Saturday, February 15, 2014

Sheikh Ahmad Adnan- "There Is No Such Thing as 'Palestine"

: Sheikh Ahmad Adwan - "There Is No Such Thing as 'Palestine"

Wed Feb 12, 2014 2:16 am (PST) . Posted by:

"Robert Hand" borntolose3@att.net

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Americans For a Safe Israel <afsi@rcn.com>
To: borntolose3@att.net 
Sent: Tuesday, February 11, 2014 5:24 PM
Subject: Sheikh Ahmad Adwan - "There Is No Such Thing as 'Palestine&quot;


Americans for a Safe Israel 
  
February 11, 2014 
    
  
JORDANIAN SHEIKH: 
ALLAH GAVE THE LAND OF ISRAEL TO THE JEWS 
Sunday, February 02, 2014 
  
Al Quds and other Arab media outlets published this amazing article late Jan./early Feb.  
Sheikh Ahmad Adwan, who introduces himself as a Muslim scholar who lives in Jordan, said on his personal Facebook page that there is no such thing as "Palestine&quot; in the Koran. Allah has assigned the Holy Land to the Children of Israel until the Day of Judgment (Koran, Sura 5 - "The Sura of the Table", Verse 21), and "We made the Children of Israel the inheritors (of the land)" (Koran, Sura 26 - "The Sura of the Poets", Verse 59). 

"I say to those who distort their Lord's book, the Koran: From where did you bring the name Palestine, you liars, you accursed, when Allah has already named it "The Holy Land" and bequeathed it to the Children of Israel until the Day of Judgment. There is no such thing as 'Palestine&#39; in the Koran. Your demand for the Land of Israel is a falsehood and it constitutes an attack on the Koran, on the Jews and their land. Therefore you won't succeed, and Allah will fail you and humiliate you, because Allah is the one who will protect them (i.e. the Jews)."

The sheikh added: "The Palestinians are the killers of children, the elderly and women. They attack the Jews and then they use those (children, the elderly and women) as human shields and hide behind them, without mercy for their children as if they weren't their own children, in order to tell the public opinion that the Jews intended to kill them. This is exactly what I saw with my own two eyes in the 70's, when they attacked the Jordanian army, which sheltered and protected them. Instead of thanking it (the Jordanian army), they brought their children forward to (face) the Jordanian army, in order to make the world believe that the army kills their children. This is their habit and custom, their viciousness, their having hearts of stones towards their children, and their lying to public opinion, in order to get its support."

It is worth mentioning, that the above mentioned sheikh visited Israel and met Jewish religious scholars. The "Israel in Arabic" site conducted an interview with him, in which he said that the reason for his openness towards the Jewish people "comes from my acknowledgment of their sovereignty on their land and my belief in the Koran, which told us and emphasized this in many places, like His (Allah's) saying "Oh People (i.e the Children of Israel), enter the Holy Land which Allah has assigned unto you" (Koran, Sura 5 - "The Sura of the Table", Verse 21), and His saying "We made the Children of Israel the inheritors (of the land)" (Koran, Sura 26 - "The Sura of the Poets", Verse 59) and many other verses.

He (Adwan) added: "(The Jews) are peaceful people who love peace, who are not hostile and are not aggressors, but if they are attacked, they defend themselves while causing as little damage to the attackers as possible. It is an honor for them that Allah has chosen them over the worlds - meaning over the people and the Jinns until the Day of Judgment. I made the reasons for Allah's choice clear in my books and pamphlets. When Allah chose them, He didn't do so out of politeness, and He wasn't unjust other peoples, it is just that they (the Jews) deserved this." 
  
The Israel in Arabic site, which appears to be an Israeli site, has a much fuller interview in Arabic.

When Adwan visited Safed (Tzfat), it was covered by Israel's Orot TV.

Saturday, January 11, 2014

LOS JUDIOS DE BARRANQUILLA. Tue Jan 7, 2014 9:56 am (PST) . Posted by: "Enrique Valle" valbircorp

INTERESANTE DEL PROGRESO QUE LOS SEFARDITAS DE CURAZAO TRAJERON AL PAIS ENTERO 

Se sabe que los judíos sefarditas de las Antillas, especialmente Curazao, apoyaron económicamente la gesta libertadora de Simón Bolívar y entre ellos se destacan Abraham de Meza y Mordechai Ricardo. Por ello, en 1819 el gobierno de Colombia les entregó a «los miembros de la nación hebrea» el derecho de radicarse en el país, así como la garantía de su libertad religiosa y los mismos derechos políticos del resto de los ciudadanos. Sin embargo, estos derechos se confirieron con una gran ambivalencia, ya que establecieron restricciones y básicamente a estos judíos sefardíes se les permitiría residir únicamente en la costa del Caribe.

En las primeras décadas del siglo XIX, Curazao padeció los efectos de una grave depresión económica, acompañada de sequías y una epidemia de viruela, muchas familias judías sefarditas emigraron hacia otras islas del Caribe y a Suramérica; algunos partieron hacia Coro en Venezuela y otros llegaron a Barranquilla un puerto sobre el río Magdalena al pie de la costa Caribe de Colombia.

Es importante señalar que el desarrollo y la importancia de Barranquilla están directamente ligados y se debe fundamentalmente a las diversas inmigraciones que encontraron albergue en esta ciudad durante el siglo XIX

Al final de la Colonia, Barranquilla era una aldea poblada por humildes pescadores, artesanos y agricultores. En 1775 Barranquilla fue incorporada como corregimiento de la Provincia de Cartagena, sólo se transformó en Villa el 7 de abril de 1813.

En 1823, el libertador Simón Bolívar le entrega al judío alemán Juan Bernardo Elbers la primera concesión para navegar en barcos de vapor por el río Magdalena, luego algunos correligionarios siguieron sus pasos y formaron compañías de transporte fluvial.

En 1832, Abraham Isaac Sénior establece el cementerio hebreo de Barranquilla, que posteriormente va a ser incorporado al cementerio Universal de dicha ciudad.
Durante este período se van a establecer pequeñas comunidades judías de origen sefardita, tanto en Santa Marta como en Riohacha.

En 1835 Barranquilla contaba 5.359 habitantes y comenzó a transformarse en un puerto importante en la región. En 1844 se establece un cementerio judío en Santa Marta y en 1850, se consolida una pequeña, pero significativa comunidad sefardita en Barranquilla. Poco a poco, Barranquilla comienza a superar la población de Santa Marta, aun cuando el puerto principal de la Costa Atlántica continua siendo Cartagena. No sabemos mucho sobre las actividades de los primeros sefarditas en Santa Marta, Riohacha o Barranquilla, pero es claro que varias firmas de sefarditas como fueron los Salas, los Sénior, los Correa, le pidieron permiso al gobierno nacional para importar mercancías a través del puerto de Sabanilla. Así, el comercio, las importaciones y exportaciones que se van a efectuar a partir de dicho puerto van a marcar un auge que impulsó el desarrollo de Barranquilla.

Según el interesante e importante libro de Adelaida Sourdis Nájera, titulado: El Registro Oculto: los sefardíes del Caribe en la formación de la nación colombiana 1813-1886, va a ser en la casa de Abraham Isaac Sénior, donde se van a reunir los judíos sefarditas de la ciudad en minian para rezar y leer el Pentateuco. En dicho período el rabino de la comunidad es don Moisés De Sola. Según los testimonios de Rodolfo Cortizzos, la comunidad se reunía todos los sábados y se celebraban las fechas de año nuevo y el día del perdón. Y en 1867 se establece un comité local de la Alliance Israelite Universelle.

Para 1871, Barranquilla cuenta con 11.595 habitantes y es el puerto más importante de la región superando a Cartagena que en ese momento contaba con 8.603 habitantes y a Santa Marta con 5.702 almas.

El papel que vino a desempeñar la comunidad judía sefardita en el desarrollo de la ciudad también fue documentado en el cuidadoso estudio: árabes y judíos en el desarrollo del Caribe colombiano, 1850-1950 realizado por Louise Fawcett y Eduardo Posada Carbó. Es claro que la llegada de inmigrantes judíos de origen sefardita, sirio-libaneses, alemanes, entre otros, transformó a ciudad y la convirtieron en la urbe más cosmopolita de país. Entre el grupo de familias sefardíes se destacan los apellidos: Sénior, Salas, Álvarez-Correa, Cortizzos, De Sola, López-Penha, Sourdis, Juliao, Salzedo y Heilbron, por mencionar algunos.

El rápido crecimiento y el desarrollo económico se explica en parte por la favorable ubicación de la ciudad, pero también debido a que se generó una sociedad atractiva, libre de barreras sociales, donde estos grupos de inmigrantes encontraron la posibilidad de interactuar sin problemas ni dificultades porque no enfrentaron las convenciones que hicieron a Medellín y a Bogotá ciudades difíciles y cerradas. Barranquilla como ciudad nueva, pujante, abierta a múltiples costumbres, más generosa que las ciudades tradicionales, tenía que transformarse en la urbe de mayor crecimiento con un 38 por ciento, algo hasta ese momento nunca visto en la historia demográfica del país.

Faucett y Posada Carbó señalan que la elección de David Pereira como Gobernador de la provincia de Barranquilla en 1854 era ya un indicativo de la integración alcanzada por la comunidad judía durante la segunda mitad del siglo XIX. Por ello, la historia de este grupo de inmigrantes está íntimamente ligada a la transformación de la ciudad que llegará a ser el puerto más importante del país.

Es diciente que, en 1871, siete de las veintidós contribuciones más elevadas de impuestos fueron pagadas por firmas originarias de Curazao. Es evidente que estos inmigrantes tenían unos contactos comerciales y un conocimiento económico que no había en la región.

En 1871 en Riohacha se instala un comité local de la Alliance Israélite Universelle.

Fueron múltiples los logros destacados en el ámbito social y cultural que se pueden atribuir a esta ola inmigratoria. Entre los más relevantes hay que señalar el acueducto de Barranquilla, dado al servicio en 1880 y construido gracias al impulso de Jacobo Cortizzos y Ramón B. Jimeno, asociados con miembros de la comunidad sefardí. Según Adelaida Sourdis Nájera, el grupo judío controlaba 255 de los 406 votos. Jacobo Cortizzos fue nombrado presidente del acueducto.

Así mismo un buen número de inmigrantes judíos fundó el Club Social de Barranquilla. El primer banco de la ciudad, Banco de Barranquilla, fue establecido por don Jacobo Cortizzos y 17 accionistas judíos que controlaban el 31% de las acciones.

También cabe resaltar que en 1919, Ernesto Cortizzos tuvo un papel determinante en el establecimiento de la primera compañía comercial de transporte aéreo que funcionó en el Nuevo Mundo, SCADTA. Por cierto, para honrar su memoria el aeropuerto internacional de la ciudad de Barranquilla fue bautizado con su nombre.

El mundo cultural y las artes no les fueron ajenos a estos judíos sefardíes. La obra literaria de Abraham Zacarías López-Penha, quien nació en Curazao en 1865 y vivió en Barranquilla desde muy joven, representa una bocanada de aire fresco para la época y aun cuando se pierde en las brumas literarias del país, merece ser redescubierta y reconocida como una de las obras que inaugura una época y una nueva tendencia en la literatura del país. En el estudio titulado Historia de la poesía colombiana, se le reconoce el mérito de ser el primer escritor que estableció contacto con los modernistas franceses. En su publicación Flores y Perlas, un quincenario, tradujo por primera vez a Mallarmé, Baudelaire y Rimbaud. Mantenía correspondencia con Rubén Darío y con Max Nordau, entre otros. Fue amigo del poeta modernista colombiano Luis Carlos López. Y con «el tuerto» López y Manuel Cervera publicaron una antología de poemas titulada Varios á varios. Su poemario Cromos fue prologado por Nicanor Bolet Pedraza y editado por la Biblioteca Azul de París en 1895. Dos años después publica su primera novela Camila Sánchez y en 1898 otro volumen de versos con el título Reflorecencias.

A pesar de las referencias a sus publicaciones en el Diccionario Espasa de 1915, podríamos decir que en Colombia sus poemas y novelas se han olvidado y desconocido. La suya es una cripto-obra dentro de la literatura colombiana. De acuerdo con Alfredo de la Espriella, historiador barranquillero, este judío sefardita goza, entre otras cosas, del mérito de ser el autor de la primera novela esotérica de Colombia titulada La desposada de una sombra, que fue editada por la librería de la Vda. de Ch. Bouret en 1902 en México.

En una nación gobernada en aquellos días por conservadores, que se consagraba todos los años al Sagrado Corazón de Jesús, las composiciones de López-Penha fueron un desafío por su tono escéptico y agnóstico. Vale la pena ver un ejemplo:

¿Presumís dudar que descendemos
de los gorilas y otras bestias asno de Dios?
No; si no aprended a mirar en redor vuestro,
y, luego, contemplaos en un espejo vos...de fijo os convenceréis al cabo, ¡es lógico!
que el mundo, en suma, es un jardín zoológico;que el hombre es un piteco mentecato
con un poco más vicios que el primato;que, tras inventar a Dios á imagen suya,
entre luces, incienso y beatíficas fanfarrias,le exige un cielo en cambio de salmos y aleluyas,
puesto en h`pócrita actitud de parias...en verdad os digo: el templo está desierto,
y el Dios del hombre-mono está bien muerto!

La irreverencia del poeta sefardí impidió que las páginas literarias de los diarios capitalinos, lo reconocieran. Alfredo de la Espriella, en una conferencia que le dictó a la comunidad judía con motivo de los 500 años del Descubrimiento de América y expulsión de los judíos de España, explicó: «No comulgaba con el laurel fachendoso de los poetas bogotanos, o su poesía patriótica o los juegos florales que tanto caracterizaron la producción literaria de su época.»

David López Penha, su hermano, era el dueño de un café llamado La Estrella (tenía grabada en la puerta la estrella de David). Ahí, Abraham Zacarías se deleitó en la lectura de los modernistas. Y por cierto fue uno de sus precursores, como bien lo indican Dino Manco Bermúdez y Paulina Santander Guerra en su tesis sobre el poeta. También los López-Penha, entre sus múltiples negocios, tuvieron a bien establecer el primer el cinematógrafo de la ciudad y fueron dueños de librerías prestigiosas.

El poeta Clímaco Soto Borda, refiriéndose a la actividad periodística y divulgadora de López-Penha, solicitó que: «se estableciera un cordón sanitario en redondo de nuestra Atenas? La pretenciosa denominación con que se tildaba y todavía se tilda a Bogotá para que librase a nuestros bardos de aquel terrible contagio». ¿Cuál era el temor de Soto Borda? ¿Sería que intuía que López-Penha y los modernistas, el cine y las nuevas artes marchitarían el romanticismo floral de los poetas de la Gruta Simbólica?

A pesar de la polémica que despertó en su momento López-Penha, hoy ha caído en total olvido. Siempre me ha extrañado que Colombia, un país de poetas, tan atento a cualquier vate, se descuide y desconozca la obra de López-Penha con tanta pasión. Es inexplicable el olvido al que someten a este poeta sefardí enterrándolo en las bóvedas de la historia literaria colombiana. Me atrevo a pensar que se debe al desconocimiento de sus escritos. Pero, sorprende y resulta sospechoso el desdén y amnesia del mundo poético por sus obras. Tal vez por ello sea apropiado recordar uno de sus versos que dice: «En un rincón de la casa / la araña teje que teje, / y el sol alumbra que alumbra, / y el hombre miente que miente.»

Las actividades tanto comerciales, industriales como artísticas de estos inmigrantes le dieron a la comunidad judía sefardita una eminente posición dentro de la vida social y económica de Barranquilla. Es bueno destacar que la presencia de estos inmigrantes judíos lejos de producir celos, fue recibida con entusiasmo y de manera cordial.

Sin embargo, el desarrollo que fomentó esta comunidad y el impacto que tuvo en la ciudad caribeña no ayudó para que el gobierno colombiano tuviera una actitud más tolerante y una mirada más benévola hacia la nueva ola inmigratoria de judíos ashquenazitas que vendrían de Europa oriental y judíos sefarditas provenientes de los países árabes durante la década de los treinta y cuarenta del siglo XX quienes huían de la depresión, la guerra mundial y la persecución Nazi.

Colombia siempre fue y continúa siendo un país cerrado a la inmigración. Y las prohibiciones a la venida de judíos durante la década de los treinta cobijaron tanto a las comunidades ashquenazitas como a las sefarditas. Para los antisemitas son iguales unos y otros a pesar de sus marcadas diferencias culturales. Y por consiguiente los que vinieron a Colombia, al comienzo lo hicieron de contrabando (parece ya un patrón histórico en el país).

Durante la preguerra surgió un pequeño tráfico de visas, resultado de las prohibiciones que se establecieron en torno a la inmigración. Los inmigrantes judíos sefarditas y ashquenazitas que ya habían logrado asentarse y que vinieron a Colombia durante la década de los veinte y principio de los treinta, ante las dificultades que vivían sus familiares tanto en Europa como en los países árabes, hicieron lo imposible por traerlos legalmente. El gobierno los obligó a depositar en el Banco de la República la elevada suma de mil pesos para empezar las diligencias legales (en otras palabras, unos once mil dólares de hoy día) lo que hacía particularmente difícil y onerosa la traída de cualquier pariente al país. La angustia los llevó a trabajar en forma tesonera y a ahorrar para pagar la suma que demandaba el Estado para comenzar unos trámites que no necesariamente garantizaban la admisión de los suyos. Los que llegaban debían jurar que eran mecánicos agrícolas o expertos en aguas o riego, cualquier profesión o práctica, pero nunca la del comercio, la única que en verdad podían ejercer.

El Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores del Presidente Eduardo Santos, Luis López de Mesa, quien gozaba entre los círculos de poder de una extraña fama de «sabio» fue el artífice de esta visión discriminatoria. Estudios como el del sociólogo Carlos Uribe Celis, titulado Luis López de Mesa, aproximación crítica a su obra, permite entrever las concepciones racistas y xenófobas de este personaje. Era claro que López de Mesa consideraba inconveniente la inmigración de judíos dadas «sus costumbres invertebradas de asimilación de riqueza por el cambio, la usura, por el trueque y el truco, sin arraigar en las actividades de su producción y transformación.»

Las absurdas teorías racistas de López de Mesa, que en alguna ocasión afirmó que la mezcla entre los indígenas y los judíos daría la peor de las condiciones «un usurero zalamer», lo llevaron a emitir una circular el 30 de enero de 1939 a todas las embajadas donde subrayaba: «Considera el Gobierno que la cifra de 5.000 judíos actualmente establecida en Colombia constituyen [sic] ya un porcentaje [sic] imposible de superar [...] opongan todas las trabas humanamente posibles a las visas de nuevos pasaportes a elementos judíos.»

Y sin embargo, aun cuando existió un antisemitismo oficial en Colombia que dificultó su entrada y la de sus familiares al país, también hay que decir que Colombia, desde los días de la Conquista, acuñó y volvió propia la famosa frase del conquistador español Sebastián de Belalcázar: «se obedece pero no se cumple». Y por más que los decretos prohibieran la entrada de judíos o que llegarán con papeles falsos no se registraron denuncias, devoluciones o extradiciones de quienes consiguieron ingresar al territorio nacional.

Colombia siempre ha mantenido una actitud ambivalente y discrepante con sus propias leyes, y los colombianos se mueven sin problemas entre un país legal y otro real. Por lo tanto, los judíos de Colombia, a pesar de su ilegalidad, en el siglo XX pudieron desarrollar una vida judía sin mayores dificultades y crearon instituciones como sinagogas, colegios, revistas, clubes, carnicerías para sus dietas religiosas, cementerios que todavía persisten y pudieron crecer y prosperar dentro de la cultura que traían de Europa y el Medio Oriente, en un país xenófobo que nunca les dio la bienvenida, pero les permitió refugiarse en silencio en sus tierras.

Sin embargo, su silencio no les sirvió de mucho cuando comenzaron a ser víctimas del flagelo que látigo a los industriales y comerciantes durante la década de los setenta, ochenta y noventa: el secuestro y extorción. La comunidad judía, al igual que la clase dirigente colombiana, vino a ser uno de los sectores afectadas por esta práctica criminal que terminó a financiando a todos los grupos armados del conflicto colombiano.

En el caso de la comunidad sefardita, el secuestro, extorsión y posterior asesinato en 1998 del joven Benjamín Khoudari, miembro de dicha comunidad de Bogotá, por parte de personas vinculadas a los organismos de seguridad del Estado haciéndose pasar por guerrilla, asustó y precipitó la salida de buena parte de esta judería colombiana.

Se calcula que el Centro Israelita de Bogotá ( la comunidad asquenazi) la institución más numerosa de la ciudad, perdió en dicho año un 25% de sus miembros; la Comunidad Hebrea Sefardita de Bogotá cerca de un 30% y la Asociación Israelita Montefiore, la comunidad más liberal y de origen alemán, un 15% de sus miembros. Ahora bien, el 60% de los afectados que salieron del país emigraron a Miami o a la Florida; el 25% a Israel; el 10% a Costa Rica y el 5% a otros países como Panamá y Canadá.

Para concluir, es importante tener en cuenta en este cuadro sobre los sefarditas en Colombia, que fue solo hasta 1991 que el país, ante la crisis y los dilemas de su falta de apertura tanto política como cultural, expide una nueva Constitución en la cual por primera vez acepta y oficializa la libertad de cultos en el territorio nacional.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/saudades-sefarad/message/44814;_ylc=X3oDMTJxZGRoaGI0BF9TAzk3MzU5NzE1BGdycElkAzM3ODg1NgRncnBzcElkAzE3MDUwNzYzMTUEbXNnSWQDNDQ4MTQEc2VjA2Rtc2cEc2xrA3Ztc2cEc3RpbWUDMTM4OTE4MzI0OQ--

Saturday, December 21, 2013

It is not surprising that five hundred years after the Jewish expuls

It is not surprising that five hundred years after the Jewish expuls

Thu Dec 19, 2013 11:49 pm (PST) . Posted by:

"rufina@netactive.co.za" bernardetti

It is not surprising that five hundred years after the Jewish expulsion and systematic anti-Semitism, little remains of a glorious Jewish past.
Toledo's XII century synagogue Photo: reuters

When I lived in Barcelona I used to run into my neighbor in the elevator quite often. He was a middle-aged man, chubby and always grumpy. Late one night, however, he was suddenly acting jovial, sympathetic and talkative; and because he was a little drunk he shared with me the cause of his joy: business was doing well. "What business?" I asked, feigning interest. He sells gift items to small shops geared toward tourists and - he explained boastfully - since the ‘Red de Juderías’ (Network of Jewish Quarters) association was created, groups of Jewish Americans began to invade Girona. He subsequently began to offer items such as clocks with Hebrew numbers, coasters depicting the Jewish quarter of Girona, magnets with Kabbalist Isaac el Cec... and the business began to prosper. "You know how Jews are..." he said smirking. “Not really. How are they?” I asked. He must have felt something behind my curiosity, because he was put on alert and carefully answered, "well, they buy everything Jewish ... " 

Twenty-four Spanish cities are part of the Red de Juderías de España, a public non-profit association that aims to preserve urban, architectural, historical, artistic and cultural Sephardic heritage in Spain, in addition to helping boost tourism in those villages. Related: 

Cities across Europe celebrate Day of Jewish Culture
The Dohány street sheriff

But it is not surprising that five hundred years after the Jewish expulsion and systematic anti-Semitism, little remains of that glorious past. There are, however, increasingly more ways to access it and to discover the Sephardic legacy by following the routes offered by the Red de Juderías en España.

There are three types of Sephardic historical tours, each organized geographically: Catalonia, Castile and Andalusia. This logistic division corresponds to three historical realities of a magnificent Jewish past that lasted many centuries, ending in 1492 with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain.

In the Andalusian zone, the Jewish community lived and sometimes flourished under Muslim rule, which began in the year 711 with the conquest of Al - Andalus, the Arabic name for the Iberian peninsula. The route of Madrid and Castilla represents the territory of the Christian kingdoms, which from the focus of resistance to the Muslim invasion in Asturias, the Northwest of Spain, took them nearly 800 years to retake the country. The Christian area also had an important Jewish community, and although it did not flourish, it created an essential heritage for Spanish and Jewish history. The third area is Catalonia, which was released/conquered by the Carolingians francs less than a hundred years after the Arab conquest, and where the Jews were forced to begin a new chapter.

When the best option for a Jew was to live with Muslims

The history of the Jews does not begin with the Arab invasion, not in Spain nor in the rest of Europe. In Spain the Jews were there before the country had its current name and even before the nation that formed the country existed. Most studies indicate that there were already Jews in the Iberian peninsula in the times of King Solomon, during the Greek and Phoenician colonies, the domain of Rome and, of course, under the Christianized Visigoths that persecuted them in the name of the religion of love.

However, the Golden Age of the Jews of Spain started with the Arab invasion of the Visigothic domain. The Golden Age of Jewish culture lasted from the 10th century to the 12th century, featuring personalities such as Hasdai Ibn Shaprut (910-975), a physician and leading diplomat of two Caliphs who helped solve complicated conflicts within Christian communities. 

Jews were also active in Toledo's school of translators, and had a transcendent role in European culture when they rediscovered --with their translations of Hebrew and Arabic texts into Latin and Spanish - the works of Greek philosophers and Jewish and Muslim thinkers.

Aristotle’s philosophy came to Europe via Hebrew and Arabic

The Jewish cultural boom in the Christian kingdoms of Castile and its allies coincides with its decline in Muslim territories, but the latter still remained the most important Jewish community of the time. In 1148, Al-Andalus was conquered by a group of Berber religious fundamentalists called Almohades who had a hostile attitude towards the Jews, of whom some 40,000 emigrated to Toledo, a Spanish city reconquered in 1085.

Religious tolerance in Christian kingdoms was based on their need to have the know-how, economical benefits and political weight of the Jewish and Muslim communities, rather than on the Spanish King’s political views. Once the Spanish king lost interest, he decided to get rid of the infidels. Meanwhile, the Jews managed to occupy important positions in medicine, finance, trade and diplomacy.

The best of Catalonia after the Barça

The third area corresponds to Catalonia, where Barcelona and Girona, city of the Kabbalist Isaac el Sec and Mose ben Nahman or Nahmanides, are the most relevant places along with the picturesque village Besalú, near Girona.

In any of these three routes the visitor can see the traces of a fascinating Jewish past: medieval synagogues, old Jewish quarters, mikves of the 11th or 12th centuries, newly resurrected cemeteries etc.

According to genetic research, no less than 20% of the current Iberian population descended from Sephardic Jews, but most Spaniards are not aware of that they may have Sephardic origins. Fuen Alcala is an example of this: born in Jaén, Andalusia, she discovered her Jewish origins when a Jesuit priest from her family decided to investigate their roots. The family,was forced to convert to Christianity shortly after the Statute of ethnic cleansing of Toledo in 1449. Despite everything, Alcala informed me that there are traditions that the family kept and which she did not relate to Judaism until she fully understood where she came from: 'we always cleaned and decorated the house it a special way on Saturday, and my mother called it to do Saturday'.

The routes of Spain offer history, culture and self-knowledge. If Paris was worth a mass to a French prince (Henry IV) who abandoned his religion in order to be crowned, Spain is worth a trip for all Jews who want to regain to their lost kingdom.

Gisela Dés is an intern at The Jerusalem Post

Monday, December 16, 2013

Mandela, justice and forgiveness


Mandela, justice and forgiveness

FW de Klerk and Nelson Mandela, World Economic Forum, Davos, 1992The guff about forgiveness that has been gushing forth since the death of Nelson Mandela is really quite... well, unforgiveable.

Mandela is rightly much admired for having rejected hatred and making an accommodation with his erstwhile persecutors rather than seeking revenge. This was indeed the behaviour of a statesman and a remarkable individual, and it would be wonderful if others could emulate that.

However, the context is all-important. First, you can only forgive your persecutor if you are in a position to do so – if you have won political power over them, or even more fundamentally if you have survived any attempt by them to harm you.

And second, while you are entitled to forgive someone who has done harm to you personally, you are not entitled to forgive those who have not done you any harm but have done harm to others. Only the victim is in a position to forgive. If others do so, this is a presumptuousness which can lead straight to gross injustice or worse. There can be no forgiveneness for Stalin, Hitler or Mao. To ‘forgive’ them would be to betray their victims and negate their suffering.

Obvious as these points may appear to some, for many others they are not self-evident at all. On the contrary, the prevalent mood in the west holds that compromise and accommodation are always preferable to conflict or war; that in the interests of ‘peace’, you must somehow blind yourself to the fact that the other guys are continuing to butcher people or even still intending to kill or conquer you. Not so much forgiveneness as a ‘get out of jail free’ card.

It is a view which does not acknowledge the crucial difference between magnanimity in victory and surrender to an active enemy. Nor does it recognise the difference between odious regimes which may give ground in their own interests, as happened in apartheid-era South Africa, and fanatical regimes which view any compromise merely as a faster way to achieve their infernal ends, as is the case today with Iran. It thus leads straight to the appeasement of the unappeasable and the victory of evil over good.

In today’s climate, however, where good and bad have become relative concepts, people have increasingly lost the will to fight for the former against the latter. They would rather reach an accommodation, even with active enemies. But you cannot split the difference between good and evil, for what you end up with is merely a sanitised form of that evil.

Moreover, with the distinction between good and bad now very blurred, the division that is now deemed to count instead is between victims and oppressors. The result of that deeply questionable distinction is that bad behaviour by those perceived as victims is ignored, tolerated or condoned (while good behaviour by those perceived as oppressors is correspondingly denied). So the appalling savagery by the ANC in burning perceived ‘traitors’ alive through ‘necklacing’, for example, is all too easily ‘forgiven’ – indeed, forgotten – by those who believed the ANC could not themselves be oppressors because they were victims. And how does one square Mandela’s signature characteristic of forgiveness, which in the eyes of so many turned him into a figure of unimpeachable goodness, with his embrace of Soviet communism, which persecuted, imprisoned and murdered so many millions of people?

In similar vein, it is hard not to conclude that substituting ‘truth and reconciliation’ for justice against the Afrikaners who oppressed black south Africans, as well as failing to act against those black south Africans who burned people alive, might well be the reason many fear a bloodbath now that the restraining presence of Mandela himself has departed. It is why criminal trials are necessary against war criminals, Nazi or otherwise, without limit of time – not just to obtain justice for their victims, but because unless a society expresses its collective abhorrence of such deeds, it is more likely to commit them again in the future.

Forgiveness may be necessary for an individual to move from darkness into light; but justice is essential if a society is to be civilised. Forgiveness is a great virtue; but it can never be at the expense of the fundamental moral distinction between right and wrong, good and bad. To make it so, as many are now doing over Mandela’s legacy, is another example of the vicious culture of sentimentalisation to which the morally confused west is now unfortunately all too prone.

Sunday, November 24, 2013

The counterfeit Arabs

The counterfeit Arabs
By VICTOR SHARPE

They are the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.

They are indistinguishable from those Arabs who live in the surrounding artificial states such as Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia or the other entities throughout the Middle East created by the colonial powers, France and Britain. Both powers were victorious after the Ottoman Turkish Empire lay defeated at the end of World War I.

Both of these European powers carved artificial borders across the corpse of what had been Turkey’s empire in the Middle East, and both France and Britain have left a resulting legacy of war and violence ever since. One such territory, previously occupied by Ottoman Turkey for 400 years, was the geographical entity known sometimes as Palestine.

But there is no such thing as a Palestinian people; no such thing as a Palestinian history; and no Palestinian language exists. There has never been any independent, sovereign Palestinian state in all of recorded history – let alone an Arab independent state of Palestine.

You will search in vain for Palestinian Arab coinage or Palestinian Arab archaeological artefacts specifically related to any Palestinian Arab king or ancient leader. But what you will find are coins, pottery, ancient scrolls, all providing conclusive, empirical and millennial evidence of Jewish civilization dotting the land known correctly as Israel – not Palestine.

The present-day so-called “Palestinians” are an Arab people sharing an overwhelmingly Muslim Arab culture, ethnicity and language identical to their fellow Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, with few if any distinctions.

Yasser Arafat, the arch-terrorist, who imposed himself undemocratically upon the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians, was fond of creating the absurd myth that Palestinian Arabs were descended from the Canaanites and the Philistines.  As we know, the bigger the lie the bigger the number of people will believe it. And so Arafat twisted history in order to disinherit the indigenous native people of the land: the Jews.

Canaanites, without doubt, were the first known inhabitants of the Land of Israel before the first Hebrews, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their wives, settled there, and before Moses brought their descendants back to the Promised Land during the Exodus from Egypt.

The Canaanites lived both along the coastal plain and in the mountain regions, which run like a spine down the biblical territory of Samaria and Judea. Their language was similar to Hebrew and their territory stretched north into present day Lebanon and included the present day Golan Heights.

The Canaanites were finally subdued during the reign of King David.
Most Canaanites were gradually assimilated into the Jewish people and were no longer a distinguishable people.

After the 8th century BC, the Canaanites no longer existed and the only people, therefore, who can trace back an historic link to ancient Canaan are the Jews, not the Palestinian Arabs. So much for Arafat’s nonsense and for the on-going attempts by today’s Palestinian Arabs, financed by vast Arab oil wealth, to hoodwink the world.

The term “Philistines” provides the source from which the term “Palestinians” is derived. Like the Arabs who gave themselves the concocted name “Palestinian,” the Philistines were alien peoples who entered the land from other lands, mostly from the Mediterranean island of Crete. That is why they were also known as the Sea People.

The modern “Palestinian Arabs” are primarily the descendants of those itinerant Arabs who illegally flooded British Mandatory Palestine from Arab territories as far away as Sudan, Egypt, Syria and what was Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). They were attracted during the early decades of the 20th century by new employment opportunities provided by the Jewish pioneers, whose heroic efforts were turning the desert green again and restoring centuries of neglect that the land had endured under a succession of alien occupiers.

Britain, during its Mandate over the territory, turned a blind eye to the flood of illegal Arab aliens entering, while at the same time often arbitrarily limiting Jewish immigration into their ancient, biblical and ancestral homeland. This was a betrayal of the Mandate given to Britain to facilitate a Jewish Homeland in the geographical territory known as Palestine.

The Philistines were non-Semitic peoples who had entered the land from their homes throughout the Aegean Islands in general and from Crete in particular. These ancient Cretans arrived in Southern Canaan and along the Egyptian coastline and were known as “Pelestim and Keretim” by the Hebrew tribes. It appears that their first settlement may have been Gaza. Later they settled in Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gat and Ekron: the Pentapolis.

Their territory was primarily along the coastal Mediterranean; interestingly, a territory not dissimilar to the present day Gaza Strip. They attempted at different times to invade Judah but were turned back by the various Jewish biblical heroes and finally defeated by King David. From that time onwards they were diminished as a threat and as a separate people, finally disappearing from history and any “Palestinian” Arab attempt to claim a lineage with them is as absurd as that of links with the early Canaanites.

Moving fast forward to 73 AD, the first attempt of the Jews to reclaim their independence from the repressive yoke of Roman occupation ended when Jewish warriors and their families fled to the fortress of Masada from Jerusalem. The Romans had destroyed the Jewish capital city along with the Second Jewish Temple.

Historically documented and universally recognized, Masada, which rises to great height overlooking the Dead Sea, is where the heroic last stand took place and where the surviving warriors and their families took their own lives rather than be sent as slaves throughout the mighty Roman Empire. The Land where these stirring and epochal events took place was in the province known as Judæa. There is absolutely no mention of any place called “Palestine” before that time.

After the suppression of the Second Jewish Revolt in 135 AD against the Roman occupation, the Emperor Hadrian replaced the name of Judea (Yehuda in Hebrew from where the name Yehudim, Jews, originates) to Syria-Palæstina after the “Philistines” who were the ancient enemies of the Israelites. Hadrian did so with the explicit purpose of effacing any trace of Jewish history.

Ancient Romans, as well as so-called Palestinian Arabs, have fulfilled the Hebrew Scriptural prophecy that declares: “They lay crafty plans against Your People… they say: ‘come, let us wipe them out as a nation; let the name of Israel be remembered no more’.” – Tehilim
83:3-4 (Psalm 83:3-4). They failed, as Israel is reconstituted as a modern Jewish state in its ancestral and biblical homeland.

No such name as Palestine occurs in any ancient document. It is not written in the Bible, neither in the Hebrew Scriptures nor in the Christian Testament, not even in Assyrian, Persian, Macedonian, Ptolemaic, Seleucian or other Greek sources. There is no “Palestinian”
people ever mentioned, not even by the Romans that invented the term.

If “Palestinians” allegedly are the historic inhabitants of the Holy Land, why did they not fight for independence from Roman occupation as Jews did? How is it possible that not a single “Palestinian” leader revolted against the Roman invaders or is mentioned in any historic record?

Why is there no Palestinian rebel group mentioned, as for example the Jewish Zealots? Why does every historic document mention the Jews as the native and aboriginal inhabitants, and the Greeks, Romans and others as foreigners dwelling in Judea; but no “Palestinian” people, neither as native or as foreigner? What is more, there is no reference to any “Palestinian” people in the Koran, although Muslims claim that their prophet was once in al-Aksa (meaning the farthest place) which Muslims, for political purposes, chose to be Jerusalem – an event not even mentioned in the Koran.

Saladin, a Kurd, knew the Jews and invited them to resettle in Jerusalem. He had no trouble in recognizing Jerusalem as their eternal capital city and the territory as their rightful Homeland. But he did not know any so-called Palestinians and to claim otherwise that Palestinians are the original people of Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel,  is not only counter to secular history but also is opposed to Islamic history.

The so-called “Palestinians” who claim Jerusalem want it so that they can take it away from the Jews for whom Jerusalem, known also as Zion, is the eternal, 3,000 year old Jewish capital.

Perhaps what links the modern day Arabs who call themselves “Palestinians” with the ancient Philistines is that both are invaders.
The Philistines wanted to take from the Israelites the Holy Ark of the Covenant, while today’s so-called “Palestinian Arabs” want to take from the Jewish people the Holy City of the Covenant – Jerusalem.

A wealth of information about this and related subjects may be found at the following website. I encourage all to read it:

http://www.think-israel.org/archives/oldindex.html#featured

So let me close, beginning with the words of a Christian Arab, Joseph Farah, who has made his home here in America and who knows of what he
writes:

“There has never been a land known as Palestine governed by Palestinians. Palestinians are Arabs, indistinguishable from Jordanians (another recent invention), Syrians, Iraqis, etc. Keep in mind that the Arabs control 99.9 per cent of the Middle East lands.
Israel represents one-tenth of one per cent of the landmass. But that’s too much for the Arabs. They want it all. And that is ultimately what the fighting in Israel is about today… No matter how many land concessions the Israelis make, it will never be enough.”

Joseph Farah, “Myths of the Middle East”

Let us hear what other Arabs have said:

“There is no such country as Palestine. ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented. There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria. ‘Palestine’ is alien to us. It is the Zionists who introduced it”.

Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, Syrian Arab leader to British Peel Commission, 1937

“There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not”.

Professor Philip Hitti, Arab historian, 1946

“It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but Southern Syria”.

Representative of Saudi Arabia at the United Nations, 1956

Concerning the Holy Land, the chairman of the Syrian Delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in February 1919 stated:

“The only Arab domination since the Conquest in 635 AD hardly lasted, as such, 22 years.”

The preceding declarations by Arab politicians were issued before 1967 as they had not the slightest knowledge of the existence of any Palestinian people.

How and when did they change their mind and decide that such people existed?

When the State of Israel was reborn in 1948 the Arabs had still not discovered that “ancient” people. They were too busy attempting to annihilate the reconstituted sovereign State of Israel, and did not intend to create any Palestinian entity, but only to distribute the seized Jewish lands among the already existing Arab states.

The Arab armies were miraculously defeated by a tiny handful of Jewish defenders. The Arabs attempted again to destroy Israel in 1967, and were humiliated in only six days, in which they lost the lands that they had previously stolen and usurped in 1948. Those lands included Judea and Samaria, which comprise the biblical and ancestral Jewish heartland, tracing its history back some 4,000 years.

Now the world forgets such empirical history and prefers to name the ancestral Jewish territory, the West Bank, which was illegally occupied by the Jordanian Arabs for 19 years from 1948 until its liberation in 1967.

In all those years, when Jordan occupied Judea and Samaria and Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip, neither of them created a “Palestinian”
state, since the still non-existing Palestinians would have never claimed their alleged right to have their own state.

Paradoxically, during the British Mandate, which lasted from 1920 to 1948, it was not any Arab group but the Jews that were known as Palestinians!

But read what other Arabs declared after the Six-Day War:

“There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are all part of one nation. It is only for political reasons that we carefully underline our Palestinian identity… yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel”.

Zuhair Muhsin, military commander of the PLO and member of the PLO Executive Council

“Never forget this one point: There is no such thing as a Palestinian people, there is no Palestinian entity, there is only Syria. You are an integral part of the Syrian people, Palestine is an integral part of Syria. Therefore it is we, the Syrian authorities, who are the true representatives of the Palestinian people”.

Syrian dictator Hafez Assad to the PLO leader Yasser Arafat

“As I lived in Palestine, everyone I knew could trace their heritage back to the original country their great grandparents came from.
Everyone knew their origin was not from the Canaanites, but ironically, this is the kind of stuff our education in the Middle East included. The fact is that today’s Palestinians are immigrants from the surrounding nations! I grew up well knowing the history and origins of today’s Palestinians as being from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Christians from Greece, Muslim Sherkas from Russia, Muslims from Bosnia, and the Jordanians next door. My grandfather, who was a dignitary in Bethlehem, almost lost his life by Abdul Qader Al-Husseni (the leader of the Palestinian revolution) after being accused of selling land to Jews. He used to tell us that his village Beit Sahur (The Shepherds Fields) in Bethlehem County was empty before his father settled in the area with six other families. The town has now grown to
30,000 inhabitants”.

Walid Shoebat

During the long years of alien occupation of the Land of Israel, though Jews were always living in the Land in whatever numbers they could sustain, visitors were always struck at how the land had become a barren waste with malarial swamps and a remarkably sparse population. The following reports from travellers to the desolate landscape that had become a mournful waste are quite telling:

“There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent (valley of Jezreel, Galilee); not for thirty miles in either direction… One may ride ten miles hereabouts and not see ten human beings. For the sort of solitude to make one dreary, come to Galilee… Nazareth is forlorn… Jericho lies a mouldering ruin… Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and humiliation… untenanted by any living creature… A desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds… a silent, mournful expanse… a desolation… We never saw a human being on the whole route… Hardly a tree or shrub anywhere. Even the olive tree and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil had almost deserted the country… Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes… desolate and unlovely…”

Mark Twain, “The Innocents Abroad”, 1867

One wonders, therefore, where were the “Palestinians” hiding so that Mark Twain could not see them? Where was that so-called “ancient”
people in the mid nineteenth century? Of course, Arab politicians now attempt to discredit Mark Twain, retreating into that realm of all scoundrels by calling him a racist.

“In 1590 a ‘simple English visitor’ to Jerusalem wrote: ‘Nothing there is to be seen but a little of the old walls, which is yet remaining and all the rest is grass, moss and weeds much like to a piece of rank or moist ground’.”.

Gunner Edward Webbe, Palestine Exploration Fund

“The land in Palestine is lacking in people to till its fertile soil”.

British archaeologist Thomas Shaw, mid-1700s

“Palestine is a ruined and desolate land”.

Count Constantine François Volney, XVIII century French author and historian

“The Arabs themselves cannot be considered but temporary residents.
They pitched their tents in its grazing fields or built their places of refuge in its ruined cities. They created nothing in it. Since they were strangers to the land, they never became its masters. The desert wind that brought them hither could one day carry them away without their leaving behind them any sign of their passage through it”.

Comments by Christians concerning the Arabs in Palestine in the 1800s

“The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is of a body of population”.

James Finn, British Consul in 1857

“The area was under populated and remained economically stagnant until the arrival of the first Zionist pioneers in the 1880′s, who came to rebuild the Jewish land. The country had remained “The Holy Land” in the religious and historic consciousness of mankind, which associated it with the Bible and the history of the Jewish people. Jewish development of the country also attracted large numbers of other immigrants – both Jewish and Arab. The road leading from Gaza to the north was only a summer track suitable for transport by camels and carts… Houses were all of mud. No windows were anywhere to be seen… The plows used were of wood… The yields were very poor… Schools did not exist… The rate of infant mortality was very high… The western part, toward the sea, was almost a desert… Many ruins were scattered over the area, as owing to the prevalence of malaria, many villages were deserted by their inhabitants”.

The report of the British Royal Commission, 1913

Far too many otherwise decent people have come to accept Arab oil financed falsehoods masquerading as history about the origins of the so-called Palestinian Arabs. These lies now permeate the mainstream media, schools, colleges, and universities and are perpetrated by the tenured leftist professors and the colleges who all too eagerly accept Saudi blood money.

The historical facts given above may be of help to those who have otherwise fallen hook, line and sinker for duplicitous Arab propaganda and what constitutes one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated upon the world.

Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of several books including a collection of short stories called The Blue Hour and Volumes One, Two and Three of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.

http://www.thejerusalemconnection.us/blog/2013/11/18/the-counterfeit-arabs.html

Sunday, November 3, 2013

How Islam managed to stay medieval for 1,400 years

Cultural psychology: How Islam managed to stay medieval for 1,40
Fri Nov 1, 2013 4:43 pm (PDT) . Posted by: "Granddaddy Hand" hisdude2004

From: handsfiasco@webtv.net
Subject: FW: Cultural psychology: How Islam managed to stay medieval for 1,400 years
Date: Fri, 1 Nov 2013 10:27:02 -0500

Date: Fri, 1 Nov 2013 11:34:44 +0100
Subject: Fwd: Cultural psychology: How Islam managed to stay medieval for 1,400 years
From: adokter@012.net.il
To: handsfiasco@webtv.net

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2013/10/cultural-psychology-how-islam-managed-to-stay-medieval-for-1400-years.html

Cultural psychology: How Islam managed to stay medieval for 1,400 years. While almost all other cultures changed from primitive and medieval to democratic and egalitarian societies, one culture managed to keep even its most brutal and backward traditions and values for 1,400 years until today. Still today, the majority of Muslims prefer to live by values that can be traced all the way back to the desert tribes in which the founder of their religion lived. Getting to know life in Muslim families and societies is like traveling back in time to the time of Muhammad. Here one finds shocking laws and traditions that are obviously criminal and inhumane — but for some reason accepted — in our otherwise humanistic culture.

While non-Muslim scientists invent new fantastic medicines and technologies daily, discover the most amazing things about the universe, its building blocks and inhabitants, and Western voters and politicians have created the most humane, rich and free societies in world history, most Islamic countries are still amputating limbs for theft, stoning women and homosexuals, heavily inbred, denying people free speech and democracy, and contributing absolutely nothing when it comes to science, human rights or peace.

What are the cultural psychological factors making Islam able to stay medieval for 1,400 years?
Religion
One main factor is that while all other religions allow their followers to interpret their holy scriptures, thereby making them relatively adaptable to secular law, human rights and individual needs, Islam categorizes Muslims who do not take the Quran literally as apostates. And according to Islamic law, the sharia, apostasy is to be punished with death. The sharia thus makes it impossible for Islamic societies ever to develop into modern, humanistic civilisations.

The fact that Muslims deviating from the Quranic world view are to be punished has the direct consequence that scientific facts conflicting with the naive and childish world view held in pre-Enlightenment cultures are suppressed. Together with massive inbreeding — 70 percent of Pakistanis, 45 percent of Arabs and at least 30 percent of Turks are from first cousin-marriages (often through many generations) — this has resulted in the embarrassing fact that the Muslim world produces only one tenth of the world average when it comes to scientific research, and are dramatically under-represented among Nobel Prize winners. Fewer books have been translated into Arabic in the last thousand years than the amount of books translated within the country of Spain every year.

Within Islam, faith and tradition is obviously valued far, far more than inventions and discoveries that would ease suffering and lead to a more reasonable understanding of the complexity of the universe and the potential of its inhabitants.

Child rearing
Another powerful defence mechanism within Islamic culture is found within Muslim child rearing. A very real threat of violence and even death is over every Muslim child’s head, should he or she decide to choose another life style than that of its parents. Even if the parents allow their child to choose his or her own religion — or none at all — other Muslims are dedicating their lives to kill them. Together with the wide use of violence and even torture within Muslim families, the horrific amount of daily family executions of Muslim youth, this is enough to keep the vast majority from even considering escaping the way of the sharia. The Quran’s and the Hadiths’ many promises of hellfire to those who go against Muhammad’s orders and example scares many from leaving the culture that brings them so much suffering. I clearly remember how several Muslim inmates at the prison I was working in as a psychologist expressed what seemed to be compassion, when I told them that I do not believe in Allah.

In order further to make sure that the children grow up to follow the same patterns as their family, many of them are subjected to mind-numbing repetitions of Islam’s exceedingly violent scriptures, making many of them ticking time bombs where ever they live.

Marriage

Muhammad’s teaching that Muslim females can only marry Muslim males — often within their own bloodline — further bolster the culture of his followers against outside influence. The fact that the wives are kept like slaves in the way that they can only divorce if they are set free by an Islamic authority, keeps them from escaping the religion and and very often violent husbands, that leaves them with so few freedoms and rights. Should they chose to run away or divorce, they will in most case be cut off by their family, the often violent father is entitled to the children, and because they are categorized as outcasts and have had no or very little right to educate themselves, the possibility to sustain themselves is strongly limited. On top of that, many will live with a death sentence over their head for the rest of their lives for having insulted the family’s honor.

Almost all Muslim women are thus threatened or even forced to fulfill their responsibility of continuing and passing on the Islamic culture, including its many misogynistic aspects. And the marriage rules within Islam makes sure that non-Muslim influence is not invited into the family.

View on non-Muslims
One basic principle within Islam is hating and harming non-Muslims. The Islamic scriptures are full of dehumanizing propaganda against us, and contain dozens of orders for Muslims to suppress, harm and kill atheists and followers of all other religions. The devaluation and demonizing of non-Muslims can easily be compared to the propaganda spread about the enemy by governments in wartime in order remove their soldiers’ psychological hindrances that would otherwise keep them from attacking the opponent. Not surprisingly, Muslims are not allowed to take non-Muslims as friends.

Thus keeping a mental and physical distance to people from other cultures, Islam prevents its followers from being influenced and inspired by our less barbaric values.

Ethnic pride
Another cultural psychological factor enabling Islamic culture to remain unchanged in a globalised world with all its possibilities concerns Muslims’ ethnic pride. No matter how ridiculous or embarrassing it may seem to the outsider, most Muslims are proud of being Muslim and a follower of Islam. According to Islam they are destined to dominate the rest of us, and we are so bad that we deserve the eternal fire. Working as a psychologist in prison, I heard how the Muslim inmates talk about their non-Muslim victims — and their victims were always non-Muslims, unless it concerned women or rival gangs — and I have no doubt that there exists a severe and widespread racism against non-Muslims among Muslims.

The cultural osmosis
Islamic culture thus has several defence mechanisms that prevents it and its followers from being influenced by non-Muslim values. At the same time, Westerners expressing pride in our country, culture or faith are immediately branded as racists,nationalistic or intolerant.

At the same time, we in the West have a longstanding tradition of tolerance and openness, together with the multicultural agenda pushed by the Left, the Media, EU and UN. The cultural osmosis can therefore go only one way: Islam stays where it is, while it drags the West back into medieval darkness, with its limitation of free speech and pre-enlightenment-style acceptance of religious dogmas and sensitivities.

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2013/10/cultural-psychology-how-islam-managed-to-stay-medieval-for-1400-years.html

Posted by Nicolai Sennels on October 30, 2013

Islam, Not Nazis, Motivated Hajj Amin El

Israeliadvocate] Islam, Not Nazism, Motivated Hajj Amin el
Thu Oct 24, 2013 4:42 am (PDT) . Posted by: "Yaacov Levi" jlevi_us

 
 
 

Islam, Not Nazism, Motivated Hajj Amin el-Hussini, Pt 1

by

Dr. Andrew Bostom

October 23, 2013

October 4, 1944—69 years ago—a then internationally renowned Muslim cleric, addressing imams of the Bosnian SS Division fighting for the Nazis, stated the following to his co-revisionists:
“Nearly one-third of the Koran concerns the Jews.  The Koran calls upon all Muslims to protect themselves against the Jews and to fight them wherever they may meet them.  The Jews in Khaybar attempted to poison Muhammad, the messenger of Allah; they also carried out themselves or supported various attacks on the person of the Prophet, all of which failed.  Muhammad’s many attempts to bring the Jews to their senses were unsuccessful, with the result that he saw himself as simply forced to dispose of the Jews and to run them out of Arabia.”
This accurate summary of canonical, mainstream Islamic theology regarding Jews, was made by Hajj Amin el-Husseini—the preeminent Arab Muslim leader of the World War II era.  Concordant with his stature then, in Islamdom, el-Husseini was viewed by Adolph Hitler (and also the Waffen-SS), as a “Muslim pope.”  For example, the Nazi regime promoted this former mufti of Jerusalem in an illustrated biographical booklet (printed in Berlin in 1943) which declared him Muhammad’s direct descendant, an Arab national hero, and the “incarnation of all ideals and hopes of the Arab nation.” 
On June 30, 1922, a joint resolution of both Houses of Congress of the United States unanimously endorsed the “Mandate for Palestine,” confirming the irrevocable right of Jews to settle in the area of Palestine; anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.  The Congressional record contains a statement of support from New York Rep. Walter Chandler which includes an observation, about “Turkish and Arab agitators . . . preaching a kind of holy war [jihad] against . . . the Jew of Palestine. During this same era within Palestine, a strong Arab Muslim irredentist current—epitomized by Hajj Amin el-Husseini—promulgated the forcible restoration of sharia-mandated dhimmitude for Jews via jihad. 
Indeed, two years before he orchestrated the murderous anti-Jewish riots of 1920, that is, in 1918, Hajj Amin el-Husseini stated plainly to a Jewish coworker (at the Jerusalem Governorate), I. A. Abbady, “This was and will remain an Arab land . . . the Zionists will be massacred to the last man. . . . Nothing but the sword will decide the future of this country.” 
Despite his role in fomenting the1920 pogroms against Palestinian Jews, el-Husseini was pardoned and subsequently appointed mufti of Jerusalem by the British high commissioner, in May 1921; a title he retained, following the Ottoman practice, for the remainder of his life. Throughout his public career, the mufti relied upon traditional Koranic anti-Jewish motifs to arouse the Arab street.  For example, during the incitement which led to the 1929 Arab revolt in Palestine, he called for combating and slaughtering “the Jews.” not merely Zionists.  In fact, most of the Jewish victims of the 1929 Arab revolt were Jews from the centuries-old dhimmi communities (for example, in Hebron), as opposed to recent settlers identified with the Zionist movement. 
With the ascent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, the mufti and his coterie intensified their antisemitic activities to secure support from Hitler’s Germany (and later Bosnian Muslims, as well as the overall global Muslim umma [community]), for a jihad to annihilate the Jews of Palestine.  Following his expulsion from Palestine by the British, the mufti fomented a brutal anti-Jewish pogrom in Baghdad (1941), concurrent with his failed effort to install a pro-Nazi Iraqi government.  Escaping to Europe after this unsuccessful coup attempt, the mufti spent the remainder of World War II in Germany and Italy.  From this sanctuary, he provided active support for the Germans by recruiting Bosnian Muslims, in addition to Muslim minorities from the Caucasus, for dedicated Nazi SS units. The Mufti’s objectives for these recruits, and Muslims in general, were made explicit during his multiple wartime radio broadcasts from Berlin, heard throughout the
Arab world: an international campaign of genocide against the Jews.  For example, during his March 1, 1944, broadcast he stated: “Kill the Jews wherever you find them.  This pleases God, history, and religion [i.e., Islam].” 
Hajj Amin also attempted to contribute to the German war effort in Yugoslavia by recruiting Bosnian Muslims for the so-called Handzar Division.  Jan Wanner has observed that,
“His [the mufti’s] appeals . . . addressed to the Bosnian Muslims were . . . close in many respects to the argumentation used by contemporary Islamic fundamentalists . . . the Mufti viewed only as a new interpretation of the traditional concept of the Islamic community (umma), sharing with Nazism common enemies.” 
However, the creation of these Muslim units, for which the mufti bears direct responsibility, had only a limited impact on the overall destruction of European Jewry when compared with his nefarious wartime campaign to prevent Jewish emigration from Europe to Palestine.  Wanner, in his 1986 analysis of the mufti’s collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II, concluded,
“The darkest aspect of the Mufti’s activities in the final stage of the war was undoubtedly his personal share in the extermination of Europe’s Jewish population.  On May 17, 1943, he wrote a personal letter to Ribbentrop, asking him to prevent the transfer of 4500 Bulgarian Jews, 4000 of them children, to Palestine.  In May and June of the same year, he sent a number of letters to the governments of Bulgaria, Italy, Rumania, and Hungary, with the request not to permit even individual Jewish emigration and to allow the transfer of Jews to Poland where, he claimed they would be “under active supervision.”  The trials of Eichmann’s henchmen, including Dieter Wislicency who was executed in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, confirmed that this was not an isolated act by the Mufti.” 
Invoking the personal support of such prominent Nazis as Himmler and Eichmann, the mufti’s relentless hectoring of German, Romanian, and Hungarian government officials caused the cancellation of an estimated 480,000 exit visas which had been granted to Jews (80,000 from Rumania, and 400,000 from Hungary). As a result, these hapless individuals were deported to Polish concentration camps.  A United Nations Assembly document presented in 1947 which contained the mufti’s June 28, 1943, letter to the Hungarian foreign minister requesting the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Poland, includes this stark, telling annotation: “As a Sequel to This Request 400,000 Jews Were Subsequently Killed.” 11Moreover, in the mufti’s memoirs (Memoirs of the Grand Mufti, edited by Abd al-Karim al-Umar, Damascus, 1999), he describes what Himmler revealed to him during the summer of 1943 regarding the genocide of the Jews.  Following pro forma tirades on “Jewish
war guilt,” Himmler told the mufti that “up to now we have liquidated [abadna] around three million of them.”
According to historian Howard M. Sachar, meetings the mufti held with Hitler in 1941 and 1942 led to an understanding whereby Hitler’s forces would invade Palestine with the goal being “not the occupation of the Arab lands, but solely the destruction of Palestinian Jewry.”13And in April 2006, the director of the Nazi research center in Ludwigsburg, Klaus-Michael Mallman, and Berlin historian Martin Cueppers, revealed that a murderous Einsatzgruppe( mobile killing units) Egypt, connected to Rommel’s Africa Korps, was stationed in Athens awaiting British expulsion from the Levant, prior to beginning their planned slaughter of the roughly five hundred thousand Jews in Palestine.  This plan was only aborted after Rommel’s defeat by Montgomery at El Alamein, Egypt, in October/November 1942. 
The mufti remained unrelenting in his espousal of a virulent Jew-hatred as the focal tenet of his ideology in the aftermath of World War II, and the creation of the State of Israel.  He was also a committed supporter of global jihad movements, urging a “full struggle” against the Hindus of India (as well as the Jews of Israel) before delegates at the February 1951 World Muslim Congress: “We shall meet next with sword in hand on the soil of either Kashmir or Palestine.” 
Declassified intelligence documents from 1942, 1947, 1952, and 1954 confirm the mufti’s own Caliphate desires in repeated references from con­texts as diverse as Turkey, Egypt, Jerusalem, and Pakistan, and also include discussions of major Islamic conferences dominated by the mufti, which were attended by a broad spectrum of Muslim leaders literally representing the entire Islamic world (including Shia leaders from Iran), that is, in Karachi from February 16–19, 1952, and Jordanian-occupied Jerusalem, December 3–9, 1953.  Viewed in their totality these data do not support the current standard assessment of the mufti as merely a “Palestinian Arab nationalist, rife with Jew-hatred.” 
There is another parallel negativist trend, which is also widely prevalent: the claim that el-Husseini’s canonical Islamic Jew-hatred somehow represented a suis generis; a specialized type of “Nazification” of Islam, which has “persisted” into our era.  Paul Berman articulated an unabashed formulation of this broadly held thesis, proclaiming, that abetted by the Nazis, el-Husseini “monstrously,” and “infernally,” “blurred Islam and Nazism,” achieving a victory of Himmler’s Islam…A victory for the Islam of fanaticism and hatred over its arch-rival, the Islam of generosity and civilization.
During 1938, a booklet Muhammad Sabri edited, Islam, Judentum, Bolschewismus (Islam, Jewry, Bolshevism), was published in Berlin by Junker-Duennhaupt [Dünnhaupt].  Sabri’s booklet included Hajj Amin el-Husseini’s 1937 declaration—also deemed by some as a “fatwa” (an Islamic religious ruling) —appealing to the worldwide Muslim umma.  El-Husseini’s declaration was extracted and reprinted, separately, by the Nazi regime as Islam und Judentum (Islam and Jewry), and distributed to Muslim SS units in Bosnia, Croatia, and the Soviet Union. 
As best as I can determine, the first complete, annotated translation of this pamphlet, directly from the German, is provided herein. Although author Jennie Lebel included a somewhat awkward Serbo-Croatian to English translation of the pamphlet in her important biography of el-Husseini, neither she, nor any other scholar has ever identified, let alone comprehensively explicated, the antisemitic Islamic motifs which punctuate el-Husseini’s pronouncement, from beginning to end.  Accordingly, what follows the translation, is a detailed commentary which addresses this critical—and frankly, self-fulfilling—lacuna in the scholarship on el-Husseini’s Jew-hatred, i.e., identifying