The Rabbis to which Arsen referred are here and here (among other places).Dont recall Vatican call terror murder of #Israeli Rabbis 'barbaric' or @Pontifex express 'pain & horror.' #Normandy https://t.co/MZZ3rQAugP— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) July 26, 2016
Labels: Islamic terrorism, Palestinian terrorism, Vatican
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:08 PM
1 comments
An investigative report in Makor Rishon cites La Stampa Vatican Insider journalist Andrea Tornielli as saying that the deal has been nearly completed, and that Deputy Foreign Minister Ze'ev Elkin is in charge of the negotiations with the Vatican, but Israel denies any such deal.
The agreement allegedly contains two elements. The first is Israel's forgoing the levying of property tax and other taxes for all “churches, holy sites, prayer houses and cemeteries.” The second is the transfer of the “Last Supper room” on the floor above David's tomb to the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land (Custodia Terræ Sanctæ).
Rabbi Yaakov Sevilia, an activist for King David's Tomb, told Arutz Sheva Sunday that there is also a deal between Christians and Muslims, according to which the Muslims will retain control over the Temple Mount whereas Mount Zion will become Christian property. He cited journalist Gulio Meotti, who contributes regularly to Arutz Sheva, as the source for this knowledge.
Rabbi Sevilia emphasized that the tomb is, without a doubt, the burial place of King David, and mentioned a recent book – “The Secret of David's Tomb” – as containing proof of this claim.
"The Christians believe that the Tomb of David is indeed located here, but they do everything possible to confuse us, the Jewish people, so that we lose our connection to this place,” he accused. He added that while there has been a Jewish awakening with regard to the site, the Christian presence at the tomb is still much greater than the Jewish presence, with about 200 tour buses bringing Christians to the site daily.
There have been reports in the past about a deal to transfer the second floor of the Tomb to the Vatican. Tornielli says that this is the core issue in talks between the Vatican and Israel.
Rabbi Sevilia claims that the Last Supper Room is just a toehold that the Vatican intends to expand in the future, in a ploy to take over the entire Tomb site.Two points. First, I'd like to know what Israel is getting in this 'deal.' If anyone can find anything, please let me know because I don't see it.
Labels: Catholic Church, Jews, Muslims, Old City of Jerusalem, Vatican
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:42 PM
2 comments
Labels: Catholic Church, Giulio Meotti, Vatican
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:21 PM
3 comments
The Catholic Church high official equated Israel’s operation in Gaza against terror groups with the New Testament story of Herod’s slaughter of Jewish babies in his effort to kill Jesus.
Ravasi, who is one of the most popular Catholic cardinals and the director of the Church’s policy on culture, called Israelis baby-killers in a shameless form of anti-Semitism which subtly accuses the Jewish State of trying to murder the new Jesus, symbolized by the Palestinian people.
The Vatican official’s modern blood libel against Israel was delivered during the presentation of Pope Benedict’s new book about the life of Jesus. However, Ravasi's theme – the Jews as Herod, who killed all the innocent babies because his heart was set on killing Jesus – was much beloved by Medieval organizers of pogroms.
The vicar-general of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, William Shomali, said on Vatican Radio that “what is happening in Gaza now is a vicious circle of violence”. The auxiliary bishop then declared that “it’s difficult to know who started it”. How difficult?
A few weeks ago, in an interview with the Catholic magazine Famiglia Cristiana, Shomali claimed that “hatred of Christians” is the Talmud itself. "The Talmud, the holy book studied by the ultra-orthodox, more highly venerated than the Bible itself, invites religious hatred, speaks badly of Jesus, and even worse of Mary and, in general, of Christians,” the bishop said, adding that “in Israeli schools, love for the other is not taught, but rather the destruction of the other”.Actually, you can't find the Talmudic passages that talk about Jesus because they've been censored out by Church-inspired governments for centuries. I have a small pamphlet in which all the censored-out words are listed, and in recent years, new volumes based on handwritten texts have added the censored words in the margins. In fact, countless Jewish books were censored to avoid offending the Church's sensitivities.
Labels: Catholic Church, Gaza, Hamas, Operation Pillar of Defense, Vatican
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:19 AM
4 comments
Italian journalist Giulio Meotti reports that the Vatican has come out in favor of the 'Palestinian' agenda of 'de-Judaising' Jewish holy sites... and that's only the tip of the iceberg. The Vatican already declared its support of waving a Palestinian flag over the Temple Mount in the heart of ancient Jerusalem. Next in line is Rachel’s Tomb near Bethlehem, Judaism’s third most holy site, which for millennia has served as a place of longing, pilgrimage and prayer for the Jewish people. In 1996, Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority began referring to the site as the “Bilal ibn Rabah Mosque,” and this is how UNESCO shamefully listed it in 2010.Read the whole thing. Disgraceful.
Many Catholic groups worldwide already embraced the Palestinian myth. Pax Christi, one of the most famous Catholic organizations, on its website, repeatedly calls the Jewish site a “mosque.” Then there is the Bethlehem University of the Holy Land, the only Vatican-run educational institution in the area and whose founding can be traced back to the visit of Pope Paul VI in the holy land in 1964. The Catholic University recently launched a project about the Rachel’s Tomb. The document calls it “a historical religious site for followers of Christianity and Islam,” whose location is “on Palestinian lands.” The Vatican institution seems to ignore that all of Rachel’s Tomb belongs to Area C, which the Oslo Accords gave to Israeli jurisdiction. The very title of the Catholic project, “Rachel: An Alien in her Hometown,” suggests that the tomb is a spot hijacked by the Israelis. The tomb, the Catholic report says, “is also known by Muslims as the Bilal Ibn Rabah Mosque.” According to the Vatican university, the Jewish shrines are Arab treasures stolen by the Zionists and the Israelis are no more than invading colonizers.
...
The Palestinian-Vatican pact is part of a bigger scenario, in which the Catholic Church is adopting a tragic appeasement on Islam. As the brave Andrew Bostom explained, the Vatican embraced “groveling Islamophilia, accompanied by criticism of the U.S. ‘war on terrorism’ as an ‘injustice’ to Muslims, and constant scapegoating of Israel, often expressed with strident animus towards the Jewish State.”
Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, who is known for having a pro-Islam position, has been appointed by Pope Benedict as the head of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. In a letter addressing his “Dear Muslim friends,” Tauran asked for Islamic help to form an alliance against atheism. The Vatican promoted “Love of God, Love of Neighbor,” the first three-day forum with Islamic leaders. The Pope agreed to meet one of the most dangerous Islamists in the Western world, the grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, Tariq Ramadan – the Swiss scholar who denies Israel’s right to life and who has been banned from entering the US because of his alleged association with extremists.
Bishop Mariano Crociata, secretary general of the Italian Episcopal Conference, announced that the Vatican is in favor of building new mosques in Europe. Then the European Bishops met with European Muslims in Turin (Cardinal Tauran was also present) to proclaim the need for the “progressive enculturation of Islam in Europe” (read it: the Islamization of the old continent).
Labels: Islam, Pope Benedict XVI, Rachel's tomb, Temple Mount, Vatican
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:12 AM
3 comments
When I read this story (Hat Tip: IMRA), I could not help but think about the mafia shaking down business owners for protection money. This is from the first link.President Mahmoud Abbas instructed a ranking Palestinian delegation to travel to the Vatican to discuss reports about a projected Vatican-Israeli agreement that may also include Catholic Church property in occupied East Jerusalem, according to a statement issued Saturday by Abbas’ office.We have ways to make you remain supportive of our 'inalienable rights.'
Senior Palestinian officials met with the Apostolic delegate in Jerusalem to discuss this issue and it was decided after the meeting that a ranking delegation, headed by the prime minister, the foreign minister and chief negotiator in the PLO, along with other senior officials, will travel to the Vatican to get clarification about the projected agreement.
The purpose of the visit “is to make sure that the position of the Vatican was and remains supportive of the inalienable Palestinian rights, particularly that which has to do with the 1967 Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and to confirm assurances by the Apostolic delegate that the agreement, which will be signed with Israel, will not include Catholic Church property or any affiliate organization in East Jerusalem,” said the statement.
Labels: East Jerusalem, Palestinian Authority, Vatican
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:39 PM
2 comments
Giulio Meotti writes that the 'Palestinian' drive to make Jesus one of them is reminiscent of the Nazi drive to make Jesus one of them. To understand the importance of the Palestinian campaign one must remind that there has been another manipulation of Jesus: the “Aryan Jesus” of Adolf Hitler. The pro-Nazis Christian Movement’s recasted Jesus as an Aryan fighting against the Jews. According to the Hitler’s theologians, Jesus was not a Jew, but a Galilean opponent of Judaism. The Christian Bible was stripped of all “Jewish influence”. As the Aryan Jesus was the Christian legitimization of the Nazi Holocaust, the Arabized and Islamicized Jesus under the Palestinian warfare is a tool in the Jihad against the State of Israel and its Jews.Read the whole thing.
Under the PLO’s dictatorship, the Jewish history has already become “Palestinian Arab history” and the Jewish nation (“Am Yisrael”) that ruled in the Holy Land for a thousand years and developed a world-shaking culture never existed. The brave Jewish historian Bat Ye’or in the pivotal book “Dhimmitude” called it “Arabization of Jesus” and “de-Judaization of the Bible”, which are both serving the Palestinian cause.
The Palestinian Authority’s television aired a program asserting that the tales of the Bible took place in what is today Yemen, not in the modern State of Israel. A PA-TV show also argued that Palestinians are “the true descendants of the biblical Israelites.” Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus and the most ancient synagogue in Jericho, two cities transferred by Israel to Palestinian control in suicidal agreements, are among the sacred Jewish places destroyed by Arabs, in eerily similar attempts to the Taliban’s deplorable annihilation of ancient Buddhas in Afghanistan. Abdallah al-Hourani, the former Palestinian minister for refugee affairs, told the newspaper Al-Hayat al-Jedidah: “The Crusaders lived in our land for 242 years, until the liberation of their last outposts, and Israel is like a tree that has flowered on land not belonging to it. No matter how much it is fertilized, it cannot put down roots, and when the fertilizer stops, it will die”.
The Palestinian lies are lethal. Alex Grobman’s wonderful book “License to Murder” (Balfour) details that Arafat carried the Arabic copy of the “Protocols of Elders of Zion” wherever he went, regularly quoting from it to impress upon his visitors the perfidy of Zionism. Like Hitler, Arafat used the Protocols as a manual in his war to exterminate the Jews. The PA still consistently cites the book while their strictly controlled media continually runs stories about Jewish “conspiracies” and “plots.” In his welcoming speech to Jericho in July 1994, Arafat “borrowed” from the Protocols. According to the scholar Grobman, “the Protocols provided the PA with the ‘academic’ credibility and authenticity it needed to portray Jews and Israelis as evil, and thus making ‘fighting and killing Jews a natural response’”.
After Hitler’s Holocaust which tried to destroy the body of the Jewish people and Stalin’s Holocaust which tried to destroy the heart of the Jewish people, it’s now the turn of the Palestinian ideological Holocaust seeking to destroy the history of the Jewish people. The 20th century of Joseph Goebbels has taught all of us that a lie starts as a small one, but if it is not corrected it festers like a cancer destroying truth, justice and finally human beings.
Labels: Jesus, Palestinian denial of Jewish history, Vatican
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:44 PM
5 comments
Israel is working to prevent the 'Palestinian Authority' from registering the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem as a UNESCO historical site of the imaginary state of 'Palestine.' The gory details of the application are here, and it is not certain that the application will be granted at this time. But given how the 'Palestinians' treat Christians generally, and given how they have treated the Church of the Nativity in particular, isn't the Vatican's silence on the issue rather odd? To remind you of how the 'Palestinians' treated the Church of the Nativity: Here's a brief summary of what happened:Given this history of 'Palestinian' mistreatment of the Church of the Nativity, isn't it odd that the Vatican is silent as UNESCO plans to put the 'Palestinians' officially in charge of the church?On April 2, 2002, as Israel implemented its Defensive Shield operation to combat the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure, in Bethlehem "a number of terrorists took over St. Mary's Church grounds and...held the priest and a number of nuns there against their will. The terrorists used the Church as a firing position, from which they shot at IDF soldiers in the area. The soldiers did not return fire toward the church when fired upon [emphasis added]. An IDF force, under the command of the Bethlehem area regional commander, entered the Church grounds today without battle, in coordination with its leaders, and evacuated the priest and nuns."
That same day, "More than 100 Palestinian gunmen...[including] soldiers and policemen, entered the Church of the Nativity on Tuesday, as Israeli troops swept into Bethlehem in an attempt to quell violence by Palestinian suicide bombers and militias." The actual number of terrorists was between 150 and 180, among them prominent members of the Fatah Tanzim. As the New York Times put it, "Palestinian gunmen have frequently used the area around the church as a refuge, with the expectation that Israel would try to avoid fighting near the shrine" [emphasis added].
And in fact this was the case. The commander of the Israeli forces in the area asserted that the IDF would not break into the church itself and would not harm this site holy to Christianity. Israel also deployed more mature and more reserved reserve-duty soldiers in this sensitive situation that militarily called for more agile, standing-army soldiers.
On the other hand, the Palestinians did not treat it the same way. Not only did they take their weapons with them into the Church of the Nativity and fire, on occasion, from the church, but also reportedly booby-trapped the entrance to the church.
On April 7, "one of the few priests evacuated from the church told Israeli television yesterday that gunmen had shot their way in, and that the priests, monks and nuns were essentially hostages....The priest declined to call the clergy 'hostages,' but repeatedly said in fluent English: 'We have absolutely no choice. They have guns, we do not.'"
Christians clearly saw the takeover as a violation of the sanctity of the church. In an interview with CWNews, Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, the Vatican's Undersecretary of State and the top foreign-policy official, asserted that "The Palestinians have entered into bilateral agreements [with the Holy See] in which they undertake to maintain and respect the status quo regarding the Christian holy places and the rights of Christian communities. To explain the gravity of the current situation, let me begin with the fact that the occupation of the holy places by armed men is a violation of a long tradition of law that dates back to the Ottoman era. Never before have they been occupied - for such a lengthy time - by armed men." On April 14, he reiterated his position in an interview on Vatican Radio.
On April 24, the Jerusalem Post reported on the damage that the PA forces were causing:Three Armenian monks, who had been held hostage by the Palestinian gunmen inside Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, managed to flee the church area via a side gate yesterday morning. They immediately thanked the soldiers for rescuing them.When the siege finally ended, the PA soldiers left the church in terrible condition:
They told army officers the gunmen had stolen gold and other property, including crucifixes and prayer books, and had caused damage....
One of the monks, Narkiss Korasian, later told reporters: "They stole everything, they opened the doors one by one and stole everything.... They stole our prayer books and four crosses...they didn't leave anything. Thank you for your help, we will never forget it."
Israeli officials said the monks said the gunmen had also begun beating and attacking clergymen.The Palestinian gunmen holed up in the Church of the Nativity seized church stockpiles of food and "ate like greedy monsters" until the food ran out, while more than 150 civilians went hungry. They also guzzled beer, wine, and Johnnie Walker scotch that they found in priests' quarters, undeterred by the Islamic ban on drinking alcohol. The indulgence lasted for about two weeks into the 39-day siege, when the food and drink ran out, according to an account by four Greek Orthodox priests who were trapped inside for the entire ordeal....A problem that arose during the siege again shows Christian fear of Muslim domination. Two Palestinian gunmen in the church were killed, and the PA wanted to bury them in the basilica. "With two Muslim bodies inside the Church of the Nativity, Christianity could be facing an absolute disaster in Bethlehem," said Canon Andrew White, the special representative of the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Middle East. "It would be catastrophic if two Muslim martyrs were buried in the church. It could lead to a situation like that in Nazareth," he said. Only after intensive mediation efforts were plans to bury the bodies inside abandoned.
The Orthodox priests and a number of civilians have said the gunmen created a regime of fear.
Even in the Roman Catholic areas of the complex there was evidence of disregard for religious norms. Catholic priests said that some Bibles were torn up for toilet paper, and many valuable sacramental objects were removed. "Palestinians took candelabra, icons and anything that looked like gold," said a Franciscan, the Rev. Nicholas Marquez from Mexico.
Labels: Bethlehem, Church of the Nativity, Palestinian Authority, UNESCO, Vatican
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:44 AM
8 comments
The 'Palestinians' are seething once again because, in the context of a final status agreement regarding Catholic institutions in Jerusalem, no distinction is being made between the two sides of the 1949 armistice lines. Palestinian sources told Haaretz that the agreement meant indirect recognition of Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem and of the imposition of Israeli law in part of the West Bank.But the Church is claiming that there is no change in its traditional position on 'east' Jerusalem, which unfortunately is like most of the rest of the West. Read the whole thing.
France, which has special standing as custodian of holy Christian sites and Christian communities, is also said to be concerned at the apparent latent recognition of the annexation and the economic implications for the communities, and particularly its Christian institutions in the country and the people who are part of them.
However, a well-informed source told Haaretz “there is nothing in the agreement to harm the rights of the Palestinians,” and that the agreement was made with the sovereign State of Israel in its internationally recognized identity, and therefore there was no need for a clarifying preamble.
The Bilateral Permanent Working Commission between the Holy See and the State of Israel is to meet in Rome on Monday and Tuesday. They are to continue talks that took place in Jerusalem last week on matters of disagreement.
Labels: Catholic Church, Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, Vatican
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:22 PM
0 comments
Labels: Andalusia, Caliphate, Gaza, Islam, Vatican
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:56 AM
0 comments
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
Like what you see? Please hit my tip box below!
Jerusalem |
 |
 |
