Conversion: Understanding how to join the nation of Israel, then and now

Posted on May 27, 2022 by ArchitectGuy

TABLET MAG
The Rules of Conversion
Richard Hidary
May 31, 2022

What does it mean to join the people of Israel? This question takes on pressing urgency now as the State of Israel takes in tens of thousands of refugees from Ukraine, some with Jewish mothers, some with only Jewish fathers, some who converted or want to convert, others non-Jews seeking safety until the fighting ends. The complexity of Israel’s national immigration law, including the relevant-as-ever Law of Return, overlaps uneasily with traditional Halacha, resulting in confusion and bureaucratic hurdles for hundreds of thousands of people. READ MORE

Posted in Israel & Middle East, Jewish | Tagged | Leave a comment

Billoo declared to an audience of Muslims that they need to pay attention to the Jewish Federation and the “Zionist Synagogues” for their support of Israel and that “polite Zionists are not your friends”

Posted on May 27, 2022 by ArchitectGuy

ISLAMISM NEWS
Minnesota Politicians Join with Sex Slavery Advocate
Dexter Van Zile
May 26, 2022

U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison are scheduled to attend a conference in Baltimore this weekend featuring talks by Islamists who have declared Western society to be “filth,” sanctioned sex slavery, called on Muslims to hate homosexuals and to support jihad in countries throughout the world…In 2012, [invited speaker] Kamani said that under Islam that there are two ways for a man to fulfill his sexual desires — with his wife, or with “a female slave that belongs to him.” Kamani has also approvingly cited a hadith that warns Muslims to seek “cleanliness” and “purity,” and to “not resemble the Jews.” READ MORE

Posted in Islam, Israel & Middle East, Jewish, Politics | Leave a comment

Hitler intermediary with Pope Pius XII convinced him to not protest the rounding up and mass genocide of Italy’s Jews

Posted on May 27, 2022 by ArchitectGuy

NEW YORK TIMES
Deep in Vatican Archives, Scholar Discovers ‘Flabbergasting’ Secrets
Jason Horowitz
May 27, 2022

…Over the last few decades, Mr. Kertzer has turned the inquisitive tables on the church. Using the Vatican’s own archives, the soft-spoken Brown University professor and trustee at the American Academy in Rome has become arguably the most effective excavator of the Vatican’s hidden sins, especially those leading up to and during World War II…Mr. Kertzer’s latest book, “The Pope at War,” looks at the church’s role in World War II and the Holocaust — what he considers the formative event of his own life. It documents the private decision-making that led Pope Pius XII to stay essentially silent about Hitler’s genocide and argues that the pontiff’s impact on the war is underestimated. And not in a good way. READ MORE

Posted in Jewish, Politics | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

A new book chronicles a mostly forgotten episode in Leonard Cohen’s long career

Posted on May 27, 2022 by ArchitectGuy

CITY JOURNAL
The Dark Night of Leonard Cohen
Katya Sedgwick
June 2, 2022

…In Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai, journalist Matti Friedman zeroes in on a mostly forgotten chapter of Cohen’s career: his performances for Israeli Defense Forces soldiers fighting in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Like Cohen’s songs, Friedman’s book is an offbeat work. It’s a word-of-mouth treasure likely to be read primarily by ardent Cohen fans and musically inclined Zionists, but it will likely gain in prominence, as it offers vital insight into Cohen’s trajectory as a songwriter and the scope of his work. War always fascinated Cohen. But while some men went to war, he went to rock and roll. In “Tower of Song,” he compared performing with fighting: “Now, I bid you farewell, I don’t know when I’ll be back/They’re movin’ us tomorrow to the tower down the track.” READ MORE

Posted in Israel & Middle East, Jewish | Tagged | Leave a comment

“A senior member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps was killed in his car by two alleged Israeli assassins on a motorcycle”

Posted on May 20, 2022 by ArchitectGuy

JERUSALEM POST
Assassination of IRGC official shows Israel has shifted gears
Anna Ahronheim
May 23, 2022

A senior member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Hassan Sayad Khodayari was killed in his car by five bullets fired by two alleged Israeli assassins on a motorcycle. Khodayari is not the first Iranian to have been killed in attacks blamed on the Jewish state. But his assassination marks a change in targets in Israel’s war-between-the-wars campaign…Most Iranians allegedly killed by Israel have been nuclear scientists, including Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who many referred to as the “father” of Iran’s nuclear-weapons project and who was assassinated in November 2020. Following the murder of Fakhrizadeh, the Biden administration reportedly told Israel to stop acting in ways that could derail the nuclear talks. READ MORE

ARUTZ SHEVA Israel told US it killed senior IRGC officer Intelligence official tells New York Times Israel informed American officials that it was behind the killing of IRGC’s Colonel Hassan Sayyad Khodaei.

TIMES OF ISRAEL Top MK: US leak saying Israel admits hit on Iran colonel may harm trust, isn’t true Ram Ben-Barak denies Israel took responsibility for Sunday’s killing in Tehran of IRGC’s Khodaei; Israeli officials believe American counterparts talked to New York Times

Posted in Islam, Israel & Middle East, Politics | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

“Congressman Levin only turned down PAC money after ‘his hypocrisy was exposed,’ Stevens alleged”

Posted on May 20, 2022 by ArchitectGuy

JEWISH INSIDER
Stevens and Levin trade barbs over AIPAC, PAC funding
Marc Rod
May 25, 2022

Reps. Haley Stevens (D-MI) and Andy Levin (D-MI) exchanged attacks over campaign funding and support from AIPAC and corporate PAC groups in their second primary debate on Tuesday night. The two are set to square off in the Democratic primary in Michigan’s 11th Congressional District, after a redrawing of the state’s congressional map that eliminated one of the state’s 14 seats in Congress…Attacking AIPAC and its super PAC’s involvement in Democratic primaries, Levin said earlier this month he was “proud to not be funding my campaign through an organization supporting insurrectionist Republicans.” READ MORE

FORWARD Jewish congressman calls attacks by AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups ‘ridiculous’ The American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other pro-Israel groups are actively backing his non-Jewish rival, Rep. Haley Stevens, in the rare incumbent-vs.-incumbent primary to represent Michigan’s redrawn 11th Congressional District…Levin has also publicly defended his progressive colleagues, Reps. Rashida Tlaib from Michigan and Ilhan Omar from Minnesota, who have been accused of antisemitism and openly support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel.

Posted in Israel & Middle East, Jewish, Politics | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

“During monthlong ‘Chariots of Fire’ exercise, air force will conduct maneuvers simulating attack on Iranian nuclear facilities; military ramps up list of wartime targets using AI”

Posted on May 20, 2022 by ArchitectGuy

TIMES OF ISRAEL
Israeli military to hold large-scale drill simulating widescale strike on Iran
Emanuel Fabian
May 17, 2022

For the first time, the Israeli Air Force will practice for a widescale strike in Iran later this month, during the military’s major Chariots of Fire exercise, The Times of Israel has learned. In light of growing uncertainty regarding a return by Iran to the 2015 nuclear deal, amid long-stalled negotiations with the United States, the Israel Defense Forces in the past year has ramped up its efforts to prepare a credible military threat against Tehran’s nuclear facilities. The large-scale air maneuvers, including a simulated attack on Iranian nuclear targets, will take place over the Mediterranean Sea during the fourth and final week of the monthlong exercise, starting May 29. READ MORE

Posted in Islam, Israel & Middle East, Politics | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

“In keeping with the language and themes that feature in the UN’s ritual denunciations of Israel, the resolution portrays the Jewish state as an incorrigible colonizer”

Posted on May 20, 2022 by ArchitectGuy

ALGEMEINER
‘Ideology of Rage’ Comes to Congress
Ben Cohen
May 22, 2022

It is the sort of resolution one would expect to be tabled before the UN General Assembly or even Iran’s parliament, the Majlis, but not the US Congress. Last week, a group of left-wing Democratic legislators led by Rep. Rashida Tlaib and backed by her House colleagues Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Cori Bush (D-MO), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), Betty McCollum (D-MN) and Marie Newman (D-IL), presented a resolution on the subject of the nakba — an Arabic word meaning “disaster” or “catastrophe” that Palestinians use as shorthand when talking about the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. READ MORE

TIMES OF ISRAEL An Open Letter to Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and Your Fellow Travelers Your resolution reiterates the historically inaccurate and delusional claim that Jews have no indigeneity to the territories that became current-day Israel, that all of historic Palestine is somehow “Palestinian land,” and that the millions of Palestinian refugees created by your people’s repeated rejection of offers of statehood—in 1937, 1947, 1967, 2000, and other occasions—is the sole reason that you continually look backward, wishing history had unfolded differently.

JTA Israeli ambassador says House Democrats’ call for US probe of journalist’s killing isn’t ‘fair’ In an unusual public broadside against dozens of Congress members, Israel’s ambassador to Washington said a letter calling for a U.S. investigation into the killing of a Palestinian American journalist was not a “fair” representation of the event. Michael Herzog was responding to a letter sent Thursday by 57 House Democrats to Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, and Christopher Wray, the FBI director. It called for an investigation into the death last week of Shireen Abu Akleh, a venerated Al Jazeera reporter killed during an Israeli army raid on the West Bank town of Jenin.

Posted in Israel & Middle East, Jewish, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Muslim pushes 90 year-old Jew from his 17th floor apartment but police say not antisemitism. Nothing to see here.

Posted on May 20, 2022 by ArchitectGuy

ARUTZ SHEVA
France: 90-year-old Jewish man pushed to his death in Lyon
Elad Benari
May 20, 2022

A dispute between neighbors in France ended with the death of a 90-year-old Jewish man, and police do not suspect an antisemitic motive, JTA reported Friday. Police arrested a 51-year-old neighbor of the deceased, René Hadjaj, sometime after Hadjaj’s death on Tuesday evening outside his home in Lyon in eastern France, the Tribune Juive Jewish newspaper reported on Friday…Reports about the incident, however, evoked anger and disbelief among multiple French Jews on social networks and beyond, who noted the similarities between this case and the murder of Jewish woman Sarah Halimi in 2017 [also thrown from her apartment window]. READ MORE

Posted in Islam, Israel & Middle East, Jewish, Politics | Tagged | Leave a comment

“Malley also announced new sanctions will be imposed on an “international smuggling and money-laundering network” that he said provides hundreds of millions of dollars to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force”

Posted on May 20, 2022 by ArchitectGuy

THE HILL
Biden’s Iran envoy says return to nuclear deal ‘tenuous’
Laura Kelly
May 25, 2022

President Biden’s lead negotiator on nuclear talks with Iran on Wednesday gave a dim outlook for prospects of a return to the deal, telling a Senate panel it was “tenuous at best” despite nearly a year of talks to revive the agreement. U.S. Special Representative for Iran Rob Malley said in opening remarks before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the U.S. would continue to reject Iranian demands that go beyond the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). He also said the U.S. is “fully prepared to live with and confront that reality” of moving forward without a return to the deal..READ MORE

JEWISH INSIDER Iran deal critics cheer Biden decision not to lift IRGC designation On the eve of Special Envoy for Iran Rob Malley’s testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, a new report indicates that President Joe Biden has decided against removing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organizations list or offering any further concessions to Iran as part of ongoing negotiations. designation was met with praise from Democrats and Republicans

Posted in Islam, Israel & Middle East, Jewish | Tagged , | Leave a comment