I am not an historian, decent author or a journalist, and the chances are that unless there is a link or reference to somewhere else, the perpetrator is yours truly – Renaud Sarda. I created this blog as a focal point, to arm people with arguments and facts that they can perhaps use to counter biased media reporting and anti-Israel propaganda, and to help counter (BDS) campaign. I am a Zionist/Sephardi/Jew who will fly the Israeli flag, and defend whatever Israel does.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has said the Church has helped spread antisemitism across the world.
Most Rev Justin Welby made the comment in an essay for the Holocaust Education Trust, which recently asked leaders in religious and public life to submit their thoughts on antisemitism for its new 'Lessons Learned?' project.
The Trust says 'Lessons Learned?' comes after an 11 percent rise in antisemitism last year, including language and imagery relating to the Holocaust where 11 millions Jews and others were murdered.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government Sajid Javed and SNP MP Angus Robertson were among those who also submitted essays to 'Lessons Learned?'.
Mr Welby said: "Antisemitism is an insidious evil... It is a shameful truth that, through its theological teachings, the church, which should have offered an antidote, compounded the spread of this virus.
"The fact that antisemitism has infected the body of the Church is something of which we as Christians must be deeply repentant.
"All humans are made in the image of God. Antisemitism undermines and distorts this truth: it is the negation of God’s plan for his creation and is therefore a denial of God himself."
Rob Thompson from the Council of Christians and Jews told Premier's News Hour it is vital at a time when antisemitism in on the rise in Britain, that the Church acts in a spirit of solidarity with Jews.
He said: "This is something that has not gone away in the Church's 2000 years of history, so it's obviously a very important issue that the Church has failed to properly deal with and failed to atone for in it's theology.
"For centuries, ideas that the New Testament has superseded the Old Testament or that Jews can be blamed for Jesus' death have been preached, practised and taught in Christian churches.
"It's absolutely vital that we expose where these antisemitic ideas still exist."
If the Egyptian army succeeds in demolishing the underground smuggling tunnels that keep Hamas running, it could mark the end of the Islamists' rule over the Gaza Strip. But if Egypt's new president, Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood tie the hands of the Egyptian army's generals and keep them from completing the mission, Hamas will become even stronger and wealthier.
The world often thinks of the Gaza Strip, home to 1.4 million Palestinians, as one of the poorest places on earth, where people live in misery and squalor.
But according to an investigative report published in the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, there are at least 600 millionaires living in the Gaza Strip. The newspaper report also refutes the claim that the Gaza Strip has been facing a humanitarian crisis because of an Israeli blockade.
Mohammed Dahlan, the former Palestinian Authority security commander of the Gaza Strip, further said last week that Hamas was the only party that was laying siege to the Gaza Strip; that it is Hamas, and not Israel or Egypt, that is strangling and punishing the people there.
The Palestinian millionaires, according to the report, have made their wealth thanks to the hundreds of underground tunnels along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt.
Informed Palestinian sources revealed that every day, in addition to weapons, thousands of tons of fuel, medicine, various types of merchandise, vehicles, electrical appliances, drugs, medicine and cigarettes are smuggled into the Gaza Strip through more than 400 tunnels. A former Sudanese government official who visited the Gaza Strip lately was quoted as saying that he found basic goods that were not available in Sudan. Almost all the tunnels are controlled by the Hamas government, which has established a special commission to oversee the smuggling business, which makes the Hamas government the biggest benefactor of the smuggling industry.
Palestinians estimate that 25% of the Hamas government's budget comes from taxes imposed on the owners of the underground tunnels.
For example, Hamas has imposed a 25% tax and a $2000 fee on every car that is smuggled into the Gaza Strip. Hamas also charges $15 dollars for each ton of cement, eight cents for a pack of cigarettes and 50 cents for each liter of fuel smuggled through the tunnels.
For Hamas, the Palestinian sources said, the tunnels are a matter of life or death.
Now, however, Hamas is facing a huge crisis as the Egyptian authorities plan to regain control over Sinai in the aftermath of the recent killing of 16 Egyptian border guards by unidentified terrorists.
The Egyptian army appears to be determined to destroy the underground tunnels out of fear that they are being used to smuggle not only goods and fuel, but also Islamist terrorists who pose a threat to Egypt's national security.
At this stage, however, it is not clear whether Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood President, Mohamed Morsi, would allow his army to cut off one of Hamas's main sources of income. Morsi's policy thus far has been to embrace and strengthen Hamas at the expense of the Western-backed Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
If the Egyptian army succeeds in its anti-terror security crackdown in Sinai, including the demolition of all the underground tunnels that keep Hamas running, it could mark the beginning of the end of the Islamist movement's rule over the Gaza Strip. But if Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood tie the hands of their generals and prevent them from completing the mission, Hamas will become even stronger and wealthier.
Sajid Javid MP, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government
By Sajid Javid
We mustn’t allow ourselves to think that prejudice is something limited to foul-mouthed thugs on the streets of our inner cities. Sometimes the problem is much closer to home. Sometimes, the problem is people just like us. And if we don’t take a stand against it, we’re no better than the racists who felt free to call my family “Pakis” all those years ago.
Paki. It’s a hard, ugly word, and it’s one I heard too many times in the high streets and playgrounds of Bristol in the 1970s and 80s. Today it’s considered completely unacceptable, sitting alongside the N-word in the dictionary of bigotry. I’m sure many of you will even have done a double-take simply when you saw it in print. After all, such racism, prejudice and hatred has no place in decent society.
At least that’s what we like to tell ourselves. But as almost any British Jew will be able to tell you, the truth is very different. Anti-semitism is making a comeback right here in the UK. In August, the Community Security Trust reported that the number of anti-semitic incidents had reached the second-highest level in recorded history. In London the figure leapt by an appalling 62 per cent.
I know that hatred, bigotry and discrimination remain a fact of daily life for far too many people in this country. But what makes the recent surge in anti-semitism stand out – and what makes it particularly worrying – is the number and range of people who are prepared to ignore it, excuse it and, worst of all, indulge in it.
I can’t remember the last time I spoke to a Jewish friend or colleague who hasn’t, at some point, found themselves sitting awkwardly at a party while a fellow guest railed against the international ‘kosher conspiracy’.
And it’s also a problem for society as a whole. Casual bigotry and lazy stereotypes create division. They put people in boxes, build barriers between us. As long as we define other people by their differences rather than recognising what we have in common, we’ll struggle to build solid, coherent communities.
But we all need to get better at speaking up when we see anti-semitism. I know that doesn’t come naturally to a lot of us. We’re British, after all – we don’t like making a scene. My dad, a bus driver who came to this country from Pakistan, used to joke that he knew he’d become British the first time someone trod on his foot and he apologised to them. But this simmering, lingering prejudice against Jews can only be stopped in its tracks if we call it out for what is. Racism.
This essay appears in ‘Lessons learned? Reflections on antisemitism and the Holocaust’, published by the Holocaust Educational Trust and Community Security Trust on 25th September
Sajid Javid MP, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government
People playing mah-jongg in an alley in what was the Jewish neighborhood of Kaifeng, China, next to the site of the old synagogue.CreditAdam Dean for The New York Times
KAIFENG, China — The rooms where ruddy-faced Chinese men and women once assembled to pray in Hebrew and Mandarin are silent. Signs and exhibits that celebrated centuries of Jewish life have disappeared. An ancient well, believed to be the last visible remnant of a long-demolished synagogue, was recently buried under concrete and a pile of earth..
After locking down Buddhist monasteries in Tibet and tearing down church crosses in eastern China, President Xi Jinping’s campaign againstunapproved religion and foreign influence has turned to an unlikely adversary: a small group of Jews whose ancestors settled in this now faded imperial city near the banks of the Yellow River more than 1,000 years ago.
A few hundred residents had staged a lively, sometimes contentious rebirth of Kaifeng’s Jewish heritage in recent decades, with classes, services and proposals to rebuild the lost synagogue as a museum. Some residents even migrated to Israel. For years, the city government tolerated their activities, seeing the Jewish link as a magnet for tourism and investment.
But since last year, the authorities have come down hard on the revival, in an example of how even the smallest spiritual groups can fall under the pall of the Communist Party’s suspicion. The government has shut down organizations that helped foster Jewish rediscovery, prohibited residents from gathering to worship for Passover and other holidays, and removed signs and relics of the city’s Jewish past from public places.
“The whole policy is very tight now,” said Guo Yan, 35, a tour guide who advocates a distinctively Chinese strain of Judaism and runs a small museum in an apartment filled with pictures of Kaifeng’s Jewish past. “China is sensitive about foreign activities and interference.”
Only about 1,000 people claim Jewish ancestry in this city — a drop in China’s ocean of 1.35 billion people or Kaifeng’s population of 4.5 million — and only 100 or 200 of them have been active in Jewish religious and cultural activities, experts say.
Nobody outside the government seems to know for sure why this tiny band of believers came to be viewed as a threat. But officials appear to have become alarmed about their growing prominence sometime last year as Mr. Xi’s government demanded that religious groups and foreign organizations bow to tighter controls. Judaism is not one of China’s five state-licensed religions: Buddhism, Catholicism, Islam, Protestantism and Taoism.
“Xi has said that religion is a major issue, and when he speaks, that has consequences,” said a burly local businessman who has supported the Jewish revival and who, like others here, asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation by the authorities. “They don’t understand us, and worry that we’re being used.”
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Guo Yan in her private museum near the site of the old synagogue and Jewish neighborhood in Kaifeng. “China is sensitive about foreign activities and interference,” she said.CreditAdam Dean for The New York Times
He and many of Kaifeng’s Jews, as well as their supporters abroad, said the clampdown did not spring from outright anti-Semitism, which is relatively rare in China. Shanghai and Harbin, a northeast city, have organizeddisplays and events celebrating their role protecting Jews who fled persecution in Europe.
“It’s fear about religion, not just us Jews,” the businessman said.
Until a few decades ago, the Jews of Kaifeng seemed destined to fade away, an obscure memory at the intersection of two ancient civilizations.
Their forebears, possibly merchants from Persia, settled in Kaifeng when it was the vibrant capital of the Northern Song dynasty and built a synagogue here in the 12th century. For hundreds of years, they prospered largely free of persecution, surviving the rise and fall of successive dynasties.
But their numbers dwindled as they intermarried with China’s ethnic Han majority. The synagogue crumbled away. By 1851, when European missionaries acquired a 17th-century Hebrew Torah in Kaifeng and later presented it to the British Museum, few if any residents could read it.
Still, even after decades of Communist rule, some residue of Jewish identity survived in Kaifeng. Parents and grandparents told children of their roots and warned them not to eat pork.
The revival here took off in the 1990s as Jewish tourists, scholars and businesspeople from around the world who were curious about this remote outpost of Judaism began to visit and share their knowledge. Several years ago, two organizations, the Sino-Judaic Institute and Shavei Israel, set up offices and offered classes in Hebrew, Judaism and Jewish history, partly to counter Christian missionaries operating in Kaifeng.
“We began with our old generation, which had no foundation,” Ms. Guo said. “But then all these different Jewish groups came in, bringing in different ideas and values.”
The authorities were ambivalent, hopeful that the interest from abroad could help economic development in Kaifeng — a charming yet dilapidated backwater amid China’s frenzied growth — but also wary of foreigners and of Judaism, a little-understood religion here.
“Anytime it seemed to cross the line of publicity, that’s when there always would be a pushback against the Chinese Jews,” said Moshe Yehuda Bernstein, a researcher in Perth, Australia, who has written about the revival in a forthcoming book. “The idea was: We’ll let you do it, but don’t let anybody know about it.”
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Tourists in front of a building that housed a display of Jewish history in Kaifeng at the Millennium City Park. The display has been closed during the recent clampdown.CreditAdam Dean for The New York Times
But the current clampdown has gone much further than previous ones, residents said. Some blamed a report in The New York Times last year in which a city official attending a Passover banquet spoke sympathetically about the revival, apparently violating government guidelines. Others cited accounts through the community grapevine that a Jewish woman from Kaifeng had won asylum in the United States after claiming religious persecution.
“The Kaifeng Jews are in a kind of survival mode again,” said Anson Laytner, a retired rabbi in Seattle and past president of the Sino-Judaic Institute, who has worked with the Jews in Kaifeng and drawn attention to the clampdown.
The institute pulled out of Kaifeng last year after its community worker there, Barnaby Yeh, came under police scrutiny. “I think it was the actions of a government that’s paranoid,” said Mr. Yeh, a Taiwanese-American convert to Judaism now living in Maryland.
Shavei Israel, which had been helping Kaifeng Jews visit and settle in Israel, was forced by the police to close its community center in 2014. Residents tried to keep the center going in a rented apartment, but that was ordered closed this year, one of them said.
Even signs of the Jewish historical presence have been erased. An inscribed stone marking the site of the old synagogue was removed from the front of a hospital that occupies the grounds, and workers buried the ancient wellbehind the hospital. Two hospital employees said city officials had ordered the changes.
“All this says that there are no Jews here,” one Jewish man said as he nervously looked around during an interview in a teahouse.
He was one of several Jewish residents I met in Kaifeng who said they wanted to reassure the government that they were law-abiding patriots. But they also said they were afraid of speaking publicly, even to declare their patriotism.
“Please remember, don’t make us out to be political,” the man said. “We just want recognition as Jews.”
Jews can still gather in small groups in their homes to pray, and there have been no arrests, they said. But many said police or state security officers were monitoring them.
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A house construction site in what was the Jewish neighborhood next to the site of the long-demolished synagogue in Kaifeng.CreditAdam Dean for The New York Times
“Before, the Chinese government was very relaxed, but now we’re under more restrictions,” said You Yong, a member of one of the city’s eight historically Jewish clans, who now observes Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, at home.
The local office of the party’s United Front Department, which manages ethnic and religious affairs, referred questions to the city’s state security service, which deals with political threats and espionage. Officials there declined to comment.
Jewish descendants in Kaifeng do not automatically qualify as Jews under Israeli law because their ancestry has been so diluted. But Michael Freund, the chairman and founder of Shavei Israel, said the Israeli government should raise their treatment with Chinese officials.
“It needs to be done respectfully and delicately, but it needs to be done,” he said.
A spokeswoman for the Israeli Embassy in Beijing, Efrat Perri, said the embassy “recently became aware of the mentioned developments in Kaifeng” and would “look into it in order to gain a better understanding of the facts.”
The Jewish families I met in Kaifeng seemed determined to preserve their revived identity. Some decorated their homes with traditional candlesticks for Shabbat, grainy black-and-white photos of grandparents, drawings of Kaifeng’s destroyed synagogue, and maps of Israel.
One Friday evening, two couples invited me to join their Shabbat service, for which they had been studying a Torah reading.
“You don’t recognize me as a Jew,” the host said, “but I recognize myself as a Jew, and that’s what is most important.”
He broke bread with his brawny hands, and after ceremoniously drinking homemade wine, his guests shared shots of baijiu, a potent Chinese liquor.
“Judaism,” the host said, “is all about endurance.”
A Methodist church in Hinde Street, London, is exhibiting ‘You cannot pass today: Life through a dividing wall’, a reconstruction of a border control point between Israel and the occupied territories. The purpose, needless to say, is not to show how to deal with a terrorist threat, but to attack Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. A Jewish human rights group which has written to protest has been told, soapily, by the minister, ‘I respect your passionate concern for these issues…This exhibition… has been carefully curated… to promote reflection and prayers for peace.’ I have noticed these wall protests popping up on campuses etc., and they never seem either reflective or prayerful. They are propaganda. Serious, bitter issues certainly surround the whole question of Israel and its wall, but for churches to focus on this in the Middle East at this time is myopic. Not many miles away, their fellow Christians are being persecuted, expelled and murdered by Isis, their cries virtually unheard in our comfortable pews. Charles Moore
This is an extract from Charles Moore’s Notes. The full article is available here.
LOUDON, N.H. -- Carlos Contreras has spent the 2016 Camping World Truck Series season working hard to get to every race, and working with several drivers to get there.
The match between driver and the Contreras Motorsports team for the race Saturday at New Hampshire Motor Speedway is one made in multicultural heaven. Israeli driver Alon Day is competing for the Mexican-owned team of Contreras.
“It is going to be huge for NASCAR and for us,” said Contreras, a Mexico City native who has 74 starts in the trucks, the national series that drivers often use to break into NASCAR before going to the Xfinity Series and then the premier Sprint Cup division.
Day competed in two Xfinity Series races earlier this year on road courses, and this will be his first attempt on an oval. After plans to run the Xfinity Series race at Richmond International Raceway two weeks ago fell through, he needed to run the 1-mile oval at New Hampshire to earn NASCAR approval to compete in events at 1.5-mile tracks later in the year.
That left Day and his sponsor, Flwaterfront.com, searching for a ride for this weekend. They got in touch with Contreras about five days ago.
“It’s a nice combination -- it’s a complete diversity team,” the 24-year-old Day said. “It makes it cooler being completely different than the others.”
Contreras Motorsports has gotten to the track each week this year, and the team is 21st in the team standings, getting a boost from two top-10 finishes by Richard Childress Racing driver Brandon Jones. Day is the eighth driver the team has used in 17 events.
“We don’t give up,” Contreras said. “We are working for next year. We knew this first year was going to be tough, tough, tough. We started the program in January.”
Attorney Dave Levin, who owns the website that serves as the sponsor of Day’s car, has been bankrolling Day’s entry into NASCAR in the United States, and he felt the time was right for a Jewish driver.
That led him to hiring Day, who competes in NASCAR’s European series and comes to New Hampshire fresh off a victory last week in Italy.
“For a long time I felt there should be a Jewish driver in NASCAR,” Levin said. "The way Alon is [racing] on the track, the more attention he has brought to everything he is doing, the more folks who would be potential sponsors will start looking at NASCAR and seeing what value it would be to sponsor Alon and what a great thing it would be for the Jewish community and Israel as well.”
Day will have Rick Carelli as his spotter -- the person on the two-way radio who can see the whole track -- helping him get used to navigating the oval. Carelli works in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series as the spotter for former champion Kurt Busch.
“It’s a good experience,” Day said. “I’m trying to learn. I’m trying to observe everything and learn as much as I can as quick as I can. …I did two races in the road courses, and in the equipment I had, it went super well.
“I’m looking forward to driving my first race on an oval.”
