RUTHFULLY YOURS

Rabbi David Rosen arrived in Riyadh to participate in an interfaith meeting in Saudi Arabia.

By World Israel News Staff

A rabbi named David Rosen became the first Jewish clergyman from Israel to be hosted by the king of Saudi Arabia in his Riyadh royal palace.

The meeting happened last week, Times of Israel reported, as part of a gathering held by the King Abdullah International Center for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue (KAICIID). Rosen is a member of KAICIID’s board of directors.

The Times quoted Rosen as saying that the meeting represented the first-ever interfaith group hosted by King Salman.

Rosen also serves as director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee and was the only Jewish member on the nine-person KAICIID board that met with King Salman last week.

Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism rounded out the faiths with representation on the KAICIID board in Riyadh.

A British-born immigrant to Israel, Rosen also sits on the Israeli Chief Rabbinate’s Commission for Interreligious Dialogue.

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2020/02/can-macron-halt-the-rise-of-islamic-extremism/

Emmanuel Macron has unveiled his plan to combat the rise of Islamic extremism in France. Stressing that his fight was not against the religion but political Islam, ‘which has no place’ in the Republic, the president outlined a series of measures in a speech last week. Notably, his plans involve an end to the hosting of imams from countries such as Turkey and Algeria, and more rigorous control on foreign financing of mosques from the likes of Qatar.

Macron stopped short of introducing an ‘Islam of France’, which had been mooted two years ago, but his intention is to eliminate the malevolent influence of outsiders.

But is it too late to stop what Macron described as the ‘Islamist separatism’ of France, a process that began in the 1980s when François Mitterrand’s Socialist government turned a blind eye to the ‘re-islamisation’ of the suburbs by men who took their inspiration from the Iranian revolution?

The alarm was first raised in 2002 with the publication of Les Territoires perdus de la République (The Lost Territories of the Republic) by Georges Bensoussan, in which he exposed the extent of this re-islamisation.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/iran-still-reeling-nearly-two-months-after-suleimani-assassination/

The U.S. assassination of Quds Force commander Qasem Suleimani on January 3 was a dramatic event—but how much did it really set Iran back? After all, he was only one official; couldn’t Iran just replace him and move on?

Almost two months later, a report in The Guardian says that’s not so, and that Iran—and the Revolutionary Guard of which Suleimani’s Quds Force was the spearhead—is still trying to recover.

“There were 11 bodies pulled from the wreckage,” said one [apparently Iraqi] official. “We are talking about the entire inner sanctum of the Quds Force. This wasn’t just Hajj Qassem [Suleimani] and Abu Mahdi [al-Muhandis]. This was everyone who mattered to them in Iraq and beyond.”

Another source, a western intelligence agency, was more circumspect, suggesting that those killed may have been less decisive in the Iranian nexus than the Iraqis believed.

But even if that Western intelligence agency is right, The Guardian goes on to say:

From the bunkers of south Beirut to the battlefields of northern Syria and the combustible streets of Iraq, the loss of Suleimani and his entourage has derailed much of Iran’s momentum in the region….

“Two senior sources in Beirut” told The Guardian that Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah “agreed to help fill the gaping hole left by the deaths of Suleimani and Muhandis. But there were limits to what he could do. He had lived a life even more in the shadows than the Iranian general for the past 14 years. And a drone strike from a night sky was unlikely to make him feel safer.”