The Day of the Dhimmi is Done - Michael Lumish, Proprietor
Friday, October 4, 2013
20 Jews Live in Indonesia!
Mike L.
20 whole Jews in the entire country.
20 whole Jews in the entire country.
Now, isn't that something? In a country of about 250 million people, there are 20 Jews who walk among them... and I very much hope that they are kvetching as they do so.
The snippet below was written by JTA and Times of Israel staff.
I think that if the Indonesian Jews can get together with the Yemeni Jews they could maybe create a bowling team.
Just 20 Jews remain in the world’s largest Muslim nation, and it’s not clear who demolished their last house of worship, Java’s Beith Shalom20 Jews and one demolished synagogue.
Indonesia’s last synagogue has been destroyed, a Dutch news site reported.
Unidentified persons demolished the Beith Shalom synagogue in Surabaya on the island of Java to its foundations sometime earlier this year, according to a report on Indoweb.nl.
The synagogue has seen a number of anti-Israel protests staged in front of it and was sealed by Islamic hardliners sealed in 2009, according to the Jakarta Globe.
Reports suggesting the synagogue’s destruction have appeared in Indonesian media since May but were confirmed last week by the Indoweb.nl, which quoted the director of the Surabaya Heritage Society as saying that he intended to protest the demolition in talks with government officials.
I think that if the Indonesian Jews can get together with the Yemeni Jews they could maybe create a bowling team.
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
Barack Obama: The Accidental Anti-Semite
Mike L.
{Cross-posted at the Times of Israel and News and Views from Jews Down Under.}
Giulio Meotti is a rare bird.
He is one of the few prominent non-Jewish journalists who covers the Arab-Israel conflict and who is unabashedly pro-Israel, but he's not the only one. The Jerusalem Post's Khaled Abu Toameh, an Israeli Arab, immediately leaps to mind, but there are very few others.
In a recent piece for Arutz Sheva entitled, Obama is Sacrificing Israel on an Iranian Deal Offer, Meotti makes a rather blunt statement.
But, I have to say, while I have considered some of Obama's policies to be anti-Semitic, I never considered the man, himself, to be anti-Semitic. The truth of the matter is that if Obama is anti-Semitic, he is an Accidental Anti-Semite. One of Obama's most anti-Semitic policies is in his demand to end settlement activity among Jews in Judea and Samaria. There are few things in this world, both today and historically, more bigoted against Jews than demanding that Jews be allowed to live - and thus build housing for themselves - in one place, but not another. Obama's attitude concerning this, along with Mahmoud Abbas's attitude, very much smacks of medieval Europe in which the various princes and potentates felt free to circumscribe Jewish lives to particular areas of which they approved, which is to say, into the ghetto.
Obama's policy in regards the so-called "settlements," however, did not emerge in a vacuum or out of conscious malice for the Jewish people. It emerged because the Palestinian Authority claimed that Jewish Israelis were stealing "Palestinian land" and because his American Jewish advisers agreed with Abbas that Israeli Jews must cease building housing for themselves on the land that the Palestinian Authority claims for its own. This is why Obama called for "total settlement freeze." He did so because the idea was given the seal of kashrut by his Jewish advisers who told him that the Jews in Judea and Samaria represented obstacles to peace.
Thus one of the foremost blunders of the Obama administration came upon the advice of his Jewish counselors.
Meotti writes:
Perhaps I am just too polite, but I don't think that I would go quite so far. Of course, it is true that Obama backed Morsi and Morsi does call Jews "apes" and "pigs." It's also true that Obama will not likely prevent the Iranian regime from gaining nuclear weaponry, although I am willing to hold out hope on that question.
If future historians conclude that Barack Obama was the most anti-Israel president in American history they will need to give considerable credit to his Jewish friends and advisers. The problem with his Jewish friends and advisers is not that they are anti-Israel or, in any way, anti-Semitic, but that they yet labor under the Delusions of Oslo. They still believe that the Palestinian Authority wants a state for itself in peace next to the Jewish one and that it is primarily the Israelis who are preventing any such outcome.
And that is how they turned Barack Obama into the Accidental Anti-Semite.
Giulio Meotti, unlike Barack Obama, is a good friend to both the Jewish people and to the Jewish State of Israel, but he is too harsh in his assessments because he focuses those assessments on Obama, himself, while giving Obama's Jewish advisers a pass.
Until such a time as American Jewish political leadership internalizes the truth that the problem is not with the minority Jewish population of the Middle East, but with the far larger, racist Arab majority, then we will continue to conjure up Accidental Anti-Semites, like golums, out of the imaginations of diaspora Jewish political kabbalists.
If Barack Obama is an anti-Semite, he is an anti-Semite mainly of our own creation.
{Cross-posted at the Times of Israel and News and Views from Jews Down Under.}
Giulio Meotti is a rare bird.He is one of the few prominent non-Jewish journalists who covers the Arab-Israel conflict and who is unabashedly pro-Israel, but he's not the only one. The Jerusalem Post's Khaled Abu Toameh, an Israeli Arab, immediately leaps to mind, but there are very few others.
In a recent piece for Arutz Sheva entitled, Obama is Sacrificing Israel on an Iranian Deal Offer, Meotti makes a rather blunt statement.
"Obama's record against Israeli Jews is long and abundant. He is the most anti-Semitic US president ever."I am someone who, having voted for Obama in 2008, became highly critical of his foreign policy, particularly around the Arab-Israel conflict, because the contradictions and tensions within his foreign policy were counterproductve and corrosive toward the well-being of the Jewish people in the Middle East. For example, demanding a "total settlement freeze" ruined any possibility for a negotiated conclusion of hostilities, or even the easing of tensions between the Jews and the Arabs in the Land of Israel, during his first term. His support for the Muslim Brotherhood, and the rise of political Islam throughout the Middle East as a matter of "democracy" was enough to make any semi-conscious human being want to empty their stomach in the wrong direction.
But, I have to say, while I have considered some of Obama's policies to be anti-Semitic, I never considered the man, himself, to be anti-Semitic. The truth of the matter is that if Obama is anti-Semitic, he is an Accidental Anti-Semite. One of Obama's most anti-Semitic policies is in his demand to end settlement activity among Jews in Judea and Samaria. There are few things in this world, both today and historically, more bigoted against Jews than demanding that Jews be allowed to live - and thus build housing for themselves - in one place, but not another. Obama's attitude concerning this, along with Mahmoud Abbas's attitude, very much smacks of medieval Europe in which the various princes and potentates felt free to circumscribe Jewish lives to particular areas of which they approved, which is to say, into the ghetto.
Obama's policy in regards the so-called "settlements," however, did not emerge in a vacuum or out of conscious malice for the Jewish people. It emerged because the Palestinian Authority claimed that Jewish Israelis were stealing "Palestinian land" and because his American Jewish advisers agreed with Abbas that Israeli Jews must cease building housing for themselves on the land that the Palestinian Authority claims for its own. This is why Obama called for "total settlement freeze." He did so because the idea was given the seal of kashrut by his Jewish advisers who told him that the Jews in Judea and Samaria represented obstacles to peace.
Thus one of the foremost blunders of the Obama administration came upon the advice of his Jewish counselors.
Meotti writes:
Obama sees the Israeli Jews as “disturbers of the peace.” He wants to see them so disheartened that in the end they will choose not to fight, but to surrender.My, my. Those are harsh words, aren't they?
Obama has become very dangerous for the Judeo-Christian civilizations and values. He backed Egypt's Islamist president Mohammed Morsi, who called Jews "apes" and "pigs", and appeased Iran's leaders, who want to incinerate the Jewish State and its people.
Perhaps I am just too polite, but I don't think that I would go quite so far. Of course, it is true that Obama backed Morsi and Morsi does call Jews "apes" and "pigs." It's also true that Obama will not likely prevent the Iranian regime from gaining nuclear weaponry, although I am willing to hold out hope on that question.
Under the Obama Administrations, a malignant growth has raised its head: anti-Jewish legislation in Judea and Samaria, “the occupied territories”. By imposing a freeze on “settlement”, Obama's Trojan horse against the Jews, the White House sent Islamists the message that this is a right which the Israelis are willing to waive under threat (his) and force.That's actually a very good point. By imposing a "freeze" on settlements Obama sends the message that Arab anti-Jewish racism is well-founded and that, therefore, Arabs should not have to live among Jews in the region of Judea. Did he make such a move out of disdain in his heart for the Jewish people? I honestly do not think so. He did it because he falsely believed that it was practical policy-making and the reason that he falsely believed that it was practical policy-making is because his pro-Israel Jewish advisers told him it was so.
If future historians conclude that Barack Obama was the most anti-Israel president in American history they will need to give considerable credit to his Jewish friends and advisers. The problem with his Jewish friends and advisers is not that they are anti-Israel or, in any way, anti-Semitic, but that they yet labor under the Delusions of Oslo. They still believe that the Palestinian Authority wants a state for itself in peace next to the Jewish one and that it is primarily the Israelis who are preventing any such outcome.
And that is how they turned Barack Obama into the Accidental Anti-Semite.
Giulio Meotti, unlike Barack Obama, is a good friend to both the Jewish people and to the Jewish State of Israel, but he is too harsh in his assessments because he focuses those assessments on Obama, himself, while giving Obama's Jewish advisers a pass.
Until such a time as American Jewish political leadership internalizes the truth that the problem is not with the minority Jewish population of the Middle East, but with the far larger, racist Arab majority, then we will continue to conjure up Accidental Anti-Semites, like golums, out of the imaginations of diaspora Jewish political kabbalists.
If Barack Obama is an anti-Semite, he is an anti-Semite mainly of our own creation.
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
Netanyahu Stands Up
Mike L.
{Cross-posted at News and Views from Jews Down Under.}
At the United Nations General Assembly, today, Benjamin Netanyahu said the following:
The European elites will either turn a blind eye or justify the violence against us by blaming Israel for that violence.
On the other hand, of course, Israel simply cannot allow a nuclear-weaponized Iran and no one believes for one single second that Iran's nuclear program is for strictly peaceful purposes. Of course, Iran wants nuclear weapons and who can blame them? If I were in their government I would want to have nuclear weaponry also because it represents a deterrent from invasion. Iran looks immediately to its east and it sees Afghanistan which was not so long ago attacked by the United States. Iran looks immediately to its west and sees the same in Iraq. And they, obviously, are right smack in the center, so naturally they want a nuclear deterrent.
Wouldn't you?
The problem is that we simply cannot allow them to get that deterrent, because what can be used as a deterrent can also be used as a weapon of aggression and that is a risk that the Jewish state of Israel simply cannot afford; not after so many years of genocidal talk coming out of Tehran.
Furthermore, we cannot count on the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) - which saw the west through the Cold War - to have much influence with a theocratic regime that has an End of Days scenario embedded in their religion. Islamic fundamentalists make American Christian Evangelicals look like a bunch of hippies in comparison. And while I would not like to see nuclear weaponry in the hands of Pat Robertson, I would much less prefer nuclear weaponry in the hands of the Iranian ayatollahs. MAD may have worked with the Soviet Union, but the Soviet Union was comprised of secular rationalists who did not believe that killing infidels represented a ticket to some cosmic paradise with Extra Virgin cocktail waitresses.
This leaves Israel in a no-win scenario. If they attack the facilities, the world community will go nuts. Even countries who benefit from Israel's action will denounce the Jewish state in acidic terms. What the United States would do is anyone's guess and it's possible that Netanyahu cleared the language with Washington, D.C. before giving the speech, but, if not, then Israel could not count on this particular American president to have its back.
I see no good options, but I would rather see Israel take out Iran's nuclear program, and weather the storm of international hatred, then allow themselves to be threatened with a potential nuclear holocaust.
{Cross-posted at News and Views from Jews Down Under.}
At the United Nations General Assembly, today, Benjamin Netanyahu said the following:
Israel will not allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons, even if we have to stand alone. Yet in standing alone, Israel will know that we will be defending many, many others.If Israel hits Iranian nuclear facilities they can expect an international wall of hatred the likes of which we have not seen since the rise of Nazi Germany. An Israeli strike upon Iran will have people pouring into the streets of the European and Arab capitals screaming for Israeli and Jewish blood. The BDS movement will gain a great boost as people throughout Europe and the United States sign up in droves. Europe, which is already an exceedingly difficult place for Jewish people to live as Jews, will become intolerable as Muslim racists attack Jewish people in the streets in London and Paris and Stockholm.
The European elites will either turn a blind eye or justify the violence against us by blaming Israel for that violence.
On the other hand, of course, Israel simply cannot allow a nuclear-weaponized Iran and no one believes for one single second that Iran's nuclear program is for strictly peaceful purposes. Of course, Iran wants nuclear weapons and who can blame them? If I were in their government I would want to have nuclear weaponry also because it represents a deterrent from invasion. Iran looks immediately to its east and it sees Afghanistan which was not so long ago attacked by the United States. Iran looks immediately to its west and sees the same in Iraq. And they, obviously, are right smack in the center, so naturally they want a nuclear deterrent.
Wouldn't you?
The problem is that we simply cannot allow them to get that deterrent, because what can be used as a deterrent can also be used as a weapon of aggression and that is a risk that the Jewish state of Israel simply cannot afford; not after so many years of genocidal talk coming out of Tehran.
Furthermore, we cannot count on the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) - which saw the west through the Cold War - to have much influence with a theocratic regime that has an End of Days scenario embedded in their religion. Islamic fundamentalists make American Christian Evangelicals look like a bunch of hippies in comparison. And while I would not like to see nuclear weaponry in the hands of Pat Robertson, I would much less prefer nuclear weaponry in the hands of the Iranian ayatollahs. MAD may have worked with the Soviet Union, but the Soviet Union was comprised of secular rationalists who did not believe that killing infidels represented a ticket to some cosmic paradise with Extra Virgin cocktail waitresses.
This leaves Israel in a no-win scenario. If they attack the facilities, the world community will go nuts. Even countries who benefit from Israel's action will denounce the Jewish state in acidic terms. What the United States would do is anyone's guess and it's possible that Netanyahu cleared the language with Washington, D.C. before giving the speech, but, if not, then Israel could not count on this particular American president to have its back.
I see no good options, but I would rather see Israel take out Iran's nuclear program, and weather the storm of international hatred, then allow themselves to be threatened with a potential nuclear holocaust.
Who Speaks for the Christians of the Middle East?
Mike L.
The snippet below was written by Raymond Ibrahim and published on his blog, among other places.
Following the misnamed "Arab Spring," Christians are being chased out of the Middle East with renewed vigor. Their churches are burned or converted into mosques. Their women and children are sometimes kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam. And they are regularly rioted against for allegedly insulting "the prophet." And sometimes, of course, their lives end with their heads entirely severed from their bodies.
In Egypt the Christian Copts are blamed, at least in part, for the fall of the Islamist Morsi government and they are being made to pay a price throughout Egypt as Brotherhood thugs seek to make their lives miserable. In Syria they are trapped between Muslim theological authoritarian forces who seek to murder them, and who are supported by the Obama administration and the EU, and Muslim secular authoritarian forces, who do not care if they live or die.
And, yet, virtually no one speaks up for these people. It's a terrible disgrace, actually, and the Christian west needs to be held accountable for failing to stand up for their co-religionists. The west, in general, Christian or otherwise, has mainly remained mute on the punishment being dished out to Christians throughout the Muslim world.
Raymond Ibrahim is an American of Coptic descent, the author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians, and one of the very few voices that regularly and consistently speaks up for the rights and well-being of his fellow Christians in that part of the world.
The Christians in the Middle East, like the Jews in the Middle East, are a people under siege. The difference, of course, is that Israelis enjoy the protection of the IDF while Middle Eastern Christians outside of Israel have virtually no protection whatsoever and this is a moment in history in which many Arabs, and many Muslims, as we just saw in Nairobi, are running amok entirely.
To be a Christian in Egypt today, or in Syria today, is to live under the perpetual threat of violence grounded in religious bigotry and hatred.
We need to speak up for these people because virtually no one else is doing so.
The snippet below was written by Raymond Ibrahim and published on his blog, among other places.
Yesterday, the al-Qaeda linked “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant” (ISIL) broke the crosses off the two Christian churches in Raqqah, a city in northern Syria. They also set the contents of the churches — the Church of the Annunciation and the Church of Martyrs — aflame, and lifted the Islamic flag above them.I find it almost incomprehensible that virtually no one is standing up for the Christians in the Middle East. Prior to the Muslim invasions of the 7th and 8th centuries that entire region was basically Christian land and, now, there are hardly any Christians left.
Members of the Islamic organization first broke the large cross from off the Church of the Annunciation. This prompted the residents of Raqqah to march and protest, calling for the expulsion of the Islamic terrorists, while carrying the large, broken cross (see video here, around :38 second mark).
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant responded by attacking the Church of the Annunciation once again, gathering all its crosses and icons from inside, and setting them on fire. They capped off their “victory” by raising the ISIL flag—which is identical to al-Qaeda’s black flag with the words, “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger” (the Islamic shehada, or profession of faith).
Following the misnamed "Arab Spring," Christians are being chased out of the Middle East with renewed vigor. Their churches are burned or converted into mosques. Their women and children are sometimes kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam. And they are regularly rioted against for allegedly insulting "the prophet." And sometimes, of course, their lives end with their heads entirely severed from their bodies.
In Egypt the Christian Copts are blamed, at least in part, for the fall of the Islamist Morsi government and they are being made to pay a price throughout Egypt as Brotherhood thugs seek to make their lives miserable. In Syria they are trapped between Muslim theological authoritarian forces who seek to murder them, and who are supported by the Obama administration and the EU, and Muslim secular authoritarian forces, who do not care if they live or die.
And, yet, virtually no one speaks up for these people. It's a terrible disgrace, actually, and the Christian west needs to be held accountable for failing to stand up for their co-religionists. The west, in general, Christian or otherwise, has mainly remained mute on the punishment being dished out to Christians throughout the Muslim world.
Raymond Ibrahim is an American of Coptic descent, the author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians, and one of the very few voices that regularly and consistently speaks up for the rights and well-being of his fellow Christians in that part of the world.
The Christians in the Middle East, like the Jews in the Middle East, are a people under siege. The difference, of course, is that Israelis enjoy the protection of the IDF while Middle Eastern Christians outside of Israel have virtually no protection whatsoever and this is a moment in history in which many Arabs, and many Muslims, as we just saw in Nairobi, are running amok entirely.
To be a Christian in Egypt today, or in Syria today, is to live under the perpetual threat of violence grounded in religious bigotry and hatred.
We need to speak up for these people because virtually no one else is doing so.
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