New Palestinian 'Christian' President is a Fan of Israel - Israel Today

New Palestinian 'Christian' President is a Fan of Israel

Wednesday, February 06, 2019 |  Israel Today Staff

El Salvador's new president is an Arab of "Palestinian" descent. He's also a fan of the Jewish state.

The small Central American nation is home to a community of 100,000 Palestinian migrants. While it is unclear how most of them view the Israel-Palestinian conflict, what we do know is that President-elect Nayib Bukele has no problem building relations with the Jewish state.

A year ago, in February 2018, at a time when many of his political contemporaries were cozying up to Venezuela and Cuba to spite US President Donald Trump, Bukele chose to visit Jerusalem.

While here, the then-mayor of El Salvador's capital, San Salvador, met with his counterpart, then-Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat. He also laid a memorial wreath at Yad Vashem and prayed at the Western Wall.

Arab media reported that Bukele faced harsh criticism from Palestinians in El Salvador over his "normalization" with Israel. It also seems that he was vilified, possibly by conservative Catholic elements, for visiting a mosque.

In a Facebook post addressing what he called these "dirty" campaign tactics, Bukele insisted that he was simply not "religious," and therefore had no problem visiting the Dome of the Rock, the Vatican and the Western Wall.

However, while he has problems with organized religion, Bukele stressed that he does believe in Jesus and relies upon the Word of God to guide his life.

"I respect all religions, and those who wish to believe in them, but I believe that the relationship with God is personal, I believe that no one is saved in groups, but that salvation is obtained individually," wrote El Salvador's new leader. "That's why I've accepted Jesus Christ, that's why I read the Word of God written in the Bible when I feel confused or need guidance, that's why I ask Yahweh for the wisdom he gave to Solomon, though I know I'll never be so wise. That's why I believe deeply in God and in his kingdom, but I don't consider myself religious."

H/T Elder of Ziyon

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Fierce Female Christian Warriors Take on ISIS - BREAKING ISRAEL NEWS

A female battalion of Kurdish soldiers. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Fierce Female Christian Warriors Take on ISIS

By Abra Forman December 13, 2015 BREAKING ISRAEL NEWS

“Be strong, and let us fight bravely for our people and the cities of our God. The Lord will do what is good in his sight.” (2 Samuel 10:12)

Fifty Syriac Christian women in Syria’s Hasakeh region have left their homes, families, and jobs behind in order to join an all-female battalion formed to fight the growing menace of the Islamic State.

The battalion, known as the “Female Protection Forces of the Land Between the Two Rivers” – those two rivers being the Tigris and Euphrates – graduated its first recruits in August. So far, about fifty women have graduated from its training camp in the town of Al-Qahtaniyeh.

Syriac Christians, who pray in the ancient Aramaic language, follow the eastern Christian tradition. Both Orthodox and Catholic branches exist within the community, which makes up about 15 percent of Syria’s Christian population.

The Christian community in Syria constituted about five percent of the country’s total population before the conflict with ISIS began. Since then, the militant Islamic state has systematically driven thousands of Syrian Christians from their homeland and killed and enslaved thousands more.

The women in the new all-female battalion are eager to join the resistance against ISIS. Some credit their religious values with the desire to enter the fight. According to the Times of Israel, one fighter, Babylonia, 36, told AFP, “I’m a practicing Christian and thinking about my children makes me stronger and more determined in my fight against Daesh (ISIS).”

She said that her husband, also a fighter, encouraged her to join the battalion, leaving behind their two children. “I miss Limar and Gabriella and worry that they must be hungry, thirsty and cold. But I try to tell them I’m fighting to protect their future,” she told AFP.

Indeed, the future is dark for women and children under the control of ISIS, which has notoriously built a network of sex slavery, trading and selling kidnapped and enslaved women throughout their territory.

The battalion has already seen action, fighting alongside the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which is made up of a coalition of Kurdish, Arab and Christian fighters, to capture the strategically located town of Al-Hol. The victory was significant for the SDF, as the town lies on a key route between ISIS-controlled territory in Syria and Iraq.

The Syriac Female Protection Forces are not the first all-female fighting unit to face ISIS. Last summer, a unit made up of Yazidi women, who are among the most persecuted under ISIS, formed to take on the sprawling jihadist state, which has kidnapped and killed thousands of Yazidis.

Opinion: Palestinian Terrorists Aiming to Replace ISIS as 'Chief Butchers'? - Erick Stakelbeck, CBN News

Erick Stakelbeck -  CBN

Opinion: Palestinian Terrorists Aiming to Replace ISIS as 'Chief Butchers'?

By John Waage

CBN News Sr. Editor

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Both Arab and Israeli observers of the daily stabbing attacks by Palestinians in Jerusalem and other Israeli cities say the terrorists seem to be modeling their attacks after the beheadings conducted by ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

Palestinian cartoonists frequently celebrate the stabbings with cartoons on social media. One shows a woman wearing the Muslim hijab stabbing a pig dripping blood with a star of David on its back.

Last week in an interview with CBN News, Israeli Infrastructure Minister Yuval Steinitz warned that some of the attacks in Israel look as if they came from the ISIS playbook.

Are Palestinian terrorists adopting ISIS's tactics? CBN News Terrorism Erick Stakelbeck addressed that and more on Newswatch, Oct. 19.

Click here to watch the CBN News interview: Erick Stakelbeck

"The fact that they're waving knives, coming to people's necks, trying to cut them or behead them -- I'm confident that at least some of these terrorists were not just indoctrinated but inspired also from ISIS," Steinitz said.

Palestinian journalist Bassam Tawil confirms the suspicion in a powerful article for the Gatestone Institute.

"They (the Palestinian terrorists) are trying to replace Islamic State jihadis as the chief "butchers" of humans in the Middle East," Tawil wrote.

"How can our leaders in Ramallah accuse Jews of 'contaminating' the Al Aqsa Mosque with their 'filthy feet' at a time when our youths burn a religious site such as Joseph's Tomb?" Tawil asked.

"The attacks are an attempt to erase history so that Jews will not be able to claim any religious ties to the land. This is exactly what the Islamic State is doing in Syria and Iraq," he added.

ISIS confirmed its support for the Palestinian attacks with the release of a video on social media Monday. A masked spokesman praised the Palestinian attackers as "lone wolves who refuse to be subdued and spread fear among the sons of Zion."

The ISIS media campaign, unprecdented in scope, calls for Palestinians to continue the attacks on soldiers and civilians, using "every means at their disposal, including knives, vehicles, poison and explosives."

With this as a backdrop, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will meet Thursday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Germany.

White House and State Department responses to the wave of violence have been tepid and laced with the usual moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinian leaders, who have in large measure sparked the violence as well as applauded it.

A more appropriate response would be to condemn without qualification the spread of terror throughout the Palestinian territories and the ISIS connection, including the incitement to violence and the celebration of it in the Palestinian media.

Democratic presidential candidates might also help by demanding a more robust response from their president.

Republicans in Congress could help by tracking the flow of hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars to the Palestinian Authority and forcing a public account of where our tax dollars are being spent.

Get with it, Washington, or your approval ratings will drop even further.

Arab Hatred for Israel Turns to Love

Thursday, July 16, 2015 |  Charles Gardner  ISRAEL TODAY

An Egyptian church leader now based in West London has told how hatred for their ancient enemy Israel turned to love through reading the Bible.

Sameh Metry leads a lively 100-strong Arabic congregation in Ealing while at the same time serving as vicar of an English-speaking church in nearby St Hugh’s, Northolt. And he showed his keyboard skills as he led a high-octane worship session during a conference in Manchester aimed at building bridges between Middle Eastern followers of Jesus.

He was born into a Coptic Orthodox family in Upper Egypt and became a born-again Christian at 15.

But he explained that even Christians in Egypt are encouraged to hate Jews and that in writing essays, for example, the more vitriol you could express against them the higher marks you would get.

“But whenever I read about Israel in the Bible I fell in love with these people; something happened in my heart connecting me with them. I identified with them, even wondering if perhaps I had Jewish ancestry.”

Before he began a theological course in Singapore, the principal warned him that they prayed for Israel at the college, and was shocked to discover it was not a problem for him.

He started a successful Bible school in Egypt, with 350 students enrolled, but the secret service closed it down. He was jailed for a time and prevented from leaving the country, but eventually got out with the help of a friendly customs official and settled in London where he founded a Bible school and started his church.

Asked if he believed Arabs and Jews could be reconciled, he answered in the affirmative, adding: “But only in Jesus.”

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Jerusalem is Israel's Capital (and Other Inconvenient Truths)

Wednesday, July 15, 2015 |  Bassem Eid  ISRAEL TODAY

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Peace Process

It has long been said that neither Israelis nor Palestinians are sensitive to each other’s narrative, and that there cannot be a true peace process without the willingness to appreciate the other side’s history, pain, suffering, hopes and dreams.

In simpler terms, negotiations cannot go anywhere without a mutually agreed baseline of truth. Sadly, a shared truth has always been one of the missing ingredients between Israelis and Palestinians, and the U.S. as would-be mediator is not helping.

Take the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision supporting the right of the President to decide that Israel does not have sovereignty over Jerusalem. I have no issue with the constitutional matter of who gets to make those decisions; every President asserts his right to make foreign policy decisions without Congressional meddling.

The problem is that the U.S. position reeks of political correctness and a refusal to tell the truth. Under any final-status agreement, Jerusalem will remain Israel’s capital, even if one day East Jerusalem ends up being the capital of a new Palestinian state. U.S. unwillingness to state this forthrightly only serves to patronize Palestinians, to unnecessarily antagonize our Israeli neighbor, and to illustrate why U.S. mediation has not been particularly effective.

The U.S. administration’s position on Jerusalem is inconsistent and even contrary to its general policy towards Israel / Palestine. When Israel declared its independence following the 1947 U.N. partition plan that called for two states, Palestinians and the Arab world rejected the partition plan and attacked Israel with the intent to destroy it. 

Israel not only survived, but the war ended with Israel holding territories beyond those allocated to the Jewish state in the Partition Plan. Those 1949 Armistice lines are now referred to as the 1967 borders, or the “green line.”  If West Jerusalem, which has been inside the green line since 1949, is not recognized as part of Israel, then none of the territories beyond the U.N. plan can be recognized as present day Israeli territory; if that is U.S. policy, Washington should say so openly.

Of course, the U.S. is not about to change its general policy on Israel / Palestine, but its stated policy on Jerusalem is an unsavory mix of evasions and falsehoods that hurt U.S. credibility. Here in my opinion are the hard but necessary steps that the three main protagonists in this conflict should take:

• Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas openly admitted that Palestinian rejection of the U.N. partition plan was a mistake, but then he asks why Palestinians have been punished by Israel ever since. Instead of finger-pointing, Abbas must acknowledge that Palestinians should have demanded that Jordan turn over the West Bank territories and East Jerusalem when it was under Amman’s control between 1949 and 1967. Abbas should add that the 1967 Six Day War also was a big mistake, just as the late King Hussein did. And Abbas should continue by saying that the two, deadly and years-long Intifadas that killed thousands of Palestinians and Israelis were also wrong, and that Palestinians should have taken seriously Israel’s peace offerings over the years. After all, he now bemoans the opportunity he squandered when former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proposed what Abbas now calls a genuine peace plan.
• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asserts that he supports a two-state solution. If that is true, he should say that while disposition of existing settlements will be left for negotiations, there will be no new settlements in the West Bank. He should state that he does not want Israel to have to choose between maintaining its Jewish character and its democratic ideals. To be a peacemaker, though, he must go further, saying that he understands the need for Palestinian dignity and freedom, which must come about in the context of assuring Israel’s security. In fact, he must tell the Israeli public that Palestinian statehood is in Israel’s security interest.
• If President Barack Obama wants Israel to appreciate the purity of his motives as he delivers his messages of “tough love” to Israel regarding settlements, he should share similar expressions with Palestinian leaders by calling them out on their undiminished culture of hate that vilifies Israelis and Jews, extols terrorists and murderers, and refuses to prepare their people for peace and reconciliation. He must tell Abbas that Jews should have every right to live in a future Palestinian state, just as 20% of Israelis today are Palestinians. And he must end the fiction that Jerusalem – at least its western half – is not the capital of Israel, so that Palestinians have no doubt about the parameters of what the two-state solution can accomplish. 

This would be a good start towards a shared truth and therefore towards peace, though no doubt there are many other things that Obama, Netanyahu, and Abbas should tell each other and their people instead of following the advice of fearful political operatives. In addition to finding it liberating to speak so honestly, they might be surprised at how much good it can accomplish.

* Bassem Eid is a Palestinian human rights activist, political analyst and political commentator. He has agreed to write periodic commentaries for Israel Today Magazine. Don't miss out - SUBSCRIBE NOW >> 

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Jewish, Arab, Iranian Believers Prove Peace is Possible

Tuesday, June 30, 2015 |  Israel Today Staff

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Messianic Jews

With the Middle East engulfed in flames, a story of peace and reconciliation was unfolding last week in Manchester, England, where delegates from all over the Muslim world came together for a unique conference.

And as Iran continues its aggressive stance against Israel, threatening to wipe the Jewish state off the map, Iranian refugees and asylum seekers now living in Britain embraced their Jewish ‘brothers’, some of whom had travelled from Jerusalem to meet with them.

Also present was a sizable contingent of Egyptians along with representatives from Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon and Algeria. Others wanting to join them had been unable to get visas.

As part of the great untold story of the Middle East, the three-day conference was hosted by the Church’s Ministry among Jewish people (CMJ), a 200-year-old Anglican society specifically dedicated to spiritual revival in Israel.

Although working mainly among Jews since its founding in 1809 by slave trade abolitionist William Wilberforce and others, CMJ has also consistently reached out to Arabs over the years and, in 2012, held their first At the Crossroads conference at their Jerusalem headquarters to enable Jew and Gentile to express their oneness in Christ and work together to spread the gospel on the basis of a prophecy from Isaiah (chapter 19) of a “highway” of peace and reconciliation from Egypt to Assyria (which includes much of the modern-day Arab world) via Israel.

For the second of what is now a bi-annual event, in 2014, a number of UK-based Iranians, as well as a group of Egyptians, were turned back at the border and thus missed out on a chance to meet up with other Muslim-background converts from all over the region at a conference hosted by Jewish believers in Jesus, generally known as Messianic Jews.

And so UK at the Crossroads was arranged to encourage and inspire those who would struggle – mainly due to visa issues – to enter Israel.

David Friedman, a Messianic rabbi from Jerusalem, was delighted that so many Iranians had turned up for the conference – they have established thriving churches throughout England – and implored them to join him in praying for barriers to be broken between their two countries.

“We need to get together and pray for our two nations,” he said. And before he had finished speaking, they came forward to pray for him, and for Israel! It was an awesome moment, something akin to an earthquake in reverse as a shattered and broken world is put back together again, with all the pieces mended.

Sessions were interspersed with times of worship in Arabic, Farsi (the language spoken in Iran), Hebrew and English creating a beautiful atmosphere of shared love and identity. Communication may have been a challenge at times, but you only had to look in each other’s eyes to know you were one in Christ who, in the words of St Paul, destroys the dividing wall of hostility, creating “one new man” out of the two, thus making peace and reconciling both of them to God through the cross. (Ephesians 2.14-16)

One Egyptian musician was playing a lute, a modern version of the ancient instrument played 3,000 years ago by Israel’s King David. Prayer was also offered in various languages with translators on hand for some of the speakers.

Beirut-based Robert Sakr, one of the visionaries behind the conference, said: “There’s no such thing as a peace process apart from Jesus. In the 55 years I’ve lived in the Middle East, there has been no political solution.”

And it was ironic, in light of the current enmity between Iran and Israel, that when the 1967 Six-Day War broke out, his family fled to Iran for safety. But the Islamic Revolution of 1979 had changed all that.

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Jewish Terror Victim Meets His Arab Savior

Wednesday, November 12, 2014 |  Israel Today Staff

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Moshe German nearly lost his life earlier this week when a mob of rioters attacked his car at the entrance to the Arab town of Taybeh. Tragedy was narrowly averted by the brave and kind-hearted action of local resident Majdi Baloum.

A day after the attack, during which assailants torched German’s car, victim and savior had the opportunity to meet face-to-face in an encounter arranged by Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot.

Meeting in Taybeh not far from where his near-lynching occurred, German told Baloum:

“You don’t understand how moving this is. I was nearly killed while driving on this same road yesterday. …I thought about my wife…my sons… I thought my family would lose me. I tried to hide…but the mob continued to attack me, and in that moment you came up to me yelling, ‘come, come!’ …You saved me. I found it hard to comprehend what was happening, but I realized that you were afraid for my life. …Did you understand that you were saving my life?”

Baloum responded by comforting German. “Be at ease, friend. You and I are the same. Would you not do the same if I were in danger?” he asked.

Baloum, a 37-year-old father of five, gave his own recounting of that day’s frightful events:

“I saw a large number of youths gathering, shooting fireworks and throwing concrete blocks and stones. …Many came with their faces covered and I realized something bad was about to happen. When I saw they were [attacking] your car, I knew you had little hope of survival, and that you needed to be rescued, and fast. I raced toward you in my jeep and saw you trapped in the car. There was no time to lose. I opened the door and shouted for you to get out. I remember your face and hands were covered in blood.”

“I’m happy I was able to save you and return you to your family,” Baloum reassured his new friend, adding that he “wished the violence [between Arabs and Jews] would end already.”

PHOTO: Illustration

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