Despite all the archeological/historical evidence of three thousand of years of a flourishing, continuous Jewish presence in their undivided city of Jerusalem, many people are inundated with lies about Arab claims to the city. In reality, the division of Jerusalem began in 1948 when Jordan invaded and physically cut the city into two pieces. In the video shown below by HonestReporting.com, hear living testimony from an eighth generation Jerusalem Jew and from one whose family arrived in the great city in 1835. Then study up on your history and learn the truth that Jerusalem has, shall, and always will be the undivided capital of the Jewish State. Period.
When the state of South Sudan came into existence last July, with great fanfare, Israel was one of the first nations to recognize it, having provided support for South Sudanese leaders since the 1960s during the first civil war. Indeed, in late December, Salva Kiir Mayardit - the president of South Sudan - came to Jerusalem, where he discussed the unique prospect of locating the country’s embassy there. It was therefore no surprise that President Shimon Peres spoke so enthusiastically of the visit as a “moving and historic moment” for him and Israel.
Now, less than a year later, in light of Israel’s plans to deport South Sudanese refugees, it is worth taking a look at how the world’s youngest nation is faring.
The year 1880 saw the publication of a book that ranks as the single most important study of Islam ever. Written in German by a young Jewish Hungarian scholar, Ignaz Goldziher, and bearing the nondescript title Muslim Studies (Muhammedanische Studien), it argued that the hadith, the vast body of sayings and actions attributed to the Islamic prophet Muhammad, lacked historical validity. Rather than provide reliable details about Muhammad’s life, Goldziher established, the hadith emerged from debates two or three centuries later about the nature of Islam.
When PBS asks someone like Jon Meacham — contributing editor to Time magazine, former editor of Newsweek, television pundit, and author of a Pulitzer-prize winning biography of Andrew Jackson — to write an essay on immigration, the result is likely to be a measure of elite media thinking on the topic.
And so it was with Meacham’s commentary at the end of last Friday’s “Need to Know” program. It was a call to welcome the world. It was also devoid of any recognition of how unconstrained immigration policy has become since passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.
Ostensibly, Meacham’s essay was an argument for more immigrant visas for high-skilled foreigners educated in the United States. But most of his message — and all of the accompanying visual imagery — was a homily about the backlash against the influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century.
Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch, has released a new book titled, Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry into Islam’s Obscure Origins. On April 24th, Mr. Spencer spoke on his book at a joint meeting of the Middle East Forum and Gatestone Institute in New York City.
Did the Prophet Muhammad really exist, or was he a sacred myth fashioned by the Koran decades after his purported death? Robert Spencer has addressed this thorny question with a dual intent:
Ed. note: This is part 2 and 3 of the series. Click here to read part 1.
Continuing his tour into the heart of the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, Mr. Luria guided the AFSI contingent in to Beit Wittenberg, now owned by Ateret Cohanim. Originally purchased by Moshe Wittenberg in the 1880s in a deal brokered by Eliezer Ben Yehuda (the father of the modern Hebrew language), it was discovered that the building was once the famous Mediterranean Hotel where Mark Twain stayed in Jerusalem when he visited in 1867. “One hundred years after this property was purchased by the Wittenberg family, former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon bought it in the 1980s. Because he thought it was important for Jews to be able to live anywhere in Jerusalem, he made his residence here,” said Mr. Luria.
“All of the world knows what happened here in 1948,’ Daoud Abu Lebdeh says, while leaning against a table in a coffee shop on the Hebrew University’s Mount Scopus campus.
“The Israeli soldiers or the Israeli militias like the Hagana, Kahane, the Irgun and Lehi came here and they [kicked] the people outside from their homes.”
Daoud is a nondescript man of 24 from the Jerusalem neighborhood of Wadi Joz. A correspondent and blogger with the Palestinian website the Middle East Post, Daoud has come highly recommended as an expert on the Nakba, the “catastrophe” of the birth of the State of Israel, and concurrently, the start of the Palestinian refugee problem, by Fatah Youth activist and Jerusalemite Mousa Abassi.
As the Syrian revolution against Bashar al-Asad’s rule enters its first year, Asad appears to have a good command over Syria’s large and fractious minority community. Three of the most prominent minority groups include the Christians, Druze, and Kurds. Asad’s control of these groups was not happenstance but the result of a number of hard- and soft-power moves executed by the regime. These calculations did not simply involve direct internal dealings with said minorities, but also outreach to their populations living in neighboring states and abroad. Due to the regime’s many policies, minority support may continue for some time.
Our way of government is not identical with that which is pursued with such conspicuous success in highly civilised and settled countries like your own. We leave the various communities and tribes alone to settle their internal differences. It is only where tribe wars on tribe, religion on religion, or their quarrels stop the traffic on the Sultan’s highway that we interfere. What would you have, mon ami? We are here in Asia!” – An Ottoman governor in Syria to author Marmaduke Pickthall, late nineteenth century.[1]
There is every reason to believe that the Islamic Republic’s days are numbered. The current government, lorded over by the religious supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i, and his Guardian Council of aging mullahs, who can overrule any policy change by the pseudo-elected president, seem wildly out of touch with the general populace. Not only are the youth of Iran—some 70 percent of whom are under the age of thirty—chaffing under the “guardianship of the Islamic jurists” (velayet-e-faqih)—but so is the economy, due to sanctions imposed by the West in response to the regime’s insistence on pursuing its nuclear program.[1] Inflation has long been out of control and trade and tourism a tiny fraction of what it could be, and yet the establishment has on the whole shown little interest in sacrificing militant, revolutionary principles for economic, and indeed, political expediency. Can this approach be sustained in view of the tightening economic noose around Tehran, and at what cost?
A very gallant Dr. Charles Asher Small just delivered an important lecture at the 92nd St Y. in New York.
Yes, this is the same Dr. Small who, in 2004, founded the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), which he housed at Yale University from 2006-2011–until the Yale Corporation decided that the Center’s work on Islamic Judeophobia and specifically on Iranian genocidal Judeophobia threatened Yale’s “scholarly commitments” in the region.
Who could make this up?
This was the first time that Dr. Small spoke about this publicly.
Author’s note: Every Yom HaShoah I try to write something from my family’s own history as an illustration of wider themes. The material below, that happened almost 70 years ago to the day, is from my manuscript, Children of Dolhinov.
Before dawn of Monday, March 28, 1942, German SS and Einsatzgruppe B units accompanied by a Latvian police detachment boarded a convoy of vehicles. Before dawn, they surrounded the town of Dolhinov, Poland.
The town awoke to the sound of stamping boots, barked commands, the wails of children, and sobs of women. The Kazovitz family hid, but David, the baby, was crying and his mother feared the noise would give the hiding place. So she ran to a Christian neighbor, handed over her fur coat and promised if the woman would conceal her she’d bring a gold watch afterward. The woman refused; the Germans killed the mother and baby.
U.S. president Barack Obama entered office with a bold plan to combat Afghanistan’s escalating insurgency, empower its government, encourage a political resolution of the conflict, and secure the cooperation of neighboring Pakistan—all in time for U.S. troops to withdraw by the end of 2014.
This new Afghanistan-Pakistan (AfPak) policy has yet to deliver on its promise. While the U.S. military surge swept insurgents out of their southeastern strongholds, the rebels have responded with terror attacks and assassinations reaching into the heart of Kabul. Washington has accelerated its training of Afghan security forces, but most U.S. aid still circumvents the central government, weakening its authority. With a political settlement nowhere in sight and Pakistani support for armed extremists unabated, Washington’s options for preventing a Taliban takeover have narrowed.
As Syrian president Bashar al-Assad struggles to contend with a massive popular uprising, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood (SMB) is poised to dominate whatever coalition of forces manages to unseat the Baathist regime. Though in many ways the Brotherhood’s official political platform is a model of Islamist moderation and tolerance, it is less a window into the group’s thinking than a reflection of its political tactics. Unlike its parent organization, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which often kept its ideological opponents at arm’s length, the SMB has repeatedly forged alliances with secular dissident groups even as it secretly tried to negotiate a deal with the Assad regime to allow its return from exile. Since the moderation of its political platform over the past two decades has clearly been intended to facilitate this triangulation, it does not tell us much about the ultimate intentions of the Syrian Brotherhood.
This was no “furious mob” on a “rampage,” reacting to Koran-burning. These men are methodically, deliberately, and in an organized fashion going about destroying crosses and objects marked with crosses. Their mood seems happy.
In the recent destruction of Commonwealth war graves in Benghazi, Libya (YouTube Video), you can see not just the desecration of graves, but attacks on crosses.
The radical Muslims who are kicking over and smashing headstones marked with crosses (and one with a Star of David), also took pains to demolish a tall “Cross of Sacrifice” standing at the edge of the cemetery.
An Arab/Muslim caliphate is not a figment of the imagination anymore: Fragments of Middle Eastern regimes will soon form a group of islands called “The Muslim Archipelago.”
“A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Communism.” These were the first words of Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto. More than a century later a different specter has appeared on the threshold of the Old World — the specter of an Islamic Caliphate. (Ed. note: “Caliphate, the political-religious state comprising the Muslim community and the lands and peoples under its dominion in the centuries following the death [ad 632] of the Prophet Muḥammad. …”)
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