[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
The Jewish community of Amsterdam-Zuid are concerned about the arrival of a refugee center in Amstelveen-Noord, which local residents were informed about on Monday night. The proposed shelter will house 400 refugees, mostly from Syria and Iraq.
This weekend it was announced that the municipality of Amstelveen intends to shelter refugees in the office building on Laan van Kronenberg – less than a kilometer away from Buitenveldert, home to the largest Jewish community in the Netherlands.
The Central Jewish Board is concerned that there will be incidents. “Let there be no doubt that the Jewish community is overwhelmingly for the reception of war refugees. But we have major concerns”, chairman Ron van der Wieken said to NU on Monday. “These people come from countries such as Syria and Iraq, who traditionally take an extremely harsh tone against Jews. These people are largely brainwashed to hate Jews. You should not underestimate it.”
Ron Eisenmann, president of the Center for Information and Documentation Israel and faction leader of VVD Amsterdam-Zuid, also raised his concerns on Twitter. “Not a good plan, Syrian refugees in the middle of a Jewish neighborhood.”, he tweeted. This tweet was met with opposition from, among others, GroenLinks alderwoman in Waterland Laura Bromet. “Maybe you can point out a Syrian neighborhood where they can go”, she replied to his tweet.
VVD Amsterdam Zuid also released a statement on their website saying that they are concerned about support among residents of Buitenveldert. “Given the disquiet among residents in the area and the importance of social security, the VVD insists that adequate security and surveillance will be present in the district.” The party also wants the emergency shelter to only accommodate families.
Oh, okay. They are now concerned, they say. There might be incidents, they say.
Posted by Kumiko Oumae on Saturday, 17 October 2015 01:49.
As a quick illustration of just how interesting things have become, I’d like to demonstrate something about just how porous the borders are, and how little is known about those who are entering Europe now.
Migrants are also flowing from Syria and Iraq, along multiple routes that lead into Europe. Some of those people are fleeing persecution at the hands of ISIL because the leaders of the North Atlantic have not yet shown the political courage to commit themselves to ground war in Mesopotamia to undo the damage that has been done by the rise of ISIL.
At the centre of all of this, is now ISIL, which intends to graduate into being able to carry out strikes inside Europe by sending its operatives to form terrorist cells, which would be included among the economic migrants and asylum seekers, and who would be able to acquire their weapons through weapons smuggling networks which have existed in Central Asia and the Balkans since at least the late 1980s and are still intact.
[...]
We are accumulating more and more evidence of people who fought in the Middle East entering Europe. The difficulty of distinguishing between those who have an intent to carry out attacks and those who do not, increases as their numbers increase. That phenomenon looks something like this:
The Social Democrat Prime Minister announced an initiative called ‘Sweden Together’ (‘Sverige tillsammans’) on Thursday morning.
He said that municipalities, religious groups, sports associations, unions and public sector employers would all be invited to a major conference in October to discuss how to help refugees better integrate into Swedish communities.
The Prime Minister told Swedish public broadcaster Sveriges Radio that he wanted a more even distribution of refugees across all 290 municipalities in Sweden, a policy that has been pushed by Sweden’s integration minister Ylva Johansson in recent months.
At a press conference in Stockholm at midday, ahead of cross-party talks on the refugee crisis, Löfven said there would be a large focus on getting refugees into schooling and the work force.
“This is about them having a speedy entrance into our society and getting a job, education, and housing,” Löfven told reporters.
“For us to be able to get through this demographic challenge, we need to get more working. This means we need to quickly get those who have newly arrived into the work force. This is what our investments are aiming for.”
One concrete change that was announced at the press conference was an increase in the compensation for municipalities per refugee, which will be raised from 83,100 kronor ($9,867) to 125,000 kronor ($14,873).
The government said it would earmark 1.8 billion kronor for the entire package to be spent over the next year. 870 million kronor of this will go into helping refugees find work quicker, offering speedier translation and validation of foreign education
The leaders of Sweden’s centre-right Alliance parties which made up former Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt’s previous government are set to attend discussions with Löfven later in the day, along with the leaders of the government’s coalition partners the Greens and the Left Party. The nationalist anti-immigration Sweden Democrat party has not been invited.
“We must have a political gathering, both about what we’re doing here at home in Sweden, but also what Sweden stands for in the EU,” said Löfven, adding that it was currently “unhelpful” that Sweden and Germany were currently sharing the bulk of responsibility for new arrivals.
Sweden’s Prime Minister met Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin earlier this week. Both leaders told a press conference that they backed the introduction of new quotas to force other European countries to take in more refugees, as is being proposed by the European Commission.
The Nordic nation currently takes in more refugees per capita than any other EU member state.
Sweden’s Migration Board (Migrationsverket) received a total of 11,743 applications for asylum last month, up from 6,619 in June and 8,066 in July, as an increasing number of refugees headed for Scandinavia over the summer.
According to friends and business partners Abe Zeines and Meir Hurwitz, who decamped to Puerto Rico from Brooklyn for the tax benefits and live in a 6-bedroom house with several girlfriends apiece, there actually might be.
Zeines and Hurwitz made their money in a field that’s now called merchant cash advance. It’s a legal way to lend money to small businesses at interest rates higher than Mafia loan sharks once charged. Completely unregulated, last year it surpassed the U.S. Small Business Administration as a source of loans for less than $150,000, according to the industry newsletter DeBanked, one of the few places with reliable information. The business was developed a decade ago in a boiler room full of ex-Lubavitcher Jewish teenagers in downtown Manhattan. They figured out how to hook people such as florists and pizzeria owners with promises of fast cash and discovered just how ridiculous the profits could be—even if it meant driving their borrowers into bankruptcy.
Zeines was one of these guys… a curly-haired 33-year-old with a cockeyed grin, he dresses like a tourist, in flip-flops and T-shirts, and speaks with a Brooklyn Yiddish accent that turns -ing into -ink. Zeines knows all the players and all the tricks to separate people from their money, but he styles himself an outsider, someone who appreciates the absurdities of Ivy League-educated financiers getting in on a seedy business.
Zeines kept telling me he was going to sell his company to a hedge fund for tens of millions of dollars. I didn’t believe him, but I told him if it ever happened it would make a good story. Then, one day this spring, I was shown a copy of a letter from Goldman Sachs. It was addressed to Zeines’s company. The bank was offering him $100 million.
Mas. Shabbath 31b
On the house of the Goy [Goy means unclean, and is the disparaging term for a non-Jew] one looks as on the fold of cattle.
Libbre David 37
A Jew should and must make a false oath when the Goyim asks if our books contain anything against them.
Tosefta, Tractate Erubin VIII
When a Jew has a Gentile in his clutches, another Jew may go to same Gentile, lend him money and in turn deceive him, so that the Gentile shall be ruined. For the property of a Gentile, according to our law, belongs to no one, and the first Jew that passes has full right to seize it.
Sanhedrin 59a
To communicate anything to a Goy about our religious relations would be equal to the killing of all Jews, for if the Goyim knew what we teach about them, they would kill us openly.
Ibid:
With no competition, Second Source could charge whatever it wanted. The standard deal it offered small businesses was to borrow $9,000 and pay back $120 a day for six months, or a total of $14,500, equivalent to an interest rate of 250 percent a year. That’s 10 times the legal limit in New York state, which made it a crime in the 1960s to charge more than 25 percent. To get around that, merchant cash-advance companies argue they aren’t actually charging interest—they’re buying the money businesses will make in the future, at a discount. As long as nobody uses the word “loan,” it usually holds up in court, says Robert Cook, a lawyer who advises the industry. Another no-no is chasing down an individual to collect if the business fails. Merchant cash advance is a supercharged version of “factoring,” the age-old practice of trading the right to collect unpaid bills in exchange for cash upfront.
At Second Source, the best customers were the most desperate
Cash advance was no longer a secret. Lots of former colleagues from Second Source were opening brokerages, and venture capitalists and private equity funds were discovering the trade. In February 2011 a lender called OnDeck Capital, which uses algorithms to identify the best borrowers and undercut companies such as Pearl, raised $25 million from Silicon Valley venture firms. CAN Capital, another competitor, raised $30 million in 2012 from early Facebook investor Accel Partners. Others raised tens of millions of dollars more.
Competition brought out Zeines’s ingenuity. Instead of building his own boiler room, he became a wholesaler. He told brokers to send him their shakiest customers. He also came up with ways to squeeze even more money from businesses that already had advances. He offered them a second loan, making it due in just two or three months, so it would get paid off before their existing debt. Other funders would lend only against credit-card sales, but Zeines would fund anyone with a bank account from which he could automatically withdraw payments.
The strategy worked so well, Zeines and Hurwitz say, they were doubling their money a few times a year. They started Pearl with $1 mil and earned $8 million in 2012, their first full year. Profit doubled in 2013, and loan volume reached $100 million.
Ibid:
The borrowers included people like Dermot O’Hare, a 60-year-old immigrant from Belfast, Northern Ireland, who ran an Irish pub with his wife in Susquehanna, Pa. As he was tending bar one day in 2013, worrying about how to get through the winter, a broker called. O’Hare took out one cash advance at about 500 percent, and then another one from Pearl at 400 percent. The daily payments turned out to be unmanageable. O’Hare filed for bankruptcy in February 2014, and a bank foreclosed on the bar. He moved to Ohio to live with his in-laws and took a job at a Lowe’s store. “It broke our hearts leaving the joint, but what can you do?” O’Hare says. “Shame on me for falling for it.”
Posted by Kumiko Oumae on Friday, 09 October 2015 02:48.
FLASHBACK: THINGS VLADIMIR PUTIN ACTUALLY SAID II
The series is, as I promised yesterday, ongoing. This is the second instalment of flashbacks as to how much Vladimir Putin and Russians in general despise all ethno-nationalists and ethno-regionalists and would dearly love to shut all of us down.
Here’s one from last year that everyone forgot about, which involved the use of the infrastructure of the United Nations. This was the time when Russia tried to trick the world into promising to outlaw all forms of all advocacy of ethnic self-defence:
And here’s the relevant excerpt:
Russia is the only country to date that has had the gall to attempt something like that, and to have chosen the timing that they chose. Given the mass migration problem that Europe is presently facing, it makes that little episode truly significant.
Basically, if there is a person who believes that Russia is not a mortal enemy on these issues, then I have a bridge to sell such a person, and it’s on the moon.
In a special letter sent to Russia’s Chief Rabbi Sunday, Russian President Vladimir Putin wished the Jewish community throughout the country a “sweet and happy new year” on the eve of Rosh Hashana, according to Russian State media.
The note, addressed to the office of Russian Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar, also connoted Putin’s admiration for the Russian Jewish community’s strength and unity, saying “For centuries, Jewish values inspire lofty ideals” while bridging together “relations among different peoples…through charity (and) education, all in the interest of the public good.”
Putin went on to say that the scourge of hatred and intolerance towards the Jewish community must be combated in Russia, with “fierce opposition to any manifestation of anti-Semitism and xenophobia.”
Putin ended the letter by writing that he wishes the Jews of Russia “good health, happiness and wealth,” in the new year to come.
Ostensibly, Putin’s relationship with the Jewish community in Russia has been amicable, with leaders in the past praising his outreach. In April, Alexander Boroda, head of the Chabad-affiliated Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, went so far as to say that the survival of Russian Jewry was dependent on Putin staying in power.
“The Jews of Russia must realize the dangers inherent in the possible collapse of the Putin government, understand the rules of the game and be aware of the limitations,” Boroda said during a talk at Moscow’s 9th annual Jewish learning event organized by Limmud FSU.
MOSCOW— A senior Russian rabbi warned of grave danger to Jews if Russian President Vladimir Putin is swept from power.
Alexander Boroda, head of the Chabad-affiliated Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, made the warning Friday during a talk at Moscow’s 9th annual Jewish learning event organized by Limmud FSU.
“The Jews of Russia must realize the dangers inherent in the possible collapse of the Putin government, understand the rules of the game and be aware of the limitations,” Boroda said at a sessions, according to a translation provided by Limmud FSU.
The Moscow conference, which drew 1,400 participants, opened Friday at the state-owned Klyasma resort just outside the Russian capital.
Boroda’s Federation is among several Russian Jewish organizations that credit Putin for facilitating efforts to re-consolidate Russia’s Jewish community of 350,000 after decades of communist repression.
Under Putin, dozens of synagogues have been renovated with government support and a massive Jewish museum was opened in Moscow with state funding.
“In Russia, there is virtually unlimited freedom of religion and the Jewish community must ensure this situation continues,” Boroda said. “The support for religious institutions is wider than in the United States and defense of Jews against manifestations of anti-Semitism is greater than in other European countries. We do not have the privilege of losing what we have achieved and the support of the government for the community.”
All Russian Jews and especially those considering action against the Putin administration, Boroda said, “must understand the grave dangers that they take upon themselves and the potential consequences.”
Such endorsements of Putin by Jewish leaders have exposed them to criticism by liberal Jews and Jews in Ukraine, who oppose Putin’s crackdown on civil liberties and rivals, annexation of Ukrainian land and perceived nationalism.
Viktoria Mochilova, a Limmud FSU participant and social activist, dismissed Boroda’s message as one-sided and unrepresentative. While appreciative of government support for Jews, they, “similar to other Russian citizens, [desire] to improve the situation of the state and to strive to make it more democratic and honest,” she said.
Just in case any of you are wondering who Rabbi Berel Lazar is in relation to Vladimir Putin, that he should be the one to receive such a warm note of appreciation from him, read this:
Rabbi Berel Lazar’s mother was eager for grandchildren. So she gave her 25-year-old son an ultimatum: He could return to his beloved Jewish outreach work in Russia if — and only if — he got married.
His yeshiva classmates jokingly said he was already wed, “to the idea of going to Russia,” said Lazar, the son of Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries in Milan, Italy.
A few months after his mother put her foot down in 1989, Lazar wed his American-born wife, Channa, and the couple settled in Moscow, where they raised 14 children.
An emissary for Chabad, Lazar, 51, would go on to become one of Russia’s two chief rabbis, a major and controversial force in the dramatic revival of Russian Jewry following decades of Communist oppression and mass immigration to Israel, the United States, Germany and elsewhere.
Lazar’s work, his Russia boosterism and his ties to the Kremlin — he is sometimes called “Putin’s rabbi” — has helped Chabad’s Russian branch eclipse all the Jewish groups vying to reshape the country’s community of 250,000 Jews. Now Lazar heads a vast network that comprises dozens of employees and plentiful volunteers working in hundreds of Jewish institutions: schools, synagogues, community centers and kosher shops.
“I am amazed at what became of a community that had been stripped of everything, even its books,” Lazar said, referring to Soviet Jewry before the fall of communism, when religious practice was suppressed.
Today, Lazar said, Russia has in Vladimir Putin its “most pro-Jewish leader,” whom he credits with “fighting anti-Semitism more vigorously than any Russian leader before him.”
But criticism of Lazar’s partnership with Putin persists as the Russian president makes use of his pro-Jewish credentials in justifying his policies. The strongman has repeatedly cited the alleged anti-Semitism of Ukrainian nationalists in justifying Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Ukraine-controlled Crimea. In January, Putin inveighed against Ukrainian nationalists — he called them “Banderites,” a reference to the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera — during a speech he delivered on International Holocaust Memorial Day, when he was Lazar’s guest at Moscow’s Jewish museum. Lazar has also been criticized for his presence at Kremlin events, like the one last year celebrating Russia’s Crimea annexation. (“Like other clerics, my duties include officiating at state events,” Lazar said in an interview with JTA.)
To Roman Bronfman, a former Israeli lawmaker and author of a book about Russian-Jewish immigration to Israel, the relationship between Putin and Lazar is a “beneficiary symbiosis.” Lazar’s support for Putin, Bronfman said, “is a constant and the basis of his claim to the title of chief rabbi.”
Lazar was Chabad’s chief envoy to Russia before staking claim to the title of chief rabbi in 2000. That’s when he quit the Russian Jewish Congress, an umbrella group, after the organization’s founder, Vladimir Gusinsky, and Russia’s other chief rabbi, Adolf Shayevich, criticized Russia’s war in Chechnya and its alleged human rights abuses — including the alleged targeting, by anti-corruption authorities, of political dissidents.
“Challenging the government is not the Jewish way, and [Gusinsky] put the Jewish community in harm’s way,” said Lazar, noting that the chief rabbi should be apolitical, not a government critic. “I wanted to have nothing to do with this.”
Shayevich, who has been chief rabbi since 1993, heads the Keroor religious congress, a body responsible for religious services at affiliated synagogues. In March, Keroor and Lazar’s Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS, or FJC — both are Orthodox bodies — signed a nonaggression pact in which the groups committed to not speak ill of one another in public. The agreement ended years of acrimonious exchanges in the media, but Keroor to this day does not recognize Lazar’s claim to his title of chief rabbi.
In recent years, however, Lazar’s federation eclipsed Keroor in prominence and reach. FJC operates in 160 cities, compared to Keroor’s 34. In addition, FJC has departments in other former Soviet countries, which means Lazar also has considerable clout in the Jewish communities of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, and elsewhere.
In 2012, Moscow opened a $50 million Jewish museum that is headed by Lazar’s top aide, Rabbi Boruch Gorin.
Putin’s support for the Jewish community, Lazar said, “flows from his respect for religion and warm sentiments” to Judaism, not out of political calculation. Russian Jews, Lazar added in reference to Putin’s time in office, “have a duty to use this golden hour and press ahead with community growth.” Still, Putin was quick to leverage the new Jewish museum for his needs.
In 2013, the space became Putin’s answer to an international legal dispute involving the Schneerson Library — composed of texts by Joseph I. Schneerson, a late leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, which have been held by the Russian state since Communist authorities confiscated them in 1917. A U.S. federal judge in 2013 ruled in favor of Chabad lawyers in the United States who are seeking the return of the library to Brooklyn, where the Hasidic group is based.
Lazar reluctantly agreed to Putin’s request that the texts be housed in the museum as a form of compromise. The claimants in New York refuse to see it as such, but the move showed Putin’s influence over Lazar.
“He wanted to solve a problem,” Lazar said of Putin’s so-called compromise, “though it may have caused a problem for me.”
But Lazar and Putin’s relationship seems to go deeper than political expediency. In 2012, Lazar led the Russian leader on a tour of Jerusalem’s Western Wall. And last year Putin made Lazar a member of Russia’s prestigious Merit to the Fatherland order, the country’s highest civilian decoration and one that is rarely conferred on people who were not born in Russia. (Lazar became a Russian citizen in 2000.)
Lazar’s prominence has a powerful effect on his constituents. At a recent brit milah in Moscow, men from a Sephardic family from the Caucasus lined up to shake his hand at a shul that fell silent when Lazar stepped in. After the shake, they kissed their own palm as a show of their reverence for Lazar, whom some in attendance described as a great sage.
Many Russian-Jewish leaders are happy to bask in the warmth of such adoration. But to Lazar — who has armed guards, a chauffeur and several assistants — his congregants’ reverence is an unwanted byproduct of a title he neither coveted nor particularly enjoys, he said. If not for his current position, Lazar said, he would have preferred to be a teacher like his father in Milan.
Dovid Eliezrie, a Chabad rabbi who recently completed writing a book on the movement’s global outreach efforts, said Lazar for months resisted pressure by other Chabad leaders to accept the title of chief rabbi. Lazar acquiesced only after a former Israeli chief rabbi revealed that Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the revered Chabad leader who died in 1994, had said Lazar would be a good candidate for becoming Russia’s chief rabbi one day.
The title, as Lazar has come to see it, is nothing more than “a tool that allows me to achieve certain goals for my community.”
Would anyone among the pro-Kremlin and pro-Russian crowd out there, like to explain what on earth all of that is?
Vladimir Putin is the same kind of man who various white nationalist parties believe is someone under whose auspices European civilisation can find recourse from the hazardous liberal political environment in the North Atlantic. Is it possible for these parties and those who are inclined to share that belief in Russia and in Putin, to be any more cucked than that?
Dire warning: The leaflets being dropped to warn people to get out of the zone of ‘special operations’ - and one implies that Isis and al-Nusra Front terrorists terror groups are backed by America and Israel
Flyers are aimed at both civilians and fighters, and warn them to leave area
One says leave ‘special operations’ zone ahead of possible ground attack
Another urged ISIS and rebel fighters to give up their arms
Moscow’s warplanes have been conducting airstrikes on Syria for six days. softening up targets ahead of an expected large-scale ground operation
A pamphlet aimed at civilians, and designed to look like ‘religious literature’, read: ‘Co-operate with the army and leave the zone of the special operations for the sake of your own life.’
It said they can travel through Syrian checkpoints safely with the leaflet, and the government will give them ‘shelter, food and medical aid’.
Another one, meant for ISIS fighters, said: ‘Don’t make it even worse for yourselves.
‘The Motherland [presumably Syria] is ready to hug you back again. Give up your arms as hundreds of other young guys like you have done.’
One of the pamphlets, obtained by the Kremlin-friendly Russian Komsomolskaya Pravda website, featured a cartoon of an al-Nusra front figurine being wound up by Israel and the United States.
“So yes. Russia is officially accusing the Jews of running ISIS.
That is a thing which is now happening.” - Daily Stormer
Colleagues are alleged to have said that reporting the crime would set back their struggle for a borderless world.
The ‘No Borders’ activist had dedicated a month of her life to helping migrants. Her group was stationed between Italy and France in Ponte San Ludovico in Ventimiglia when the atrocity occurred, according to reports from local papers La Stampa and Il Secolo XIX, and now reported in the major Italian national Corriere Della Serra.
One Saturday night, as loud music played at a nearby party, the woman was reportedly trapped in a shower block set up near the camp in a pine forest know as Red Leap.
A gang of African migrants allegedly raped her there, and her cries for help are said to have gone unheard because of the music.
La Stampa reports that the woman, around 30 years of age, would have reported the horrific crime were if not for her fellow left-wing activists, who convinced her that if the truth got out it could damage their utopian dream of a world without borders.
But Corriere Della Serra also reports that some of her fellow activists are now accusing the woman of reporting the rape out of “spite,” because her group was withdrawn from the camp following a separate controversy.
The town of Ventimiglia, where the alleged crime occurred, has been a flashpoint in the ongoing migrant crisis.
On the 30th September around 50 migrants and 20 activists were cleared from an illegal camp there. The activists organised a protest, whereby 250 migrants conducted a “sit in” on the shoreline.
Yesterday, Osman Suliman, 20, a Sudanese asylum seeker who had been in the UK for just five months, appeared in court.
He was charged with the rape of a Nottingham woman last weekend, the 26th of September, The Nottingham Post reports.
