AFTER ISRAEL BOYCOTT VOTE, SWASTIKAS HIT JEWISH FRATERNITY AT UC DAVIS

StandWithUs via Facebook 

By Joel B. Pollak - February 1, 2015

Originally appeared here on Breitbart.com 

A Jewish fraternity at the University of California Davis was spray-painted with two swastikas Saturday, several days after the student council voted to endorse divestment from Israel.

The fraternity, Alpha Epsilon Pi, had opposed the vote, which is part of a coordinated campaign by pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel activists across the University of California system.

CBS Sacramento reported that AEPi members believe their fraternity was attacked in retaliation for its support for Israel. The fraternity was attacked on the Jewish sabbath, shortly after the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Read More

‘By the rivers of Babylon’ exhibit breathes life into Judean exile

Photo: Ardon Bar-Hama courtesy of The Bible Lands Museum

By Ilan Ben Zion - February 1, 2015

Originally appeared here in The Times of Israel

We know they sat on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, and that they wept. But a new exhibit at Jerusalem’s Bible Lands Museum puts faces and names to the Judean exiles in ancient Babylonia 2,500 years ago

“By the Rivers of Babylon” showcases a collection of about 100 rare clay tablets from 6th century Mesopotamia that detail the lives of exiled Judeans living in the heartland of the Babylonian Empire. Through these mundane Akkadian legal documents written in cuneiform, scholars have breathed life back into generations of Judeans who lived in Babylon but whose names and traditions speak of a longing for Zion.

The Al-Yahudu tablets are part of a private collection that has never before gone on public display. Their provenance is unknown; they likely turned up somewhere in southern Iraq, but no one knows when. After decades on the antiquities market they ended up in the hands of a private collector, David Sofer, who offered to loan them to the Bible Lands Museum. After two years of labor, the exhibit is opening to the public on Sunday.

“It puts a face on the real people who went through these fateful events,” Dr. Filip Vukosavović, curator of the exhibit, told The Times of Israel. The tablets preserve a wealth of Judean names — including the familiar Natanyahu — of the exilic community, and even include a handful of Aramaic inscriptions. Read More

Tel Aviv Engineering Students Bring Clean Water Solution To Tanzania

By NoCamels Team - January 21, 2015

Originally appeared here in NoCamels

Like many good stories, this one began with food. A group of students at TAU’s Iby and Aladar Fleischman Faculty of Engineering organized a campus beer and bratwurst sale to kickstart fundraising for a volunteering project in Africa. Many sausages later, and with a lead donation from Arison Group’s Shikun & Binui construction company, a TAU team arrived in Tanzania to build a system that would provide hundreds of students at a local high school with clean drinking water.

Leading the TAU delegation was electrical engineering student Eran Roll, the director of TAU’s chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB), which initiated and supervised the project. EWB is an international organization dedicated to bringing engineering solutions to disadvantaged communities. 

Roll explained that the project’s genesis went back to 2007, when engineering alumnus Itai Perry saw the hardship caused by contaminated water during a TAU-affiliated volunteer trip to the northern Tanzanian village of Minjingu. The residents’ drinking water was saturated with exceptionally high levels of fluoride, causing skeletal deformities and severe dental problems among the local children. Read More

What the Miss Universe Selfie Revealed

@doronmatalon, Instagram

By Eliyahu Federman - January 19, 2015

Originally appeared here in USA Today

Even the beauty of the Miss Universe pageant can't overcome the irrational and one-sided hatred of Israel. This weekend in South Florida, the Miss Israel contestant, Doron Matalon, Instagrammed a friendly selfie she snapped with Miss Lebanon, Saly Greige, and several other contestants.

This caused an uproar in Lebanon with many calling to strip Greige's beauty queen title. The Lebanese government has even launched an official investigation. And the threat is sadly very real. In 1993, Miss Lebanon, Ghada al-Turk, was stripped of her title for taking a photo smiling with her Israeli contender.

Contrast that with Miss Israel proudly displaying the picture, receiving an outpouring of support from Israelis who praised the unity a photo like that could represent, and her express wish that any "hostility" be temporarily forgotten so girls from around the world can meet in peace and unity. Read More

What Dr. King Really Had to Say About Israel

By Dumisani Washington - January 19, 2015

Originally appeared here in Times of Israel

I was in a social media debate about Israel and Zionism the other day, when my opponent asked me a curious question. “Why point to MLK’s stance on the issue of Israel as a debate point?

I explained to my opponent that, particularly in the discussion of human rights and answering false accusations against the Jewish State, quoting Dr. King in context is an advisable starting point. This is particularly true when anti-Zionists attempt to twist Dr. King’s words to denounce Israel. Very often, Israel’s enemies refuse to accept the fact that the unparalleled civil rights champion of the 20th century was a staunch, vocal supporter of Israel and loyal friend to the Jewish people.

One person who knows Dr. King’s position on Israel full well is avowed anti-Zionist, and former Black Panther Party member, Angela Davis. There is no disputing Ms. Davis’ long and storied anti-racism career. (Few people in the world have had protest songs written in their honor by the Rolling Stones and the Beatles). Sadly, there is also no denying Ms. Davis’ anti-Zionist rhetoric and anti-Israel libel; the type of language Dr. King strongly denounced. So, having Angela Davis provide the keynote address at an event that purports to honor Martin Luther King is a bitter irony, and completely misguided. Such is the case with events at University of North Carolina of Chapel Hill on Monday, January 19, and University of California Santa Cruz on Wednesday, January 28. The title of these events is, “Racism, Militarism, Poverty: From Ferguson to Palestine”. Read More
 

Israel's Christian Awakening

Wikimedia Commons

By ADI SCHWARTZ
Dec. 27, 2013 7:34 p.m. ET

Originally appeared here in the Wall Street Journal

As Christmas neared, an 85-foot-high tree presided over the little square in front of the Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth. Kindergarten children with Santa Claus hats entered the church and listened to their teacher explain in Arabic the Greek inscriptions on the walls, while a group of Russian pilgrims knelt on their knees and whispered in prayer. In Nazareth's old city, merchants sold the usual array of Christmas wares.

This year, however, the familiar rhythms of Christmas season in the Holy Land have been disturbed by a new development: the rise of an independent voice for Israel's Christian community, which is increasingly trying to assert its separate identity. For decades, Arab Christians were considered part of Israel's sizable Palestinian minority, which comprises both Muslims and Christians and makes up about a fifth of the country's citizens, according to the Israeli government.

But now, an informal grass-roots movement, prompted in part by the persecution of Christians elsewhere in the region since the Arab Spring, wants to cooperate more closely with Israeli Jewish society—which could mean a historic change in attitude toward the Jewish state. "Israel is my country, and I want to defend it," says Henry Zaher, an 18-year-old Christian from the village of Reineh who was visiting Nazareth. "The Jewish state is good for us." Read More

Hebrew University of Jerusalem Elects First-Ever Indian Student Leader

Milan.sk Wikimedia Commons

BY DEBRA KAMIN 

January 5, 2015, 9:12 pm

Originally appeared here in Times of Israel

An Indian doctoral research scholar from the Gujarat State in Western India made Hebrew University history last month when he became the first-ever Indian to represent the Rothberg International School to the school’s Student Union.

Zulfigar Sheth, an economics student who is attending Hebrew University as a Visiting Research Fellow, is also a Muslim. A student at Aligarh Muslim University in India, he came to Israel through an Indian government-run exchange program, sponsored by the Indian Government’s Ministry of Human Resources and Development.

“Despite being diverse, one thing we have in common is that at the end of the day, all we need is peace and prosperity,” Sheth says of the students at the Hebrew University. “I will follow one simple thing: accepting differences and searching for common ground.” Read More

Israeli Civil Rights Group Defends Christian Missionary Imprisoned in North Korea

By Carol Morello December 23, 2014

Originally appeared here in Times of Israel

North Korea can be ordered to pay damages to the family of a Christian missionary who was abducted almost 15 years ago, then presumably tortured and killed, a federal appeals court has determined.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia this week ordered the case of the Rev. Kim Dong-shik back to a trial court so his family can seek damages in the suspected death of the missionary, who was kidnapped in China in 2000. He was never seen again after being taken to North Korea. The trial court ruled against the family because they had no proof of his fate, though experts testified that he almost certainly was tortured to death.

“The Kims’ evidence that the regime abducted the Reverend, that it invariably tortures and kills prisoners like him, and that it uses terror and intimidation to prevent witnesses from testifying allows us to reach the logical conclusion that the regime tortured and killed the Reverend,” the three-judge panel said in a decision written by Appeals Court Judge David S. Tatel.

The Kim case revolves around a section of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act that usually protects foreign governments from being sued in U.S. courts. One exception is for countries designated as state sponsors of terrorism. Read More

A mission to locate ailing refugees in Iraqi camps reveals the unlikely network that brings them to the Jewish state

Photo:  Flickr- Foreign and Commonwealth Office

BY LAZAR BERMAN January 28, 2014, 2:50 pm 

Originally appeared here in Times of Israel

KURDISTAN REGION, Iraq — A grandmother steps out warily into the muddy street. The sun setting behind the jagged mountains to the west casts a pink hue over the tents of the refugee camp. She wraps her blue scarf around her face, sizing up the unannounced visitors who are asking to see her granddaughter.

The seven-month-old child lies motionless in her arms, eyes barely open, breath slow and shallow.

The baby is fighting ventricular septal defect, a hole in the wall that divides the left and right ventricles of the heart. She weighs only three kilograms, and doctors here in Iraq won’t operate on her until she gets much bigger. But the same hole in her heart keeps her from growing.

It’s the first week of January, and a winter in the cold, damp refugee camp means that the only question about her future is whether she succumbs to a chest infection or her defective heart first. Her family still has a tank of kerosene to heat the tent, but it will soon run out, with little chance of being replaced.

Here in the refugee camp, fuel and hope are in equally short supply. But the visitors who have come all the way to the mountains of Iraq’s Kurdistan region to find this baby girl just might be able to offer the latter.

Maybe.

The visitors are from the Jerusalem-based Christian NGO Shevet Achim, founded by Jonathan Miles almost 20 years ago. (The Times of Israel wrote about Shevet Achim last June, when this reporter accompanied 4-year-old Nadrah, a Syrian refugee in Jordan, to Israel for a life-saving operation.) It brings sick children from the Muslim world into Israel for heart surgery; the group’s mission today is to locate Syrian Kurdish refugee children who need urgent medical attention in the camps of northern Iraq in order to arrange access for them to Israel’s pediatric heart surgeons.  Read More 

Christmas Day NASA Photos of Israel from Space Take off Online

BY TIMES OF ISRAEL STAFF December 28, 2014, 3:32 pm

Photos of Israel as seen from the International Space Station on Christmas Day are attracting immense interest online, with tens of thousands of likes on NASA’s Facebook page.

The photos were posted by US astronaut Barry Eugene “Butch” Wilmore, who is currently on his second space mission as part of Expedition 41 to the International Space Station.

The pictures were posted by NASA with the message: “Israel – completely clear – on Christmas morning from the International Space Station. Astronaut Barry Wilmore woke up early on Christmas to reflect upon the beauty of the Earth and snap some images to share with the world.” Read More

Ancient Rock adds to Evidence of King David’s Existence

BY MENACHEM WECKER 

December 16, 2014, 2:52 am

Originally appeared here in Times of Israel

NEW YORK (JTA) — Dimly lit, the stone slab, or stele, doesn’t look particularly noteworthy, especially when compared to the more lavish sphinxes, jewelry and cauldrons one encounters en route to the room where it is installed.

Indeed, in a Twitter post this fall, art journalist Lee Rosenbaum described the nearly 13-by-16 inch c. 830 BCE rock, as “homely.”

What’s significant about this stone — on view at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of its “Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age” exhibit running through January 4 — is its inscription: the earliest extra-biblical reference to the House of David.

“There is no doubt that the inscription is one of the most important artifacts ever found in relation to the Bible,” Eran Arie, curator of Israelite and Persian periods at the Israel Museum, wrote in the exhibit catalog. Read More