photo credit: Abba Reitsman, MDA |
Hanna Bladon, murdered by an Arab who thought she was a Jew. |
photo credit: Abba Reitsman, MDA |
Hanna Bladon, murdered by an Arab who thought she was a Jew. |
Al-Azhar's Council of Senior Scholars defended its teachings on Tuesday amid rising criticism in Egypt that its curriculums foster extremism and sectarianism.Al Azhar has been fairly outspoken against anti-Christian terror, it does not extend that courtesy to Jews. In fact, Al Azhar clerics have praised suicide bombings against Jews.
In an official statement released following a meeting presided over by the grand imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmed El-Tayyeb, to discuss several issues, the council described itself as "the only ones mandated to teach righteous Islamic dogma that spreads peace and stability between Muslims themselves and between Muslims and others."
"The proof of this is the millions who have graduated from Al-Azhar whether in Egypt or worldwide and who call for peace; and it is a falsification of people's awareness and a defamation of its teachings to accuse it of nurturing terrorists," the statement read.
The council added that anyone who "tampered" with the religious body would be considered to be meddling with Egypt and its history, as well as being unfaithful to the integrity of the people and the whole nation.
Egypt was rocked by twin bombings of churches last week, which killed at least 47 people. The attacks in Tanta and Alexandria were claimed by local IS-affiliated militants.
Criticism of Al-Azhar has increased since the attacks, with some public figures accusing the venerable Islamic institution, which has branches all over Egypt and several abroad, of spreading extremism through its teachings and syllabuses and by its public decision not to formally declare IS militants apostates.
The statement also said that the council stands side-by-side with the Coptic Orthodox Church against the latest attacks, stressing that the Egyptian people will be able to fight off terrorism and extremism.
The Council of Senior Islamic Scholars is an advisory board comprised of prominent Azhar clerics; appointees are selected by the grand imam.
President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi has called on Al-Azhar in several speeches to rethink religious discourse and "purge it of flaws" that negatively affect Islam.
On Friday, US Secretary of Defense James Mattis will visit Israel as part of a tour of the region that will bring him to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Djibouti. The declared purpose of Mattis’s trip is to “reaffirm key US military alliances, engage with strategic partners in the Middle East and Africa, and discuss cooperative efforts to counter destabilizing activities and defeat extremist terror organizations.”PMW: PA students are read letter glorifying terror written by terrorist murderer
Ahead of his visit, Mattis should spend some time considering the hunger strike being carried out by the Palestinian terrorists imprisoned by Israel. A serious consideration of the strike will tell him more about the nature of the Palestinian conflict with Israel than a hundred “expert” briefings.
There are several important things for Mattis to consider in relation to the strike.
The first thing he needs to note is that all of the terrorists on strike are members of the Fatah terrorist group.
This fact should signal to General Mattis that Fatah is not a normal political party. In fact, it is a terrorist organization that has a political party.
The second thing Mattis needs to consider about the strike is that it is supported by the international Left.
To understand why, Mattis needs to recognize the Fatah tautology.
In line with the Palestinian Authority's policy of teaching children to see terrorists as heroes and all violence as internationally accepted means to confront Israel, the PA Ministry of Education decided that a letter by imprisoned terrorist Marwan Barghouti should be read to all "students of Palestine."JPost Editorial: No Barghouti option
Marwan Barghouti is serving 5 life sentences for orchestrating three shooting attacks that killed 5 people in 2001-2002.
Barghouti's dominant messages in the letter are that the imprisoned terrorists are the students' heroes and role models and that studies and terror go together.
Referring to himself as "the great prisoner and the free man," Barghouti addressed "all the young people of Palestine" presenting himself and his fellow imprisoned terrorists and murderers who "have already chosen the path of resistance" as examples to follow.
While he emphasized that studying and acquiring knowledge is a way of "resisting," even while in prison, Barghouti focused on his personal experiences as a prisoner: "I was arrested for the first time when I was in high school... Imprisoned for more than 23 years, expelled for seven years, and subjected to pursuit and assassination..." He then concluded: "I say this to you in order to emphasize to you that the path of studies and the national path go side by side" - the national path being his euphemism for violence, terror, and murder. Barghouti underlined how he himself has been able to study while imprisoned:
Those in Israel who support Barghouti remember him from before the second intifada. It was a period in the late 1990s when Barghouti opposed violent struggle and led the fight against corruption within the Palestinian political leadership.
But Barghouti was radicalized as a result of the collapse of the peace talks in 2000 between then-prime minister Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat. He turned to terrorism and became involved in the Tanzim, the military arm of Fatah which was responsible for some the most deadly terrorist attacks ever carried out against Israeli civilians.
Barghouti is a savvy political manipulator who has managed to remain relevant despite his incarceration a decade and a half ago. He is using the Palestinian prisoners as his latest ploy for self-advancement.
It is depressing that a man like Barghouti, with the blood of so many victims on his hands, has consistently been the most popular candidate to lead the Palestinian people. And it is not despite his murderously violent past, but precisely because of it, that Barghouti is able to beat a Hamas candidate for the Palestinian vote. This is the sad state of radicalized Palestinian politics that is the real obstacle to peace.
The idea that people can change is central to Judaism.
It forms the basis for Teshuva – roughly translated as repentance or contrition, but more properly expressed as a return to one’s true moral nature. If Barghouti were popular for a brave call to stop violent terrorism and embrace peace that would be laudable. If, however, he enjoys the support of the Palestinian street due to his track record as a murderer who inflicted pain and suffering on Israelis, that is intolerable.
The Fatah-affiliated Shabibah won a total of 41 of 81 seats on the student council at an-Najah National University in Nablus, while the Hamas-backed Islamic Bloc won 34 seats, Student Affairs Dean Musa Abu Dia told Wafa, the official Palestinian Authority news site, on Tuesday.Fatah is trumpeting its win, especially since Hamas has won several high-profile student elections recently especially at BirZeit University.
Student elections in the Palestinian territories are viewed as important barometers of public opinion, since Hamas and Fatah have not competed against each other in municipal, legislative or presidential elections since the 2006 legislative elections.
“These elections are an important indication of where the Palestinian street stands,” said Khaled Musleh, an-Najah Central Elections Committee spokesman.
Student elections at an-Najah have not taken place since 2013 because the various student blocs had previously failed to reach agreements to hold elections.
In the 2013 elections at an-Najah, Fatah won 43 seats, while Hamas garnered 33 seats.
The Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency UNRWA Pierre Krähenbühl reiterated the full commitment of the agency to the Palestinian curriculum and emphasized that no change may affect these curricula.This is a violation of UNRWA's own stated educational principles of creating students who are "tolerant and open minded, upholding human values and religious tolerance, "
This came during a meeting this afternoon with the Minister of Education and Higher Education Dr. Sabri Saydam...
Krähenbühl stressed that the Ministry of Education is a full partner, especially in the educational field, stressing the right of Palestinian children to receive quality education and to preserve their identity and culture...stressing that any enrichment to Palestinian textbooks will be in coordination between the ministry and the agency.
UNRWA textbook showing all of Israel as "Palestine" |
The Arab heads of state and monarchs do not like to be reminded of how badly they treat Palestinians and subject them to discriminatory and apartheid laws.
It is not comfortable or safe to be a Palestinian in an Arab country. Scenes of lawlessness and anarchy inside Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank have also driven many residents to move to nearby cities and villages. Most refugees in the West Bank no longer live inside UNRWA-run camps.
Let us end where we began: with the Palestinian (non)leadership. What has it done to help its people in the Arab countries? Nothing. No Palestinian leader will urge an emergency session of the UN Security Council to expose the ethnic cleansing and killing of Palestinians in Arab countries. No Palestinian leader will demand that the international media and human rights organizations investigate the atrocities perpetrated by Arabs on their Palestinian brethren. We are sure to see more such criminal silence when Abbas meets with the president of the United States.
Deputy Minister Michael Oren declared Tuesday that the biggest winners of the 1967 Six Day War were the Palestinian people.Alan Dershowitz: What North Korea Should Teach Us about Iran
Speaking at an event in Jerusalem marking 50 years since the conflict, he noted that before 1967, the concept of a “Palestinian” did not exist as we now know it.
Oren, now deputy minister for diplomacy in the Prime Minister’s Office, spoke more as a historian than a parliamentarian at the event, which was organized by The Israel Project and took place at the headquarters of the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research.
His comments drew on research he completed for his seminal 2002 book, “Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East.”
He remained mostly mum on the issue of where the peace process with the Palestinians stands today.
“We are in a process, but I can’t speak too much about that,” said Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States.
We failed to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons. As a result, our options to stop them from developing a delivery system capable of reaching our shores are severely limited.
The hard lesson from our failure to stop North Korea before they became a nuclear power is that we MUST stop Iran from ever developing or acquiring a nuclear arsenal. A nuclear Iran would be far more dangerous to American interests than a nuclear North Korea. Iran already has missiles capable of reaching numerous American allies. They are in the process of upgrading them and making them capable of delivering a nuclear payload to our shores. Its fundamentalist religious leaders would be willing to sacrifice millions of Iranians to destroy the "Big Satan" (United States) or the "Little Satan" (Israel). The late "moderate" leader Hashemi Rafsanjani once told an American journalist that if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons, they "would kill as many as five million Jews," and that if Israel retaliated, they would kill fifteen million Iranians, which would be "a small sacrifice from among the billion Muslims in the world." He concluded that "it is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality." Recall that the Iranian mullahs were willing to sacrifice thousands of "child-soldiers" in their futile war with Iraq. There is nothing more dangerous than a "suicide regime" armed with nuclear weapons.
The deal signed by Iran in 2015 postpones Iran's quest for a nuclear arsenal, but it doesn't prevent it, despite Iran's unequivocal statement in the preamble to the agreement that "Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire nuclear weapons." (Emphasis added). Recall that North Korea provided similar assurances to the Clinton Administration back in 1994, only to break them several years later -- with no real consequences. The Iranian mullahs apparently regard their reaffirmation as merely hortatory and not legally binding. The body of the agreement itself -- the portion Iran believes is legally binding -- does not preclude Iran from developing nuclear weapons after a certain time, variously estimated as between 10 to 15 years from the signing of the agreement. Nor does it prevent Iran from perfecting its delivery systems, including nuclear tipped inter-continental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States.
Israeli authorities have detained approximately one million Palestinians since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip in 1967, according to a joint statement released Saturday by the Palestinian Committee of Prisoners’ Affairs, the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society (PPS), and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS).I've been following this fake statistic since the claim from similar groups that 750,000 had been arrested by 2009.
The April 2015 report from the same groups said that the number of Palestinians arrested from 1967 to 2015 was 850,000.
150,000 arrests in one year?
In 2014, they said the number was 800,000.
That number had been pretty constant since 2006, when they claimed 700,000.
As I have shown in the past, these numbers are completely made up.
150,000 arrests in a year would mean over 400 a day and nearly 3000 arrests a week.
An Egyptian lawmaker has said members of parliament are drafting a law that would ban women from wearing the burqa in government institutions after alleging the Islamic full-face veil was a "Jewish tradition".She is referring to Genesis 38 which actually says the opposite, mentioning that at the time prostitutes were known to cover their faces, which proves that normal women of course didn't.
Amna Nosseir said on Sunday that the proposed ban would be in the best interest of Egyptian society and that she has been battling against the burqa over the past 40 years.
Nosseir, who wears the hijab, said on Wednesday that the burqa - known in Arabic as the niqab - had its origins in Jewish religious law.
"In the Old Testament, you find in chapter 38 that the Jewish religious authorities tell you that if Jewish women leave the house without covering the face and head then they are breaking Jewish religious law," the lawmaker said during an interview with local media.
"I have gathered around 20 texts by Jewish religious authorities that completely forbid women from showing their faces and heads," Nosseir said while discussing also banning female university students from wearing "ripped jeans" in lectures.
She added that this part of Jewish law became entrenched in pre-Islamic Arab tribes of the Arabian Peninsula and then spread throughout the Middle East with the Muslim conquests.
As a British-born Israeli Jewish tour guide, I endured a similar experience to your Hannah, but lived to tell the tale. In 2010, while guiding an American Christian tourist, we were accosted by two Palestinian terrorists. They found my Israeli ID and minutes later, my client, Kristine Luken, was dead. When I faced the terrorists in court, I learned that her brutal murder was an unfortunate case of mistaken identity: The terrorists assumed she was Jewish, too.Daphne Anson: 'So Why "Free Palestine"?'
Hannah's death is intertwined with Kristine's. Both women came to learn about our people. Both came to learn our language and both came to explore our land. Yet both were murdered due to mistaken identity. How unfathomable it is that they are now inscribed in the annals of our history.
Since the terrorist attack, I have been telling my story all over the world, educating people about Israel. I describe how, thanks to our democracy, it was an Israeli Arab Muslim surgeon who saved my life. I also speak about the incitement in the Palestinian Authority, where children are taught that Jews are pigs and monkeys and unworthy of life. I speak about the financial incentive that the corrupt Palestinian Authority government offers terrorists in the form of monthly salaries drawn from monies donated by Western tax-payers.
I also speak for those who are no longer with us, those who have been senselessly and brutally murdered because they were Jewish -- or assumed to be.
Next time I tell my story, Hannah will be foremost in my mind.
At the site of the attack in Jerusalem that took the life of a young British exchange student and wounded two other people, a mindless anti-Israel activist, asked the above question, splutters a response:JERUSALEM TERROR ATTACK - FREE "PALESTINE"?
Perhaps now she's in the Middle East she might care to confront these situations instead.
Originally titled “Jerusalem stabbing: British woman killed in train attack”, the report was amended numerous times and its headline changed as details emerged and the victim was identified – but the word terror does not appear in any of its thirteen versions.
An additional report on the same story appeared on the BBC News website’s ‘England’ page on April 15th under the title “Hannah Bladon Jerusalem stabbing: Family ‘devastated’ at attack“. The word terror is likewise absent from all versions of that article.
When British tourists were murdered in Tunisia in 2015, the BBC accurately described the incident as a terror attack. When an attack in which some of the victims were visitors to Britain took place in London in March 2017, the BBC similarly used accurate terminology to describe it to its audiences.
However, when visitors to Israel have been murdered in terror attacks perpetrated by Palestinians, the corporation has consistently refrained from using accurate language to describe those attacks.
Once again, the BBC’s double standards on terrorism, together with the redundancy of its inconsistently applied guidelines on ‘Language when Reporting Terrorism’, are glaringly apparent.
Buy EoZ's book, PROTOCOLS: EXPOSING MODERN ANTISEMITISM
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The Apartheid charge, the Abraham Accords and the "right side of history"
With Palestinians, there is no need to exaggerate: they really support murdering random Jews
Great news for Yom HaShoah! There are no antisemites!