http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2013/05/30/blogging-from-the-51st-state-day-1/?print=1 I arrived in Israel Thursday afternoon — I think it was Thursday, hard to tell with a ten hour difference — and almost immediately took a walk along the Tel Aviv beach to clear my brain. It didn’t. But Sheryl, Madeleine, and I pushed on, anxious to acclimate ourselves to Israeli time. It was […]
http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/saturday-people-sunday-people-ruth-king.html
An underreported tragedy of the Middle East is the persecution and exodus of Christian communities that have lived there for centuries, some for millennia, well before the advent of Islam. The irony is that today Israel is the only country where the Christian population is growing. The sorry exception is in the Arab controlled regions of Judea and Samaria.
Lela Gilbert, in her inspiring book Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of
a Christian Sojourner, describes her life in a country she came to visit but now makes her home.
Although Gilbert grew up in a family supportive of Israel, for her the defining moment was Israel’s triumph in the 1967 War–whose 46th anniversary will be celebrated on June 5th this year. She watched with concern as, in the following decades, Israel’s enemies increased in number, with Muslims joined by fellow travellers throughout the world, including the leadership of the mainline churches who shrugged off the fiercest faith driven diatribes against Jews, Christians and other “infidels.”
Alarmed by these trends, in 2006 Gilbert decided to visit the land that fascinated her as a writer and as a practicing Christian. To her family’s surprise and to Israel’s great benefit, Gilbert would be no ordinary tourist. She rented a flat in Jerusalem and began her sojourn. She currently divides her time between Jerusalem and California.
What is amazing about this book is the way Lela Gilbert resonates to Israel’s dangers, its security concerns, its diversity, its army, its vitality and its destiny, feeling them as her own. In her words: “….I came with the conviction that an assault upon Jews is an implicit assault upon Christians, since it strikes at the root of the same ancient tree.” She experiences the hypocrisy, the lies and libels of the world’s “enlightened” elite; she feels horror at the unspeakable jihadist terrorists who murdered the Fogel family including women and babies in their beds. She absorbs “the heavy weight of sadness pressed against the whole country.” She also has witnessed the fear of Christians in PA-ruled Bethlehem, similar to the fear of Christians throughout the Muslim world–in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Indonesia, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.
But Lela Gilbert also experiences the holiness of Israel, the eternal miracle of the Sabbath in Jerusalem, the joys of Passover and Sukkot, the renewal and commitment of Tisha B’av and the optimism that pulses through Israel with the belief that the best is still to come.
With the Bible as her GPS, Gilbert has visited every corner of Israel and spoken to Israelis–and Arabs–from every background. She has visited the “settlements” of Judea and Samaria–from the handsome villas of the towns to the hilltop “outposts” where she went to ancient wine cellars as well as new vineyards on the windswept hills. In Gilbert’s words: “For a number of reasons, the passage in the bible referring to the Israelites coming into the land and claiming their land has held important personal meaning for me.”
Ruthie Blum, the American born Israeli journalist and our mutual friend, has described Lela Gilbert thus: “Lela is what I call ‘one of us.’ She gets it about America, and she gets it about Israel. She is a rare breed who, upon her arrival in Israel, immediately grasped that the issues in both countries are very similar. It is not only that, as a pro-Israel Christian, she has a belief in the justice of the Jewish homeland. It’s more complicated than that. She actually understands the threat to democracy and free cultures that radical Islam poses. Aside from that, she managed to become socially enmeshed in Jerusalem society in a way that even many Jews who immigrate here have difficulty doing. She’s a real treasure.”
Gilbert writes that during her first days in Israel she visited a shop on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda Street. The owner was curious about her as a writer and as a Christian who would come during the war in Lebanon. He gave her a gift–a silver Star of David–with the words: “It is my way of saying thank you for being with us.”
I can only add “Thank you Lela Gilbert, for this book.”
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/giving-illegals-access-to-welfare-an-assault-on-the-us-taxpayer?f=puball http://cnsnews.com/news/article/giving-illegals-access-welfare-assault-us-taxpayer-researcher-says (CNSNews.com) – The Senate immigration legislation that includes access to federal entitlement programs for illegal aliens after a waiting period is a “travesty” and “an assault on the U.S. taxpayer,” Robert Rector, senior research fellow on domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation, said an event on Wednesday at the Bipartisan Policy Center. CNSNews.com […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/mindless-green-indoctrination-of-children?f=puball “We’re from the Earth Guardians group, and we’re working on fracking and how it’s going to affect our future and our health. So we wrote this song for all the gas companies that are putting their profits ahead of our future.” With that prelude, 12-year-old Xiuhtezcatl Martinez and his 9-year-old brother Itzcuauhtli launched into […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/message-to-moderate-muslims/
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/charles-bybelezer/mainstreaming-hamas/print/ On May 16, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to go through with a planned trip to the Hamas-ruled Gaza strip in June. Flanked by US President Barack Obama at the White House, Erdogan expressed “hope that my visit can contribute to the process [of establishing a Palestinian state].” He then insisted—while standing next […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/mccain-knows-less-about-the-syrian-civil-war-than-you-do/print/
Do you know what’s troubling? A top United States Senator went to Syria, met with Syrian Jihadists and showed that he knows less about the conflict than anyone reading this site.
In an Anderson Cooper interview, Senator McCain claimed, “We can identify who these people are. We can help the right people.” And who does he think the right people are?
McCain said such radical fighters make up only a small part of the rebels forces. For example, he said, Syria’s Islamist al-Nusra Front, identified as an alias of al Qaeda in Iraq, accounts for only about 7,000 of the 100,000 fighters battling the government of Assad.
“Every single day, more and more extremists flow in… “They’re flowing in all the time, these extremists. But they still do not make up a sizeable portion,” the Arizona senator said.
McCain said he was escorted during his visit on Monday by General Salem Idris, leader of the Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army, and that he had a long meeting with Idris and a group of his battalion commanders.
The Al Nusra Front had repeatedly fought alongside with and coordinated operations with the Free Syrian Army. Salem Idris, whom he just met with, is on the record as defending the Al Nusra Front.
“All rebels are fighting to topple the regime of Bashar al-Assad, and before we designate anybody or accuse anyone of being a terrorist we should tell what they have done to terrorize others,” the Free Syrian Army military command’s Brigadier General Salim Idris, told al-Jazeera television. “Not everyone wearing a beard is an extremist.”
“They are not terrorists,” he said of the Nusra Front.
Recently Idris has changed his tune, but it’s safe to say that his original position is the real one. The FSA remains closely aligned with Al Qaeda and even the enthusiastic supporters at the New York Times have bowed to reality and admitted, “Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.”
That’s not somewhere. That’s nowhere. And if you’re reading this right now, you’re more qualified to be a United States Senator dealing with the question of whether to arm the Syrian militias than John McCain is.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/may/31/holders-contempt-for-the-truth/ Attempt to hold secret press briefing shows how low the administration has sunk The Associated Press, the New York Times and CNN have turned their backs on one of President Obama’s top Cabinet officials. It’s no surprise to conservatives, but the true meaning of Chicago-style politics is dawning on the news outlets that have […]
N.Y. teen Arvind Mahankali wins the national spelling bee with ‘knaidel’ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/may/30/spell-ebrities-take-stage-final-day-national-spell/ Maybe it’s the fourth time that’s the charm, perhaps it’s what 13-year-old Arvind Mahankali calls the “German blessing,” or it could just be that the eighth-grader just really knows how to spell. But whatever it was, late Thursday night the teen from Bayside […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/barack_obama_george_orwell_and_terror.html George Orwell would have disliked Barack Obama’s big speech on terror, because Orwell hated when politicians used words to hide ugly truths. In 1984, Orwell coined the term “double-speak.” He foresaw how men of state would misstate and mislead to stay in power, using words to distort more than to inform. Orwell knew politicians […]
