Egypt warned Turkey on Tuesday that it was losing its patience, after Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Israel of being behind the removal of former President Mohammed Morsi by the Egyptian military.
The state news agency MENAquoted Egyptian ministers as having said that Erdogan’s comments aimed to divide Egyptians.
“The cabinet stresses that Egypt’s patience is wearing thin,” the ministers were quoted as having said.
“Egypt does not share others’ enmities, and is not about to go in search of a new identity. Its Arab and Islamic nature is obvious,” they added.
In Israel, an official in Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s office toldAFP, “These comments by the Turkish prime minister are nonsense.”
Erdogan told members of his AKP party that “Israel is behind the coup in Egypt, we have evidence.”
He reportedly cited an unnamed French intellectual who he claims said in 2011 that the Muslim Brotherhood won’t be in power even if they are elected because “democracy is not the ballot box.”
Erdogan stressed that the intellectual was Jewish, the implications of which are consistent with a long string of anti-Semitic comments and conspiracy theories issued by the Islamist Prime Minister, whose party is sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood.
The White House also condemned Erdogan’s claim. Spokesman Josh Earnest said his comments were “offensive and unsubstantiated and wrong.”
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While Syrian rebels accuse the regime of Bashar al-Assad of killing hundreds of men, women and children with chemical weapons last night, the Assad regime’s official broadcast network has a different account of the night’s events.
“Units of our heroic army destroyed terrorist dens and concentrations in several villages and towns in the rural area of Damascus and caused them casualties, both dead and wounded,” the station said.
A senior Syrian element added that the attacks took place in the villages of Jubar, Arabeen and Zamalka.
Two of the three locations cited correspond with the locations mentioned by pro-opposition groups that claim the Assad regime targeted civilians with poison gas.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said intense shelling hit the eastern suburbs of Zamalka, Arbeen and Ein Tarma.
It says “tens of people” were killed, while the Local Coordination Committees said hundreds of people were killed or injured.
Al Jazeera writes that such different figures “are common in the immediate aftermaths of attacks in Syria,” and that the reports could not be independently confirmed.
Al Arabiya says the number of dead is “at least 640.”
Meanwhile, The Arab League called Wednesday on U.N. chemical weapons inspectors now inside Syria to immediately visit the site of the incidents.
Arab League chief Nabil al-Arabi urged the inspectors in a statement to “go immediately to Eastern Ghouta to see the reality of the situation and investigate the circumstances of this crime.”
Three Israeli academic institutions are included in the 2013 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), an annual survey published by the Center for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The three universities — Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Weizmann Institute of Science and Technion – Israel Institute of Technology — were also included on last year’s prestigious list.
This year’s rankings put the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 59th place, followed by the Technion in Haifa at 77th and the Weizmann Institute at the 92nd place. Both the Technion and Weizmann Institute moved up one place from last year’s poll.
The Palestinian Authority (PA agreed to resume peace talks with Israel without preconditions? Not according to chief negotiator Saeb Erekat.
Erekat revealed, in an interview with the Nazareth-based Arabic language A-Shams radio station on Tuesday, that the PA would not have returned to the negotiating table with Israel had it not received a letter of assurances from the United States, guaranteeing its main negotiating preconditions.
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Erekat said in the interview that the U.S. had assured the PA in writing that talks would recognize the indefensible pre-1967 borders as the basis of a Palestinian state, would deal with all core issues (Jerusalem, refugees, borders, security and water), would take place within six to nine months and would not allow for any interim solutions before a final status agreement is signed.
Ahead of this round of talks, Israel agreed to a release of 104 terrorists, but rejected the other two preconditions. Israeli officials have claimed that Abbas had agreed to drop most of his preconditions before this round of talks began.
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Poriya, a Tiberias hospital, has joined Safed’s Ziv Medical Center as well as Israeli hospitals in the Western Galilee and in Nahariya in treating casualties of the ongoing Syrian civil war.
One Syrian patient, suffering from moderate leg injuries, arrived at the Tiberias hospital for treatment on Monday, Israel Hayomreported. So far, the hospital has treated 11 Syrians, including a 10-year-old girl.
One of the patients at Poriya, 26-year-old Mohammed, recounted the heavy fighting in Quneitra. “I have been fighting for a year and a half, and I don’t believe the war will end any time soon. When I recover, I will return to Syria and continue fighting,” he said.
Baha, another Syrian patient, said that his friends had brought him to the border after he was hurt because they had known of people who had been wounded in the fighting, and then treated in Israel, who safely returned home. According to his account, most of the patients treated in Israel resumed fighting upon their return to Syria.
Ginot Ha’Ir (City Gardens) Community Council was built on founding director Shaike El-Ami’s belief that community members themselves must determine the character of their community center rather than the professionals who run it.
To the many Israeli and overseas community center professionals who come to see how he runs his organization, El-Ami explains that he is spearheading no less than a revolution in Jerusalem.
“I call it the community revolution, the next step for Israel’s social agenda,” he tells ISRAEL21c. “It is the idea that the responsibility, anywhere, for quality of life and culture should come from the public, not from city hall or from the synagogue.”
Iranian high school students will soon know how to hunt for U.S. drones and learn how to hack the drone's controls. The school children will receive lessons by the country’s Revolutionary Guards paramilitary units in order to promote civil defense in Iran.
The plans were unveiled on the 60th anniversary of the coup in Iran which deposed Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh after he restricted the flow of oil to the West.
As the final minutes of Rosh Hashanah ticked away, 13-year-old Leo Goldberger was hiding, along with his parents and three brothers, in the thick brush along the shore of Dragor, a small fishing village south of Copenhagen. The year was 1943, and the Goldbergers, like thousands of other Danish Jews, were desperately trying to escape an imminent Nazi roundup.
“Finally, after what seemed like an excruciatingly long wait, we saw our signal offshore,” Goldberger later recalled. His family “strode straight into the ocean and waded through three or four feet of icy water until we were hauled aboard a fishing boat” and covered themselves “with smelly canvases.” Shivering and frightened, but grateful, the Goldberger family soon found itself in the safety and freedom of neighboring Sweden.
For years, the Allied leaders had insisted that nothing could be done to rescue Jews from the Nazis except to win the war. But in one extraordinary night, 70 years ago next month, the Danish people exploded that myth and changed history.
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Tel Aviv is going ahead with a plan to install a monument to the gay community persecuted by the Nazis, memorializing thousands of homosexual men who were murdered in death camps.
The memorial is designed to be a concrete triangular slab embossed with a smaller pink triangle, reminiscent of the symbol that the Nazis forced gay men to wear on their clothes.
A park bench and plaque will provide information about the 50,000 gay men who were convicted under Paragraph 175 of the Nazi penal code, which banned homosexual relations. Between 7,000 and 10,000 were sent to their deaths for the crime during the Third Reich.
“If I were a musician looking to protest human rights abuses today, I would be looking at Syria, at Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, everywhere but Israel,” Rabbi Cooper said. “The fact that Roger Waters would call for a boycott against Israel, when Israelis and Palestinians are actually meeting today, shows a complete disconnect from reality, and probably really just a disinterest in even the headlines of today’s newspaper, and certainly, a fundamental bias; I guess you could call it a hatred.”
“You can dress it up anyway you want, but how can Waters come down on the side of BDS, when the two sides are sitting down in negotiations, which was allegedly the original reason for creating this movement, and doing so given that the entire neighborhood of the Middle East, with the exception of Israel, is boiling over in bloodshed?” Rabbi Cooper asked.
According to Wales Online, a branch of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, a group which accuses Israel of ethnic cleansing and war crimes, has posted an online petition calling for Jones to cancel his October 26th appearance in Tel Aviv’s Nokia Stadium.
The activists have likened his decision to appear to the scandal which surrounded rock giants like Queen and Elton John when they performed in the racially segregated South Africa during the 1980s.
“To perform in Israel today would be akin to performing in Sun City during the height of apartheid,” a spokesperson for the group told Wales Online.
Unfounded and absurd to say the least.
Police on Wednesday said vandals defaced a monastery near Jerusalem, the latest in a series of similar incidents blamed on extremists.
Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said Wednesday that an investigation is underway. She said minor damage was caused, likely by a firebomb, to the exterior of the Beit Jamal Monastery, where the phrase “price tag” was scrawled onto a wall.
A fringe group of Jewish extremists use the phrase to protest what they perceive as the government’s pro-Palestinian policies, and in retaliation for Palestinian attacks. Israeli leaders across the political spectrum have condemned the attacks.
The monastery, next to the town of Beit Shemesh, is known for its good relations with Israelis who visit to buy its ceramics.
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An Israeli couple was told this week by the Brussels Municipality that they could not name their newborn daughter ‘Jerusalem’ since the name is not on the list of valid names permitted by Belgium, claimed the Daily News.
Elinadav and Hagar Hyman are both Jerusalemites and decided to name their first born, Alma Jerusalem, after the city they grew up in.
The parents were told ‘no’ by the officials in the city when they tried registering the name since Jerusalem is not included on a list of approved names for babies born in Belgium.
The Brussels city hall clerk told them that the name “Alma” passed, and even “Bethlehem” made the cut, but “Jerusalem” is ‘not a valid name for a child’.
The clerk at the municipal offices in Brussels did offer them a compromise. In order to get the name Jerusalem approved with a valid Belgium birth certificate, the couple will need to appeal to the Israeli embassy and have them write a letter confirming that Jerusalem is a valid name.
Until then, the infant will be left without a birth certificate and the parents will be left with frustration.
The family has been living in Brussels for three years; Elinadav works in the European Parliament while his wife works as a security agent with Israel’s El Al Airlines. They say they both “miss the city of Jerusalem very much.”
The mother of the baby had noted that a man in line next to her wanted to give his son a name that was 25 letters long.
“Where is the public condemnation of the Muslim Brotherhood by President Obama? Where is the public condemnation of other national leaders? Where is the condemnation by Christian leaders? Where is the condemnation by Jewish leaders? Where is the condemnation by other religious leaders? And where is the condemnation by Muslim leaders?“
Book Review
When I recommend children’s books, I try to make it clear that not every book is for right every reader. But these three Jewish biographies? They are right for every human on the planet. They are so unabashedly fabulous, such a perfect blend of writing and art, so good at explaining complicated subjects, so inspiring without being sappy, you need to stop what you’re doing and buy them all right now. (Fine, you can finish reading this review first.)
The world of Polish-Jewish relations is confronting a crisis over kosher slaughter of animals. Both kosher and Muslim halal slaughtering rules forbid stunning the animal beforehand. Under Polish law, however, such stunning is mandatory. The Polish Constitutional Court recently struck down an exemption from that law for kosher and halal slaughter on a legal technicality. Last month the Sejm, the lower chamber of the Polish Parliament, failed to reinstate the exemption.
Jews in the United States and Israel reacted quickly to the Sejm vote. Misinformation about the roots of the legislation as well as a negative knee-jerk reaction based on certain perceptions—or misperceptions—of Poland’s history led many to the hasty conclusion that Poland today is no different than it was in the 1930s, when anti-kosher-slaughter legislation was part of a broad assault on Jewish rights.
