Satmar Hardim burn Israeli flag in Antwerp

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The JTA reports

Haredi Orthodox burn Israeli flag in Antwerp

May 14, 2012

THE HAGUE (JTA) – Dozens of haredi Orthodox schoolchildren participated in a Lag b’Omer bonfire in Antwerp that featured the burning of an Israeli flag.

An eyewitness who photographed the event on May 10 said the boys attended a cheder of the Satmar community — an anti-Zionist Chasidic stream of approximately 150,000 adherents worldwide.

The picture, taken in an interior courtyard, shows a middle-aged man burning a handmade Israeli flag as some 30 boys watch.

“This is one of the first times we have seen this sort of thing in recent years,” Michael Freilich, editor in chief of Belgium’s leading Jewish publication, Joods Actueel, told JTA.

According to Freilich, the flag-burning ceremony provoked “a lot of anger” within Antwerp’s haredi Orthodox community. Followers of the Chasidic schools of Lubavitch and Belz spoke out against the burning, Freilich said, but the Satmar leadership in Antwerp remains unrepentant.

The last organized instance of flag burning by Belgian Jews was in the 1980s during a few demonstrations outside the Israeli Embassy.

The Satmar movement opposes Zionism because it believes the establishment of a Jewish state should only come after the arrival of the Jewish Messiah.

Full article here 

Interestingly Messianic Jews concur with the Satmar view on the establishment of the Jewish state only after Messiah has come, hence the support of the State of Israel now.

Yad L’Achim Up a Junction with Anti-Missionary Hysteria

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“They are waiting for you at the junction” warns Yad L’Achim!

Yad L’Achim are Israel’s version of The Simpson’s Helen Lovejoy screaming hysterically “will somebody think of the children”. They are the masters of over-the-top scaremongering.

In their latest offering Yad L’Achim propagandists are scaring Israeli drivers by warning of the dangers of missionaries waiting to catch, confuse, and convert them up the junction! Beware, beware, beware they scream, the soul hunters are after you…. spooky!

However at Israeli junctions the missionaries you tend to find are the ones from Chabad or Breslov!

This also a great excuse for a Squeeze song, Up The Junction!

Yad L’Achim and the Neturei Karta on Islam

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A common argument against Jews believing in Yeshua, is that it’s as absurd as saying Jews can worship Allah.

This kind of argument motivates Yad L’Achim and other opponents to Jews expressing any kind of positive belief in Yeshua.

Another argument against our belief, is that Messianic Jewish belief in Yeshua is the continuation of religious antisemitism and blood libels.

For these reasons, Yad L’Achim oppose Christians sharing their faith with Jews.

In a similar vein, Yad L’Achim oppose Muslims sharing their beliefs with Jews, writing:

Conventional wisdom has it that while Christian cults attack Judaism with missionaries, radical Islam uses Kassem rockets and suicide bombers. Recent findings, however, show that Muslims are becoming increasingly active on the spiritual battlefield as well.

“In the past year, we have seen the establishment of an Islamic organization that seeks to influence Jews to become Muslims,” says Rabbi Moshe Cohen, who heads a special unit at Yad L’Achim, the countermissionary organization. “After several months of intensive field work, we’ve managed to make direct contact with a number of Jews who have gone over to the other side. They’ve been converted in Islamic religious courts, live in Arab villages and carry papers that identify them as Muslims.”

Last month however, Neturei Karta’s leader Meir Hirsch welcomed the Blood Libel Sheikh Raed Salah, a religious antisemite, back to Israel.

In this speech, Hirsch praises Allah:

I wonder, will Yad L’Achim oppose Neturei Karta as vocally, as publicly, and as zealously as they oppose Messianic Jews, Christian missionaries, and Islamic missionaries to Jews?

Due to Neturei Karta’s respected status within Mea Shearim and other haredi communities, I strongly doubt it.

I rather expect that Yad L’Achim will prefer to focus their zeal on the relatively vulnerable Messianic Jewish community.

Christian Aid-ing and Abetting the Destruction of Israel

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Kirsty Walker argues in her recent article Which “World Vision”? that “Christian aid and church organisations are effectively aiding and abetting these groups in the fulfilment of their ambition to destroy the Jewish state.”

Although unquestionably poor by international standards, the Palestinian people are not the “poorest of the poor”, nor are they the world’s most vulnerable people. New Zealand’s nearer neighbours, Tokelau (GDP $USD1000) and Papua New Guinea (GDP $USD2500), both have GDPs lower than that of Gaza, with significantly less international attention and support. Gazans have longer life expectancies than their neighbours in Egypt, Yemen, Pakistan or Turkey and their GDP exceeds those of Yemen and Pakistan.[2]

The UNRWA receives approximately $USD1 billion annually, to spend improving the lives of 4.7 million Palestinian refugees in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, West Bank and Gaza.[3] This compares to the $USD3.3 billion that the UNHCR has available to spend on over 15 million refugees in 123 countries.[4]

Of the annual UNRWA budget, $200 million cash and $250 million worth of goods is given to Gaza every year.[5] In addition to UNRWA funding, Gaza receives monies from the Palestinian Authority, and 160 non-governmental organisations and the World Bank.[6]

Receiving such preferential treatment from the United Nations and the international community for more than sixty years, it is hard to understand why the Palestinian people are in such dire poverty. Where does all the money go?

The answer to this question is at the heart of the Middle East conflict: successive generations of Palestinian leadership have squandered much of the money on their ideologically driven obsession with destroying Israel and the Jewish people. There is no need for poverty to exist in Gaza or the Palestinian Authority administered territories; there is no need for any Palestinians to be still living in refugee camps.

None of the 750,000-1,000,000 Jewish refugees expelled from Islamic countries since 1948 remain in refugee camps, neither have they received any significant international assistance in their resettlement.[7]The Palestinian people are used by their democratically elected leaders to maintain political pressure against the Jewish state, with the ultimate aim of destroying Israel and replacing it with an Arab Islamic state.

By electing to work with the Palestinian political leadership, while overlooking rather than challenging the extreme anti-Semitic ideology of Hamas, Fatah and the PLO, Christian aid and church organisations are effectively aiding and abetting these groups in the fulfilment of their ambition to destroy the Jewish state.

Read full post here

WorldVision Fund Gaza terrorist group

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This is an interesting development not least because WorldVision had some delegates at Christ at the Checkpoint, but also, arguably, an example of Christian ministries taking an aggressive anti-Israel stance as a form of evangelistic strategy towards Muslims!

(Sydney, 20 March 2012) An Israeli civil rights group, Shurat HaDin—Israel Law Center, has revealed conclusive evidence supporting its allegations that World Vision Australia & AusAID are funding an arm of a proscribed terrorist organisation in Gaza in breach of Australian & US law.

On 15 February 2012, Shurat HaDin sent letters to World Vision Australia and AusAID warning that providing financial aid and other forms of material support to the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (“UAWC”) was illegal because it was an arm of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (“PFLP”), a proscribed terror group. Shurat HaDin warned that the PFLP was the controlling hand of the UAWC and that PFLP members form the executive of the UAWC. Initially, the organisations suspended aid to the UAWC.

However, on 2 March 2012, without having received Shurat HaDin’s evidence and based solely on an irrelevant search of registers of not-for-profit organisations, World Vision publicly announced that it had conducted an “extensive investigation”,  that Shurat HaDin’s allegations were “unfounded” and resumed funding the UAWC. In a separate letter, AusAID similarly made the same false claims of having conducted a “detailed investigation”.

Today, Shurat HaDin director, attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner and Australian solicitor Andrew Hamilton reveal their dossier of evidence conclusively implicating the UAWC as an arm of the PFLP.

Read full post here 

Jews Are a ‘Race,’ Genes Reveal

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Jon Entine reviews Harry Ostrer’s new book for Jewish Ideas Daily:

In his new book, “Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People,” Harry Ostrer, a medical geneticist and professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, claims that Jews are different, and the differences are not just skin deep. Jews exhibit, he writes, a distinctive genetic signature. Considering that the Nazis tried to exterminate Jews based on their supposed racial distinctiveness, such a conclusion might be a cause for concern. But Ostrer sees it as central to Jewish identity.

“Who is a Jew?” has been a poignant question for Jews throughout our history. It evokes a complex tapestry of Jewish identity made up of different strains of religious beliefs, cultural practices and blood ties to ancient Palestine and modern Israel. But the question, with its echoes of genetic determinism, also has a dark side.

Geneticists have long been aware that certain diseases, from breast cancer to Tay-Sachs, disproportionately affect Jews. Ostrer, who is also director of genetic and genomic testing at Montefiore Medical Center, goes further, maintaining that Jews are a homogeneous group with all the scientific trappings of what we used to call a “race.”

For most of the 3,000-year history of the Jewish people, the notion of what came to be known as “Jewish exceptionalism” was hardly controversial. Because of our history of inmarriage and cultural isolation, imposed or self-selected, Jews were considered by gentiles (and usually referred to themselves) as a “race.” Scholars from Josephus to Disraeli proudly proclaimed their membership in “the tribe.”

Read full book review here