NZ Friends of Israel Association Inc
Fighting racial intolerance in New Zealand and beyond
Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah
BEIRUT (AP) — The head of Lebanon’s militant group Hezbollah said his group will not be compelled by threats or sanctions to give up its rocket a capability, urging his government in comments Saturday to contend with the diplomatic pressure it faces.
Hassan Nasrallah said succumbing to diplomatic pressure would allow Israel to attack Lebanon at will.
Roald Dahl
Plans to celebrate the life of Roald Dahl with a commemorative coin were rejected because of concerns about the author’s antisemitic views, it can be revealed.
Official papers obtained by the Guardian using freedom of information laws also disclose that the Royal Mint dropped proposals to issue a coin to mark the centenary of Dahl’s birth because he was “not regarded as an author of the highest reputation”.
The decision is set out in the minutes of a Royal Mint sub-committee meeting held in 2014, where the company instead opted for coins commemorating William Shakespeare and Beatrix Potter.
The decision was made despite the Royal Mail honouring the children’s author with a set of commemorative stamps celebrating his books, many of which have been adapted into films. These include Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the BFG.
Saudi delegate addresses the UNHRC
For those who think that the UNHRC has any credibility:
GENEVA, November 5, 2018 – Saudi Arabia today won widespread praise for its human rights record as the fundamentalist regime was examined in a routine UN review.
Sadly, 75 out of 96 country delegations who took the floor at the UN Human Rights Council today expressed praise for the brutal and misogynistic Saudi regime.
It was a betrayal of jailed Saudi human rights activists like pro-democracy blogger Raif Badawi, who has been wrongfully imprisoned since June 2012. UN Watch made appeals to Canada, and to Germany, Britain, Sweden, France and others, yet no one spoke up for Raif Badawi.
Despite today’s mandatory review of Saudi Arabia, in a standard exercise that all countries undergo every five years, the 47-nation UNHRC has never produced a single resolution, special session or commission of inquiry to condemn Saudi Arabia’s human rights record — not even for their confessed killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Recep Erdogan
ISTANBUL (AP) — Turkey’s president says he will not permit what he called the seizing of natural resources in the eastern Mediterranean.
Speaking at a naval ceremony Sunday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey would never accept such attempts “excluding our country and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.”
Turkey and the Greek Cypriot government in Cyprus_who do not have diplomatic relations— are both planning hydrocarbon research in the Mediterranean Sea for natural gas reserves.
NZ Parliament shows solidarity with observant Jews worldwide in the aftermath of the Pittsburgh Massacre.
The Tree of Life Synagogue, Pittsburgh, PA.
PITTSBURGH (AP) — A Jewish nurse who treated the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting suspect says that he saw confusion but not evil in the man’s eyes, and that his own actions stemmed from love.
“I’m sure he had no idea I was Jewish,” registered nurse Ari Mahler wrote in a Facebook post Saturday about suspect Robert Bowers, who was taken to Allegheny General Hospital after the Oct. 27 rampage at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood that left 11 people dead.
Mahler described his role as “The Jewish Nurse” who treated the suspect, saying that he felt nervous about sharing his account but that “I just know I feel alone right now, and the irony of the world talking about me doesn’t seem fair without the chance to speak for myself.”
Just days after the mass shooting of Jewish congregants in Pittsburg in what has been described as America’s worst-ever an anti-Semitic hate crime, online news publication The Intercept discovered it could place an ad on Facebook appealing to white supremacists.
The publication said it was able to select “white genocide conspiracy theory” as a predefined “detailed targeting” criterion on Facebook to promote two articles to an interest group of 168,000 people “who have expressed an interest [in] or like pages related to White genocide conspiracy theory.”
The paid promotion was approved by Facebook’s advertising department.
The Intercept, which says it follows the protocols of investigative reporting used by ProPublica, a website set up to “expose abuses of power”, contacted the company for comment.
Benjamin Netanyahu
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Israel’s prime minister has praised the restoration of U.S. sanctions on Iran that were lifted under the 2015 nuclear deal.
Benjamin Netanyahu, a staunch opponent of the agreement concluded by the Obama administration, said Saturday that President Donald Trump had made an “historic” decision by restoring sanctions against “the murderous terror regime in Iran that is endangering the entire world.”
Jonathan S Tobin
It was the sort of unforced error that was the last thing the Trump administration needed in a week during which its liberal critics have been trying to place blame for the massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue on the president.
Vice President Mike Pence was scheduled to appear at Republican campaign rally in Michigan. After Saturday’s horrific attack on the Tree of Life-Or L’Simcha Synagogue that left 11 Jewish worshipers dead, the vice president’s office asked that the local organizers also invite a rabbi to offer a prayer remembering the victims. But while that request showed sensitivity to a national tragedy, what followed came back to bite the veep in a big way.
The problem was that as far as the Jewish community is concerned, Loren Jacobs — the “rabbi” who was asked to speak at the rally — isn’t Jewish.
Jacobs was there representing the very-Jewish sounding Congregation Shema Yisrael in suburban Detroit. But when he spoke in condemnation of the anti-Semitic attack, he did so by invoking the “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, God and Father of my Lord and Savior Yeshua, Jesus the Messiah, and my God and Father, too.”
Far from being a representative of the Jewish community, Jacobs is a Christian, albeit the pastor of a Messianic Jewish church that bills itself on its website as being “the same thing” as Christianity, but “expressed within the Jewish heritage.”
But while many Christians may see this as somehow being a variant of Judaism, Jews see it very differently. In a world in which Jews are bitterly divided along denominational, ideological and political lines, the one thing almost of them agrees on is that anyone who believes in the divinity of Jesus is not a Jew.
More to the point, most Jews see “Messianic” sects that bill themselves as being either a form of Judaism or rooted in Jewish traditions as a standing insult, if not a threat, to their faith and identity.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS — Jewish News Syndicate. His opinion columns appear there on a daily basis. He is also a contributing writer for National Review, a conservative magazine of opinion and ideas, a columnist for the New York Post, a contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Haaretz, a columnist for the New York Jewish Week, a contributor to the Gatestone Institute and to the Israeli magazine, MiDA.
The Tree of Life Synagogue, Pittsburgh, PA.
(CNN) Like many American Jews, Rabbi Ethan Linden was in a synagogue on Saturday morning, reading a portion of the Torah, when a friend came and interrupted him.
