a mass grave was found in 2010,” the prosecutors said in a statement.
The site has been cordoned off but no further details were immediately available.
The mass grave discovered in 2010 was located in a forested area called Vulturi, some 400 km (250 miles) north of Bucharest, through which Romanian and German troops advanced at the start of their invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
An international commission headed by Nobel laureate Wiesel had concluded in 2004 that between 280,000 and 380,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews were killed in Romania and areas it controlled during World War Two as an ally of Nazi Germany.
Read more @ IsraelHayom
History will reflect kindly upon President Trump’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. America’s stature in the world has risen and the security of its ally Israel had been enhanced.
This past Sunday I was privileged to have been invited to a meeting of the cabinet of the government of Israel. The meeting – convened in an open field on the Golan Heights with pure air and breathtaking views – had a single item on the agenda: a proposed resolution to authorize a new community at that site under the name “Ramat Trump” (“Trump Heights”).
The resolution passed unanimously. It was the first time since Harry Truman (1949) that an Israeli village was named for a sitting American president. The resolution was a fitting tribute to President Trump’s bold and courageous decision to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.
In the aftermath of President Trump’s momentous proclamation of March 21, 2019, many rose to applaud while words of criticism emanated from the usual corners. But as the noise dissipated and the sun rose the next day, two new realities were beyond dispute: America’s stature in the world had risen and the security of its ally Israel had been enhanced.
Read more @ IsraelHayom
Lack of trust in Islamist governments, spike in non-religious identity are among chief reasons, report finds.
The results of a recent survey in the Arab world show that more than half of the region’s young adults are considering emigrating, and an increasing number of people are identifying as “non-religious.”
The Big BBC News Arabic Survey, a joint assessment by BBC News Arabic and Arab Barometer, a Princeton University-based non-partisan research network, is the largest in-depth survey ever carried out in the region. Over 25,000 people in 10 countries and the Palestinian Territories participated in face-to-face interviews for the study between October 2018 and April 2019.
Read more @ The Jerusalem Post
A postcard written and signed by Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, just one day after officially declaring the State of Israel’s independence, was recently discovered. Dated on the sixth day of the Hebrew month of Iyar in the Jewish year 5748 (May 15, 1948), it was sent to the founding father of the kibbutz movement, Shlomo Lavi.
In a letter inscribed on the back of the postcard, Ben-Gurion wrote: “The people of Israel have attained the pinnacle of their existence—the State of Israel has been born.”
Read more @ JNS
The top intelligence agency in Germany has written what is being called its most comprehensive analysis of rising anti-Semitism by Islamist extremists.
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, or BfV, described its 40-page brochure as a tool for educators, social workers, police and others who work closely with recent Muslim immigrants or refugees.
Titled “Anti-Semitism in Islamism,” the recently published report represents a leap forward in terms of the agency’s focus on the topic, spokeswoman Angela Pley told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a telephone interview.
She said the agency has never published such a comprehensive analysis of the subject based on empirical data.
Read more @ JTA
