[Majorityrights News] KP interview with James Gilmore, former diplomat and insider from first Trump administration Posted by Guessedworker on Sunday, 05 January 2025 00:35.
[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[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.
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.
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 07 October 2015 09:12.
Seriously, Estonia, Luxembourg & Sweden are to be thronged within days, as invaders are directed northward from their Mediterranean beachheads:
(ANSA) - Brussels, October 2 - EU sources said Friday the relocation of asylum seekers from Italy to other EU nations including Estonia, Luxembourg and Sweden will begin “within days”. The idea is to get it done before the next EU summit on October 15, the sources said. EU interior ministers agreed in September to resettle 120,000 asylum seekers from Greece and Italy - where most refugees fleeing across the Mediterranean usually make first landfall - to other member States.
Of auguries, apparitions and specters.. .
With the help of the Swedish government, Barbara Spectre set-up a non-denominational institute of Jewish learning with the Greek name of Paideia -
She believes Jews have a key role to play in a country undergoing profound change:
“I think there is a resurgence of anti-Semitism because Europe has not yet learned how to be multicultural; and I think that we’re going to be part of the throes of that transformation, which much take place. Europe is not going to be the ‘monolithic’ ..uh, uh, societies they once were in the last century. Jews are going to be at the center of that - it’s a huge transformation for Europe to make. They are now going into a multi-cultural mode, and Jews will be resented because of our leading role.”
She adds….”but without that leading role and with out that transformation, Europe will not survive.” - ??
Introducing Kenneth Griffin, a blue eyed White guy who funds no civil rights or anti-defamation league for Whites:
The billionaire hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin is known as an aggressive trader who waits for prices to fall before buying. But when it comes to personal real estate, Mr. Griffin appears to be less price-sensitive.
Over the last two years, Mr. Griffin, the chief executive of the investment firm Citadel, has gone on a multicity real estate shopping spree. He has spent nearly $300 million and set new price records in three cities, according to people familiar with his buying. They requested anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the deals.
The buying binge includes the purchase last year of two full floors of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Chicago, the city where Citadel is based and where Mr. Griffin, 46, has his main residence. He paid $13.3 million for the 37th floor and $16 million for the 46th floor, totaling just under $30 million. If combined, the deal would be the most expensive real estate purchase in Chicago.
In New York this year, Mr. Griffin agreed to purchase three full floors — totaling over 18,000 square feet — at 220 Central Park South, the condo tower under construction in Midtown. According to people familiar with the deal, the purchase includes a main residence as well as several other apartments that could be used for staff or guests. Mr. Griffin paid around $200 million for the space — a price that brokers say is a record in New York.
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 03 October 2015 16:27.
Even where not required by EU quotas, Ireland’s Catholic bishops are calling for Irish parishes to accept and settle refugees who “will be arriving for months and years to come.”
Prelates seek reform of direct provision for asylum seekers to avoid two-tier system
The Catholic bishops have called on parishes throughout the island to mobilise resources to help with the resettlement of migrants who come to Ireland.
They have also called for urgent reform in direct provision for asylum seekers to avoid the emergence of an unjust two-tier system.
In a statement on Thursday afternoon, the bishops encouraged “all members of our parish communities to explore how they might offer their services, talents, time and commitment to supporting the resettlement of refugees through practical parish actions such as friendship and welcome schemes, English language classes, trauma counselling and medical services, as well as legal advice services”.
Demanding solidarity
They noted how “local communities across the island of Ireland have reacted to the worsening refugee crisis by mobilising to demand greater solidarity from European political leaders. The swift and enthusiastic response to Pope Francis’s appeal to parishes shows a ready willingness to help and a recognition that our parishes need to be places of welcome to all.
“Bishops are working with clergy and other diocesan personnel, as well as faith-based organisations, to assess our capacity to contribute to the national and international response.”
They said that “given the magnitude of the current crisis, refugees will be arriving for months and years to come, and it will be some years before they can safely return to their country of origin. Co-operation and clear sharing of responsibility across relevant Government departments, to address different types of need, is a necessary foundation for strategic planning.”
Move is aimed at atoning for the ‘historic mistake’ of forcing Sephardic Jews to leave on pain of death
October 2, 2015
Spain granted citizenship on Friday for 4,302 Sephardic Jews under a new law aimed at atoning for the expulsion of their Jewish ancestors five centuries ago in the Inquisition.
The law allowing dual citizenship for descendants of Jews who were forced to flee Spain in 1492 or face burning at the stake was approved by the Spanish parliament in June and came into force on Thursday.
But Justice Minister Rafael Catala said Friday the government had approved an extra measure to save paperwork for thousands who had already filed applications for nationality before the latest law came into force.
The new decree “has allowed us at one stroke to grant nationality to 4,302 people of Sephardic origin” whose applications under previous legislation were already pending, Catala told a news conference after a cabinet meeting.
“This is one more step in developing the law for granting nationality to the Sephardim,” he said in reference to the descendents of Spanish Jews forceed into exile.
“It seemed fair, rather than making them go through the process of filing their applications again, to speed up the process.”
The measure aims to correct what the Spanish government has called the “historic mistake” of the country’s Catholic monarchs sending Jews into exile in 1492.
Jewish groups welcomed the law in June, though some Jewish leaders complained the requirements are too burdensome.
Applicants do not have to be practising Jews but they must have their ancestry vetted by Jewish authorities and prove a “special connection” to and knowledge of Spain.
Historians believe at least 200,000 Jews lived in Spain before the monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand ordered them to convert to the Catholic faith or leave the country on pain of death.
Up to 3.5 million people around the world are thought to have Sephardic Jewish ancestry.
