Shabbat Shalom to all our Jewish friends

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Shabbat Shalom to all our Jewish friends.

Ahava and shalom,

Steve Martin in Charlotte, North Carolina

The hunting down of Jews for sport. All Israel News

​Opinion Blog / Guest Columnist

Cookie Schwaeber-Issan | August 7, 2026

ALL ISRAEL NEWS is committed to fair and balanced coverage and analysis, and honored to publish a wide-range of opinions. That said, views expressed by guest columnists may not necessarily reflect the views of our staff.

OPINION

The hunting down of Jews for sport

A flyer in Amsterdam that showed the names and locations of IDF soldiers visiting the city. (Photo: Eppo Tjuchem/X)

It’s the second time in just a matter of weeks that reports are coming in of attempts to locate Israeli tourists visiting abroad, making their whereabouts known to the general public. The first incident happened in Italy.

According to a Jerusalem Post article, in late July, local Italians were being urged to fill out forms, available on Google, to report the presence of Israeli citizens staying in hotels and other accommodations. Finding this very disturbing, the president of the Jewish Community of Milan responded by saying, “I think we’re going back to the 1930s to hunting Jews.” 

The second incident occurred in Amsterdam, when “flyers were distributed, featuring names and locations of Jewish IDF soldiers visiting the city, ahead of the Pride Amsterdam event, slated to take place between July 25 and August 8.” 

Written on the flyers was, “Protect your community, watch out for war criminals during WorldPride.” The names of Israelis were mapped out throughout different locations in the city, with photos attached to facilitate recognition.

Although both the WorldPride event organizers, as well as the City of Amsterdam, categorically stated that they were not responsible for the dissemination of the flyers, their distribution took place, during the celebration, with the official WorldPride logo.

It turns out that the anonymous form, circulated in Italy, along with the messaging to hotels, vacation rentals and businesses, warning to be on the lookout for Israeli tourists, was also the work of an outside group. 

What is clear is that malicious antisemitic groups have infiltrated venues with their hateful propaganda, designed to intimidate both the visiting Jewish tourists and also those who host them.

The troubling practice definitely conjures up horrific memories of the same toxic atmosphere that began to spread throughout much of Europe in the days leading up to the Holocaust.

In the case of Amsterdam, recipients of the flyers, who wanted to learn more, were directed to go to the HRF website (Hind Rajab Foundation) – an advocacy group, pushing for the prosecution of IDF soldiers, who they claim have committed genocide. 

These two incidents are especially maddening, because they involve an insidious deception which takes advantage of already organized scheduled events, where large audiences will gather.  

By appropriating the same logo as those sponsoring the celebration or other occasion, they try to add legitimacy to their message by illegally co-opting someone else’s symbols and function.

It’s thievery at its finest – capitalizing on the creation of others. But that’s the whole idea.  By spreading their message to unsuspecting people, who came for another purpose, they turn them into a captive audience, ripe for the pickings. 

While some may come to realize that the portrayal of Israelis, as war criminals, was not initiated or approved by those sponsoring the events, others may never arrive at that conclusion, which means they may believe that this message is also held by their hosts.

It’s hard not to see the deliberate dishonesty, being employed by organizations such as the Hind Rajab Foundation, established after the death of five-year-old Hind Rajab in January 2024, claiming that the child, along with her family, had been part of a targeted operation by the IDF, connected to their genocidal campaign.

The real story is that the Hamas massacre of October 7 displaced Rajab’s family, as had happened to so many others, forcing them to flee. During their flight, their car was identified, riddled with bullets. Although the IDF was blamed for the incident, they maintained that their soldiers were not within firing range of the car or even in the vicinity. 

The possibility also existed that Hamas could have been responsible for accidentally killing the child, but why would biased human rights groups or a dishonest media entertain such a theory when their narrative is best served by blaming the IDF?

One thing is incontrovertible. A sad consequence of war is always the death of innocents, but Israel’s military does not target ordinary civilians. Because life is so sacred and revered by Jews, no wars, which have been fought against our enemies, were ever initiated by Israel, nor have peace agreements been extended by those seeking to destroy the Jewish people. 

It’s only Israel who has been willing to give up significant parts of their land for the sake of ending the bloodshed. Of course, all were met with rejection. 

So, despite the deliberate barbaric murders of many innocent Israeli children on October 7, the irony is that Hind Rajab, a victim of Hamas aggression, was turned into a symbol of resistance “that demands justice.” 

Shouldn’t the tables be turned? If the Jewish people were vindictive and vengeful, they might be the ones hunting down Palestinians for all the horrors that were perpetrated against them. 

But Israelis are not built that way. Despite the great tragedy, which occurred on its soil, by the same neighbors who received assistance and personal attention from the surrounding kibbutz communities, that were attacked, they have chosen to return to their restored homes, looking to the future rather than holding a grudge against the real aggressors.

But then Israelis have never had the desire to kill Gazans, Arabs or anyone else. We are a people who strive for peace, exemplified in our hello and good-bye greeting of “Shalom.”

This is why the charge of genocide, perpetrated by Israel, is so absurd, because if it was truly our goal, no Israeli leader would have ever wasted their time offering land for peace.  

Knowing that peace is our goal, our enemies must reject every attempt to reach that objective, because it is not a shared ending for their side.  For them, it’s all or nothing, and the Jewish people stand as a barrier to that finish line.

This explains why Jews are being hunted down and will continue to be pursued, both in the Promised Land and abroad. Permanent peace can never be an outcome when we are viewed as the major impediment that prevents them from seizing what rightfully was given to the Jewish people. 

Sadly, they don’t seem to realize that they are fighting a losing battle, wasting their lives on a fruitless conflict which, in the end, will only hurt them – both in this life and the next. ​

Love For His People Ministry was founded in 2010 by Steve & Laurie Martin. Charlotte, NC USA

“Know your DNA?” - Steve Martin

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Know Your DNA?

Many of us have wondered, at some point or another, “Who am I?” And so we order a DNA kit, swab the mouth and mail it in.

And so I did. For the third time. Different company of course.

I knew the general area from where my heritage line of ancestry came from, based on previous accounts from several sources. I wasn’t expecting the 30% Scottish part, nor the 11% Irish segment that this last one reported.

I guess I had always wondered why I liked the Texas Longhorns (I.e.. Scottish Highlander cattle) and St. Patrick so much. Now I know.

With the last name of Martin I had also heard a Jewish speaker at a Jerusalem Aliyah conference years ago say many Hispanics in Central and South America, with the last name of Martinez, most likely have Sephardic (Spanish descendants) Jewish DNA within. Millions of them do not know it.

No connection there though.

Being “grafted in” is what is most important for most of us.

Romans 11:11:17-18 says, “But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive, were grafted in among them and became partaker with them of the [j]rich root of the olive tree, do not be arrogant toward the branches; but if you are arrogant, remember that it is not you who supports the root, but the root supports you.”

Because of the Jews, whom God the Father chose to hear and write the Bible to reveal Himself. and sent the Messiah Yeshua to the nations through them, we the goyim (Gentiles), now also have the promise of life with Him as we believe and receive His salvation.

DNA research can be helpful in revealing your ancestry.

The Bible, God’s Word, is best for determining your eternal ancestry.

Ahava and Shalom,

Steve Martin

A Scottish Gentile from the goyim (if I am saying that right!)

Christian Friends of Israel supporting IDF bases

Christian Friends of Israel supporting the IDF bases

There is something incredibly special about returning to visit friends. On this visit to an IDF base in the Judea/Samaria region, we had the privilege of bringing practical supplies and treats to encourage the soldiers who work tirelessly to protect the people of Israel. 

We delivered Tanach Bibles, chocolates, snacks and much-needed plates and cutlery for the kitchen, where meals are prepared for around 400 soldiers — three times every day.

​

Will You Be on the Next Train?

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WILL YOU BE ON THE NEXT TRAIN?

For anyone who wants to understand how it happened.

The evil of Nazism did not fall out of the sky.

It was built, and it was built by people who believed in something.

The core idea was that Jews were not a faith or a people but a biological threat. An infection in the body of the nation.

That is the thing to understand, because it is what makes genocide possible. As long as you see a human being as a human being, you can hate him. See him as a disease, and you acquire a duty to remove him.

Where did it come from?

Nazism did not grow out of conservatism, and it did not grow out of Christianity. It grew out of a revolt against both.

The foundation was race biology and social Darwinism. The idea that Darwin’s struggle for survival applied not only to animals but to peoples, and that the strong people had a right to displace the weak. 

Add to that a blood and soil mysticism that made the nation holy, and a view of man where your worth was measured by how useful you were to the race.

That requires tearing down one thing first. 

The Christian principle that every single human being is made in the image of God and therefore carries a worth nobody can take away.

The Nazis knew this perfectly well. They worked actively to push the church aside and replace it with the state and the leader. 

You cannot sort human beings like cattle as long as people believe they have a soul.

And then the part many people get wrong. The party was called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. That was not an accident. They ran a command economy, they nationalised, they replaced trade unions with the state’s own organisation, and they promised the people everything if the people would just give them everything.

At the same time, communists and social democrats were among the first sent to the camps, because they were competing for the same voters.

The axis that matters is this. 

How much power does the state take over the individual person? For Nazism, for communism and for every other totalitarian movement, the answer is all of it. Your property, your work, your children, your faith, your body and your conscience belong to the movement.

That is what you watch for.

And then there is the conspiracy…

On top of the ideology sat the lie. That Jews secretly ran the banks, the press, the governments and communism all at once. That they were behind everything going wrong.

That story is ancient, it has been recycled in every single century, and it is being recycled right now.

Then there was the ground it grew in. A lost war. Humiliation. Hyperinflation that turned people’s savings into nothing. Mass unemployment. 

People who could not understand why their lives were falling apart were told who was responsible.

But notice the order. The words came first. Years of language turning Jews into vermin, parasites, a plague. By the time the trains started running, the great majority had already been trained to accept the idea.

Nobody wakes up one morning and goes from normal to murderer. 

You are walked there, one step at a time, and every step looks small.

So who helped them?

This is the part nobody talks about. Germany could not have done it alone.

The Netherlands. 107,000 Jews deported. Around 5,200 came back. Dutch administrators built the registries, Dutch police made the arrests, and Dutch railway workers ran the trains and invoiced the Germans for it.

France. On 16 and 17 July 1942, French police arrested 13,152 Jews in Paris. 4,115 of them were children. Not a single German soldier took part. It took France fifty years to admit it.

Hungary. 437,000 Jews deported in 56 days in the summer of 1944, mostly to Auschwitz. Eichmann arrived with a handful of German staff. The rest was the Hungarian gendarmerie.

Slovakia. The government deported around 58,000 of its own citizens in 1942 and paid Germany a fee per head to take them. A few hundred survived.

Romania. Antonescu’s regime did its own killing. Around 270,000 died in Transnistria from starvation, disease and massacre.

Norway. Around 770 deported by Norwegian police. About 35 came home.

Croatia. The Ustaše ran their own camps and murdered Jews, Serbs and Roma without the Germans lifting a finger.

And then there are the places where no government was left to collaborate with. In Poland, around 3 million Jews were murdered, more than anywhere else. There was no Polish state left to hand them over, the Germans did it themselves, and the occupation was the harshest in Europe.

In Poland the penalty for hiding a Jew was death, not only for you but for your whole family. 

In the Soviet territories they did not even bother with trains. The Einsatzgruppen shot around 1.5 million people at the edge of dug pits, family after family, village after village.

And then the exceptions. Bulgaria refused to hand over the roughly 48,000 Jews inside the country itself, but deported 11,343 from the territories it had occupied. 

Denmark saved around 7,200. That is what makes October 1943 so rare. Not because Danes were better people, but because they chose differently while everyone else was busy obeying.

That is the lesson. Every single country had a choice. Most of them chose wrong.

What did America mean?

Without the United States, Europe would not have been liberated. It is that simple.

As early as March 1941, long before the Americans were in the war themselves, Lend-Lease began. Weapons, aircraft, trucks, food and fuel to Britain and later the Soviet Union.

American industry built around 300,000 aircraft and 88,000 tanks while Europe lay in ruins. It was not only soldiers. It was a production machine nobody could match.

On 6 June 1944, around 156,000 Allied soldiers landed in Normandy. Young Americans, British and Canadians, most of them under 25, who had never seen Europe and went ashore to free a continent they did not live on.

Around 418,000 Americans never came home.

I cry when I read about them. Every single time. 

Boys of eighteen and nineteen who left a farm in Ohio or a street in Chicago and died on a beach or in a town in a country they had never seen, for people they had never met and never would.

And when the war ended, they did not stay. They rebuilt. The Marshall Plan poured around 13 billion dollars into a wrecked Europe, Germany included. The victor lifted the enemy back onto its feet.

Today half of Europe looks down on them. We stand on what they paid for, and we turn up our noses at the bill. 

I have nothing but contempt for that attitude in any person who enjoys a freedom he did not pay for and has never lifted a finger to defend.

Go to Normandy and walk between the white crosses. Then try saying it again.

And no, we have not become better people!

Some say we have moved past it. That we are more developed now, more enlightened, that this cannot happen again because we have grown wiser. 

It is not true. It is the most dangerous lie of them all.

The men who built the camps were not primitive. They were educated. They were engineers, doctors, lawyers and civil servants. They read Goethe and listened to Bach. None of them lacked culture. They lacked something else entirely.

Nothing has happened to the human heart in eighty years. We got better phones. That is all.

The same capacity to follow the herd, the same capacity to look away, the same capacity to convince yourself that what you are doing is just, sits in us exactly as it sat in them.

And you do not have to take my word for it. There are people walking among us today with precisely the same attitude toward Jews as the ones who slaughtered them back then. 

They do not even hide it. They shout it in our streets and in the comment sections on this platform.

We have not become more developed. We just have not been put in that situation yet.

Why am I writing this?

Because the pattern never changes. First the words. Then the acceptance. Then the neighbours turn their backs. Then the authorities act.

We are (still) in the language stage right now. That is still a place where it can be stopped.

But it hangs by a thread. Otherwise the trains run again. And maybe you are on one of them. Or your children are.

Because it never stops with the Jews. It never has. It never will.

Send the text on to the young. Share it with everyone who needs their memory refreshed. History only repeats for those who forgot it. 

* Written by Krisztina Maria