Archive for May, 2018

Turkey slams French figures demanding change in Quran

(HURRIYET DAILY NEWS) — Turkey’s EU Affairs Minister Ömer Çelik slammed a French manifesto proposing the removal of some verses from the Quran, saying those 300 prominent French figures demanding the changes were as “bigoted” as members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) who infer violence from the holy book, state-run Anadolu Agency reported.

“This is the most striking example of intellectual violence and barbarism. Whoever these people are and whatever they have been doing up till now, they will be written at the beginning of the history of bigotry,” Çelik said on Twitter.

“Barbarism is intellectually and politically centered in the modern world,” he added.

Çelik drew parallel between the “barbaric and immoral” proposal and the ideology of ISIL.

“They could not tell in a better way that they are the closest ideological relatives of Daesh. But this approach, which will be the subject of political psychiatry, reveals how barbarism has risen in the midst of Europe, and how this mentality, at least as dangerous as Daesh, keeps itself behind certain concepts,” he said, using the Arabic name for ISIL.

“These are the most dangerous ones; those who conceal themselves behind an intellectual and political image. This is the mentality of those who are so-called anti-violence, but in fact they worship the bigotry and violence. These 300 French figures are the same as Daesh which infers violence from the humanity’s guide Quran,” Çelik added.

On April 21, 300 prominent French figures, including former President Nicolas Sarkozy and former Prime Minister Manuel Valls signed a manifesto published in the French daily Le Parisien and demanded some parts of the Quran, which they claimed have included violence and anti-Semitic references, be removed.

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Jewish dreams of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital go back thousands of years

(NEW YORK POST) — In the Second century AD, Jewish rebels who had stunned the Romans and liberated a portion of Judea, overstruck imperial coins with images and a message of their own, “Year One of the Redemption of Jerusalem.”

The Roman emperor Hadrian had planted the seeds for the rebellion with his ambitions to remake Jerusalem, including the planned construction of a Temple to Jupiter on the site of the old Jewish Temple.

The leader of the Jewish rebellion, Bar Kokhba, was fired by a vision of a united Israel with Jerusalem as its capital that had been the exception during the prior millennium, thanks to the depredations of the Assyrians and Babylonians, among others. But such was the power of the national idea — and his messianic zeal — that Bar Kokhba ventured all on regaining it.

And lost. Not for nearly another 2,000 years would the vision come to fruition. At a ceremony in 1982 burying bones of some of those long-ago rebels with military honors, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin declared, ‘’Israel and Judea are reborn. We have redeemed Jerusalem.”

King David conquered the city in 1,000 BC and made it the capital of the kingdom of Israel. His son Solomon built the First Temple. “He who has not seen Jerusalem in her splendor has never seen a desirable city in his life,” declares the Babylonian Talmud. “He who has not seen the Temple in its full construction has never seen a glorious building in his life.”

But Jerusalem would repeatedly be captured and the Temple destroyed (first by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar and then by the Roman Emperor Titus).

The story of the Jewish people is one of loss, memory and faithfulness and persistence. Psalm 137 recounting the Babylonian captivity avers, “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.”

The Jewish people never forgot. In one of the miracles of our age, after long centuries of exile punctuated by genocide at the hands of the Nazis, they re-established Israel in 1948, and then gained control of all of Jerusalem in 1967 (prior to that, when Jordan held East Jerusalem, Jews couldn’t visit the Western Wall).

The notion that the City of David isn’t the capital of Israel was an impolite fiction, honored by the United States and the West for fear of provoking Arabs hostile to the very idea of the Jewish state. Its prime minister, parliament and highest court are based there, and it’s unimaginable that Israel would ever agree to any peace deal that didn’t recognize it as the capital.

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Former ISIS Fighter: Islamic State Will Return With More Rigid Ideology

(OANN) — A former ISIS fighter issues a warning to the U.S. the ideology of the Islamic State will not go away.

Thursday, a Belgian man claiming to be one of the first foreign members of ISIS, gave an interview from a terrorist prison in Syria.

He warned of continued plots and splinter groups that will arise from the now defeated Muslim caliphate in Syria.

He said fighters were already planning to organize break away terror groups before the fall of Raqqa.

Reports show, many displaced ISIS fighters from Syria and Iraq are now moving to areas of the Philippines, where one in five residents are Muslim.

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