On the Hamas children's program Tomorrow's Pioneers this week, the host
and a large stuffed bumblebee advocate for Palestinian children to
punch, throw rocks at and "Shoot the Jews"... "All of them."
Peace becomes difficult to achieve when each subsequent generation is taught hate from a young age.
What's especially disturbing is that this is being taught to a new generation of Palestinian children. How do you make peace with this type of mindset?
Friday, May 9, 2014
Thursday, May 8, 2014
Canadian teen wins 2014 Bible Quiz
18-year-old Eitan Amos receives prize from Netanyahu, who reiterates scripture’s importance to Israel’s existence
By Yifa Yaakov for Times of Israel
Eitan Amos, a Jewish teenager from Canada, was this year’s winner of the International Bible Quiz,The competition was held Tuesday, as in every year, at the Jerusalem Theater on Israel’s Independence Day.
Amos, an 18-year-old Toronto native, beat 15 other finalists from all over the world, answering questions posed by Education Minister Shai Piron (Yesh Atid) and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Rehovot native Tefila Berenson placed second, while Sha’alabim Yeshiva student Itamar Khalifa placed third.
“The compass and map that help us navigate our way in a changing and unchanging reality is the Book of Books, the foundation of our existence, the Bible,” Netanyahu said after awarding the winners their prizes.
“Foresight and being prepared for the future are the most important things. Without them, we are like leaves blowing in the wind, unable to influence our national existence,” said the prime minister.
Participating in the quiz throughout the year were 75 contestants from 33 countries around the world, including Portugal, Brazil, Costa Rica, Turkey, France, Australia, Belgium, and the United States, according to an official government statement.
However, only 16 made it to the final stage of the competition, which was held on Israel’s 66th Independence Day.
Last year, 15-year-old Yishai Eisenberg, a native of Passaic, New Jersey, and Elior Babian of Beit Shemesh shared the top prize.
Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Dutch Muslim rapper: I hate Jews more than Nazis
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (JTA) – Dutch police are investigating a Muslim rapper who used hateful language against gays and Jews in one of his songs.
The rapper Ismo, whose real name is Ismael Houllich, included the text in his first single. The official video clip for the song titled “Eenmans” (or “One Man’s”) shows Ismo singing: “I hate those fucking Jews more than the Nazis,” “don’t shake hands with faggots” and “don’t believe in anything but the Koran.”
The clip, which was filmed in the southern border city of Breda, had received 125,000 viewers on YouTube before a 19-year-old gay resident of the city, Lars Hobma, filed a complaint with police against Ismo for alleged incitement to hatred, the news site of the Algemeen Dagblad daily reported Friday.
Hobma has received death threats on Facebook after filing the complaint, the daily reported.
In an interview for Omroep Brabant, a regional radio station, Ismo denied Hobma’s allegations.
“They are trying to twist my words against me,” he said. “I don’t hate all Jews. I hate only Zionist Jews that made Palestine smaller than my neighborhood.”
He added: “It all depends on how you interpret the song. By ‘faggots’ I didn’t mean homosexuals and by ‘Jews’ I didn’t mean all Jews. My fans realize that.”
Last month, the rightist, anti-Muslim politician Geert Wilders filed a police complaint against another Muslim Dutch rapper, Hozny, who released a video depicting Wilders’ abduction and murder.
In the video, Hozny sings about Wilders, who in his youth worked as a volunteer on a moshav, or co-operative farm, in Israel: “As a soldier in Israel he was happy among the Jews, then hate for Islam was born in his eyes.”
He also sang to Wilders: “How are things with your kippah? Are you being oppressed by the Jewish faith?”
Wilders, who never served as a soldier in Israel but describes himself as a friend of the Jewish state and people, has said his criticism of Islam were partially based on his extensive travels in Muslim countries.
Tuesday, May 6, 2014
Jewish groups decry Supremes on town council prayer ruling
WASHINGTON (JTA) — An array of Jewish groups decried a U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing prayers at town hall meetings.
The 5-4 decision along conservative-liberal lines handed down Monday reversed a lower appeals court decision in favor of a lawsuit brought by Susan Galloway and Linda Stephens, an atheist in Greece, a town in upstate New York.
The town board has since 1999 opened meetings with a prayer, almost always by a Christian clergyman, and some of these at times proselytized.
The plaintiffs held that the prayers should be nonsectarian, a position the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled overextended government reach.
“To hold that invocations must be nonsectarian would force the legislatures that sponsor prayers and the courts that are asked to decide these cases to act as supervisors and censors of religious speech,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion, “a rule that would involve government in religious matters to a far greater degree than is the case under the town’s current practice of neither editing or approving prayers in advance nor criticizing their content after the fact.”
A number of Jewish groups, which had filed friend of the court briefs, condemned the decision.
The Anti-Defamation League, in its statement, said the ruling was “deeply disturbing” and noted the circumstances of the Greece case, in which opening prayers involved not just lawmakers but citizens petitioning their town council.
“The religiously divisive implications of this new rule are troubling in any of these contexts, however it is particularly disturbing at the local level where ordinary citizens seek recourse from public officials and will likely feel pressured to participate in religious observances not of their own faith,” the ADL said.
Also condemning the decision were the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the American Jewish Committee.
Marc Stern, the AJC’s general counsel, said he was relieved that the court did not go as far as some had expected and gut standards in place since the 1970s that ban legislating toward religious purpose.
“It turns out to be a fairly narrow decision,” he said.
In his decision, Kennedy said that “a pattern of prayers that over time denigrate, proselytize or betray an impermissible government purpose” would violate the constitution.
Stern said that the conservative majority and the liberal minority seemed to accept that the Greece council did not intend to advance a pattern of prayers advancing proselytization, and that the impression that it was impressing Christianity on its citizens was an inadvertent one.
“The only discernible legal difference between the plurality and the dissent is whether stupid bureaucrats violate the establishment clause,” he said.
Justice Elena Kagan, in her dissent, cited a seminal moment in American Jewish history, in 1790, when George Washington communicated with Moses Seixas, a lay official of the Jewish community in Newport, R.I.
She noted that Seixas, in a letter to Washington, expressed gratitude for an American government “which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance – but generously affords to All liberty of conscience and immunities of Citizenship.”
In his reply, now enshrined as a key document outlining religious freedoms, Washington, Kagan said, “like any successful politician” knew to borrow a successful turn of phrase – and appropriated Seixas’ language.
The 5-4 decision along conservative-liberal lines handed down Monday reversed a lower appeals court decision in favor of a lawsuit brought by Susan Galloway and Linda Stephens, an atheist in Greece, a town in upstate New York.
The town board has since 1999 opened meetings with a prayer, almost always by a Christian clergyman, and some of these at times proselytized.
The plaintiffs held that the prayers should be nonsectarian, a position the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled overextended government reach.
“To hold that invocations must be nonsectarian would force the legislatures that sponsor prayers and the courts that are asked to decide these cases to act as supervisors and censors of religious speech,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion, “a rule that would involve government in religious matters to a far greater degree than is the case under the town’s current practice of neither editing or approving prayers in advance nor criticizing their content after the fact.”
A number of Jewish groups, which had filed friend of the court briefs, condemned the decision.
The Anti-Defamation League, in its statement, said the ruling was “deeply disturbing” and noted the circumstances of the Greece case, in which opening prayers involved not just lawmakers but citizens petitioning their town council.
“The religiously divisive implications of this new rule are troubling in any of these contexts, however it is particularly disturbing at the local level where ordinary citizens seek recourse from public officials and will likely feel pressured to participate in religious observances not of their own faith,” the ADL said.
Also condemning the decision were the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the American Jewish Committee.
Marc Stern, the AJC’s general counsel, said he was relieved that the court did not go as far as some had expected and gut standards in place since the 1970s that ban legislating toward religious purpose.
“It turns out to be a fairly narrow decision,” he said.
In his decision, Kennedy said that “a pattern of prayers that over time denigrate, proselytize or betray an impermissible government purpose” would violate the constitution.
Stern said that the conservative majority and the liberal minority seemed to accept that the Greece council did not intend to advance a pattern of prayers advancing proselytization, and that the impression that it was impressing Christianity on its citizens was an inadvertent one.
“The only discernible legal difference between the plurality and the dissent is whether stupid bureaucrats violate the establishment clause,” he said.
Justice Elena Kagan, in her dissent, cited a seminal moment in American Jewish history, in 1790, when George Washington communicated with Moses Seixas, a lay official of the Jewish community in Newport, R.I.
She noted that Seixas, in a letter to Washington, expressed gratitude for an American government “which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance – but generously affords to All liberty of conscience and immunities of Citizenship.”
In his reply, now enshrined as a key document outlining religious freedoms, Washington, Kagan said, “like any successful politician” knew to borrow a successful turn of phrase – and appropriated Seixas’ language.
Monday, May 5, 2014
Eternal Hero, Soldier of Israel : Michael Levin [Documentary]
On this day of Yom Haatzmaut, we celebrate those who gave their lives in order that we may live our lives.
Friday, May 2, 2014
Thursday, May 1, 2014
Israeli Film Giant Assaf Dayan Dies at 68
Debra Kamin for Variety
Israeli
screen legend Assaf “Assi” Dayan died on Thursday at his home in Tel
Aviv, bringing the curtain down on a career that for many served as a
microcosm of the state of Israel itself. He was 68.
The youngest son of Israel’s eye-patch wearing military hero Moshe Dayan, the younger Dayan is considered one of the primary pioneers of the Israeli cinematic industry and the creator of some of its most iconic films. He shot to fame in “He Walked the Films,” an idealistic love story about both romance and country that hit theaters in 1967, the same year that Israel faced its nation-defining Six-Day War.
Later roles would see Dayan playing roles reflecting all corners of the political spectrum, from a treasonous prisoner in the Academy Award-nominated 1984 “Beyond the Walls” to a discharged commander in 1991’s “Real Time.”
He was an undisputed mega-star in his home country, and despite his public misgivings with his father’s legacy and the future of his oft-aligned nation, Israeli audiences never fell out of love with him.
Later in life, he moved into both writing and directing, and in the 1990s made a trilogy of films exploring the dark, creeping underbelly of modern Israeli society.
His later years were mired in public controversies, including failed relationships, health struggles and substance abuse. There were professional triumphs, though, as well: He received a lifetime achievement award at the Jerusalem International Film Festival in 1998 and in the last decade secured some of his best-loved roles. He starred as a therapist in the award-winning “B’Tipul,” which was remade in the U.S. by HBO as “In Treatment,” and he also starred in 2008’s “Jellyfish,” co-directed by husband-and-wife team Etgar Keret, the beloved master of absurd fiction, and his niece Shira Geffen.
Israeli
screen legend Assaf “Assi” Dayan died on Thursday at his home in Tel
Aviv, bringing the curtain down on a career that for many served as a
microcosm of the state of Israel itself. He was 68.The youngest son of Israel’s eye-patch wearing military hero Moshe Dayan, the younger Dayan is considered one of the primary pioneers of the Israeli cinematic industry and the creator of some of its most iconic films. He shot to fame in “He Walked the Films,” an idealistic love story about both romance and country that hit theaters in 1967, the same year that Israel faced its nation-defining Six-Day War.
Later roles would see Dayan playing roles reflecting all corners of the political spectrum, from a treasonous prisoner in the Academy Award-nominated 1984 “Beyond the Walls” to a discharged commander in 1991’s “Real Time.”
He was an undisputed mega-star in his home country, and despite his public misgivings with his father’s legacy and the future of his oft-aligned nation, Israeli audiences never fell out of love with him.
Later in life, he moved into both writing and directing, and in the 1990s made a trilogy of films exploring the dark, creeping underbelly of modern Israeli society.
His later years were mired in public controversies, including failed relationships, health struggles and substance abuse. There were professional triumphs, though, as well: He received a lifetime achievement award at the Jerusalem International Film Festival in 1998 and in the last decade secured some of his best-loved roles. He starred as a therapist in the award-winning “B’Tipul,” which was remade in the U.S. by HBO as “In Treatment,” and he also starred in 2008’s “Jellyfish,” co-directed by husband-and-wife team Etgar Keret, the beloved master of absurd fiction, and his niece Shira Geffen.
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