Friday, February 22, 2019

Golda Meir: Iron Lady of the Middle East and Yehuda visits his Ancestral home in Germany

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Yehuda Lave, Spiritual Advisor and Counselor

Yehuda Lave is an author, journalist, psychologist, rabbi, spiritual teacher and coach, with degrees in business, psychology and Jewish Law. He works  with people from all walks of life and helps them in their search for greater happiness, meaning, business advice on saving money,  and spiritual engagement

The World is a Constant Gift

The Torah viewpoint is that the Almighty constantly creates the entire world and everything in it for each individual. This concept has the potential to give a person immense pleasure. Think about it for a moment. The Almighty -- Creator and Sustainer of the universe -- is constantly creating for you the sun, the moon, and all the other worldly phenomena. He is constantly bestowing upon you life, and every single second He supplies you with your needs.

Love Yehuda Lave

Speaking of gifts, I had the gift of seeing my Ancestreal home last week. As the culmination of my four country tour, I went to my Mother's birthplace in Germany. There two wonderful people gave me the history of my Mother's family where the family had been for 500 years before being murdered in the holocaust. Only my Mother survived, hence why I am here. I say kaddish for the six million every day I am able to try to make some sense of a senseless world. See my pictures below and for the next several days.

Yahrtzeit of Rabbi Eliezer Silver (1882-1968)

9 Shvat
, who served the Jewish community of Cincinnati for four decades. Rabbi Silver is best known for spearheading efforts to rescue Jews from the Holocaust. As head of the "Agudas HaRabbanim," he tirelessly raised millions of dollars. He used the funds to produce counterfeit documents and pay off smugglers -- in the end directly saving at least 10,000 Jewish lives. In October 1943, Silver organized a rally of 200 rabbis in Washington; the effort prompted President Roosevelt to form the War Refugee Board, which rescued tens of thousands more from Hitler's ''Final Solution.'' After the war, Rabbi Silver traveled to DP camps to help Holocaust survivors start a new life. He also sought out hundreds of Jewish children who had been placed by their parents in Catholic orphanages, to spare them the horrors of the concentration camps. Often, the parents were killed during the war and there was no one to claim them. Rabbi Silver discovered that the priests operating the orphanages were often unable (or refused) to identify which children came from Jewish families. So Rabbi Silver had a solution: He strode into the lunchroom, stood on a chair, and proclaimed in his loudest voice: "Shema Yisrael, the Lord our God, the Lord is One!" Suddenly, the orphanage was filled with children's cries for their mother. Rabbi Silver looked at the priest, and said, "These children are mine."

My Ancesterial home in Germany

With the help of Meli and Rose, Yehuda learns about his Mother's heritage

Golda Meir: Iron Lady of the Middle East

This week on History of Israel Explained - Golda Meir, Israel's first female prime minister (though hopefully not the last) - the original Iron Lady and a figure whose legacy continues to divide Israelis. A feminist, a go getter, the creator of Israel's welfare state and a fierce advocate for the newly independent African states of the 1960s. In many ways, she was Golden. Golda Meir has a complicated legacy. Her many successes were overshadowed by her actions in the Yom Kippur War. Revered by some, reviled by others, Israel's first woman prime minister never forgave herself for her decisions in 1973. What do you think of Meir's actions and legacy? Let us know in the comments below! ----------- Credits: GPO Israel/Pridan Mosher/Zolton Kluger University of Milwaukee - Picturing Golda Meir Yehuda Eisenstark Archives - courtesy of Israel State Archives Central Zionist Archives Executive Producers: - Shevi Peters - Adam Milstein This series would not be possible without the generous support of: - Kam and Lily Babaoff - The Adam and Gila Milstein Family Foundation - Shevi Peters ----------- Subscribe and check out more awesome JerusalemU videos! https://www.youtube.com/subscription_... GET SOCIAL @ JERUSALEM U https://www.jerusalemu.org/ https://www.facebook.com/JerusalemU http://instagram.com/Jerusalem_U http://twitter.com/Jerusalem_U http://twitter.com/IsraeliHistory #Israel #History #Zionism Golda Meir: Iron Lady of the Middle EastCategoryEducation

The Dark Reach of The Muslim Brotherhood By Ambassador Dore Gold -

The Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin) has evolved since it began in 1928 as a strictly Egyptian organization, becoming a global network with branches in 70 countries. Understanding its purpose and examining its methods is extremely important. The latest information comes from former President of Egypt Hosni Mubarak. It must be seen in the context of a global debate that has raged since 9/11 over the question of whether the Muslim Brotherhood was a dangerous Islamist terror organization or a real alternative to the jihadist militancy witnessed with al-Qaeda. At times it seemed that the Middle East and the West were operating at cross purposes on this question.

Take, for example, the regular periodical of the Muslim Brotherhood, Risalat al-Ikhwan; it was banned in Egypt, but it was legal in the UK. At the top of the masthead of this publication was printed: "Our Mission; World Domination (Siyadat al-Dunya)." It also carried the famous Muslim Brotherhood motto which included: "jihad is our path; martyrdom is our aspiration." There was no ambiguity about the purpose of the Muslim Brotherhood. Indeed, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, used to write that the flag of Islam must be raised again in territories it once rule, like Andalusia (Spain), Sicily, the Balkans, the coast of Italy, as well as the islands of the Mediterranean.

In the 1980s, one of its leaders who was based in Germany, Mustafa Mashour, gave a speech in which he praised the Afghans for their victory over the Soviet Union and then said that jihad must continue so that other occupied Muslim lands may be liberated; he then ticked off Palestine, India, and Chechnya. He went on to say, "as the Soviet Union has fallen, so will America and the West succumb, with the help of God."

 

Mashour was not a peripheral figure. He went on to become the Murshid, or Supreme Guide, of the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2004, another Murshid, Muhammad Akef, declared "his complete faith that Islam will invade Europe and America because Islam has logic and a mission."

In 2002, Sheikh Yousef Qaradawi, a Qatar-based spiritual leader of the global Muslim Brotherhood movement, posted a fatwa, an Islamic legal opinion, on Islamonline.net, which read, "Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and victor, after being expelled from it twice." He then added a caveat: "I maintain that the conquest this time will not be by the sword but by preaching and ideology." An analysis written by the domestic intelligence agency of The Netherlands concluded, nonetheless, that the "ultimate aim" of the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe was to "create, then implant and expand, an ultra-orthodox Muslim bloc inside Western Europe."

In 2007, newly revealed federal court documents, accepted into evidence during the trial of the Holy Land Foundation in Texas, helped disclose the inner thinking of the Muslim Brotherhood. There was a 16-page document in Arabic about its "general strategic goal." That document stated, "the Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers, so that it is eliminated and Islam is made victorious over all other religions."

 

 

In the U.S. there were those who tried to present a forgiving image of the Muslim Brotherhood: in February 2011, James Clapper, who was serving as President Obama's senior intelligence advisor, testified to the House Intelligence Committee: "The term 'Muslim Brotherhood'…is an umbrella term for a variety of movements, in the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried al-Qaida [sic] as a perversion of Islam." In June 2011, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke about U.S. policy toward the Muslim Brotherhood being one of "limited contacts," noting that these groups had to be "peaceful and committed to non-violence."

The view from the Middle East was very different. In 2005, a former Kuwaiti Minister of Education wrote in the Saudi-owned Asharq al-Awsat that "the beginnings of religious terrorism that we are witnessing today were in the Muslim Brotherhood ideology." He added that all those who worked with bin Laden and al-Qaida [sic] went out under the mantle of the Muslim Brotherhood."In fact, bin Laden himself studied at King Abdulaziz University in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, under two key Muslim Brotherhood leaders, Abdullah Azzam and Muhammad Qutb (brother of Sayyed Qutb, the main ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1960s).

Hamas, which defines itself as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, has engaged in mass terror for years; its parent organization in Cairo has not criticized its use of bus bombings against Israel or its unleashing of rocket attacks against Israeli civilian targets. Organizationally, the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1940s had a "secret apparatus" for acquiring arms and plotting against its enemies; it assassinated Egypt's Prime Minister Nuqrashi Pasha in December 1948. In short, it had all the attributes of a terrorist organization. In recent years, the Muslim Brotherhood was outlawed not only in Egypt, but also in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and in the United Arab Emirates.

 

 

Despite this history, the dispute over the Muslim Brotherhood persisted. There was a debate about the Muslim Brotherhood in the UK, as well. A report issued in the British House of Commons during the summer of 2007 proposed: "As long as the Muslim Brotherhood expresses a commitment to the democratic process and non-violence, we recommend that the British Government should engage with it and seek to influence its members."

Yet in April 2014, Prime Minister David Cameron commissioned an internal review on the Muslim Brotherhood for the British government. Its international aspects were investigated by Sir John Jenkins, a former British ambassador to Saudi Arabia. In his main findings he concluded that from the time of its origins, the Muslim Brotherhood "accepted the political utility of violence." Under the influence of Sayyed Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood took up the doctrine of takfir-ism, labeling fellow Muslims as apostates or infidels, which meant they could be attacked as well.

It is well known that former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was a strong opponent of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Nonetheless, his court testimony provided on December 26, 2018, cannot be ignored or dismissed, given the level of detail he reveals about the role of the organization in the events of 2011, sometimes known as the Arab Spring. He described how in 2011, 800 armed operatives infiltrated into Egyptian Sinai through the Hamas tunnels with the aid of the Muslim Brotherhood. They helped some 20,000 inmates escape Egyptian prisons. These included members of Hizbullah, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood.

The vivid description that Mubarak provided regarding close coordination between the Muslim Brotherhood and established international terror organizations belied the notion that it had somehow evolved into a peaceful group renouncing violence. It confirmed the worst assumptions that Middle Easterners and observers had about the dangers that emanated from the Muslim Brotherhood since its birth.

 

Ambassador Dore Gold has served as President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs since 2000. From June 2015 until October 2016 he served as Director-General of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Previously he served as Foreign Policy Advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's Ambassador to the UN (1997-1999), and as an advisor to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

See you Sunday --Shabbat Shalom

Love Yehuda Lave

Rabbi Yehuda Lave

2850 Womble Road, Suite 100-619, San Diego
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