RUTHFULLY YOURS

Robert Nicholson is the executive director of The Philos Project, a nonprofit organization that seeks to promote positive Christian engagement in the Middle East. He holds a BA in Hebrew Studies from Binghamton University, and a JD and MA (Middle Eastern History) from Syracuse University. A formerly enlisted Marine and a 2012- 2013 Tikvah Fellow, Robert lives in New York City with his wife and two children.

The Jesuit magazine America recently reported that Arab Christians are fleeing in droves from Bethlehem, the hallowed city of Jesus Christ’s birth. In 1990, Christians made up a majority of the city’s residents; today they make up only about 15%. “With thousands more fleeing the city every year,” reports America’s correspondent Jeremy Zipple, “you can’t help but wonder, will there be any Christians left here…in the not too distant future?”

Zipple’s question is rhetorical. He clearly believes that Christianity in Bethlehem may be nearing its end.

But why? Why are Christians fleeing?

At first Zipple says “it’s complicated.” But he goes on to list one reason, and one reason only: “Since 2003 Bethlehem has been circumscribed by a 26-foot military grade wall.”

Zipple is, of course, referring to the separation barrier that was constructed by Israel during the Second Intifada to keep out suicide bombers who tried to cross from the West Bank into Israel. Although the vast majority of the barrier is a chain link fence, in Bethlehem and a few other metropolitan areas it becomes a tremendous gray wall. Since its construction, the barrier has become the international symbol of Palestinian resistance against Israel.

“[T]he separation wall…cuts family from each other. People get humiliated at checkpoints. People do not have many opportunities to improve their living standards. So, therefore, Christians who can afford to, are trying to leave this country,” says interviewee Hanan Nasrallah, a Palestinian employee of Catholic Relief Services.

Nasrallah’s calculation is simple: Israel built a wall; the wall makes life difficult; therefore, Palestinian Christians are leaving.

When Col. Steve Warren, spokesman for U.S. military efforts against ISIS, was asked about the status of Christians in Iraq soon after the monastery’s destruction, he replied “We’ve seen no specific evidence of a specific targeting toward Christians.”

Kuwait lawmaker Ahmad Al-Azemi said that he and other MPs will reject an initially approved request to build churches because it “contradicts Islamic sharia laws.” He added that Islamic scholars are unanimous in banning the building of non-Muslim places of worship in the Arabian Peninsula.

“We have little hope left that there can be a future for us, Aramean Christians, to stay in the land of our forefathers.” — Fr. Yusuf, head the last Christian family to flee Diyarbakir, Turkey.

Yet another Christian girl in Pakistan was abducted by a group of Muslim men, forced to convert to Islam, and, at the age of 15, marry one of her kidnappers.

Iraq: The Islamic State blew up the country’s oldest Christian monastery, St. Elijah’s. The 27,000-square-foot building had stood near Mosul for 14 centuries. For several years, prior to 2009, U.S. soldiers protected and sometimes used the monastery as a chapel. “Our Christian history in Mosul is being barbarically leveled,” reported a Roman Catholic priest in Irbil. “We see it as an attempt to expel us from Iraq, [and] eliminating and finishing our existence in this land.” Yet, when Col. Steve Warren, spokesman for America’s military efforts against ISIS, was asked about the status of Christians in Iraq soon after the monastery’s destruction, he replied, “We’ve seen no specific evidence of a specific targeting toward Christians.”

According to gay activist Judith Butler, Hamas is a progressive organization and anyone who points out that Israel doesn’t have the death penalty for gays is just “pinkwashing”. But Hamas is not actually all that progressive on gay rights as we see with the case of Mahmoud Ishtiwi, a Hamas commander who was tortured into confessing to being gay and then killed.

A Hamas commander who was executed in February was tortured and then killed after at least one terrorist under his command admitted to having sex with him.

Relatives and other sources say he was tortured extensively during that period, including beatings, whippings, being suspended by his hands from the ceiling for hours on end, sleep deprivation and more.

So bad were his conditions that family members protested outside the home of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, in a rare show of dissent in authoritarian-ruled Gaza. Demonstrators were beaten by Hamas police and dispersed.

Here’s how Hamas progressively dealt with the whole gay thing.

In his next meeting with relatives, on March 1, Mr. Ishtiwi told his brother Hussam that he had been tortured since his fourth day in detention. Six weeks later, when his wives visited, they sneaked out a note, of which Human Rights Watch shared a photograph. “They nearly killed me,” it says. “I confessed to things I have never done in my life.”

By June 7, when Samia visited her brother at a Qassam base near Gaza City’s used car market, Mr. Ishtiwi “looked destroyed,” she recalled.

“I asked, ‘Why are you crying, brother?’ ” she said. “And he said, ‘I have been wronged, wronged.’ ”

Members of Kaifeng community, believed to be founded by 8th- or 9th-century Jewish traders, to undertake formal process to become Jews

For the first time in 7 years, 5 young women in their 20’s from China’s historic Jewish community have made Aliyah and are presently living in Israel. They were brought to Israel via the Shavei Israel organization. The women, Gao Yichen, Yue Ting, Li Jing, Li Yuan, and Li Chenglin, have been studying Hebrew and Judaism intensively in Kaifeng for the past several years prior to their Aliyah.

“Kaifeng’s Jewish descendants are a living link between China and the Jewish people,” Shavei Israel Chairman Michael Freund stated. “After centuries of assimilation, a growing number of the Kaifeng Jews in recent years have begun seeking to return to their roots and embrace their Jewish identity. These five young women are determined to rejoin the Jewish people and become proud citizens of the Jewish state and we are delighted to help them realize their dreams.”

“Being part of the Jewish people is an honor because of the heritage and wisdom,” said Li Jing, who on a brief previous visit to Israel put a note of prayer in the Kotel asking to return and live in Israel. “Now, my prayer has been answered,” she said. After the 5 women arrived in Israel, they were brought by Shavei Israel to the Kotel to pray and from there will be studying in a seminary in Jerusalem. After they formerly convert to Judaism, they will receive Israeli citizenship.

For the past three years, the West has been tricking itself into seeing the Islamic Republic of Iran as a country undergoing a gradual process of reform. The outcome of Friday’s two elections — one for the Majlis (parliament) and the other for the Assembly of Experts — is serving as the latest mirage in the delusion.

In 2013, when Hassan Rouhani replaced Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran, the United States and Europe took it as a sign of a new dawn. Even Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the chief mullah controlling Iran’s “elected” leader, came to understand that Rouhani was preferable to the volatile and fanatic Ahmadinejad, whose repeated pronouncements about wiping Israel off the map before attending to America were not serving Tehran in good stead.

Rouhani’s appearance on the international stage provided particular fantasy-fodder for supporters of a diplomatic solution to the problem of Iran’s race to obtain nuclear weapons and to guarantee its regional, and eventually global, hegemony.

Those people today feel vindicated for two reasons. The first is that world powers finally did reach a nuclear deal with Iran. The second is that Rouhani’s “pro-deal” camp emerged victorious in the latest parliamentary election, and two of the most hard-line ayatollahs were voted out of the Assembly of Experts, the body charged with appointing the supreme leader. And considering Khamenei’s advancing age and questionable health, this clerical assembly, which sits for eight years, is likely to end up selecting his successor.

To understand why the above is no cause for celebration, two crucial things need to be kept in mind: the only thing the nuclear deal accomplished was to enable Iran to step up its nuclear program, but with lots more money at its disposal; and Rouhani is no moderate.

Indeed, Iran continues to assert its right to nuclear power, while flexing its military muscles nearly daily by testing missiles and threatening the West not to intervene. In addition, celebrations less than three weeks ago marking the anniversary of the 1979 revolution that turned Iran into an Islamic state included chants of “death to America,” “death to Israel” and a reenactment of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy’s humiliation of U.S. sailors who had strayed into Tehran’s territorial waters.

A review of Rouhani’s record also leaves little room for optimism. Though the Shiite cleric was not Khamenei’s preferred choice, he would never have been approved as a candidate in the first place if his revolutionary credentials had not been impeccable. And they certainly were.

Where is the professional journalism the mainstream media keeps talking about? While they have been focusing on Iran’s artificial democratic elections, the mainstream liberal outlets seem to have intentionally ignored one of the most heinous and egregious acts that the ruling mullahs of Iran committed during the elections.

The Islamist henchmen of the Islamic Republic executed every man in a village in the province Sistan-Baluchestan, according to the latest report coming from Iran. Shahindokht Molaverdi, the vice president for women and family affairs, called for increased protection for the families of the executed as she claimed to a Persian news outlet that “We have a village in Sistan-Baluchestan (province) where every single man has been executed.”

In addition, while liberal journalists often report on the mass executions that are being carried out by the non-state militia — the Islamic State — they have chosen to ignore larger scale of human rights violations by a powerful Islamist state, Iran.

Iran has surpassed China in the number of executions being carried out per capita, now ranking at the top. The number of executions of juveniles, women, and political prisoners has significantly increased under the government of the so-called moderate president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani.

Cologne is a warning sign of what is coming to Europe. The Islamic attitude toward women is a Pakistani or Egyptian problem for now. But it’s becoming a European and American problem due to migration.

What was a distant horror in Pakistan yesterday, is a nearby horror in our cities and towns today and a permanent reality tomorrow.

In 2011 in the area of Gardone Val Trompia (Brescia) two Pakistanis were killed because they had violated Islamic law: they had worn swimsuits on the beach. Condemning them was the imam of Zingonia (Bergamo) Muhammad Zulkifal, a member of a cell of Al Qaeda with its operational base in Olbia. Zulkifal has always claimed “the role of moral guardian of the community and the right to inflict exemplary punishment to enforce divine law.”

The double murder was accidentally discovered by investigators, thanks to an interception in 2012. Two foreigners, never identified, had asked a Lodi photographer to extract images from a mobile phone. Once at work, the man had found the photos sought by the two, depicting a young Pakistani woman with her face swollen, her arms amputated at the elbows and legs to the knees. The limbs were placed close to the body, “according to the technique used by the Taliban” the investigators had highlighted.

The imam was only arrested in April last year and today the trial was reopened in Sassari before the Assize Court. The investigations have uncovered that Zulkifal is part of an organization responsible for the bloody massacre in 2009 in a market in Peshawar (Pakistan) that caused the death of 100 civilians. The terrorist cell to which he belongs, despite being based in Olbia, also has great influence in Pakistan.

This took place in Italy. Not Pakistan, not Afghanistan, Europe. This nightmare is inside the West. And it’s getting worse.

In a September 9, 2011 Zulkifal said: “Taking a photo you could better position the throat of the corpse … you had to take pictures so you can see even the chest. This thing is great …. ” And in the next interception, the imam was referring to movements on the territory of Brescia, the “trunk of a car” and to a “corpse placed in the ground.”

Apparently Najat Abu Bakr forgot that she is a member of the Palestinian parliament and not the Israeli one. She and her colleagues have no right to criticize President Abbas or any senior official in Ramallah. Such criticism is considered an “insult” to top officials and even an act of treason.

And so we have two legislators. One is forced to seek shelter within her own parliament for fear of being arrested by the Palestinian security forces. The other receives all the rights and privileges enjoyed by her fellow Arabs inside Israel — in spite of her immensely provocative behavior.

That is the difference between a law-abiding country and the Palestinian Authority, which has been functioning for many years as a mafia.

Najat Abu Bakr and many Palestinians dream of the day they too will have a Knesset, a true parliament, where leaders are held accountable.

What do Haneen Zoabi and Najat Abu Bakr have in common?

Both women are outspoken members of parliament — Zoabi in Israel and Abu Bakr in the Palestinian territories.

Zoabi, who hails from Nazareth, is a citizen of Israel. Abu Bakr, from the West Bank city of Nablus, is an elected member of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), the parliament that has been effectively paralyzed since 2007, when Hamas expelled the Palestinian Authority (PA) from the Gaza Strip.

The project of a “French Islam” has failed abysmally. A 2,200-page report, “Suburbs of the Republic,” concluded that Muslim immigrants in France were increasingly rejecting French values and identity, and instead immersing themselves in Islam. The report warned that Islamic sharia law was displacing French civil law in many parts of suburban Paris.

The pattern of “importing” imams with no knowledge of the local language and customs is the same all over Europe.

Qatar and Saudi Arabia, where the official form of Islam is Wahhabism, are the main financiers of mosques in Europe. Wahhabism discourages Muslim integration in the West, but actively encourages jihad against non-Muslims. Qatar has financed mosques in France, Italy, Ireland and Spain, among other places, thus spreading Wahhabism across the continent.

Last week Austria ordered the first foreign-funded imam to be expelled when his visa expires. The decision was made under the new provisions of an anti-radicalization law, which Austria passed one year ago under considerable controversy. The main aim of the law is to counter extremism by requiring imams to speak German, and to prohibit foreign funding for mosques, imams and Muslim organizations in Austria. It also stresses that Austrian law must take precedence over Islamic sharia law for Muslims living in the country.

“We want a future in which increasing numbers of imams have grown up in Austria speaking German, and can in that way serve as positive examples for young Muslims,” said Integration Minister Sebastian Kurz, who helped draft the law. Another 65 imams are expected to be deported in the coming weeks, after being informed that their visas will not be renewed. The decision to deport the foreign imam has — predictably — been deemed unconstitutional by Austria’s Constitutional Court, which finds the law discriminatory because it targets only Muslims.