Israel is considering annexing major West Bank settlement blocs if the Palestinians unilaterally seek world recognition of a state, an Israeli official said Tuesday — moves that would deal a grave blow to prospects for negotiating a peace deal between the two sides.
Israel has refrained from taking such a diplomatically explosive step for four decades. The fact that it is considering doing so reflects how seriously it is concerned by the Palestinian campaign to win international recognition of a state in the absence of peacemaking.
The Palestinians launched that campaign after peace talks foundered over Israeli construction in West Bank settlements. On Tuesday, the Israeli Interior Ministry said it would decide next month whether to give final approval to build 1,500 apartments in two Jewish enclaves in east Jerusalem. Israel captured both east Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan in 1967.
Israel annexed east Jerusalem, home to shrines sacred to Judaism, Islam and Christianity, immediately after seizing it. But it carefully avoided annexing the West Bank, where 300,000 settlers now live among 2.5 million Palestinians.
Although it is widely assumed that under any peace deal, Israel would hold onto major settlements it has built in the past 44 years, any decision to formally annex West Bank territory would be a precedent-setting move that could increase Israel's already considerable international isolation. The Palestinians claim all of the West Bank and east Jerusalem, in addition to the Gaza Strip, for a future state.
The government official who disclosed the possible annexation said he did not know how seriously authorities were considering the option. He said that "adopting unilateral measures is not a one-way street" and added that other options were also being considered.
These could include limiting water supplies beyond agreed-upon amounts and restricting Palestinian use of Israeli ports for business purposes, he said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was aware of the moves being discussed, he added, speaking on condition of anonymity because no final decisions have been made.
Netanyahu's office had no comment. Nimr Hamad, an aide to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, said "these threats are not new. ... But we are continuing (our campaign) and are convinced our position is right."
In a related development, the Israeli Transportation Ministry is working on a plan to build an island off the coast of Gaza, where an Palestinian-run airport and seaport would be located. Ministry spokesman Ilan Leizerovich said this would allow Israel to cut all ties with Hamas-ruled Gaza.
At present most goods and people enter and exit Gaza through Israeli land crossings.
Leizerovich said the island would be built about three miles (4.5 kilometers) off the Gaza coast and would be connected by a bridge. He said it would take about six years and cost more than $5 billion to build. The grandiose scheme would need additional government approval, Palestinian acceptance and funding.
Although peace negotiations have taken place since Netanyahu came to power two years ago, they have been sporadic and largely mediated by the U.S. Three weeks of direct talks broke down in September over Palestinian objections to continued Israeli settlement construction.
Palestinians say they won't talk peace with Israel unless Israel freezes all construction in both the West Bank and east Jerusalem, lands they claim along with the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip for their hoped-for state. Israeli officials fault Palestinians for the peacemaking impasse, saying a construction moratorium should not be a condition for peacemaking, because it never was in the past.
Israeli building in east Jerusalem is especially contentious because the Palestinians want to create their future capital there. Because of the annexation, Israel does not consider the Jewish enclaves housing 200,000 Jews there to be settlements, but the rest of the international community does.
Roi Lachmanovich, a spokesman for Interior Minister Eli Yishai, said officials would decide the fate of the 1,500 new apartments on April 14. The homes would be built in two existing Jewish enclaves in east Jerusalem.
Major Western powers have not given up on the concept of a negotiated solution. But with talks deadlocked, Palestinian leaders plan on seeking international recognition of a state, with or without an agreement with Israel, at the United Nations in September.
Their campaign has received a boost from Latin American countries that have lined up in recent months to offer recognition. It hasn't received crucial U.S. or Western European support.
Although international recognition wouldn't immediately change the situation on the ground, it would isolate Israel and put additional pressure on it to withdraw from occupied territories.
Rabbi Saul Kassin, spiritual leader of New York's Syrian Jewish community is one of 44 arrested for alleged involvement in an international corruption ring, trafficking in goods as diverse as human organs and fake designer handbags.
Rabbi Saul Kassin, a well-known spiritual leader in the Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn, has confessed to using a religious charity for money laundering.
Kassin, a 79-year-old rabbi, was arrested in July 2009, part of a group of 44 businessmen, public officials and notable members of the New York Jewish community under suspicions of money laundering and illegal financial transactions.
The sting was the result of an extensive corruption investigation that began as a probe into an international money laundering ring that trafficked in goods as diverse as human organs and fake designer handbags.
The corruption and money laundering cases are tied together by a single witness who cooperated with police for about three years.
Kassin operated within a network is alleged to have laundered tens of millions of dollars through charities controlled by rabbis in New York and New Jersey, including about $3 million handed to them by the witness over the past two years alone. Its alleged offenses range from trafficking kidneys from Israeli donors to laundering proceeds from selling fake Gucci and Prada bags.
The case was a great source of shame for Brooklyn's veteran Syrian community that is well-respected and active in the Jewish world. Many of its members are considerably affluent.
Kassin, an elderly gentleman with a long white beard, was brought before a federal judge in Trenton, New Jersey, where he confessed to all the charges against him.
The spiritual leader's confession was in exchange for a plea bargain, according to local media. By admitting to his wrongdoing, the elderly rabbi would not have to serve jail-time.
Kassin will have to pay a-quarter-million dollar fine, and the 367 thousand dollars in his possession when he was arrested will be confiscated.
Only a handful of those arrested in the sting have admitted to any wrongdoing.
Yoichi Shimatsu, Senior Advisor to the 4th Media, based in Hong Kong, covered the rise of Islamic militancy in North Africa in the 1990s for the Japan Times group.
In the 2005 political thriller "Syriana", starring George Clooney and Matt Damon, Qatar is at the heart of an international intrigue. The title was based on the concept of "Pax Syriana", a secret arrangement between two mutually hostile powers to divide a region into their respective spheres of dominance.
Washington think-tanks use this term to describe a reshaping of the Middle East to suit American interests, but in the knowledge that this goal is attainable only through covert cooperation with the enemy, namely the elite financial sponsors of Al Qaeda and the Islamic Brotherhood.
The thinly veiled fiction was based on the political reality of that thumb of desert that juts out of the Arabian Peninsula into the Gulf - the emirate of Qatar. Home of the state-owned Al Jazeera network, Qatar is on the surface the pro-Western host of the U.S. Central Command and an active supporter of "democratic revolutions" now sweeping the Mideast. It is also accused of being a state sponsor of terrorism.
Chemical weapons looted
It may puzzle and perhaps dismay young protesters in Benghazi, Cairo and Tunis that their democratic hopes are being manipulated by an ultra-conservative Arab elite, which has underhandedly backed a surge of militant Islamist radicals across North Africa. Credible U.S. intelligence reports have cited evidence pointing to the emirate's long-running support for the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda and jihadist fighters returning from Afghanistan
The links to Qatar uncovered by anti-terrorism investigators in the wake of 9-11 need to be reexamined now that the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an on-and-off affiliate of Al Qaeda, has seized armories across half of the North African country. Libya's well-stocked arsenals contain high-power explosives, rocket launchers and chemical weapons. LIFG is on the State Department's terrorist list.
Most worrying, according to a U.S. intelligence official cited by CNN, is the probable loss of chemical weapons. The Federation of American Scientists reports that, as of 2008, only 40 percent of Libya's mustard gas was destroyed in the second round of decommissioning. Chemical canisters along the Egyptian border were yet to be retrieved and are now presumably in the hands of armed militants.
After letting slip that the earliest Libyan protests were organize d by the LIFG, Al Jazeera quickly changed its line to present a heavily filtered account of "peaceful protests". To explain away the gunshot deaths of Libya soldiers during the uprising, the Qatar-based network presented a bizarre scenario of150 dead soldiers in Sirte having been executed by their officers for "refusing to fight". The mysterious officers then miraculously vacated their base disappearing into thin air while surrounded by angry protesters! Off the record, one American intelligence analyst called these media claims an "absurdity" and suggested instead the obvious:-that the soldiers were gunned down in an armed assault by war-hardened returnees from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Many Libyan Army units have "defected" to the opposition if for no other purpose than to try to recover the troves of weapons seized by the militants. Al Jazeera's role in erasing the fingerprints of the armed militants vindicates the earlier conclusion of Western anti-terrorism experts of Qatar's sponsorship of terrorism.
Payments for terror
According to a Congressional Research Service report of January 2008, "Some observers have raised questions about possible support for Al Qaeda by some Qatari citizens, including members of Qatar's large ruling family. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, Qatar's Interior Minister provided safe haven to 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed during the mid-1990s, and press reports indicate other terrorists may have received financial support or safe haven in Qatar after September 11, 2001."
The national security chief, Interior Minister Abdullah bin Khalid Al Thani, is further mentioned as paying for a 1995 trip by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed "to join the Bosnia jihad." The report recalls how after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, FBI officials "narrowly missed an opportunity to capture" the suspect in Qatar. "Former U.S. officials have since stated their belief that a high-ranking member of the Qatari government alerted him to the impending raid, allowing him to flee the country."
Qatar's spymaster also "welcomed dozens of so-called 'Afghan Arab' veterans of the anti-Soviet conflict in Afghanistan to Qatar in the early 1990s. These ties go back to the late 1980s, when "the United States and Qatar engaged in a prolonged diplomatic dispute regarding Qatar’s black-market procurement of U.S.-made Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.The dispute froze planned economic and military cooperation, and Congress approved a ban on arms sales to Qatar until the months leading up to the 1991 Gulf War, when Qatar allowed coalition forces to operate from Qatari territory."
The hidden connections to the terrorist network broke out into public view when an Egyptian suicide bomber attacked a Doha movie theater in 2003. Foreign Minister, Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr al-Thani, reacted in haste and anger calling it an "act of unpardonable treachery by Bin Laden." His slip of tongue led to the discovery that from the start of the first Gulf War Qatar had been paying millions of dollars to Al Qaeda as compensation for its hosting of the U.S. Central Command during the Iraq War. .Anti-terrorism experts allege that Doha upped its payments following the theater bombing.
More worrisome is the February 9, 2000 cable from the American Embassy in Doha, issuing a security alert on Qatari resident in the U.S. named Mohamed Ali Dahham Mansoori, who guided a three-man team that allegedly scouted the World Trade Center, the Statue of Liberty and the White House for the upcoming 9-11 attack. The three suspects traveled under aliases with Qatar passports. Their air tickets to Los Angeles and hotel rooms were paid for by a "convicted terrorist," according to the FBI asserted. The trio's role in 9-11 was subsequently tomb-stoned with all evidence suppressed, probably due to the warming US diplomatic relationship with Qatar's royal family.
Mirage or Reality?
Doha, a cluster of shiny towers and fountains in a peninsula that is otherwise barren,seems the unlikeliest spot for financial and institutional support for Islamist terrorists. In Qatar, however, mirages are real, and reality is a mirage. Hailed as a model of political reform by Western diplomats and think tanks like the Brookings Institution, which has a Doha center, Qatar's legal code is nonetheless firmly based on sharia law. Its education system , with links to dozens of American and British universities, is also the academic platform for the Egyptian cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the intellectual champion of the Muslim Brotherhood and advocate of suicide bombings.
The emirate's insistence on preserving Gulf Arab traditions stands in contrast to Qatar's business-savvy role as the region's biggest supplier of natural gas. Per-capita GDP is estimated at about $90,000 a year; and average income around $65,000. Excluding small tax-haven countries, its population is the richest in the world. Qataris, then, are the Swiss of the Arab world, and their small nation, like Switzerland, is a haven for arms trafficking, illicit money transfers and other skullduggery.Even something as innocuous as TGI Fridays, a struggling fast-food chain in America, is in Doha an upscale retreat for off-duty Marine officers, petroleum engineers, international weapons dealers and their incognito clients from across the Mideast.
Despite the many connections with terrorism, Qatar got back into the good graces of the Obama administration with donations to the Clinton Foundation, including one of up to $5 million in 2008. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reciprocated with a February 2010 visit to inaugurate the Carnegie Mellon University in Doha's Education City complex, which also houses Qaradawai's Islamist institute. In early January, just before the Tunis and Cairo protests, she took a longer sojourn for the Forum for the Future, co-hosted by the royal family.
The relations between Washington and Doha has been sold to the public as a partnership for democracy and human rights, but beneath the smiles and photo ops is the hard fact of a Syriana-type arrangement to carve up the "future Mideast" between the Anglo-American energy industry and an ultraconservative elite set on imposing sharia law. For this "enemy of my enemy" alliance, the common foes are the secular governments of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and next Algeria.
Blowback in Libya
Covert cooperation between the West and sponsors of Islamic extremism is not new . In the 1950s, the CIA provided money and weapons to the Muslim Brotherhood for their battle against Egyptian independence leaderAbdul Gamal Nasser. US. intelligence operatives trained and armed mujahideen insurgents in the anti-Soviet Afghan war, including Osama bin Laden, then known by his cover name Tim Osman. According to former UK counterintelligence officer David Shayler, the British MI-6 hired Libyan militant Anas al-Liby, from the Al Qaeda-friendly Al-Muqtaliya group and later linked to the bombing of US embassies in East Africa, to assassinate Colonel Muammar Qadhafi in 1996.
The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, under the leadership of Abu al-Laith al-Libi, formally merged into Al Qaida in 2007. Two years later, Libi disowned armed violence and negotiated with Qadhafi for acceptance of LIFG as an above-ground political association. The sudden rejection of violence coincided with the Muslim Brotherhood's makeover as a democratic force and Qatar's advocacy of political reform across the Mideast. As a legal entity, it incited the first protests in Benghazi in mid-February. Within days of the uprising's start, however, the LIFG reverted to its old ways, brandishing automatic weapons. What it plans to do with chemical weapons and advanced explosives is anyone's guess, while one psychological point remains clear: The militants are eager to pay back Americans and Europeans for10 years of bombing, maiming and torture.
The constant temptation in a partnership between enemies is betrayal. The White House had counted on the protests to nudge Saif al-Islam Gadhafi to replace his father in a relatively smooth transition to democracy. The Gadhafi clan, however, united against the threat of an Islamist resurgence. Washington also miscalculated the potential for Al Qaeda elements and Brotherhood acting independently of high-level deals made in Doha.
Possible outcomes - from the collapse of the Qadhafi regime to the partition of Libya - could easily prompt Al Qaeda allies and the militant arm of the Brotherhood to establish the Libyan-Egyptian border as the next global training center for jihadists, now that the Afghan-Pakistan tribal regions no longer provide a safe platform for jihad operations. Any US or NATO intervention will only lead to a third front in the endless war. The more easily grasped alternative to a Syriana duopoly is an even older political formula: The winner takes all.
On this 10th anniversary year of the 9-11 attacks, Washington is staggering under a huge "blowback" from an out-of-control North Africa, self-inflicted by its own greed for oil and uranium, fears of declining influence, deceitful ambition and misplaced trust.
In a letter to Israeli officials, producer says legendary anchorman's crew held up for hours at security checks, strip-searched before interview with Deputy PM Meridor
A crew for Dan Rather was harassed and humiliated by Israeli security officials, a producer for his show has said, accusing them of forcing the staffers to drop their pants for a strip search before seeing a Cabinet minister.
The allegations, made in a letter to Israeli officials that was obtained by The Associated Press, add to growing complaints about how Israeli security officials treat foreign media.
Andrew Glazer, an Emmy-award winning producer at Dan Rather Reports, wrote that the legendary anchorman came to do a story about improving Israeli-Palestinian relations pitched by Israel's Foreign Ministry.
Glazer said problems mounted after they arrived. He said they were held up for hours at security checks. Israeli soldiers barred the crew's veteran Palestinian cameramen — a Jerusalem resident — from accompanying Rather to a West Bank neighborhood. And then came the strip search before an interview with Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor.
"Mr. Rather said that in his career, he had never seen a crew forced to strip prior to an interview — including the one he conducted with Saddam Hussein," Glazer wrote.
Reached in New York, Glazer acknowledged sending a letter to several people in the Israeli government, but he would not discuss its contents or say when the events took place.
Glazer said in the Jan. 25 letter that the team held advance consultations with government and military officials and had a good experience with Palestinian security officials.
Israel's relationship with the foreign media is often testy, with some Israeli officials accusing journalists of sympathizing with the Palestinians and disregarding Israel's legitimate security concerns.
Journalists' recurring problems with chaotic and intrusive security, at Israel's international airport and entering government offices, have strained relations even further.
The new director of Israel's Government Press Office, Oren Helman, has vowed to usher in a new era of cordial relations with the hundreds of foreign journalists based in Israel. His pledges have not filtered down to the security agents who inspect journalists before entering official events with top officials.
RAMALLAH, occupied West Bank (IPS) - "If the regime that encourages incitement, racism and anti-democracy is not toppled soon, we will find that the future is already here," says Israeli columnist Sefi Rachlevsky in the Israeli daily Haaretz.
He adds "If there is one country in the world that should have heeded the commandment 'Thou shall not fall into the chasm of anti-democratic racism,' it is Israel. But the regime threatens to turn Israel into a rising anti-democratic power after all."
Rachlevsky's remarks come in the wake of an accusation by Richard Falk -- an investigator with the UN Human Rights Council and an American professor emeritus of international law -- that Israel is carrying out a form of ethnic cleansing against Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem.
Falk was addressing the council on Monday as it prepared to pass a resolution condemning settlement building in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
"The continued pattern of settlement expansion in East Jerusalem combined with the forcible eviction of long-residing Palestinians is creating an intolerable situation in the part of the city previously controlled by Jordan," Falk said.
"This situation can only be described in its cumulative impact as a form of ethnic cleansing," he added.
Falk has requested that the council ask the International Court of Justice in The Hague to investigate Israel's actions in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Israel has refused to deal with him and refused him entry to the country on several occasions despite him being Jewish.
Falk's remarks in fact confirmed what human rights organizations have long accused Israel of: "Judaizing" occupied East Jerusalem by making it almost impossible for Palestinians to get building permits despite a chronic housing shortage.
Simultaneously, the Jerusalem municipality has actively encouraged the illegal settlement of Israeli settlers in the area while carrying out a wave of home demolitions which have left hundreds of Palestinians homeless.
Figures released by the United Nations show a two-fold increase in the number of Palestinian homes and agricultural buildings destroyed by Israel during this year, causing concern among officials.
The UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) recorded 70 demolitions since the start of 2011, displacing 105 Palestinians, of whom 43 were under the age of 18. The demolitions were carried out across the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and ordered by Israeli police, municipal officials and Israel's civil administration.
While Jerusalem municipality has been adamant about destroying Palestinian homes and evicting Palestinians, illegal Jewish construction has largely been ignored.
In 2008, the Israeli high court ordered a group of settlers to vacate the apartment building Beit Yonatan, named after convicted American spy Jonathan Pollard who was jailed in 1987 for passing classified information on the US to Israel. The building is located in occupied East Jerusalem. But Jerusalem municipal authorities have so far refused to enforce the court order.
Towards the end of last year 25 European consuls based in Jerusalem and Ramallah called for strong action against Israeli policy in the eastern sector of Jerusalem.
Israel has extended its discriminatory policy to the rest of the Palestinian West Bank where almost sixty percent of the occupied Palestinian territory falls under complete control of the Israeli civil administration.
"Parallels between Israeli and Palestinian construction in the West Bank can't be drawn. All Israeli settlement in the West Bank is illegal under international law. Settlers are positively discriminated against when it comes to illegal construction. Palestinians should have the right to build and grow but Israel is using its illegal construction policy as a political tool to restrict the Palestinians," Sarit Michaeli from Israeli rights group B'Tselem told IPS.
Palestinians also face discrimination in almost every other aspect of life in occupied East Jerusalem with one of the most important sectors being education.
More than 5,000 Palestinian children in occupied East Jerusalem do not attend school at all. The drop-out rate for Palestinian school students in occupied East Jerusalem is 50 percent, compared with less than 12 percent for Jewish students.
"The rate of school drop-outs and the level of poverty in East Jerusalem amongst Palestinians is frightening," Orly Noy from Israeli rights group Ir Amim told IPS.
"The severe neglect of the education system in East Jerusalem is brewing a catastrophe," added Tali Nir, a lawyer with the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI).
Israel's Education Law requires the state to provide education equally to all residents of the city.
However, the Israeli government spent an average of 2,300 New Israeli Shekels (NIS), or approximately US $604, on each Jewish child in elementary school during the year 2008-2009. In contrast, no more than 577 shekels ($151 dollars) were spent on each Palestinian child.
Palestinians who have lived in occupied East Jerusalem for generations can also easily lose their residency.
Israeli Interior Ministry regulations provide for the abrogation of the rights of Palestinian residents of Jerusalem who leave the city for a period of more than seven years. Citizens of Israel can leave the country for any length of time, and their citizenship and all their rights are theirs in perpetuity.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday Palestinian member of the Knesset (Israeli parliament) Jamal Zahalka argued with Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu over several new discriminatory laws.
The first law withholds funds from any Palestinian town within Israel which honors the Palestinian Nakba, or catastrophe, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were either expelled by Israeli forces or fled during the war which saw the creation of Israel in 1948.
The second bill, alleged to target Israel's minority Palestinian population, allows admission committees to review potential residents of Negev and Galilee communities that have fewer than 400 families "to maintain their cultural identity."
Haneen Zoabi, a Palestinian member of the Knesset, told IPS, "There were approximately ten laws passed during 2010 which discriminated against the Arab minority."
Suppressing free and open discussion on any subject is as bad as telling lies, and knowingly suppressing the truth is the biggest lie of all, because it is based, not on a mistake or a genuine error, but on a deliberate intention to deceive.
Having been tortured, Rudolf Höss, who was the commander of Auschwitz from 1940 to 1943, almost certainly lied to save the lives of his wife and children. Even if torture and duress cannot not be proven, the overwhelming reason for recognizing the utter falsity of the Höss confession is that the gassing method he described was not scientifically plausible.
Yet Höss's conviction has stood, by inference, as a testament to the cruelty of Germans in general, since he was tried at Nuremberg, in 1947, and subsequently hanged on April 16th, 1947, in Poland.
With great respect for those who have tried—though harassed, punished, fined, imprisoned and otherwise abused—to tell it like it really was: Arthur R. Butz, Robert Faurisson, Paul Grubach, Gerd Honsik, David Irving, Kevin Käther, Nicholas Kollerstrom, Fred Leuchter, Horst Mahler, Ingrid Rimland, Germar Rudolf, Bradley Smith, Sylvia Stolz, Fredrick Töbin, Ernst Zündel and many others.
Interesting video: Israeli Minister "We always use the anti-Semitism trick or bring up the Holocaust" 14 August, 2002 Shulamit Aloni http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uW3a1bw5XlE
The European Commission has awarded about $322,000 to three Jewish organizations and an NGO that monitor and record hate crimes and incidents within the European Union.
The groups have formed a joint two-year project called "Facing Facts!" to confront hate crime and help other nongovernmental organizations, governments and police to improve their monitoring and reporting of such crimes, which are "a growing problem in the European Union," according to a statement announcing the grant Wednesday.
A manual for trainers will be the centerpiece of the project. Its other tasks will include the introduction of standardized criteria for collecting statistics; the training of victim-advocacy groups; holding governments accountable to international agreements; and improving intergroup cooperation.
EU member states are required to monitor and publish data on hate crime. The much broader membership of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe is required to monitor and combat anti-Semitism, but "these obligations are often unfulfilled," according to the announcement from the British-based Community Security Trust, one of the four awardees. The group provides security advice to the Jewish community of the United Kingdom.
The other awardees are the Brussels-based A Jewish Contribution to an Inclusive Europe; the Dutch Center for Documentation and Information Israel; and the Federation of Dutch Associations for the Integration of Homosexuality. A fifth group, the International Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Trans and Intersex Association, is an associate partner.
The United Nations has launched a new plan to teach the Holocaust in Gaza schools, drawing fierce condemnation from Gaza's militant Hamas rulers, school teachers — and even the body tasked with peace negotiations with Israel.
If implemented, it would be the first time most Palestinian children learn about Jewish suffering. But the outcry underscores how sensitive the issue is to Palestinians.
"Playing with the education of our children in the Gaza Strip is a red line," Hamas Education Minister, Mohammed Asqoul told a website of the group. He said Hamas will block attempts to teach the Holocaust "regardless of the price."
The uproar erupted after a U.N. official told a Jordanian daily in February that UNRWA, the main U.N. agency serving Palestinian refugees, would introduce a short case study about the Holocaust to Gaza students as part of its human rights curriculum.
"Instead of pre-emptive accusations, it is important for Palestinians ... to fully understand the tragedies and suffering that happened to all people through generations, without divvying up facts and taking things out of context," the official, Sami Mushasha, was quoted as saying.
UNRWA representatives refused to comment on the record, but one official said the agency was committed to introducing the curriculum for the next school year, beginning in September.
He added that officials were hesitating because they feared Hamas would incite loyalists to damage U.N. schools or harm their teachers if they introduce the materials. He requested anonymity because he was barred from discussing the matter with the media.
Hamas frequently accuses the U.N. of spreading immorality, and unknown assailants have attacked the agency's property in the past, including the torching of summer camps last year.
Since Hamas seized power of Gaza in 2007, it has viewed the U.N. as the main challenger to their influence in the coastal territory. Officials have tried to limit the international group's vast influence in Gaza, where it operates schools for some 200,000 children.
But the controversy over teaching the Holocaust in Gaza is more than a power struggle between the U.N. and Hamas, whose militant officials frequently deny the Nazi genocide of European Jewry ever occurred.
Many Palestinians are reluctant to acknowledge Jewish suffering, fearing it would diminish recognition of their own claims. Views range from outright denial to challenging the scope of the Holocaust.
Even Hamas' bitter enemy, the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, which rules the West Bank, reacted angrily to the U.N. plan. And the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the chief body tasked with negotiating peace with Israel, rejected the idea.
"Teaching the Holocaust to Palestinian students in U.N. schools is unacceptable," said Zakaria al-Agha, a member of the PLO's executive committee.
Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev called the Palestinian responses "obscene." Israelis consider the Holocaust a central event in modern Jewish history.
Some 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis during World War II, and the need to find a sanctuary for hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors contributed to Israel's creation after World War II.
In a war that followed Israel's declaration of independence, more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes.
The Palestinians call this dispersal their "Nakba," or catastrophe, and many see the events linked. As such, recognizing the Holocaust is often seen as tantamount to acknowledging Jewish claims to the land.
Israeli officials have long said that Palestinian recognition of Jewish suffering is a necessary step toward peace. But for Gaza residents, empathy is particularly difficult: Most of the territory's 1.5 million residents live in poverty, facing Israeli restrictions in commerce and travel, and hundreds of civilians were killed in an Israeli military offensive against Hamas two years ago, aimed at stopping daily rocket attacks at Israel by Gaza militants.
Yet even if the U.N. moves ahead with the plan this year, it could face another obstacle: its own schoolteachers.
In about a dozen interviews, they said they did not want to teach the materials and warned of rebellion.
"The agency will open the gates of hell with this step," said one schoolteacher, Sami. "This will not work." http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/9558393
“God is landing blow after blow on the Japanese. But they’re like Egypt and Pharaoh. Japan does not understand that it is holding the detainees [Satmar yeshiva students arrested for drug smuggling] for no reason. They think the yeshiva students know what this drug is, but from where would hasidic yeshiva students know what this is? Only goyyim [non-Jews] know what drugs are. Rather than [Japan] admitting its mistake, it continues to hold them, and for that [Japan] is punished.”
Three days ago, Ayman, a boy of eleven years old from Ein Il Hilwe, was attacked by three settlers from the illegal Israeli settlement of Maskyyot. The settlers arrived in a blue car when Ayman was playing with four friends near the spring water.
This spring water is 30 meters far from his home, however, Ayman, his family, and all the Palestinian living in the Jordan Valley, are banned to use them and usually threatened and attacked by settlers when they are around.
In this occasion, the settlers who attacked Ayman, took his horse, tied a cable around its neck and after tried to asphyxiate the animal, the settlers broke its head. The settlers carried out all this brutality in front of the eyes and horror of Ayman and his friends.
Ayman’s sisters were attacked in the same place when they approached the spring water to give water to their cows. Also two month ago, Ayman’s mother was also beaten by settlers.
The Israeli illegal occupation is also working with bulldozers in this area preparing the land for expending Maskyoot settlement.
The intelligence branch of the Israel Defense Forces, previously entrusted with keeping tabs on Iran’s nuclear program and the inner workings of the Syrian regime, now has a new target: Left-wing groups in Europe and America. Several months ago, Haaretzreported yesterday, Israeli military intelligence began collecting data on foreign organizations critical of Israel. Specifically, it has formed a department, headed by a major, dedicated solely to collecting information on groups that advocate anti-Israel sanctions. It plans to eventually share its findings with the foreign service, the prime minister’s office, and other civilian bodies, military sources say.
The foreign ministry criticized the initiative, arguing that uniformed officials should steer clear of political questions. It certainly raises several serious questions. Even if one overlooks the problematic nature of involving the army in a thoroughly non-military matter that should be addressed by the proper civic authorities, and even if one is willing to ignore the inherent risks associated with snooping on organizations operating according to the law in Western, friendly countries, one is still likely to come up against the unsolvable conundrum of just what sort of activity qualifies as sufficiently anti-Israeli. “We ourselves don’t know exactly how to define delegitimization,” a foreign ministry source told Haaretz. “This is a very abstract definition. Are flotillas to Gaza delegitimization? Is criticism of settlements delegitimization? It’s not clear how Military Intelligence’s involvement in this will provide added value.”
Under this thinking, it is bad enough that the Knesset is considering a law to defund groups considered insufficiently supportive of Israel and that it is holding hearings (opposed by many groups, including the Anti-Defamation League) into J Street’s pro-Israel bona fides.
To involve one of the world’s greatest armies in such intractable questions, though, is even worse. Some anti-Israeli criticism is legitimate, and some is not: It’s a fine line to draw, and without drawing it clearly the new, military department is left with a wide-open mandate to act against civilian, non-combatant targets—a premise that should be unacceptable in a democracy.
TA District Court sentences former President Moshe Katsav to seven years in prison, two years of probation for rape, indecent acts, sexual harassment and obstruction of justice. Defendant also ordered to pay compensation to two complainants. 'The court must send a clear message,' judge says
The sentence was given four years and eight months after Katsav turned to then Attorney General Menachem Mazuz complaining that A. from the President's Residence was blackmailing him.
Judges George Karra and Miriam Sokolov were in agreement and Judith Shevach was in the minority.
She said four years and a larger sum of compensation for the complainants would have sufficed.
Katsav will begin his prison sentence on May 8. The court also ordered Katsav to pay NIS 100,000 (roughly $28,300) to A. from the Tourism Ministry and NIS 25,000 (roughly $7,000) to L. from the President's Residence.
Katsav interrupted the judges after the reading of the sentence and cried out "It's a lie" and got up from his seat and approached the judges. "You're wrong. The girls know they lied. They know," he said. "They mock the verdict. She knows she lied."
Shevach stated that "the media's premature judging of the defendant placed him in a weak starting point."
Katsav bowed his head and cried as Shevach said "the public's judging was a direct continuation of pathetic statements made by the attorney general, witnesses who were interviewed freely and boundaries which were crossed." Katsav then turned to the judges as did his sons and called out: "It's all lies, it’s not true."
'Rape among most serious offences' [Raping Jews that is]
Katsav arrived at the court accompanied on Tuesday morning by his attorneys Zion Amir and Avigdor Feldman and members of his family.
Dozens of reporters, protestors and rape crisis center activists gathered outside the court.
"Rape is one of the most serious offences in the statute book," Justice George Karra stated at the beginning of the hearing, adding that for this reason the court must send a clear message."
He further added: "Having acknowledged the harm caused to the defendant we nevertheless could not withdraw the charges but mitigate the sentence which would have much harsher otherwise. We must not forget the defendant is not the victim but the one who caused harm."
He further added: "The defendant committed the crime and must bear the punishment as any other man." He rejected the claims the rapes were not brutal.
Karra said Katsav abused his position as president and stressed the severity of the fact the offences were committed while the defendant served in a public post.
Repeating the State's statement he said: "The defendant is a symbol. The fact that Katsav committed the acts while serving in a high-ranking post is reason to judge him severely." The defense claimed that the media sentenced the former president in a field trial.
Earlier in the hearing, Karra stated "Rape hurts and ruins a person's soul. Sexual harassment trampled the dignity of the complainants."
He noted that the State Prosecutor's Office motioned to sentence Katsav to considerable time in prison and accuse him of moral turpitude.
At one point Katsav interrupted the judges and said: "Let them release the protocols. This isn't a Bolshevik regime."
He later said: "Sir, you made a mistake. You didn't allow me to bring in witnesses. You let malice win. You shut me up. Did you allow me to defend myself?
Last December, Katsav was convicted of two instances of rape and one forceful indecent act against A. of the Tourism Ministry, one indecent act and sexual harassment of L., of the President's Residence, and sexual harassment of H., also of the President's Residence.
On Monday it was reported that A., a former employee at the President's Residence whose complaint was withdrawn from the indictment against Katsav, will file a claim for punitive damages amounting to several million shekels next week.
'Court should send message'
Complainant A. from the Tourism Ministry, who was raped by Katsav twice, told her associates Monday, "I am not vengeful, but I think the court should send a message. Regardless of how many years he spends in prison, (Katsav) will always be a villain.
"The number of years (sentence) is not the issue here, but the harsh verdict, which proved that Katsav committed these despicable acts and raped me," she said.
It appears Katsav will not go to prison immediately, regardless of the sentence, as his attorneys have struck an agreement with Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein allowing the former president a month and a half to prepare for his prison term. The court is expected to agree to these terms.
In addition, Katsav can appeal to the Supreme Court within 45 days. An appeal, however, will not delay the start of his prison term. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4045757,00.html
Former journalist Helen Thomas told an interviewer for a pornographic magazine recently that her anti-Zionism is fully intended.
The 90-year-old modern-day Haman was fired from her long-time job as a White House correspondent for Hearst Corporation for virulently anti-Israel remarks. Not exactly a fluffy bunny herself, she told Playboy magazine she “knew exactly what she was doing” when she said that “Jews don't belong in Palestine,” and they should all “go home to Poland, Germany and the United States.”
For good measure, Thomas told the interviewer in the article to be published next month that the White House and the Congress are “in the pocket of the Israeli lobbies.”
Thomas claimed she has nothing against Jews in her latest diatribe. “I think they're wonderful people. They had to have the most depth. They were leaders in civil rights. They've always had the heart for others but not for Arabs for some reason. I am not anti-Jewish; I am anti-Zionist.”
She continued with the rant that got her fired, however, complaining that Jews “carry on the victimization... American people do not know that the Israeli lobbyists have intimidated them into believing that every Jew is a persecuted victim forever, while they are victimizing Palestinians.”
Meanwhile, she said, she cannot understand why it is so important to continue to bother with remembering the Holocaust. “There's nothing wrong with remembering it,” she remarked, “but why do we have to constantly remember? We're not at fault.”
Her final salvo was the instant replay of the oft-repeated stereotype of the Jewish controlling financial mogul in charge of the world:
“It's very open everybody is in the pocket of the Israeli lobbies, which are funded by wealthy supporters, including those from Hollywood. Same thing with the financial markets. There's total control. Not just two percents.”
No comment on the funding from Saudi Arabian royalty to the universities of America, nor on the influence of the Arab oil market. http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/142999
Judeofascism/world Zionism increasingly unable to hide behind "anti-Semitism" charges and other minorities as Europe catches on to their racket
A German think-tank affiliated with the Social Democratic Party issued a new report last week that revealed “high levels of anti-Semitism in Germany, Poland and Hungary.”
Dr. Beate Küpper, a researcher from the University of Bielefeld who co-authored the study along with her colleagues Andreas Zick and Andreas Hoevermann, told The Jerusalem Post that the study showed a strong presence of “anti-Semitism that is linked with Israel and is hidden behind criticism of Israel, and is not neutral.”
Küpper termed the outbreak of Jew-hatred in Germany “remarkable” because, according to her, “there were widespread Holocaust remembrance and education events in Germany.” More
Security agents stopped an Irish journalist from trying to make a citizen’s arrest of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in the press room of the European Council in Brussels on Tuesday.
David Cronin, a freelance journalist who has written for The Economist and is a member of the Brussels press corps, shouted, “Mr. Lieberman, this is a citizen’s arrest. You are charged with the crime of apartheid. Please accompany me to the nearest police station.”
Before he could advance towards the Foreign Minister, security agents swiftly and bodily escorted him out of the meeting room as he shouted “apartheid” and “Free Palestine.”
Cronin’s press credentials were temporarily revoked last year when he managed to place his arm on the Quartet's Middle East envoy Tony Blair and tell him he was under citizen’s arrest for Britain’s involvement in the invasion of Iraq.
Yoel Mester, a spokesman for the Israeli mission to the EU, told The Guardian that Cronin is "obviously obsessed with Israel; judging by what he's written, [he is] a dedicated anti-Israel activist.”
Israel's expansion of Jewish settlements in east Jerusalem and eviction of Palestinians from their homes there is a form of ethnic cleansing, a United Nations investigator said on Monday.
U.S. academic Richard Falk was speaking to the U.N. Human Rights Council as it prepared to pass resolutions condemning Israeli behavior on territory it has occupied since 1967.
The "continued pattern of settlement expansion in East Jerusalem combined with the forcible eviction of long-residing Palestinians are creating an intolerable situation" in the part of the city previously controlled by Jordan, he said.
This situation "can only be described in its cumulative impact as a form of ethnic cleansing," Falk declared.
Israel declines to deal with Falk or even allow him into the country, accusing him of bias against the Jewish state.
In a linked discussion on Israeli policies toward lands it seized in the 1967 Middle East War, Israeli and Palestinian delegates clashed over the recent killing of members of a Jewish settler family on the West Bank.
Israel's ambassador Aharon Leshno Yaar called on Palestinian leaders to condemn the March 11 murders of three children, including a baby, and their parents "without caveats or hedging" in Arabic to their own people.
Almost as shocking as the killings, "in the days following the massacre many Palestinians took to the streets celebrating the deaths of this family," Leshno Yaar said.
But Palestinian envoy Ibrahim Kraishi said the killings had already been condemned by the Palestinian Authority as "an act of terrorism" that was not part of his people's culture. "Rather, it is the culture of the occupying power," he added.
In his speech, Falk said he would like the Human Rights Council to ask the International Court of Justice to look at Israeli behavior in the occupied territories.
This should focus on whether the prolonged occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem had elements of "colonialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing inconsistent with international humanitarian law," the investigator declared. (Reporting by Robert Evans; editing by Paul Taylor) http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110321/wl_nm/us_israel_un_cleansing
"Kidnapping people in another country and mysteriously bringing them back to Israel without anyone knowing his whereabouts for weeks is hardly the practice of a democratic country. Ruthless regimes such as Pinochet’s Chile or Qaddafi’s Libya are infamous for making people disappear, and for these practices they are shunned, sanctioned and isolated. However, when Israel pulls these stunts, it is swept under the carpet, filed away as one more unpleasant but necessary measure to ensure Israel’s security and ultimately disregarded as a glitch in the otherwise 'democratic' and 'civilized' Israel."
"
“I’m not anti-Jewish, I’m anti-Zionist. I am anti-Israel taking what doesn’t belong to it. If you have a home and you’re kicked out of that home, you don’t come and kick someone else out."
"
This is just one quote from resigned White House correspondent Helen Thomas’ interview to be published in next month’s Playboy. Her resignation last year did not come about because of her ripe age – Ms. Thomas is 90 – but because of comments she made about Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians.
Unlike the majority of public personalities, Helen Thomas hit the nail right on the head with the above statement. Being critical of Israel is not anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic. And being anti-Israel is not necessarily about “delegitimizing” Israel or denying its right to exist. These offenses are merely a way of putting the speaker on the defensive instead of focusing on why criticisms are being lobbed at Israel in the first place.
If anything, Israel is beginning to make it extremely easy to criticize it. What is so amazing is how much of the world still blames others of anti-Semitism or delegitimizing Israel when criticism should clearly be directed in the other’s direction.
Take for example the recent kidnapping of a Palestinian in Ukraine. Dirar Abu Sisi was last seen boarding a train in the Ukraine city of Kharkiv headed for Kiev on February 19. His wife reported him missing and squarely blamed the Mossad – Israel’s Intelligence and Special Operations Unit – for taking her husband. A week or so later, news leaked that Abu Sisi had somehow called his wife, telling her he was in a jail in Petah Tikva. At first, Israel denied any involvement. Yesterday, after a partial gag order was lifted, Israeli authorities admitted to the “arrest and detention” of Abu Sisi.
Abu Sisi, an electrical engineer in Gaza’s power plant, was upper management and said to be a Hamas loyalist. He was visiting his wife’s family in the Ukraine when he went missing.
Kidnapping people in another country and mysteriously bringing them back to Israel without anyone knowing his whereabouts for weeks is hardly the practice of a democratic country. Ruthless regimes such as Pinochet’s Chile or Qaddafi’s Libya are infamous for making people disappear, and for these practices they are shunned, sanctioned and isolated. However, when Israel pulls these stunts, it is swept under the carpet, filed away as one more unpleasant but necessary measure to ensure Israel’s security and ultimately disregarded as a glitch in the otherwise 'democratic' and 'civilized' Israel.
For those of us at the receiving end of these practices, it is equally disheartening to hear Israel’s rants about parties within the country and abroad that seek to delegitimize Israel or call for its destruction. Just the other day, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voiced his rejection of the Palestinians’ reconciliation efforts.
“How can the Palestinian Authority could be in favor of peace with Israel and also want unity with Hamas which calls for the destruction of the Jewish state?” he asked in an interview with CNN. “It's one or the other. Not both.”
To top it all off, Israel is unabashedly and unapologetically spying on foreign groups deemed anti-Israeli. According to reports in the Israeli press, the army’s military intelligence now “collects information” on left-wing organizations abroad that it believes seeks to delegitimize Israel.
According to the Israeli army, there is an “upsurge in worldwide efforts to delegitimize Israel and question its right to exist.” Thus, the new unit will keep tabs on groups involved in boycotting Israel, divesting from it or imposing sanctions on it. It will also gather information on groups that express a desire to bring war crime charges against Israeli officials by trying to link them with so-called terror groups.
On the ground, this is translated into a near-police state. People coming into the country with any sort of affiliation with any such group could be deported, fined or harassed for their supposed plans to “delegitimize” Israel. Never mind the democratic concept of freedom of speech, expression and choice. This is about questioning Israel. You are either a terrorist or an anti-Semite. In the worst case, you are both.
Ritual murder accusations have been made against the Jews for thousands of years. The murders were sometimes alleged to have been accompanied by ritual cannibalism, but not always. In every case, it is rather improbable that the testimonies which have come down to us from antiquity were known and disseminated in the Middle Ages and could constitute a significant point of reference for later accusations of crucifixion and ritual cannibalism (1).
As early as the second century before Christ, the almost unknown Greek historian, Damocritus, who probably lived in Alexandria, recorded a violently biased anti-Jewish testimony, at that time referred to under his name in Suida's Greek dictionary. According to Damocritus, the Jews were accustomed to render worship to a golden head of an ass; every seven years, they abducted a foreigner to sacrifice him, tearing the body to pieces (2).
This horrible rite is said to have taken place probably every seven years in the Temple of Jerusalem, sanctuary of the Jewish religion.
Damocritus’s report is evidently intended to stress the barbarism of the Jews, the "haters of mankind", who practiced superstitious and cruel cults. It should nevertheless be noted that the Greek historian made no reference either to any need to collect the victim's blood or other forms of ritual cannibalism.
A report only partly similar to that reported by Damocritus is found in the polemical, Contra Apione, by Flavius Josephus, quoting the tendentiously anti-Jewish rhetorician, Apione, who lived at Alexandria during the 1st century of the Christian era. According to Apione, Antiocchus Epiphane, entering the Temple of Jerusalem, is said to have been surprised to find a Greek, stretched on a bed and surrounded by exquisite foods and rich dishes. The prisoner's report was extraordinary and horrifying. The Greek said that he had been captured
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by the Jews and taken to the Temple and concealed from everyone, while they force-fed him on all sorts of foods. At first, it the unusual circumstances in which he found himself did not greatly displease him until the sanctuary attendants revealed the fate waiting in store for him: he was fated to die, the predestined victim of homicidal Jewish sacrificial practices.
"(The Jews) carry out this (rite) every year, on a pre-established date. They catch a Greek merchant and feed him for a whole year. They later take him into a forest, kill him and sacrifice him according to their religion. They then savor the viscera, and in the moment of sacrificing the Greek, they swear their hatred of all Greeks. They then dump the remains of the carcass into a ditch” (3).
Flavius Josephus reports that the history recounted by Apione was not invented by him, but was, rather, derived from other Greek writers, an indication that its dissemination must have been much more widespread than we are led to imagine based on the two only surviving accounts, i.e., of Damocritus and Apion(4).
Compared to the first, the second describes a number of variants which are undoubtedly important. The sacrificial ceremony is now annual, and held on a fixed date, even if the account does not specify the Jewish holiday on which it allegedly took place. Furthermore, ritual cannibalism is now stressed in an explicit and brutal manner, even if there is still no mention of any need for human blood, which, as we have seen, is said to have become the preponderant element starting with the Middle Ages. On the other hand, that both Greeks and Romans are alleged to have ended up as a meal for ravenous Jews is shown by the fact that Dio Cassius, writing of their rebellion at Cyrene (115 of the Christian era), hastened to mention, in disgust, that the Jews were accustomed to feasting upon the bodies of Greek and Roman enemies slain in battle. Not contenting themselves with the satisfaction of this alimentary predilection, they painted their bodies with the blood of their enemies and used their intestines as belts (5).
A more delicate matter than the above seems to relate to a passage in the Talmud (Ketubot 102b) which might be interpreted as an indirect confirmation of the phenomenon of ritual murder during an ancient epoch, although we don’t know how widespread or how widely approved it may have been. The passage concerns a so-called “outside” baraita, or mishnah, i.e., one not incorporated into the codified and canonical text of the mishnah (dating back
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approximately to the third century A.D.) -- which seems to be one of the oldest -- and may therefore be traced back to Palestine at the time of the second Temple.
"A man is killed, leaving a son of a tender age in the care of his mother. When the father's heirs approach up and say, 'Let him grow up with us', and the mother say 'Let him grow up with me', he (the boy) should be left with the mother, and should not be entrusted to the care of anyone entitled to inherit from him. A case of this kind happened in the past and (the heirs) killed him on Passover Eve (Hebrew: weshachatuhu ' erev ha-Pesach)" (6).
We know that the Hebrew verb shachet has the meaning of "butcher", "kill", as well as to "immolate", as, for example, as a sacrifice (as for example, Exodus 12:21 "Thou shalt sacrifice the Passover lamb", we-shachatu ha-pesach). If in the case in question were merely a question of a simple murder committed by heirs for profit, the statement that the murder was committed "on Passover Eve" would be quite superfluous. In fact, in support of the law providing that the child should be entrusted to the mother instead of persons entitled to inherit his property, it would have been sufficient merely to state that, in the past, a child had been killed by his heirs. When and how the murder occurred is in fact superfluous. Unless we recall to mind a circumstance, presumably well known, in which the child murder, which deserved to be condemned, actually occurred, but only for material and egotistical motives.
At this point, it might be noted that the most ancient Christian authors appeared to make no use of this Talmudic passage in their anti-Jewish polemics, although the passage shows a relationship between the cruel killing of a child and the Jewish Passover, which might have been used by them in support of the ritual murder accusation. But perhaps their failure to do so was due to poor knowledge of Talmudic literature and rabbinical literature in general on the part of Christian polemicists, who were often ignorant of Talmudic and rabbinical language and interpretive categories (7).
Be that as it may, it is advisable to stress that the reading "They killed (or immolated) him on Passover eve" (we-shachatuhu 'erev ha- Pesach ), appears in all the manuscript and ancient versions of the Ketubot treatise in question, as well as in the first edition of the Talmud, printed at Venice in 1521 by Daniel Bomberg. Later, no doubt
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for the purpose of defending themselves against the ritual murder accusation brought by those who had, in the meantime, discovered the potential value of the embarrassing passage, the Jewish editors of the Talmud replaced the passage with a more anaemic, less embarrassing reading: "they killed him on New Year's Eve ('erev Rosh Ha-Shanah), or "they killed him the first evening" ('erev ha-rishon) (8). The latter version might suggest that the child's heirs got rid of him in a violent way as early as the evening of the day upon he was entrusted to them, with the obvious intention of getting their hands on the estate as soon as possible.
The editors of the famous Vilna edition of the Talmud (1835) justified their decision to adopt the reading "they killed him the first evening" in a glossa to Ketubot 102b, in which they rejected the preceding version – but without explicitly mentioning it – containing the reference to “Passover Eve”, as the circumstance under which the unhappy child is said to have been cruelly killed. "Whoever preceded us in the Talmud", they stressed, "fell into error and preferred a reading completely torn out of context" (9).
That Christian Europe of the Middle Ages feared the Jews is an established fact. Perhaps the widespread fear that Jews were scheming to abduct children, subjecting them to cruel rituals, even antedates the appearance of stereotypical ritual murder which seems to have originated in the 12th century. As for myself, I believe that serious consideration should be given to the possibility that this fear was largely related to the slave trade, particularly in the 9th and 10th centuries, when the Jewish role in the slave trade appears to have been preponderant (10).
During this period, Jewish merchants, from the cities in the valley of the Rhône, Verdun, Lione, Arles and Narbonne, in addition to Aquisgrana, the capital of the empire in the times of Louis the Pious [Louis I]; and in Germany from the centres of the valley of the Rhine, from Worms, Magonza and Magdeburg; in Bavaria and Bohemia, from Regensburg and Prague - were active in the principal markets in which slaves (women, men, eunuchs) were offered for sale, by Jews, sometimes after abducting them from their houses. From Christian Europe the human merchandise was exported to the Islamic lands of Spain, in which there was a lively market. The castration of these slaves, particularly children, raised their prices, and was no doubt a lucrative and profitable practice (11).
The first testimony relating to the abduction of children by Jewish merchants active in the trade flowing into Arab Spain,
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comes down to us in a letter from Agobard, archbishop of Lyon in the years 816-840. The French prelate describes the appearance at Lyons of a Christian slave, having escaped from Cordoba, who had been abducted from Leonese Jewish merchant twenty four years before, when he was a child, to be sold to the Moslems of Spain. His companion in flight was another Christian slave having suffered a similar fate after being abducted six years before by Jewish merchants at Arles. The inhabitants of Lyons confirmed these claims, adding that yet another Christian boy had been abducted by Jews to be sold into slavery that same year. Agobard concludes his report with a comment of a general nature; that these were not considered isolated cases, because, in every day practice, the Jews continued to procure Christian slaves for themselves and furthermore subjecting them to "infamies such that it would be vile in itself to describe them" (12).
Precisely what kind of abominable “infamies” Agobard is referring to is not clear; but it is possible that he was referring to castration more than to circumcision (13). Liutprando, bishop of Cremona, in his Antapodosis, said to have been written in approximately 958-962, referred to the city of Verdun as the principal market in which Jews castrated young slaves intended for sale to the Moslems of Spain (14). During this same period, two Arab sources, Ibn Haukal and Ibrahim al Qarawi, also stressed that the majority of their eunuchs originated from France and were sold to the Iberian peninsula by Jewish merchants. Other Arabic writers mentioned Lucerna, a city with a Jewish majority, halfway between Córdoba and Málaga in southern Spain, as another major market, in which the castration of Christian children after reducing them to slavery was practiced on a large scale by the very same people (15).
Contemporary rabbinical responses provide further confirmation of the role played by Jews in the trade in children and young people as well as in the profitable transformation of boys into eunuchs. These texts reveal that anyone who engaged in such trade was aware of the risks involved, because any person caught and arrested in possession of castrated slaves in Christian territories was decapitated by order of the local authorities (16).
Even the famous Natronai, Gaon of the rabbinical college of Sura in the mid-9th century was aware of the problems linked to the dangerous trade in young eunuchs.
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"Jewish (merchants) entered (into a port or a city), bringing with them slaves and castrated children [Hebrew: serisim ketannim]. When the local authorities confiscated them, the Jews corrupted them with money, reducing them to more harmless advisors, and the merchandise was returned, at least in part" (17).
But if one wishes to interpret the significance and scope of the Jewish presence in the slave trade and practice of castration, it is a fact that the fear that Christian children might be abducted and sold was rather widespread and deeply rooted in all Western European countries, particularly, France and Germany, from which these Jews originated and where the greater part of the slave merchants operated. Personalities in the clergy nourished that fear, conferring religious connotations upon it with an anti-Jewish slant, failing to account for the fact that slavery as a trade had not yet gone out of fashion morally and, as such, was broadly tolerated in the economic reality of the period. On the other hand, the abduction and castration of children, often inevitably confused with circumcision, which was no less feared and abhorred, could not fail to insinuate themselves in the collective unconscious mind of Christian Europe, especially the French and German territories, inciting anxiety and fear, which probably solidified over time, and, as a result, are believed to have concretized themselves in a variety of ways and in more or less in the same places, as the ritual murder.
In the Hebrew calendar, Pesach, Passover, comes one month after the feast of Purim, which commemorates the miraculous salvation of the Jewish people in Persia during the reign of King Ahasuerus I (519-465) from the threat of extermination linked to the plotting of the King’s perfidious minister, Haman. The Book of Esther, which examines all these explosive matters and exalts the saving function of the Biblical heroine as well as that of Mordechai, Esther’s uncle and mentor, concludes with the hanging of Haman and his ten sons, as well as with the beneficial massacre of the enemies of Israel. Leon of Modena in his Riti, describes Purim in precisely this manner, stressing a carnival-like atmosphere of celebrations and convivial opulence in which restraint and inhibition were dangerously weakened.
"On the 14th of Adar, which is March, is the festival of Purim, in memory of everything we read in the Book of Esther, which saved the people of Israel from being exterminated through the machinations of Haman, and he and his sons were hanged [...]. After the ordinary orations, with remembrance only of the escape which occurred at the hour of death, we read the entire History or Book of Esther, which were written on parchment in volume as the Panteuch, and we call meghillah, i.e., volume. And some hearing Haman's mentioned,
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beat as a sign to curse him [...] They make much rejoicing festivities and banquets [...] an effort is made to serve the most sumptuous meal possible and eat and drink more than usual, after which friends go out to visit each other, with receptions, festivities and revelry" (18).
For a number of reasons, not least that of its not infrequent proximity to Holy Week, Purim, also called the "festival of the lots", came, in time, to acquire openly anti-Christian connotations and the related celebrations became openly suggestive in this sense, both in form and substance, sometimes audaciously and openly. Haman, equated with that other Biblical arch-enemy of the Jews, Amalek (Deut. 25: 17-19), whose memory was to be blotted out from the face of the earth, was transformed, over time, into Jesus, the False Messiah, whose impious followers were once threatening the Chosen People with extermination (19).
Moreover, Haman was killed, hanged, as Jesus was said to have been, and there was no shortage of exegetic material reinforcing this paragon. In the Greek translation of the Septuagint as well as in Flavius Josephus (Ant. Jud. Xi, 267, 280), Haman’s gallows was interpreted as a cross, and the execution of King Ahasuerus’s belligerent minister was described, in effect, as a true and proper crucifixion. The equation between Amalek, Haman and Christ was self-evidently obvious. Haman, who, in the Biblical text is referred to as talui, "the hanged one", was confused with He who, in all anti-Christian Hebraic texts, was the Talui by antonomasia [the replacement of a proper name by an epithet], i.e., the crucified Christ (20).
The sensational trial of the most prominent members of the Ashkenazi communities of northern Italy, accused of vilifying the Christian religion was held in Milan in the spring of 1488. In reply to inquisitors demanding the name used by Jews with reference to Jesus of Nazareth, Salomone da Como, one of the accused, answered unhesitatingly: "Among ourselves we call him "Ossoays" ("that man", from the Hebrew oto' ha-ish, according to the German pronunciation), or Talui ("the hanged one", "the crucified one"), while, when speaking to Christians, we always refer to him as ‘Christ’" (21). It is not surprising that a text by 4th century writer Evagrius describes the Jew Simone, in an argument with a Christian, Theophilus, should have equated “the cursed and despised Passion of Christ" with Haman’s ‘crucifixion’ (22) .
According to the great English anthropologist James George Frazer, Christ died while playing the role of Haman (the dying god) in a drama of Purim in which (Jesus) Barabbas, the double of Jesus
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of Nazareth, played the part of Mordechai (the god that resurges). In the model of the god that dies and is reborn -- which is common in the Near East -- Haman is said to have played the part of death and Mordechai that of life, while the celebration of Purim is said to constitute the Hebraic ritual of death and resurrection. Based on this consideration, one might hypothesize that, in the past, the Jews, at the culmination of the festival, might have been accustomed to putting a man to death in flesh and blood reality, and that Jesus was crucified in this context, playing the role of Ahasuerus’s tragic minister, the arch-enemy of Israel (23).
There is no shortage of testimonies of the celebration of rituals, within the framework of the carnival of Purim, intended to vilify and outrage the image of Haman, reconstituted in the semblance of Christ hanging from the cross. First, the emperor Honorius (384-423) and, in his footsteps, Theodosius (401-450), prohibited the Jews from the provinces of the Empire from setting fire to effigies of Haman crucified in contempt of the Christian religion. Probably to be associated with the preceding prohibitions is the report, mentioned by the late chronicler Agapius [10th century] and dating back to 404-407 A.D., during the reign of Theodosius II [Flavius Theodosius, Roman Emperor of the East, 401-450 A.D.], that certain Jews of Alexandria, forced to submit to baptism, are said to have rebelled, giving rise to a sensational protest, stating that, in their eyes, such a ceremony possessed the fascination of a certain originality. They are said to have taken an image of the crucified Christ, heaping insults upon the Christians, mocking them with the words: "This is our Messiah?" (24). It is not impossible that the episode formed part of the framework of the Hebraic Purim celebrations.
Before 1027, at Byzantium [Constantinople, now Istanbul], baptized Jews were required to curse their ex-fellow-Jews "who celebrated the festival of Mordechai, crucifying Haman on a beam of wood, in the form of a cross, and then setting fire to it, accompanying the vile rite with a torrent of imprecations directed at those faithful to Christ". Again, in the very early 13th century, Arnol, prior of the monastery at Lübeck, censured the wickedness of the Jews in bitter terms "in crucifying the figure of the Redeemer every year, making him the object of shameless ridicule" (25).
Even the Hebrew texts do not seem to be sparing on information in this regard. The Talmudic dictionary Arukh, consisting of the rabbi Natan b. Yehiel of Rome in the second half of the 11th century, contains reports that the Jews of Babylon were accustomed to celebrate the festival of Purim in a particular way.
"It is the custom among the Jews of Babylon and the rest of the entire world for the boys to make effigies shaped like Haman and hang them
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on the roofs of their houses for four or five days (before the festival). In the days of Purim, they prepare a phallus and throw it among these images, while they stand around singing songs" (26).
The above mentioned rites were culinary, even symbolically cannibalistic in nature. The effigies of Haman-Christ were of sweet pastry, to be destroyed, avidly consumed by youngsters and children during the days of carnival (27).
During the Middle Ages, the sweet delicacy enjoying absolute primacy in the sumptuous banquets of Purim was a typical biscuit, once again bearing the pathetic figure of Haman as a gastronomic butt of ridicule. The so-called "Haman's ears" (onze' Aman), presented in a variety of versions according to the various traditions of the Jewish community, gained a position of great importance in the feast of Purim. In Italy, they were strips of puff pastry shaped like ass's ears, fried in olive oil and powdered sugar, which quite resembled the Tuscan cenci and Roman frappe prepared during carnival time. Among Oriental and north African Jews, the puff pastry was roasted and covered with honey and sesame seeds (28).
The Italian Ashkenazim did not much care for the overly-Mediterranean taste of these [latter] biscuits, which they called "galahim frit" in contempt, "fried priests" (literally "people with the tonsure"), confirming the detestable relationship between Haman, Israel’s bitter enemy, and the arrogance of Christianity, with its priests. Their version of the "ears" were called Hamantaschen or "Haman's pockets", and was more elaborate. These consisted of a large triangle-shaped cake of egg pasta filled with a sweet brownish mixture based on poppy seeds (29). Nor should we be surprised to find that, even in the relatively recent past, there was no shortage of people in Germany who shared the belief, curious even if not very original, that the Ashkenazi stuffed their Hamantaschen with the coagulated blood of Christian boys martyred by them (30). Modern anti-Semites gather and disseminate this cannibalistic fable today from their university chairs, particularly in the Arab countries, making it the subject of ridiculous pseudo-historical research (31).
Turning back centuries, however, we must note, following Frazer, that the ritual of Purim did not always conclude with the bloodless hanging of a mere effigy of Haman. Sometimes, the “effigy” was a flesh-and-blood Christian,
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crucified for real, during the wild revelry of the Jewish carnival. One of these sources of which we can attain with regards it Socrates Scolasticus, history of the Church in the 5th century, which, from its Historia Ecclestiastica (VII, 16) refers to a case occurring in 415 at Inmestar, near Antioch, in Syria (32). The local Hebrews, in their debaucheries and intemperate revelry to celebrate Purim, after getting suitably drunk, according to the prescriptions of the ritual, which provided that they must drink so much wine that they can no longer distinguish Haman from Mordechai:
”…took to deriding the Christians and Christ Himself in their boasting; they ridiculed the cross and anyone trusting in the crucifix, putting the following joke in practice.
“They took a Christian child, tied it to a cross and hanged him. Initially they made him the object of jokes and drollery; then, after a while, they lost control of themselves and mistreated him to such a degree that they killed him."
The report, which makes no mention of miracles occurring at the site of the relics of the martyred child, seems to possess all the indications of truthfulness. Moreover, as we have seen above, there are people who have viewed the immoderate celebrations of Purim, accompanied by anti-Christian insults and violence, as the core from which the belief in Jewish ritual homicide of Christian children is thought to have developed during the Middle Ages, as an integral part of a ritual centered around on the festival of Pesach, considered the ideal culmination of Purim (33).
The case of Inmestar is not an isolated one. A Jewish source, the memoires of rabbi Efraim of Bonn, takes us to France, to Brie-Compte Robert, in 1191 or 1192 (34). A servant of the Duchess of Champagne was found guilty of the murder of a Jew and was held in prison for that offense. The other Jews of the village decided to rescue the prisoner in exchange for money and executed him during the festival of Purim , hanging him (35).
“A perfidious Christian killed a Jew in the city of Brie, which is in France. Then the other Jews, his relatives, went to the lord of the region (the Duchess of Champagne), and implored her (to hand over) the murderer, who was a servant of the King of France. They therefore bribed her with their money in order to be able to crucify the killer (36). And they crucified him on the eve of Purim" (37).
The vengeance demanded in a loud voice by the Christians of Brie, headed by Philippe II August, King of France (1165-1223), was not long in coming.
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The entire adult Jewish population of the city, totaling about eighty persons, were tried and condemned to be burnt at the stake ("wealthy persons, rich and influential, some of them famous rabbis and people of culture, who refused to sully themselves [in the baptismal waters] and to betray the One God, were burnt alive proclaiming the unity of the Creator"). The children, who were Jews and circumcised, were taken en masse to the baptismal font to be made Christians. No festival of Purim ever concluded in a more tragic manner for the Jews, overturning and thwarting the saving and hope-giving meaning of the Biblical account of Esther and Mordechai.
The blasphemous parody of the Passion of Christ sometimes had the most tragic consequences. But this obvious fact did not always suffice to cool hot heads and restrain fanatical, agitated minds. The Christians were not too subtle about it, since they certainly didn't need excuses or pretexts to perpetrate indiscriminate massacres of Jews or to plunge Jewish children into the beneficial waters of baptism by force. The spiral of violence, having due regard to the discrepancies between the relative power and size of the two conflicting societies, could not be extinguished. The serpent bit its own tail, leaving its imprint of blood on the sand. Each society was, in a sense, its own victim, but neither noticed.
To give a few examples, on 7 February 1323, a few days before the festival of Purim, a Jew in the Duchy of Spoleto was condemned for striking and insulting the cross (38). On 28 February 1504, precisely coinciding with the festival of Purim, a beggar from Bevagna accused the local Jews of the place, transformed into evil spirits, of having cruelly crucified him (39). It was still in the days of Purim, in February 1444, that the Jews of Vigone, in Piedmont, were accused of having pretended to butcher an image of Christ Crucified as a joke (40); again, it was in the month of February, this time in 1471, that a Jew from Gubbio brought a legal action to "scrape" the image of the Virgin Mary from the outside wall of his house (41).
Purim was followed by Pesach, but the story, during that violent month, was no different, even without any strict need to play cruel and lethal cruel tricks on Christian boys, or to stone Jews and their houses en masse during the "holy hailstorm of stones". On 21 March 1456, a Jew of Lodi entered the cathedral of San Lorenzo at nightfall with a drawn sword, directing himself without hesitation, where he walked straight up to the main altar and proceeded to make log wood and splinters out of the image of Christ
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Crucified, with the evident intention of chopping it to bits. His fate was sealed. The culprit was lynched on the spot, amidst the rejoicing of a jubilant crowd, and vengeance was wreaked. 21 March 1456 corresponded to the 15th of the Month of Nissan of the Jewish year 5216 and the first day of Pesach. The matter was thus described by the commander of Lodi to the Duke of Milan:
"In our dear city of Lodi, on the 21st day, 17 hours, of the present month [March], according to the common reports, a Jew entered the cathedral with sword in hand to cut the crucifix of Christ to pieces, for which offense the whole territory rose up against him and they ran to the Jew’s house [...] and killed the above-mentioned Jew and dragged him on the ground" (42).
In the early modern age, the carnival-like festivities of Purim finally lost those qualities of aggressiveness and violence which had been characteristic since the early Middle Ages, but never renounced the clearly anti-Christian meaning it possessed according to tradition. Thus wrote Giulio Morosini, known as Shemuel Nahmias at Venice when he was still a Jew, a shrewd former disciple of Leon da Modena:
"During the reading [of the megillah of Esther], whenever Haman is named, the boys beat the benches of the synagogue with hammers or sticks with all their might as a sign of excommunication, crying in a loud voice 'May his name be blotted out and may the name of the impious rot. And they all cried 'Be cursed, Haman, Be blessed, Mordechai, Be blessed Esther, Be cursed Ahasueruss.' And they continue like that until evening, just as on the morning of the first day, never ceasing to express their justified contempt for Haman and the enemies of Judaism at that time, covertly spreading poison against Christians, under the name of Idolaters [...] they therefore cry out in a loud voice Be Cursed all the Idolaters (43).
But at an even earlier time, the illustrious jurist Marquardo Susanni, protected by Paolo IV Carafa, the fervent and impassioned founder of the Ghetto of Rome, mentioned the wild hostility of the Jews towards Christianity as well as the peculiar carnival-like characteristics of Purim . According to him, "during the feast of Mordechai", the Jews did not hesitate to greet each other by saying, in contemptuous tones:
'May the King of the Christians go down to ruin immediately, the way Haman went down to ruin" (44). More
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