Winston Churchill 1899

“Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.”

This is amazing. Even more amazing is that this hasn’t been published long before now.

CHURCHILL ON ISLAM

Unbelievable, but the speech below was written in 1899… (check Wikipedia – The River War).

The attached short speech from Winston Churchill, was delivered by him in 1899 when he was a young soldier and journalist. It probably sets out the current views of many, but expresses in the wonderful Churchillian turn of phrase and use of the English language, of which he was a past master. Sir Winston Churchill was, without doubt, one of the greatest men of the late 19th and 20th centuries.

He was a brave young soldier, a brilliant journalist, an extraordinary politician and statesman, a great war leader and British Prime Minister, to whom the Western world must be forever in his debt. He was a prophet in his own time. He died on 24th January 1965, at the grand old age of 90 and, after a lifetime of service to his country, was accorded a State funeral.

HERE IS THE SPEECH:
“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries, improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.

“A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement, the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

“Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome …”

Sir Winston Churchill; (Source: The River War, first edition, Vol II, pages 248-250 London).

Churchill saw it coming……

Restoring the Iraqi Jewish archive to its Israeli owners

Sent to me by a friend. Ms. Glick’s historic information is a little long but interesting. This is an accurate tale of Iraqi Jews and the Jewish Archive now in American hands. Contacting your congressman and senator would be the appropriate things to do.

David Bancroft
—
By CAROLINE B. GLICK

Restoring the Iraqi Jewish archive to its Israeli owners would be tantamount to recognizing that the cause of the Arab world’s conflict with Israel is Arab anti-Semitism.

If you happen to be in Washington, DC, between now and January, you can see a piece of Jewish history that was never supposed to see the light of day. The National Archives is now exhibiting restored holy books and communal documents that belonged to the Jewish community of Iraq.

In 1940, the Iraqi Jewish community numbered 137,000 people. Jews made up more than a quarter of the population of Baghdad. A 2,500-year-old community, Iraq had for centuries been a major center of Jewish learning. The Babylonian Talmud was written there.

The yeshivot in Karbala and Baghdad were considered among the greatest in the world.

According to Dhiaa Kasim Kashi, a Shi’ite Muslim interviewed in the 2008 book Iraq’s Last Jews, by the 1930s, the Jews of Iraq had become leaders in every field. “All of Iraq’s famous musicians and composers were Jewish,” he said.

“Jews,” he continued, “were so central to commercial life in Iraq that business across the country used to shut down on Saturdays because it was the Jewish Shabbat. They were the most prominent members of every elite profession – bankers, doctors, lawyers, professors, engineers, etc.”

All of this began to end with the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s. Due to rampant Islamic Jew hatred, Arab leaders were drawn to the Nazis. For their part, the Nazis were quick to capitalize on their popularity. The German ambassador to Iraq, Fritz Grobba, cultivated Nazi sympathizers in the Iraqi military and organized a pro-Nazi military coup in April 1941.

On June 1, 1941, as Jews celebrated the festival of Shavuot, the pro-Nazi government carried out a massive pogrom. Estimates place the number of Jews murdered at anywhere between 180 and 900. Nine hundred Jewish homes were destroyed. Hundreds of Jewish shops and businesses were looted and burned.

The pogrom, which came to be known as the Farhud, or “violent dispossession,” marked the beginning of the end of the Iraqi Jewish community.

Iraq was one of the five Arab states that invaded Israel on May 15, 1948.

The immediate victims of Iraq’s unyielding rejection of Jewish national liberation were the Jews of Iraq. In 1950, the exodus began. By the end of 1952, when the government shut the remaining Jews in, 124,000 Jews had fled Iraq, mainly to Israel. Forced to abandon their private and communal property, their possessions became hostage to the regime.

The few thousand Jews left in Iraq lived in utter terror. But even in their reduced state, they tried to protect the property of their phantom community.

In Baghdad, only one synagogue remained in operation. The Jews brought all the communal documents and holy books there for storage.

But as Harold Rhode, a recently retired US Defense Department cultural expert, reported in August at PJM Media, in 1985 Saddam Hussein sent his henchmen to the synagogue with several trucks. They stole the documentary history of the community in broad daylight.

Rhode explained that Saddam ordered the theft of the Jewish community’s property both to humiliate the Jews and Israel and to impress his fellow Arabs. As he put it, from a local cultural perspective, “Humiliation – i.e., shaming another’s personal reputation – is more important and more powerful than physical cruelty.

“By capturing the Jewish archives, Saddam was humiliating the Jewish people. He was showing how powerless the Jews were to stop him.”

From a pan-Arab perspective, Saddam demonstrated that he “was in the vanguard of protecting and regaining Arab honor, and was therefore more worthy of Arab/Muslim leadership than were the others.”

Rhode was deployed to Iraq shortly after the US-led overthrow of Saddam’s regime. By the time he arrived in May 2003, there were only a dozen Jews still living in Iraq.

Rhode was the first American official informed of the existence of the archive. It was stored in the cellar of the headquarters of Saddam’s mukhabarat, or secret police. When Rhode arrived at the building with a small detail of soldiers and New York Times reporter Judith Miller, the building had just been flooded by an unexploded shell that had punctured the water main.

When he realized the dimensions of the archive, now largely underwater, Rhode moved heaven and earth to save it. Due to Rhode’s action, and the support he received from Iraqi leader Ahmed Chalabi, vice president Dick Cheney and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the archive – which included everything from school records to 500- year-old copies of the Bible – was saved on Shavuot 2003 and sent to the US.

Once the archive was safely in the US, the State Department spent $3 million restoring the 2,700 books and tens of thousands of documents. In the meantime, back in Iraq, there are still hundreds of Torah scrolls languishing in a government cellar, inaccessible to the public, and in a horrible state of disrepair.

The fact that the archive was rescued from Saddam’s vault and is now being shown to the public is a miracle.

But if nothing changes, on Shavuot 2014, the miracle will come to a tragic and scandalous end. In an act of cultural aggression, the US government has promised to return the Jewish communal archive – stolen from the Iraqi Jewish community by the Iraqi government – to the Iraqi government by June 2014.

The State Department insists that the archive is Iraqi government property, since it was found in an Iraqi government building. But if that is true, then all the Jewish property stored in the Gestapo’s dungeons should have remained German government property after World War II. And even the comparison to the Nazis is too facile.

Jews could safely enter Germany, and even live there after the Nazis were defeated. Jews cannot safely enter, let alone live in, Iraq.

The difference between Jewish property stolen by the Nazis and Jewish property stolen by Arab regimes is political. It is politically acceptable to acknowledge that the Nazis were criminals. But the Arabs have never had to pay a price for their persecution and eventual destruction of their Jewish communities. No one wishes to recognize the fact that it is anti-Semitism that drives the Islamic quest to destroy the Jewish state.

The only lawful owners of the Iraqi Jewish archive that is being shown in Washington are the Iraqi Jews and their descendants, who are now overwhelmingly Israelis. The only place the archive should be sent is the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center in Or Yehuda, the only museum in the world dedicated to preserving the cultural heritage of the 2,500-year-old Jewish community of Iraq.

Yet for the American foreign policy establishment, besotted by a quasi-religious belief that the establishment of a Jew-free Palestinian state on Israeli land will cure everything from Islamic jihad to the common cold, recognizing this simple truth is a bridge too far. Restoring the Iraqi Jewish archive to its Israeli owners would be tantamount to recognizing that the cause of the Arab world’s conflict with Israel is Arab anti-Semitism.

A petition is now circulating demanding that the US government return the archive to its rightful owners in Israel.

At this point, it would be a great miracle if they would just agree to keep it safe in Washington until an American government comes along that decides to base its Middle East policies on the truth.

caroline@carolineglick.com

A Jewish Sephardic leader dies – an Israeli ayatollah

More than 700,000 Israelis, many rending their clothes, packed the streets of Jerusalem two weeks ago to mourn Ovadia Yosef (died October 7,2013), the ultra-Orthodox rabbi who once led Israel’s Sephardic Jews. Yosef, 93, founded the influential Shas party to speak for working-class Jews from the Middle East, who had less clout in Israel than Ashkenazi Jews from Europe. A polarizing figure, he paved the way for peace with Egypt by ruling that territorial concessions were permissible, yet he also denounced Muslims as “ugly” and “stupid,” and said Jews who died in the Holocaust were being punished for ancestral sins. Non-Jews, he said in a 2010 sermon, “were born only to serve us.”

Jeffrey Goldberg, a Bloomberg columnist, called Yosef “the Israeli Ayatollah.” Goldberg went on to write:

In the manner of the crudest fundamentalists everywhere, Yosef blamed misfortune and death on apostasy, irreligiosity and homosexuality (gay people, in his eyes, were “completely evil”). About Israeli soldiers who fell in battle, Yosef once said, “Is it any wonder if, heaven forbid, soldiers are killed in a war? They don’t observe the Sabbath, they don’t observe the Torah, they don’t pray, they don’t put on phylacteries every day. Is it any wonder that they’re killed? It’s no wonder.” Even more famously, he blamed the deaths of Jews during the Holocaust on the spiritual deficiencies of their ancestors.

In 2005, he argued that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for the Gaza withdrawal and for the alleged godlessness of the black residents of New Orleans. “There was a tsunami and there are terrible natural disasters, because there isn’t enough Torah study,” he said. “Tens of thousands have been killed. All of this because they have no God.” He went on to argue — if that’s the word for it — that the deaths were also punishment directed at President George W. Bush for pressuring Sharon to remove Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip. “It was God’s retribution,” he said. “God does not short-change anyone.”

Sorry, no: Prejudice is prejudice, whether it comes from an imam in Qatar or from the man whose Jewish critics labeled him, correctly, the “Israeli ayatollah.”

David Bancroft

Trancoso’s Hidden Jews

More than five centuries after Portugal’s Jews were compelled to convert to Catholicism, the Torah has finally returned to Trancoso. Today visitportugal.com recognizes the history of the Jewish population of the town.

by Michael Freund

Slowly but energetically, the festive procession made its way through the narrow and winding alleyways of the ancient Portuguese town.

The sounds of buoyant Hebrew song cascaded off the cool stone walls, prompting residents to open their windows and stare inquisitively at the unfamiliar sight, as dozens of people from across the country danced and clapped in a rousing surge of emotion.

Among the participants, who were all swept away in the moment, many a moist eye could be seen glistening in the midday sun at this remarkable and most unexpected turn of events.

More than five centuries after Portugal’s Jews were compelled to convert to Catholicism, the Torah has finally returned to Trancoso.

In a moving ceremony organized with the local municipality this past Sunday, Shavei Israel, the organization I founded and chair, arranged for the dedication of a Torah scroll to inaugurate the village’s new Jewish cultural and religious center.

It will serve the large numbers of B’nai Anusim (people whose Iberian Jewish ancestors were forcibly converted to Catholicism in the 14th and 15th centuries and whom historians refer to by the derogatory term “Marranos”) who reside in the area.

The facility, named the Isaac Cardoso Center for Jewish Interpretation, is named after a 17th-century Trancoso-born physician and philosopher who came from a family of B’nai Anusim. Cardoso later moved to Spain with his family and then fled to Venice to escape the Inquisition, where he and his brother Miguel publicly embraced Judaism.

He went on to publish a number of important works on philosophy, medicine and theology, including a daring treatise in 1679 titled The Excellence of the Hebrews, which defended Judaism and the Jewish people from various medieval stereotypes such as ritual murder accusations and the blood libel.

The initiative for the center came from Trancoso’s mayor, Julio Sarmento, who invested more than $1.5 million in erecting the modern structure, which will include an exhibition about the Jewish history of Portugal and the renewal of Jewish life in the region in recent years.

At Sarmento’s insistence, the building also contains a new synagogue, Beit Mayim Hayim, “the House of Living Waters,” whose name was suggested by Rabbi Raphael Weinberg of Jerusalem, the first rabbi to visit Trancoso.

Near the entrance to the synagogue is a memorial wall filled with the names of B’nai Anusim who were tried and punished by the Inquisition for secretly practicing Judaism, including some who were publicly burned at the stake in the 18th century, nearly three centuries after their ancestors had been dragged to the baptismal font.

Located in the Guarda district in Portugal’s northeastern interior, the charming village of Trancoso was home to a flourishing Jewish community prior to the expulsion and forced conversion of Portugal’s Jews in 1497.

A local journalist and historian, Jose Levy Domingos, who has spent decades lovingly recording and preserving the town’s Jewish past, has discovered well over one hundred stone etchings and other physical traces of that bygone era in Trancoso’s old Jewish quarter, some of which are poignant and emotive.

On typical Jewish homes, for example, the windows were laid out in a decidedly asymmetrical fashion, at varying heights and lengths, creating a sense of architectural imperfection and inadequacy.

Domingos explains that this was done intentionally because the Jews wanted to underline that only the Temple which once stood in Jerusalem embodied perfection.

Many of the medieval homes have crosses engraved adjacent to the entrance as an ostensible statement of piety. Fearful of running afoul of the watchful eyes of the inquisition, Trancoso’s B’nai Anusim also engaged in this practice, albeit with a twist.

Domingos points out that at the bottom of the etching, they added what appear to be three prongs, as if holding up the cross. But to Jewish eyes, it is clear what their real intention was as the three spokes clearly form an inverted “Shin,” the Hebrew letter that is often used to denote one of the Divine names.

This was how Trancoso’s hidden Jews sought to cling to their heritage, subtly indicating that they had not forgotten, nor abandoned, the faith of their forefathers.

The Jewish spark cannot be extinguished. We truly are the immortal nation.

It is in memory of their tenacity that we gathered dozens of their descendants, all of them Portuguese B’nai Anusim, to take part in the ceremony this past Sunday. Symbolically, we began the procession with the Torah facing a large and imposing cathedral in the very same public square where the Inquisition had once tormented Trancoso’s hidden Jews.

Speaking to the assembled crowd, my voice cracked with emotion as I pointed at the basilica and told the B’nai Anusim, “we are here today because your forefathers did not surrender to those who sought to force them to abandon their faith. They bravely and stubbornly clung to their Jewishness in secret, risking everything. Let us all take inspiration from their example.”

As we neared the synagogue, I noticed a young man, one of the B’nai Anusim from a nearby village, looking longingly at the Torah, but seemingly shying away from it at the same time. Taking the scroll, I went over to him and offered it to him to hold. He hesitated for a moment, the surprise on his face giving way to joy as he lovingly embraced it and danced it towards its destination.

It was, I later discovered, the first time since his ancestors had converted to Catholicism in 1497 that he or anyone else in his family had ever held a Torah in their arms, as far as he knew.

And then I understood as clearly as I have ever felt before: the Jewish spark cannot be extinguished.

We truly are the immortal nation.

David Bancroft

Did the Pope Resign as the Result of Child Abuse/Sex Abuse Cases?

There are suspicions about the reason for Pope Benedict’s resignation. After all, no pope has resigned in about 600 years. The others all died in office. I am sure that many of them were in poor health but continued as best they could. So why did the current pope believe he could no longer perform the duties required of the position?

CNN posted this on the bottom of their screen during “Reliable Sources” today. “Italian media are buzzing with reports that the pope’s resignation was tied to a secret report on gay priests. The Vatican strongly condemns the allegations, calling them ‘deplorable.’ The allegations may be deplorable (synonym for unforgivable) but are they accurate?

Here are the cardinals involved in sex abuse case cover-up:

Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston
Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York
Cardinal Roger Mahoney of Los Angeles

Instances of abuse listed on Wikipedia. Even if these cases are exaggerated the extent of abuse is overwhelming.

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Dallas paid $30.9 million in 1998 to twelve victims of one priest.^[21] In July 2003 the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Louisville paid $25.7 million to “settle child sexual-abuse allegations made in 240 lawsuits naming 34 priests and other church workers.”^[21]

In 2003 the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston also settled a large case for $85 million with 552 alleged victims.^[87]

In 2004, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange settled nearly 90 cases for $100 million.^[88]

In April 2007 the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon agreed to a $75 million settlement with 177 claimants and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Seattle agreed to a $48 million settlement with more than 160 victims.^[89]

In July 2007 the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles reached a $660 million agreement with more than 500 alleged victims, in December 2006, the archdiocese had a settlement of 45 lawsuits for $60 million.^[23][90]

In September 2007 the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego reached a $198.1 million “agreement with 144 childhood sexual abuse victims.”^[91]

In July 2008 the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Denver agreed “to pay $5.5 million to settle 18 claims of childhood sexual abuse.”^[92] The Associated Press estimated the total from settlements of sex abuse cases from 1950-2007 to be more than $2 billion.^[23] According to BishopAccountability reports that figure reached more than $3 billion in 2012.^[6][20]

In the late 1980s allegations were made of physical and sexual abuse committed by members of the Christian Brothers, who operated the Mount Cashel Orphanage in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

In June 2010, Belgian police raided the Belgian Catholic Church headquarters in Brussels, seizing a computer and records of a Church commission investigating allegations of child abuse.

In April 2010 it was reported that former bishop of the Norwegian Catholic Church, Georg Müller, had confessed to the Norwegian Police in early January 2010 that he had sexually abused an underaged altar boy 20 years earlier.

In November 2010, an independent group in Austria ^[82] that operates a hotline to help people exit the Catholic Church released a report documenting physical, sexual, and emotional abuse perpetrated by Austrian priests, nuns, and other religious officials.

In 2012 an Australian police report in the Victoria state jurisdiction detailed 40 suicide deaths by people who had been abused by Catholic clergy.

Perhaps Pope Benedict is so dismayed that he can’t bring himself to lead the church any longer. Perhaps he too is guilty of some of the crimes. We will never really know. It is sad that one of the world’s greatest religions has this horrible mark on its history. What other marks does it have?