Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Speech at the United Nations General Assembly, 2015: Algemeiner, Oct. 1, 2015 — Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you greetings from Jerusalem. The city in which the Jewish People’s hopes and prayers for peace for all of humanity have echoed throughout the ages.
Iran Sanctions Relief Will Feed Europe’s Syrian Refugee Crisis: Benjamin Weinthal, Jerusalem Post, Sept. 15, 2015 — While Germany and Austria are in a celebratory mood about absorbing Syrian refugees, European politicians have ignored Iran’s role in producing the waves of desperate Syrians fleeing to Europe.
Who Qualifies for ‘Asylum’?: Emily Bazelon, New York Times, Sept. 15, 2015— It’s an ancient promise: When outsiders flee to a new place in desperate need, they will not be turned away.
A Crime That Echoes Through the Centuries: Ben Cohen, Wall Street Journal, Aug. 28, 2015 — Of all the calumnies leveled at the Jews down the centuries, none has been as lethal as the blood libel.
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Speech at the United Nations General Assembly, 2015 (Video): Algemeiner, Oct. 1, 2015
Searching For Hartman: Ben Hartman, Jerusalem Post, Sept. 27, 2015
Montrealer’s Painstaking Work as a Torah Scribe: Micah Bond, Montreal Gazette, Sept. 12, 2015
The Intrepid Couple Who Restored a Gem of a Polish Synagogue: Penny Schwartz, Times of Israel, Sept. 30, 2015
PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU’S SPEECH AT THE UNITED
NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY, 2015
Algemeiner, Oct. 1, 2015
Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you greetings from Jerusalem. The city in which the Jewish People’s hopes and prayers for peace for all of humanity have echoed throughout the ages. Thirty-one years ago, as Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, I stood at this podium for the first time. I spoke that day against a resolution sponsored by Iran to expel Israel from the United Nations. Then as now, the UN was obsessively hostile towards Israel, the one true democracy in the Middle East. Then as now, some sought to deny the one and only Jewish state a place among the nations. I ended that first speech by saying: Gentlemen, check your fanaticism at the door.
More than three decades later, as the Prime Minister of Israel, I am again privileged to speak from this podium. And for me, that privilege has always come with a moral responsibility to speak the truth. So after three days of listening to world leaders praise the nuclear deal with Iran, I begin my speech today by saying: Ladies and Gentlemen, check your enthusiasm at the door.
You see, this deal doesn’t make peace more likely. By fueling Iran’s aggressions with billions of dollars in sanctions relief, it makes war more likely. Just look at what Iran has done in the last six months alone, since the framework agreement was announced in Lausanne. Iran boosted its supply of devastating weapons to Syria. Iran sent more soldiers of its Revolutionary Guard into Syria. Iran sent thousands of Afghani and Pakistani Shi’ite fighters to Syria. Iran did all this to prop up Assad’s brutal regime.
Iran also shipped tons of weapons and ammunition to the Houthi rebels in Yemen, including another shipment just two days ago. Iran threatened to topple Jordan. Iran’s proxy Hezbollah smuggled into Lebanon SA-22 missiles to down our planes, and Yakhont cruise missiles to sink our ships. Iran supplied Hezbollah with precision-guided surface-to-surface missiles and attack drones so it can accurately hit any target in Israel. Iran aided Hamas and Islamic Jihad in building armed drones in Gaza. Iran also made clear its plans to open two new terror fronts against Israel, promising to arm Palestinians in the West Bank and sending its Revolutionary Guard generals to the Golan Heights, from which its operatives recently fired rockets on northern Israel.
Israel will continue to respond forcefully to any attacks against it from Syria. Israel will continue to act to prevent the transfer of strategic weapons to Hezbollah from and through Syrian territory. Every few weeks, Iran and Hezbollah set up new terror cells in cities throughout the world. Three such cells were recently uncovered in Kuwait, Jordan and Cyprus. In May, security forces in Cyprus raided a Hezbollah agent’s apartment in the city of Larnaca. There they found five tons of ammonium nitrate, that’s roughly the same amount of ammonium nitrate that was used to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City. And that’s just in one apartment, in one city, in one country.
But Iran is setting up dozens of terror cells like this around the world, ladies and gentlemen, they’re setting up those terror cells in this hemisphere too. I repeat: Iran’s been doing all of this, everything that I’ve just described, just in the last six months, when it was trying to convince the world to remove the sanctions. Now just imagine what Iran will do after those sanctions are lifted. Unleashed and un-muzzled, Iran will go on the prowl, devouring more and more prey. In the wake of the nuclear deal, Iran is spending billions of dollars on weapons and satellites. You think Iran is doing that to advance peace? You think hundreds of billions of dollars in sanctions relief and fat contracts will turn this rapacious tiger into a kitten? If you do, you should think again.
In 2013 president Rouhani began his so-called charm offensive here at the UN. Two years later, Iran is executing more political prisoners, escalating its regional aggression, and rapidly expanding its global terror network. You know they say, actions speak louder than words. But in Iran’s case, the words speak as loud as the actions. Just listen to the Deputy Commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Quds Force. Here’s what he said in February: “The Islamic revolution is not limited by geographic borders….” He boasted that Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Yemen are among the countries being “conquered by the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Conquered.
And for those of you who believe that the deal in Vienna will bring a change in Iran’s policy, just listen to what Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei said five days after the nuclear deal was reached: “Our policies towards the arrogant government of the United States will not change.” The United States, he vowed, will continue to be Iran’s enemy. While giving the mullahs more money is likely to fuel more repression inside Iran, it will definitely fuel more aggression outside Iran.
As the leader of a country defending itself every day against Iran’s growing aggression, I wish I could take comfort in the claim that this deal blocks Iran’s path to nuclear weapons. But I can’t, because it doesn’t. This deal does place several constraints on Iran’s nuclear program. And rightly so, because the international community recognizes that Iran is so dangerous. But you see here’s the catch: Under this deal, If Iran doesn’t change its behavior, In fact, if it becomes even more dangerous in the years to come, the most important constraints will still be automatically lifted by year 10 and by year 15. That would place a militant Islamic terror regime weeks away from having the fissile material for an entire arsenal of nuclear bombs. That just doesn’t make any sense…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
FEED EUROPE’S SYRIAN REFUGEE CRISIS
Benjamin Weinthal
Jerusalem Post, Sept. 8, 2015
While Germany and Austria are in a celebratory mood about absorbing Syrian refugees, European politicians have ignored Iran’s role in producing the waves of desperate Syrians fleeing to Europe. To stem the flow of refugees and stop the raging bloodbath in Syria, Europe has showed little appetite to confront dictator Bashar Assad’s regime.
“The refugee crisis is a direct consequence of European and Western paralysis over Syria. Calling for Assad’s ouster was easy, but they did nothing as Iran and Russia propped him up,” Prof. Gerald Steinberg, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University, told The Jerusalem Post on Monday. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Monday that critics who demand that Assad be deposed “are responsible for the bloodshed in Syria.” He added that the call for Assad to resign has extended the Syrian civilian war. “Peace will not return to Syria with the slogans we are hearing from Syria’s neighboring countries,” Zarif said in a direct reference to Turkey and presumably also to the Sunni Gulf states supporting rebel groups seeking Assad’s ouster.
With Iran slated to receive some $150 billion in sanctions relief as part of an agreement to curb its alleged nuclear weapons program, Tehran’s rulers can funnel fresh funds into Assad’s war machine. According to leading Iran expert and international journalist Amir Taheri, “more than 30 Iranian companies and banks are doing business with the EU.” With Iran’s military apparatus as major booster, Assad has murdered eight times as many Syrians as Islamic State. Since 2011, Assad’s war on Syrian civilians has resulted in the deaths of 250,000 people.
Fred Hiatt, the editorial page editor for The Washington Post, issued a scathing indictment of Obama’s failed Syrian policy on Monday, which is largely a mirror image of an impotent European posture: “Obama – who ran for president on the promise of restoring the United States’ moral stature – has constantly reassured Americans that doing nothing is the smart and moral policy. He has argued, at times, that there was nothing the United States could do, belittling the Syrian opposition as ‘former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth.”’ Obama “soothed the American people into feeling no responsibility for the tragedy,” Hiatt wrote. European leaders have not only conditioned their populations for inaction against Assad, but have taken the political lead.
Take the example of the British parliament’s rejection of military strikes against Assad in 2013. German Chancellor Angela Merkel vehemently opposed military action. After Assad used chemical weapons to murder 1,400 Syrians in 2013, a poll for German television station ZDF showed 58% opposed intervention. The Merkel administration – and former social democratic chancellor Gerhard Schröder – approved chemical agent sales to Syria. The chemical deliveries, which took place starting in 1998 and ran until 2006, were believed to be later converted into Assad’s poison gas arsenal.
Merkel and her counterparts in France, Francois Hollande, and in Britain, David Cameron, are working feverishly to contain a European problem. However, the comment of Kinan Masalmeh, a 13-year-old Syrian refugee in Hungary, fails to resonate on a broader political level: “Please help the Syrians … The Syrians need help now. Just stop the war. We don’t want to stay in Europe. Just stop the war.”
Steinberg told the Post that the policy of malignant neglect toward Syrian refugees is a kind of Act 2 of the Iran nuclear deal. “The same pattern applies to Iranian nuclearization, where years of talks and concessions were useful in avoiding confrontation. But now, as Tehran uses the post-sanctions windfall to finance advanced weapons and terror networks for Assad, Hezbollah and other allies, the violence will increase. To prevent an even greater bloodbath and exodus, Europe and the US will need to abandon the myths, develop a workable policy, and act, ” said Steinberg.
His recommendation: “The first step is to declare and enforce no-fly zones and protected humanitarian zones. The next phase, including regime change, would involve more costs in the short term, in order to gain long-term stability. But as long as European officials are paralyzed by a dream of outlawing warfare, the consequences will grow.” With Austria’s announcement on Monday that border controls will be reimposed to block new waves of refugees, will Europe return to business as usual?
Emily Bazelon
New York Times, Sept. 15, 2015
It’s an ancient promise: When outsiders flee to a new place in desperate need, they will not be turned away. The Hebrew Bible speaks of six cities of refuge where someone who caused a death unwittingly would be protected from being killed in revenge. The Greeks allowed slaves who ran away from abusive masters and even some criminals to seek sanctuary in certain temples; ‘‘asylum’’ comes from their word for inviolable. According to legend, Romulus, the founder of Rome, extended asylum to people we would call migrants, choosing a spot between two groves on Capitoline Hill for his city’s temple of asylum. ‘‘A crowd of commoners, both free and enslaved, poured in from the neighboring territories, eager for new conditions,’’ the historian Livy wrote. ‘‘This was the first step towards the strength Romulus envisioned for Rome.’’
The right of asylum might seem as culturally embedded as the ruins of one of the old temples. According to international law, if a person merits asylum by showing she has a ‘‘well-founded fear of being persecuted’’ based on race, nationality, religion, political opinion or membership in a particular social group, she is no longer a migrant, who can be sent away at any time. She must be recognized as a refugee, with a right to be protected for as long as it is unsafe to return home. Yet many of the 380,000 people who have arrived in Europe this year from countries like Syria, Eritrea and Afghanistan have sought legal refuge, risking suffocation in smugglers’ trucks and drowning at sea, only to find themselves described as a threat and a nuisance.
Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain invoked insects when he warned of a ‘‘swarm’’ of ‘‘illegal migrants.’’ Prime Minister Victor Orbán of Hungary is throwing up a fence along his country’s southern border with Serbia and refusing to register asylum claims. ‘‘From a European perspective, the number of potential future immigrants seems limitless,’’ he warned, making the disorder he helped create sound intractable. Most of those arriving, he emphasized, ‘‘are not Christians, but Muslims,’’ adding, ‘‘Europe is not in the grip of a ‘refugee problem’ or a ‘refugee situation,’ but the European Continent is threatened by an ever-mounting wave of modern-era migration.’’ In other words, in his view, the people arriving in Hungary are not entitled to protection.
The modern right to asylum has roots in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution. Fleeing famine and the Bolsheviks, an unprecedented wave of 1.5 million Russians streamed into Europe. They had been stripped of citizenship by the Soviet government, and their plight gave rise to terms that reflected their statelessness. In 1921, the nascent Council of the League of Nations authorized ‘‘certificates of identity’’ for all ‘‘Russian refugees.’’ More than 50 countries agreed to recognize the documents, which gave the Russians the right to work and resettle.
The system began to crack, however, as Nazi aggression destabilized the Continent. In the 1930s, few countries signed the accords that would have provided asylum to Germans, Austrians and Czechs escaping the Nazis. The St. Louis, a ship filled with more than 900 Jews, symbolized the failure of the era: Denied entry by Cuba, the United States and Canada in 1939, it was forced to return to Europe on the eve of the Holocaust. After the war, the international community tried to make amends. A landmark treaty, the 1951 Refugee Convention, expressed ‘‘profound concern’’ for refugees and established the standard for attaining asylum that remains in place today. From this era comes the forlorn, perhaps romantic memory of the post-World War II refugee, worthy of more sympathy than a migrant (an ostensibly neutral word now tainted by its proximity to ‘‘illegal immigrant’’).
But even in that moment of accord, there was still a question of who would bear responsibility for the flood of bodies with their urgent needs. ‘‘The grant of asylum may place unduly heavy burdens on certain countries,’’ the treaty’s preamble stated, such that global protection cannot be achieved ‘‘without international cooperation.’’ Today, while Europe squabbles over quotas, 86 percent of the world’s 19 million refugees live in developing countries like Ethiopia, Kenya and Pakistan. Turkey has more than two million Syrian asylum-seekers — compared with zero for the wealthy countries of the Persian Gulf…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
A CRIME THAT ECHOES THROUGH THE CENTURIES
Ben Cohen
Wall Street Journal, Aug. 28, 2015
Of all the calumnies leveled at the Jews down the centuries, none has been as lethal as the blood libel. This infamia, which “branded the Jews as bloodthirsty ‘others’ who deserved to be killed,” as the late, revered historian Robert Wistrich explained it, has appeared in a dizzying range of locations. From the 12th-century kingdoms of England and France, the blood libel, which accused entire Jewish communities of murdering Christian children for ritual purposes, spread to other territories and cultures, among them Poland and Lithuania in the 17th century, Damascus in the 19th century, and Kiev as recently as 1913.
“The Murder of William of Norwich,” by the Princeton academic E.M. Rose, is a landmark of historical research into the grotesque 800-year history of blood-libel accusations. The book traces in forensic detail—Ms. Rose calls it microhistory—the circumstances around the emergence of the first recorded blood libel in history and in so doing demonstrates how the libel was used as a tool in wider Christian struggles over power, money and territory, in which the Jews became all too convenient pawns.
The story of an apprentice boy named William, who would eventually be canonized as St. William of Norwich, begins in eastern England in 1144, less than a century after the Norman Conquest. As Ms. Rose demonstrates in her mesmerizing study, it was a dark time for England. Violent civil war raged between King Stephen, the grandson of William the Conqueror, and his cousin Matilda, who challenged him to the throne. The situation was considered so dire that, in the words of one chronicler of the time, it was as if “Christ and his saints were asleep.”
William was an uncommonly bright lad, able to communicate fluently with both Anglo-Saxons and Normans as well as with the burgeoning Jewish community of Norwich, then England’s second city after London. As an up-and-coming leathermaker, William would have been noticed by the Jews of Norwich, some of whom were involved in that industry. Shortly after being offered a post as assistant to the cook who served the local archdeacon—a position of advanced status—William was found dead in a nearby woodland, his body horribly mutilated.
In the immediate aftermath of his death, William’s fate excited little interest. Adolescent suicide, Ms. Rose points out, was common at the time. The bruises and cuts on his body could have been the result of abuse by peasants, who regarded the act of suicide as satanically inspired. But in 1150, the story of William’s death adopted the features of a religious cult, thanks to the wholesale revision of William’s story by the Benedictine monk Brother Thomas. Herein lies Ms. Rose’s key contribution: While the blood libel as a phenomenon across the ages retains certain shared features, she says, historians ignore at their peril the “significantly different cultural and social forces at work in those periods.” In the case of young William, it was the failure of the Second Crusade of 1147 that gave a “master narrative” to the snippets of unreliable detail about his death. While theology, particularly the growing appeal in the 12th century of the cult of the “innocents”—children whose stories of suffering replicated that of Jesus himself—conveniently segued into libel, the coarse material interests of the crusaders themselves, chiefly their willingness to use violent means to cancel their debts, were arguably of greater importance.
Enter Simon de Novers, a knight from the environs of Norwich who was among those who “straggled home” to England in 1149 stricken by military failure and crushing personal debt. Joining the Crusades was an expensive business, and churches and abbeys were often reluctant to lend money to aspiring crucesignati as they set out on their expeditions to the Holy Land. Like other knights, Simon was compelled to turn to Jewish moneylenders for financing. Unable to pay his main creditor, a Jew known by the name Deulesalt (“May God Save”), the knight, in contemporary parlance, had him whacked. Deulesalt’s murder resulted in a lengthy trial for Simon de Novers, motivated by the king’s desire to prove that no crime in his domain would go unpunished. Fortunately for Simon, his lawyer was the bishop William Turbe, a crafty character who devised an ingenious defense. Deulesalt, Turbe insisted, had led the Jews of Norwich in executing William in the manner of Jesus, even placing a crown of thorns on his head. In killing Deulesalt, Simon had thus avenged the noxious crime of odium fidei—the killing of a Christian by Jews driven by hatred of the dominant faith.
King Stephen’s personal verdict resulted in a stalemate: Simon’s trial was indefinitely suspended, and the Jews of Norwich, who countered Turbe’s falsehoods at the king’s court with patiently Talmudic reasoning, also escaped unscathed. Yet Turbe’s fatuous arguments became sacralized in Brother Thomas’s manuscript, “The Life and Passion of William of Norwich,” which underwent several revisions over the next two decades in a bid to provide Norwich a patron saint, like other great cities. (A new edition of Thomas’s deadly myth has just been published by Penguin Classics.) Among the many charges made by Thomas was that the killing of gentiles was a necessary condition of Jews regaining their ancient homeland—a portrait of bloodthirstiness reinvented for our own time by opponents of Zionism who endorse the dismantling of Jewish sovereignty with the same zeal that the monks and bishops of old urged the expulsion of their Jewish neighbors.
Ms. Rose’s fascinating treatment of the narrative around William and its gradual dispersal throughout England and France is followed by examinations of four similar blood libels in the ensuing decades. One of those, in the French town of Blois in 1170, when the body of a child was dragged out of a river, is deemed by Ms. Rose as a “watershed” moment in the development of the libel. Eager to assert his independence from the king, a local count named Thibaut blamed the drowning on local Jews who until then were able to rely on royal protection. Thirty members of the Blois community were burned to death. No longer was Judaism, as the author puts it, “a licit but subordinate religion”—a doctrine primarily associated with St. Augustine, for whom the persistence of Judaism was a reminder of the greater truth of Christianity. They had been transformed into the deadly adversaries of Christendom, deserving only death and expulsion. Within a century, the Jews would be expelled from France and England.
CIJR Wishes All Our Friends & Supporters: Shabbat Shalom!
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Speech at the United Nations General Assembly, 2015 (Video): Algemeiner, Oct. 1, 2015
Searching For Hartman: Ben Hartman, Jerusalem Post, Sept. 27, 2015—I’ve never been one to believe in ghosts, but the scene was enough to make you wonder. A light rain at midnight in a remote German village, a church bell ringing overhead, and my footsteps echoing off the pavement below the church tower were enough to put a chill in my bones.
Montrealer’s Painstaking Work as a Torah Scribe: Micah Bond, Montreal Gazette, Sept. 12, 2015 —According to Jewish tradition, all 304,805 characters of the Torah must be written out by the hand of a trained scribe.
The Intrepid Couple Who Restored a Gem of a Polish Synagogue: Penny Schwartz, Times of Israel, Sept. 30, 2015—It’s been almost one year since Israeli president Reuven Rivlin delivered a stirring speech at the opening ceremonies of Warsaw’s glistening new POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews.