Showing posts with label Presbyterians. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Presbyterians. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

The Purpose of Religions: How It Affects Us Today in Israel

Nadene Goldfoot                    
                                                                                            

                Haj Amin Husseini, Arab leader,  flew to Germany to talk with Hitler about Jews

"When Husseini eventually met with Hitler and Ribbentrop in 1941, he assured Hitler that 'The Arabs were Germany's natural friends because they had the same enemies... namely the English, the Jews, and the Communists'." 

Hammurabi came along  with a code of laws.  It was a well-preserved Babylonian law code of ancient Mesopotamia, dating back to about 1772 BCE. It is one of the oldest deciphered writings of significant length in the world. The sixth Babylonian king, Hammurabi, enacted the code, and partial copies exist on a human-sized stone stele and various clay tablets. The Code consists of 282 laws, with scaled punishments, adjusting "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth as graded depending on social status, of slave versus free man.   Moses came along much later (1391 BCE-1271 BCE). He had a set of laws that were similar but improved upon, and his came from G-d.  That carries much more weight than from a king of some country.  We don't know Hammurabi's story, though.  Was he given the laws through such a means as G-d?  Did he just think them all up?  We'll never know.    

The Jews waited for 2,000 years to have their country back again.  They went through 2,000 years of anti-Semitism against them for religious reasons. Why did they need a country?  Because they couldn't practice their religion.  They were hounded and killed for ages because they were Jews.  In modern society they were slaughtered in a recent Holocaust.  They couldn't work in certain places because they were Jews.  They were the first picked on as the cause of everyone's problems; the scapegoat of the world.  They were people without a country, a people of an ancient religion.  They were being treated horribly.  That's not how they wanted their children to grow up and learn to emulate.

 The idea was that originally Jesus had come to teach the people in Judah a way of living.  He spoke without a script and didn't give papers to people to read.  He had been educated in Judaism.  He gave his opinions such as I am in this article.    For Jews   he was simply teaching Judaism in a new and modern way, bringing a form of Judaism to the masses.  Jews  had been following Judaism since Moses taught them the way to live since 1311 BCE.  That Moses lived from 1391 BCE and died at age 120 in 1271 BCE meant that Judaism hadn't been noticeably upgraded for 1,200 years when Jesus came along.  Then Jesus was one of the many thousands of Jews hung on crosses by the Romans in their taking of the country.  He had become a threat to the Romans, a possible king.

 Jews were accused of killing Jesus, however, and his followers said he was the son of G-d.    Jews had killed their god. Judaism teaches me that we are all children of G-d.  How someone can kill a god is beyond me, but that has been the accusation, and it has stuck to this day.  According to his story as told much later by the Gospel writers, was that he seemed to know what was going to happen.   The new religious group attacked Judaism.   This put Jews on the side of outcasts; they lost their country in 70 CE and they killed Jesus, so his followers said. They suffered from the Crusades and from the Spanish Inquisition, the hundreds of years that Catholicism attacked them and forced them to flee from country to country.

The Jews remained believers in one and only one G-d, a god that was unseen.  The rest of the world that the Jews found themselves in became Christians, followers of Jesus.  Instead of the new religion  concentrating on what Jesus had taught, such as how to treat each other -as you would be treated (the Golden Rule) , it became a contest between 2 religions, like a soccer game.  Christianity  had to put down Judaism in order to come out on top. Whatever people remembered of Jesus' teachings was forgotten when it came to the treatment of Jesus' people, the Jews.

And so we find that finally after 2,000 years of patiently waiting for the right moment, the moment came with WWI and Judah had been part of the Ottoman Empire for 400 years.  Arabs made the mistake of siding with the Germans who lost that war.  The land was put in the hands of England, who held the mandate for a period of 25 years.  It was decided to give back to the Jews their Jewish Homeland.  This was in the form of a letter, the Balfour Declaration.  Finally the allied countries had felt some guilt about how Jews had been treated.

  1. The Balfour Declaration (dated 2 November 1917) was a letter from the United Kingdom's Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Baron Rothschild (Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild), a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland.
His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.  Later in 1922, the League of Nations voted for a Jewish Homeland by accepting the Balfour Declaration.  By 1939, at the start of WWII, England issued the White Paper stopping Jews from entering Palestine to escape Hitler's death sentences.  
                                                                          
                                   Chaim Weizmann and Emir Feisal

25 years of planning and waiting was interrupted by WWII where again the Arabs backed Germany.  Whereas Emir Feisal backed the Jewish return, thinking it would help improve his own uneducated masses, his competitors were against the idea.  When Jews tried to enter Palestine while Hitler was trying to kill all Jews, England stopped them  from  entering.  At the same time they aided and abetted Arabs in coming into land meant to become the Jewish Homeland.  

On May 14, 1948 Israel was declared a state and 5 minutes later they were attacked by all the neighboring Arab countries.  Now why couldn't these Muslims accept Israel back again?  The land was empty.  It had been worked on by Jews who came in the late 1800's and worked to restore it.  The land had gone to waste and had been full of weeds, swamps and mosquitoes.  No one lived here for all the time the Jews had been forced to leave.  Any Arabs who had land had decided they couldn't work it and made a profit by selling to the crazy Jews who wanted it.  Now they in turn were attacking Jews who wanted to live there again?  
                                                                      
Judea and Samaria becoming a Palestine while attacking Israel

Again I ask.  What is it in Islam that is so against Jews returning to their own land?  They are people like the Muslims, most likely sharing some segments of chromosomes as well, who believe in one unseen G-d like the Muslims profess to do.  Because our messengers, our teachers are not the same, is not the message the same?  Doesn't Islam look upon Moses as a prophet?  Or has G-d changed his message since Moses?  Those who heard Jesus's message certainly seemed to change the focal point of it all from the Mosaic teachings Jesus was brought up with.  

I ask again, what is the most important lesson to be learned through Moses, Jesus and Mohammad?  What were they telling everyone?  Religion has gone a different route, from the message of G-d to the importance of the teacher, not the message.  As a teacher myself, I want my students to remember the lesson, not me.  I am not the important lesson, what I do, how I wear my hair, but what the lesson is about.  

Here we see Sunni terrorists called ISIS slaughtering other Sunnis and of course slaughtering Shi'as because they are following a different teacher.  Are these teachers not teaching the words of Mohammad who himself was a teacher of G-d's word?  Is this what G-d wants people to do?  Cut them apart in pieces and kill everyone who disagrees with you?  Because you understand one teacher and not the other, are they not teaching the same thing?  What does it matter who the teacher is?  The lesson is to be learned regardless of the teacher.  That is, if the message is understood  well, both teachers should be giving the same message.

We have Presbyterians attacking Israel by the BDS movement.  Using their religion to force someone to follow  their political misguided goals is just throwing a monkey-wrench in the works that were helping both Jews and Arabs in Judea and Samaria.  Meddlers and idiots!  Followers like sheep of their uneducated leaders.  Using religion to do this is despicable.  A voting program by people who know nothing about the issues at hand.  Not only are they being anti-Semitic, but they are being anti-American as well, for the things they are against are made by American companies, so their business is being hurt.  "In a close vote at its annual assembly in Detroit on Friday, the church voted 310-303 to divest $21 million from Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola Solutions."

These same people probably think it's wonderful to have an al-Jazeera TV programming when someone like Qaradawi, Muslim religious leader is on every week from Qatar telling people to kill Jews and who has said himself that he would kill Jews with his bare hands.  Maybe he's the religious leader of ISIS.  I don't see them practicing their BDS on al-Jazeera.  

The good side of Islam is lost in the intolerable acceptance of Jews in their own homeland again.  Because of their meddling, they helped to cause 6 million Jews to die in the Holocaust.  Their leader talked with Hitler and encouraged him to kill Jews.  They kept Jews from entering during WWII years which caused their deaths.  Whatever goodness Mohammad wanted to teach didn't come through in the followers' actions.  The same goes for Christianity.  Very few people actually treated Jews according to how Jesus would have expected.  
                                                                           
650,000 Jews in 1948 faced thousands more Arabs in an attack and held their land.  They would have had land to place the 6 million who were slaughtered during WWII's Holocaust had the Western countries held to their promise of the Jewish Homeland.  Instead, Israel lost 80% of promised land which became TransJordan and are down to the 20% that is now divided to accommodate a Palestine.  Notice that Judea and Samaria are in the blue section.  

Religion came about through G-d or through mankind, whatever you wish to believe for the purpose of making people nice.  It was so that we would be a step removed from the Cave Man and his club to hit people over the heads with to get his own way.  It came about because people were frightened of nature's effects; storms, earthquakes, volcanoes.  It is to advance a civilization so that we aren't sacrificing the best of the land by ripping their hearts out for a certain god. We stopped sacrificing our children long ago, but have started again by using them as soldiers in  wars.   We haven't advanced much.  That means we either didn't understand the message or we refuse to do so.  We aren't using clubs anymore; we're using A bombs.  We've turned out to be a big disappointment.  Mankind.  Bah! 

How is Israel being affected by other religions?  Israel stands quite alone except for some special people.  .  Even the USA has not been the friend it had been.  Why?  Religion may be the cause.  Islam has been against Jews occupying their own ancient land.  Why?  They were virtually empty of a population.  The land was waiting for their return.  The Arabs evidently want only Muslims sitting on the land.  Why?  What does religion have to do with caring for the land that once was theirs in the first place?   Christianity is not helping matters except in the acts of Evangelicals.  .  Using BDS is just a lot of BS.  It's really anti-Semitism.  Jews are still being punished for being Jews.  Even the Pope made efforts to make friends with the Arabs but not the Jews on his recent visit.  

We, on the other hand, are in awe of the intelligence of our lesson as taught by Moses.  We're proud of what we have learned this way and are appalled by our neighbors' behaviors.  We haven't gone out to harm anyone, and are staying the way we have been.  We've upgraded ourselves all along with the prophets and others such as Rashi.  Such people continue to comment and learn in Yeshivote and share with us in our synagogues.  We haven't stagnated, but we haven't altered our original lessons, either.  

Resource:  From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haj_Amin_al-Husseini
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration
http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/21/us/presbyterian-church-palestinians/
http://www.ifcj.org/site/PageNavigator/sfi_about_war_league
http://www.rabbisletter.org/faq/ reason of divestment and how they help Israel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi




                                                

Friday, May 9, 2014

Presbyterian Church Joins Islamic Sabeel Against Israel

Nadene Goldfoot                                                               

What else is going to happen?  Fatah just joined up with Hamas again.  Now that makes them both terrorists.  Assad knew that move would bring the peace talks to a halt.  Something always has happened over the past 66 years to stop any peace talks between the Arab Palestinians and Israel.
                                                                       
                                        Christian Theologians in Jerusalem

Christians who support Israel  are now called dangerous and a threat to Middle East "peace by other Christians ."  The name callers are  Presbyterian Protestant Christians, a Protestant denomination of 1,849,496 people as of 2012.  Their membership has been  going down.   This radical change in their church is due to the partnership between the Presbyterians and the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in east Jerusalem that was founded in 1989.  They are now official partners.  The threat to the Middle East actually means that the Presbyterians  are rooting and doing everything they can to help the Arabs win against Israel.  They think that without Israel being there, everything will be peaceful, as if it always was a peaceful area before 1948.

Presbyterians have not done their homework on history of the Middle East and less on religion but instead have joined up with Sabeel's religious plan.   First of all, the Middle East is not an oasis of peace with a spring and date trees and belly dancers.  It's been a hub of wars over all the centuries when there was no Israel but just called Palestine. Hamas and Fatah are not interested in the Christian Arabs, either. They have their own Muslim agenda.
                                                                       
Sabeel, in Arabic (The Way) or (Channel or Spring), is a Christian liberation theology organization founded by a Palestinian Arab Anglican priest, Rev. Naim Ateek, the former Canon of St. George's Cathedral in Jerusalem.   They now have chapters in the USA, Canada, UK, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Ireland, France, Germany, Netherlands and Australia.   They aim to bring in the Palestinian Christians and their concerns, but how they are doing it is treasonable. They are generating hostility towards Israel by using theologically charged accusations at Judaism and Israel.  Sabeel rejects Zionism on theological grounds.  They promote the idea that Zionism is based on a false reading of the Bible and that it stands for injustice and is in opposition to G-d.   There are 1.7 million Arabs  that are citizens of Israel.  8% of them are Christians.  The rest are Muslims.

What they are is a political organization who want Israel to withdraw from Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem.  They can't include Gaza as Israel already did that only to have Hamas terrorists take over and be dictating to their people and bombing southern Israel.   They call for Palestine to cover the whole 23%  of the land of Palestine.  Let's see.  Israel is sitting on 20% of the promised 100% because Jordan grabbed 80% in the beginning when Israel was fighting against all the states who had attacked them.  Evidently they are teaming up with Hamas and Fatah, but they want only Muslims in their Palestine.  Jews can't be allowed, they say.

A leader of all this is Dr. Gary Burge who believes in a form of "replacement Theology," which is really the cause of centuries of Christian anti-Semitism.  That's because some Christians have taken it upon themselves to think up this religious theory and that is that they have replaced the Jews in G-d's plan with themselves.  Seems it causes them a fit that the Jews were asked to carry the burden of being the light of the nations and lead the way in this fashion in following G-d's commandments on how to behave.  Jews don't go into actively converting people.  That was stopped long ago by the Christians themselves, but they follow Moses's original plan of just being the examples, the light.

The light must have been bright enough, for Christianity sprang out of it, followed by Islam.  Yes, Mohammad admired both groups and called them the "People of the Book."  He didn't have a book and might have felt bad about it being his people didn't have one, so lo and behold, he was also visited by the angel Gabriel who helped him to to write his Koran with the help of a scribe because he couldn't write it himself.

Now that everyone has their own book, the Presbyterians have thrown Judaism out with the trash and think that their way is the only way.  It's because we refuse to convert to their religion.  For us Jews, however, we made a covenant with G-d about 4,000 years ago and we're still going to keep it.  To us, the Abrahamic Covenant is an everlasting covenant.

This puts the Presbyterians in bed with such groups as Sabeel,  who is all for Palestinian Liberation Theology.  This started in South America because the Communists couldn't infiltrate the Roman Catholic Church so they created this new theology to talk people into their way of thinking.  The Presbyterians are now using a study guide calling for churches to stop using hymns and liturgy that use Biblical terms such as: Exodus, covenant, return, blossoming of the desert, Zion and Israel!  I think that erases most all of what Christians call " The Old Testament."   This is so unbelievable!  It makes me realize that these are indeed weird times we are living in.

This is the USA Presbyterian Church who has changed along with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Sabeel gets help in creating a Palestine without Israel and the Presbyterians become the new G-d's chosen people.  They can all live happily ever after.

  Ateek said "Before the creation of the state of Israel, the Old Testament was considered to be an essential part of Christian Scripture, pointing and witnessing to Jesus.  Since the creation of the State, some Jewish and Christian interpreters have read the Old Testament largely as a Zionist text"...What he can't accept is that it looks like the words in the bible are coming true.  It was prophesied that Israel would be reborn.  This has concerned many to find such prophecy actually happening.  He went on, saying, "to such an extent that it has become almost repugnant to Palestinian Christians......How can the Old Testament be the Word of God in light of the Palestinian Christians' experience with its use to support Zionism?"

Yes, that is something, isn't it?  They want to erase the fact that this is happening, something that other Evangelical Christians are excited about.  Pastor Hagee is a big backer of Israel for his own theological reasons because this is happening.  Prophecy is being fullfilled.

Hagee said that for 1800 years Christian leaders ranted that "the church is the new Israel."  They pointed to the wandering, tormented Jews of the Diaspora saying, "If G-d is with them, why has this befallen them?"  They forgot that Jews were living in papal states controlled by the church of Rome, living without rights, property, legal redress, hman dignity in an environment created by the laws of the Roman church.  Replacement theologian ignore a fundamental fact in the biblical text.  When god replaces something, you never hear from it again.  God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, and they have never been rediscovered.  Jews have returned to their land since May 14, 1948 and were speaking 60 languages.  This state of Israel is a superstate in just 20 years and is not passing away.  Yes, this is bothering the replacement theorists.

There are Hamas and Fatah, joined together against Israel, and there is Sabeel and Presbyterians of the world, joined together against Israel with the latter attacking our religion as well.

Resource:  http://blogs.jpost.com/content/presbyterian-church-gets-bed-radical-islam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabeel_Ecumenical_Liberation_Theology_Center
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Palestinian_territories
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presbyterian_Church_(U.S.A.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersessionism
The Strong  Horse, power, politics, and the clash of Arab civilizations by Lee Smith
From Time Immemorial, the origins of the Arab-Jewish conflict over Palestine by Joan Peters
In Defense of Israel by John Hagee, the Bible's Mandate for supporting the Jewish State.
http://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2013/03/anti-israel-code-pink-ladies.html
http://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2012/07/presbyterian-friendship-with-israel.html
http://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2012/01/how-sabeel-movement-is-harming-israel.html
http://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2012/01/attacks-on-israel-with-and-without.html
http://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2012/02/kairos-palestine-against-israels.html

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

The Bigots' March in Washington DC to Curb Aid to Israel

Nadene Goldfoot
The biggest problem Israel is always facing are lethal attacks such as rockets, mortars and missiles as well as suicide bombers and such.  The next biggest problem is anti-Semitism/anti-Israelism.

A march is planned to demonstrate such views of bigotry on January 19 in Washington DC.  It's bringing out all the malcontents who blame Israel while cheering on the people trying to destroy her.  Who leads the pack?  Why, some of our self-destructive Jews, of course, like the "The Jewish Voice for Peace", people that don't care to read or understand a thing about their own people.  One of the leaders is Noam Chomsky, a man I have spent many an hour arguing with via email about Israel.  He has taken a stand against Israel and G-d himself won't change him.  He may know  about linguistics, his PhD area.    No matter what proof   I came up with, he denied it all.  He should have stuck to Linguistics.  

What they are doing is not trusting in the Senators that Americans have elected democratically.  This fringe group thinks differently than the Senators who have explored the subject. At least they know that Israel needs a certain amount of dollars which have already been approved, even in this time of financial need ourselves in the states.  They know what the stakes are.

Arab nationalists are all against Israel, of course and will be in the demonstration.  The Muslim Public Affairs Council, Islamic Society of North America,  and Council on American-Islamic Relations will all be in on the act.

Religious Christian groups such as the Presbyterian Church and the United Methodist Church are also against Israel and will be marching.  There's even a Washington Interfaith Alliance for Middle East Peace and they're in the act, too.  They've been hard nosed for quite some time advocating such things as not buying from any Israeli company.  15 churches wrote letters in October supporting congressional investigations into US aid to Israel.  They are boasting that the stance of the church will decide the future of the US-Israeli relationship.

These anti-Israel people follow the lead of the American Arab Anti-discrimination Committee (ADC) who make out that prosecuting Muslims for terrorist deeds are acts of political persecution.  They honored columnist Helen Thomas with an award after she told Jews to "get the hell out of Palestine" and that "Congress, the White House,  Hollywood and Wall Street are owned by the Zionists."  So you can see just how they think.   Jews make up all of 0.02% of the world population.  We sure do "OWN" a lot that bothers the rest of the world. like Helen.  The USA contains about 2% Jews, most of which are liberal Democrats.  Helen, now 92 years old, with parents  from Christian Greek Orthodox church in Tripoli, Lebanon, is sure shook by us.  She must not have thought Major Hadad was doing right by siding with Israel in fighting the Palestinians.  She retired in June of 1910 after her nasty comments about Jews.

What do they profess to want?  They want US aid to Israel to stop.  Do I see complaints about US aid to Egypt who is now under Muslim Brotherhood control  who is threatening Israel and all Jews everywhere?  They're even a threat to the Egyptian Christians, for heaven's sake!  Oh no.  Aid to Egypt must be fine.  They certainly do need those updated F-16's.  And who are their potential enemies being they have so many Muslim neighbors?  Why, it must be Israel.  Israel is promised more aid dollars than Egypt, but then it has more enemies as well, and it is a very democratic state.  It's situations like Egypt's Arab Spring that causes Israel to need financial help from the USA.  Ironically, it was the USA's desire to create a democratic state without looking into the culture and religion that brought about the Arab Spring and Mubarak's downfall that has put Israel in jeopardy.  .

And as for the Jewish Voice of Peace, a San Francisco group including rabbis, I'd like to get ahold of them and give them a piece of my mind.  Then I'd like to expose them to some lessons on the history of Israel and what's been going on, especially on International law from International Law lawyers.    That should be followed up with a trip to Israel to actually see it, something I did and lived there for 5 1/2 years.  Put this together with our own Jewish history in the USA and the world and they just might learn something no matter how thick headed they are.

What they are doing is insisting that Israel get no money unless its on their terms and their concept of legality. Netanyahu, PrimeMinister of Israel would love to have a peaceful Palestine next door that Israel could be friends with, but until a special day comes along, it's not in the works of happening right now.  Right now Israel is in constant peril and needs to be prepared.  Taking away defense money from Israel is spelling out their doom.  Is that what they are aiming for?  It sure seems so to me.

Reference: frontpagemag.com/2013/ryan-mauro/no-blank-check-for-israel-march-coming-to-dc-on-january-19/print/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Thomas
http://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/