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Learning the lessons of Australia’s recognition of the State of Israel, seventy years on Peter Wertheim ****

https://www.abc.net.au/religion/lessons-of-australias-recognition-of-israel-1949/10758504

Peter Wertheim is co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.

Today, 29 January 2019, marks the 70th anniversary of an obscure and long-forgotten event in the history of Australia’s international relations: the day Australia recognised the State of Israel. The issue generated intense behind-the-scenes controversy, and ultimately open disagreement, between the then Labor government, led by Prime Minister Ben Chifley and Foreign Minister, “Doc” Evatt, and its sister Labour government in Britain.

Seventy years later, following the passing of a resolution at the recent ALP National Conference supporting recognition of a Palestinian State, it is worth recalling what the controversy was about and understanding why it still matters.
Recognising Israel ― 1949

In the late 1940s, support for the Zionist cause in Australia came primarily from the Labor side of politics, whereas the conservatives were the source of most of the opposition to it. Conservative views were shaped largely by traditional feelings of loyalty to Britain, which had ruled Palestine under a League of Nations mandate. Britain fought a bitter insurgency by Jewish forces for three years, sparked by its decision to bar entry into Palestine to tens of thousands of Jewish Holocaust survivors who were desperate to escape Europe and leave behind the traumas they had endured.

On 29 November 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to recommend the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine into a Jewish State and an Arab State, giving international endorsement to the principle of “two States for two peoples.” This was not an act of recognition, however; neither State yet existed. The British Mandate government continued to function.

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr George Carey on Anti-Semitism in the UK

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr George Carey, now a life peer, is seen below asserting, in an interview on i24NEWS with video anti-antisemitism campaigner and Middle East analyst Jonathan Sacerdoti, a few home truths on Holocaust Memorial Day:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5E8Xx58zq68

‘…. Lord Carey of Clifton told i24NEWS on Sunday that ‘Christians are to blame as well’ for high-levels of anti-Semitism in the UK, which he suggested was linked to the one-sided narratives many received on pilgrimages to Israel and the West Bank. ‘What I think we need to do is to better educate Christians who go on these pilgrimages to see this as not the total story,’ Lord Carey said, urging the thousands attending such religious trips to prominent and widely-contested holy sites in the region to seek the entire picture with regards to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Many of the religious sites such as Jesus’ birthplace in Bethlehem and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron are located in the West Bank, often flashpoint and conflict-centric areas. ‘What they don’t realize is what is happening to the Jewish communities in their own land who are sidelined and in a way persecuted by Palestinians. You’ve got to get a much more balanced view of what’s going on,’ he continued. ‘I think of Israel as a wonderful, sophisticated, democratic society surrounded by undemocratic nations. I mean we must support one another,’ he said, emphasizing shared the Judeo-Christian heritage. ‘Christians owe so much to the Jewish scriptures and Jewish history, so we stand as one,’ the former top church leader added. Lord Carey of Clifton has often spoken out publicly against anti-Semitism in the church and across the UK. ‘It’s not going to cost my life, it’s not going to cost my future, and this is what Jews fear, you know, the persecution, indirect persecution,’ he asserted, referring to the detrimental impact anti-Semitism can often have on daily life. ‘Think of Jewish children walking to school with armed guards, guards outside synagogues — in an advanced civilization such as ours, this is quite deplorable,’ he told i24NEWS’

Austria Reeling From Migrants’ Murder of Women When patriarchy and misogyny among foreigners spawn killings. Stephen Brown

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272710/austria-reeling-migrants-murder-women-stephen-brown

It is definitely not how Austrians wanted to begin the New Year.

In a bloody start to 2019, four women have been brutally murdered in the peaceful Alpine nation of almost 9 million people in just over two weeks, shaking the country to its core.

With an additional two murders of women committed last December, the tally of this “femicide,” as it is being termed, stands at six in a little over five weeks. (There have been no male murder victims.) And this in a country with the very low murder rate of only .66 per 100,000 people! (The United States, by contrast, has 5.35)

What is conspicuous to Austrians about these terrible tragedies is that all the women-killers, except one, are not native Austrians. (Non-Austrians are only 15 per cent of the population.) Another visible factor is most murders were committed by partners or ex-partners of women who were about to leave, or had left, relationships with their killers.

“It is striking that many foreigners and asylum seekers are found over proportionally among the suspects. That suggests that this group is particularly misogynistic and patriarchist oriented,” said social scientist Birgitt Haller of the Institute for Conflict Research in Vienna.

Police concur. They report that sometimes when called to a migrant home where the husband is physically abusing his wife: “Then he doesn’t understand at all why he is not allowed to hit his wife and why he has to leave the apartment.”

Vice-Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache of the ruling conservative Freedom Party of Austria (FPO), horrified by the killings, says the fact most of the criminals have a migrant background “is not permitted to be withheld.”

The Latest Brexit Episode Disappoints Remainers By John O’Sullivan

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/latest-brexit-episode-disappoints-remainers/

It didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to.

In the latest thrilling parliamentary episode of Brexit, the hopes and expectations of, among other Remainers, House of Commons speaker John Bercow were largely disappointed, and the hopes of Brexiteers began to rise again. That was not supposed to happen.

Before the actual votes on seven amendments to a government motion supporting Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement with the European Union, it was generally expected that some would pass and either delay the date of Brexit, or transfer control of parliamentary business from cabinet ministers to a coalition of Remainers, or allow MPs to choose among several alternative versions of Brexit. All of these were departures from usual parliamentary conventions — which Bercow had approved, contrary to both precedent and his duty of impartiality — and almost all represented a reversal of what a vast majority of MPs had voted for a year ago. Most significantly, however, they would all have had the intended effect of delaying Brexit indefinitely and likely canceling it altogether.

That was expected because it has become conventional wisdom that a House of Commons with a Remainer majority would inevitably vote only for a Brexit tolerable to the Remainers and thus disappointing to Leavers. It very much didn’t turn out that way. Of the seven amendments, the five most hostile ones were defeated, all by healthy majorities. The two amendments that did pass were (1) the Brady amendment, which the government had accepted as a way of keeping May’s plan alive, and (2) a non-binding amendment calling for the government not to pursue a No Deal Brexit but not providing any means to prevent it.

Finland’s Grooming Gangs by David Brown

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13650/finland-grooming-gangs

Much of the coverage of the same problem in Great Britain said that Jay had accused the Rotherham council and police of failing to tackle sexual exploitation because of misplaced “political correctness.” Yet Jay says those are not the words she would use: “I have an aversion to phrases like that,” she said. Instead, she believes the Labour-dominated council turned a blind eye to the problem because of “their desire to accommodate a community that would be expected to vote Labour, to not rock the boat, to keep a lid on it, to hope it would go away.”

What hits hardest in the little town of Oulu in Finland is a disturbing sense that history is repeating itself here and nothing has been learned from the well-documented lessons of the past. Instead there seems to be a hope that with a few overdue statements this problem will go back underground and the noise will go away.

Despite bold assertions that action would be taken and the laws regarding asylum seekers would be tightened, in recent conversations regarding the numbers of migrants to be accepted from the EU quota system, politicians such as the interior minister were still campaigning to increase the refugee quota tenfold.

In January, the Andalus Islamic Center of Kastelholm in Helsinki’s Puolinharju area, published a message to its followers on Facebook. It featured a picture of two lollipops. One was unwrapped, dirty and covered with insects; the other was not. “This is why the Hijab plays an important role in Islam,” it said.

Finland is a curious place. Tucked up under the arm of its celebrity sister Sweden and with Russia as a neighbour, it is one of the world’s most northern and geographically remote countries. It takes a hardy kind of European to withstand the severe climate. The Finns in Oulu, the most populous city in northern Finland, go about their lives as normal in -25 degrees Fahrenheit.

With a national population of just over 5.5 million, trees easily outnumber people; two-thirds of this country is blanketed in thick woodland, making it the most densely forested country in Europe.

The European Court of Human Rights Does Not Deserve Its Name by Saied Shoaaib

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13533/european-court-human-rights

It is a shame that voices such as Bahiri’s are being drowned out in the West, not only by fundamentalist Islamists but by liberal apologists — and courts. Evidently they are more fearful of being called “Islamophobic” than they are of protecting the victims of radical Islamism.

The recent ECHR ruling against Sabaditsch-Wolff for speaking her mind about Mohammed’s marriage to a little girl is not merely a slap in the face to freedom of expression in an academic sense. It also serves to keep silent all those Muslims who are physically and mentally victimized by the practices sanctified in the Quran and by those adopting the strictest interpretation of Quranic texts.

In so doing, the court is giving its stamp of approval for criminal practices, such as paedophilia. Crimes that victimize children must not be tolerated. The European Court of Human Rights does not deserve its name.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) recently ruled that referring to the Islamic Prophet Mohammed’s marriage to a 9-year-old as paedophilia is “beyond the permissible limits of an objective debate.”

As Judith Bergman explained in the wake of the October 25, 2018 judgement, which was handed down seven years after “free speech and anti-jihad activist, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, was convicted by an Austrian court of ‘denigrating religious symbols of a recognized religious group'”:

“Sabaditsch-Wolff was ordered to pay a fine of 480 euros and the costs of the proceedings. The Vienna Court of Appeal upheld the decision… Sabaditsch-Wolff then appealed… to the European Court of Human Rights. She stated that her right to freedom of expression, safeguarded in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, had been violated.”

According to the recent ECHR ruling, Article 10 had not been violated. Furthermore, it stated that the Austrian court that convicted Sabaditsch-Wolff had “served the legitimate aim of preserving religious peace in Austria.”

Even more shocking than ignoring the whole point of freedom of expression by talking about “preserving religious peace” was the ECHR’s defense of the Austrian court for stating that that “child marriages were not the same as pedophilia, and were not only a phenomenon of Islam, but also used to be widespread among the European ruling dynasties.”

World’s Dumbest Energy Policy After giving up nuclear power, Germany now wants to abandon coal.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/worlds-dumbest-energy-policy-11548807424

Dumb environmental policies are routine across Europe—see Emmanuel Macron’s riot-inducing fuel tax in France—but even by that standard Germany’s new plan to abandon coal is notable. Having wasted uncountable billions of euros on renewables and inflicted some of Europe’s highest energy prices on German households and businesses, now Berlin is promising to kill the one reliable power source Germany has left.

That plan comes via a blue-ribbon commission that recommended over the weekend that Germany phase out coal-fired power generation by 2038. Coal currently accounts for 40% of Germany’s electricity, by far the highest proportion in northern Europe. To the extent this is creating an environmental crisis, it’s a result of more than a decade of bad green policy choices.

The energiewende, or energy transformation, championed by Chancellor Angela Merkel heavily subsidizes unreliable wind and solar power, making it uneconomical for utilities to invest in cleaner natural gas. Meanwhile, Mrs. Merkel pledged to shutter German nuclear plants in the wake of Japan’s 2011 Fukushima disaster. Utilities have fallen back on cheaper but dirtier coal to fill the supply gaps when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun isn’t shining.

County lines gangs make £500m profit as they exploit 10,000 children to sell drugs, say police

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/01/29/county-lines-gangs-make-500m-profit-exploit-10000-children-sell/

Criminal gangs are making £500m profit a year from “county lines” networks with 10,000 children as young as 11 being exploited to sell drugs, police have revealed.

There are now 2,000 county lines through which gangs run their drug dealing networks, almost treble the 720 of just a year ago, according to analysis by the National Crime Agency (NCA) and National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC).

Each line generates more than £800,000 profit and turns over some £5,000 a day, equivalent to £3.6bn a year if scaled up.

The gangs exploit children whom they recruit to sell heroin, cocaine and crack in areas outside their normal territories, directing them via mobile phone “lines.”

Duncan Ball, NPCC lead on county lines, said 10,000 was a “reasonable” estimate of the number of children now being used, with most being boys aged 15 to 17.

He said the youngest gang member police had safeguarded was just 11 but there was evidence gangs were grooming younger children so they could join their operations when they reached 11.

Laura Plummer lands back in Britain after being released from prison in Egypt

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/29/laura-plummer/

A British woman has told of her “15 month trip to hell” after her holiday turned into a nightmare when she was jailed over painkillers.

Laura Plummer, 34, landed at Heathrow Airport on Tuesday afternoon and said she thought her “nightmare would never end” when she was held in al-Qanater women’s prison, south of Cairo in Egypt.

The shopworker from Hull was sentenced to three years in prison on Boxing Day 2017 for taking 290 Tramadol tablets into the country.

Breaking down in tears as she arrived back in the UK, Ms Plummer said: “Words cannot express how delighted I am to be home.

“At times I thought this nightmare would never end. What should have been a two-week holiday in the sun turned into a 15-month trip to Hell.

“I would like to thank everybody for supporting me throughout this, especially my family.”

Ms Plummer was arrested at Hurghada Airport on October 9 2017 when she flew into the Red Sea resort.

She claimed she was taking the tablets – which are legal in the UK but banned in Egypt – for her Egyptian partner Omar Caboo, who suffers severe back pain.

HOLOCAUST DENIAL, DEMENTIA AND ISRAEL- FIAMMA NIRENSTEIN

http://jcpa.org/holocaust-denial-

Memory loss can be a terrible disease. In the best case, it affects our recall of the minor details of an event, but in the worst case, such as with Alzheimer’s, it can lead to complete distortion of the past.

Holocaust denial is a kind of amoral cultural Alzheimer’s, and what makes it worse is that, unlike dementia, it is an intentional disease. Holocaust deniers often consciously lie, but they do so in the name of deep-seated hostility toward Jews. Their attitude is based on typical anti-Semitic bias – the idea that the Jews are taking advantage of the memory of what happened. This is a particularly ridiculous thought, given the colossal, overwhelming nature of the experience the Jewish people went through. It is impossible to imagine that some advantage could be gained from an absolute evil that pervades recent knowledge and the facts of Jewish history and life. Yet, the desire to deny the Holocaust propels these individuals to repudiate historical evidence and even eyewitness accounts.

Similarly, when UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) denies that Jerusalem has been linked to the Jewish people for centuries and millennia, it also rejects the extensive historic evidence attesting to the ongoing Jewish presence in the city. By so doing, it is also suffering from what could be diagnosed as anti-Semitic Alzheimer’s.

There is nothing improper about this comparison. The connection between relegating the Holocaust to non-existence and doing the same with the relationship between the Land of Israel and its people are two forms of denial intended to obliterate the Jewish people.

It is therefore very important and positive that International Holocaust Remembrance Day is currently observed in Europe with commitment. International Holocaust Remembrance Day takes place on January 27 every year, on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau on this day in 1945. In Italy, the president of the Italian Republic Sergio Mattarella will participate in the commemorations, alongside many schoolchildren. Commemorations also include educational programs, trips to Auschwitz, and public speeches. Most importantly, this day provides a unique opportunity to meet with survivors, who are dwindling in number but can still provide us with their personal testimonies and the strength of their presence.