The confined spaces of the Old City of Jerusalem present real problems for Israeli officials during celebrations of the Easter Triduum. In particular, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and its narrow courtyard present a nightmare for officials responsible for crowd control in the Old City. Sadly, Yusef Daher, executive secretary of the Jerusalem Inter-Church Center, currently located at the Monastery of St. Anne in the Old City, uses Israel’s response to these difficulties as a pretext to accuse Israeli officials of oppressing the Christian community in Jerusalem. (Photos: Dexter Van Zile)

Yusef Daher really ought to be ashamed of himself.

For at least a decade, he has used his status as executive secretary of the Jerusalem Interchurch Center — currently located in St. Anne’s Monastery near the Lion’s Gate of the Old City — to de-legitimize the Jewish state.

It’s bad enough that Daher, a Christian, has posted images on social media that valorize Palestinian violence against Israeli civilians, but to make matters worse, he has used his status as a “Christian peacemaker” to portray legitimate Israeli security measures as a violation of religious freedom in Jerusalem. The problem is that if Israeli officials did not impose some sort of crowd control on Christian celebrations in Jerusalem, people might get killed in stampedes. It’s happened in the past.

Here are the details.

Daher periodically condemns Israeli security officials for keeping a tight rein on the crowds of Christians that gather to participate in Good Friday and Easter services in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the Old City of Jerusalem. Sadly enough, irresponsible Christian leaders in Jerusalem have cooperated with Daher’s efforts to demonize Israel.

In an article published by the Catholic News Service in April 2014, Daher complained that pilgrims intent on watching Good Friday and Easter services at the Sepulcher are kept away from the Church and are forced to watch the events on a large TV screen near Jaffa Gate. Pilgrims, Daher said, “are kept behind iron barricades as if they are in prison.”

The same article quotes church leaders in Jerusalem as they accuse Israel of “tampering with the traditional celebrations and local heritage.”

Daher said that Israel disrupts pilgrims on Good Friday service and that this “often disturbs people who are in prayer and creates tension.” He also declared that Israeli police have acted violently against worshippers and that there have been arrests.

The article also states that “Daher noted that pilgrims are prevented from standing in the church’s courtyard even though a three-meter-wide corridor would be enough for people to pass through in an emergency.”
(more…)

Note: This post has been updated. Scroll down for information.

If anyone has any doubts that Wikipedia has a problem with the Jewish state, let them take a look at the website’s list of national dances. It’s a pretty straightforward list, except of course when it comes to Israel. The screenshot below shows the problem:

Brian Schrauger, editor and publisher of The Jerusalem Journal. (Photo: Dexter Van Zile)

Brian Schrauger, editor of a pro-Israel website The Jerusalem Journal, has, along with a number of his friends and supporters, been placed in Facebook’s equivalent of jail, blocked from posting articles to groups on the social media giant’s network. Details are a bit sketchy, but Schrauger, along with a number of other pro-Israel bloggers who have attempted to post articles from Schrauger’s Chaim Report, a news aggregation section on The Jerusalem Journal.

“The Chaim Report is a kind of Israel-centered version of the Drudge Report,” Schrauger says. “Like Drudge, it provides a daily aggregation of third party stories from mainstream news and government sources.”

Folks who have tried to post articles from The Chaim Report into Facebook groups have gotten messages that state “Action Blocked.” The messages go onto state that the writers in question have been “temporarily restricted from joining and posting to groups.” The restrictions or punishments appear to be about 10 days in length.

“Eleven of us have been put in prison,” Schrauger says. “So far the release date is from 3-6 October.”

Schrauger has his suspicions as to what’s happening.
(more…)

A few hours ago, at least 12 people were murdered in Barcelona by a Spanish national of North African descent who drove a van into a restaurant. One news source in Europe reports that prior to the attack, the perpetrator posted anti-Israel propaganda on social media. Ninety people were injured in the attack; more deaths are likely.

In its coverage of the attack, Agence France Press has included a list of car ramming attacks that have taken place over the past year, with the list beginning with an attack that took place in Nice, France in 2016. The language (which is in the screenshot above) used to frame the list is as follows:

Vehicles have been used as weapons of terror several times over the past year, often by by followers of the Islamic State (IS), attacking nations in the US-led coalition fighting the jihadists in Iraq and Syria.

The list includes car ramming attacks perpetrated in France, Germany, Sweden, and England. Predictably, AFP’s list omits car ramming attacks that have targeted Israelis.

There were at least three such attacks, probably others.
(more…)

“If the sermon was misconstrued, we sincerely apologize to anyone offended. We will continue our commitment to interfaith and community harmony.”

That’s the dishonest, cowardly, meaningless, and insulting apology offered by the Islamic Center of Davis in California after Imam Ammar Shahin called for the annihilation of Jews during a sermon he gave on Friday, July 21, 2017. [See note below.]

After Shahin’s sermon was recorded and posted on the mosque’s website, it came to the attention of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) who translated it from Arabic into English for a shocked public.

In his vitriolic sermon, Imam Shahin, called on Allah to “liberate the Al-Aqsa Mosque from the filth of the Jews,” “destroy those who closed the Al-Aqsa Mosque, ” and “count them one by one and annihilate them down to the very last one. Do not spare any of them.” He also asked that these things happen at the hands of Muslims. Someone in the audience could very well take Imam Shahin’s sermon as an exhortation to kill Jews.

This is the type of incitement people have grown to expect from the imams at Al Aqsa Mosque and from pulpits in Iran, but to hear an imam call for the murder of Jews in such an explicit manner from a pulpit in the United States is another thing altogether.

This is America, where open calls for genocide and the annihilation of people from other religions and ethnicities are contrary to the rules of civil society that allow people from different countries and faith traditions to live together in peace.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center has asked Homeland Security and the U.S. Attorney to investigate the Imam Shahin’s hateful sermon, with good reason. This is the type of stuff that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al Husseini, said to incite anti-Jewish pogroms in 1929 and 1936. It is the type of stuff leaders in Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas said to encourage young Palestinians to murder Israelis during the recent stabbing intifada.

It simply has no place a modern, pluralistic, and civilized society.
(more…)

James M. Wall meeting with Martin Luther King in 1967. (Screenshot from The Link.)

James M. Wall, former editor of The Christian Century, is notorious for his hostility toward Israel and its supporters in the United States.

On his blog, Wall has referred to Israel’s supporters in the United States as a “fifth column” and for a while, he was associate editor for a website called Veterans News Now, a publication that promotes hostility toward Jews throughout the world and has promoted the work of David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan. His behavior is a huge embarrassment for his former employer, The Christian Century, the flagship publication of mainline Protestantism in the United States.

CAMERA has written extensively about Wall’s descent into the netherworld of antisemitism on a number of occasions, including articles that can be seen here and here. Articles on the failure of Christian Century and the United Methodist Church to hold Wall accountable for his hateful writings about Israel and its Jewish supporters can be seen here and here.

All this is worth recounting because a few weeks ago, a well-known historian, Randall Bytwerk, who taught for many years at Calvin College in Grand Rapids Michigan, apparently wrote an article about Wall at Wikipedia.

The article, which can be read here, is a pretty straightforward text, detailing his career as a journalist, movie critic and Democratic politician and activist. The documentation demonstrating that Bytwerk wrote the Wikipedia article in question can be seen here and here.

What is amazing is that the text makes no mention whatsoever of Wall’s affiliation with Veterans News Now, which was so embarrassing to Christian Century that it was forced to issue a statement about the controversy here.
(more…)

A screenshot of an image posted on Yusef Daher’s Facebook page.

Yusef Daher, the Executive Secretary of the Jerusalem Inter-Church Center, has posted some ugly stuff on his Facebook page and on his Twitter timeline. Daher is supposed to promote peace at the JICC — which is supported by the World Council of Churches — but for one reason or another, the licensed tour guide has posted a number of images that legitimize, promote or downplay the horror of Palestinian violence against Israelis.

It’s something that CAMERA has written about on a number of occasions, including here, here, and here.

But yesterday, June 26, 2017, Daher hit a new low, posting an image of a young girl holding a plastic water bottle as if to throw at a target off in the distance. She’s standing in front of a stenciled image of a young girl — with a pigtail just like hers — throwing a Molotov cocktail.

The comments posted in response praise the young girl, calling her “precious” and “spontaneous” and “humble.”

Both the image and the comments are indicative of a thoughtlessness and contempt for the victims of Palestinian violence on the part of both Daher and his friends on Facebook.
(more…)

Rev. Olav Fyske Tveit, the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, has recently penned an op-ed defending the organization from criticism leveled by NGO Monitor, an Israel-based organization that highlights how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) cooperate with the effort to de-legitimize the Jewish state.

Close observers of Christian organizations such as the World Council of Churches, World Vision and more recently, World Relief will not be surprised to find that Tveit failed to deal honestly and directly with the charges leveled at the organization he leads.

Instead of dealing with the allegations as they are laid out against the WCC, Tveit distorts what was written, and then defends against charges that were never leveled. This is the type of behavior expected from politicians, not religious leaders.

Tveit’s highly deceptive piece, which was published by the Religion News Service (RNS) on April 19, 2017, denies the allegation of “political warfare” leveled by NGO Monitor’s Executive Director Gerald Steinberg in a piece published by RNS in late March.
(more…)

Igor Sadikov, a student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada has revealed the underlying hostility toward Israel and Jews motivating the BDS campaign on college campuses.

Sadikov, a BDS activist and a member of the Legislative Council and Board of Directors of the Students’ Society of McGill University, did this by calling on his Twitter followers to “punch a Zionist.” Sadikov “apologized” for his call to violence in the face of criticism from B’Nai Brith in Canada.

In his “apology,” Sadikov expresses regret for harming his fellow students and adds that as a Jew, he wants to be “disentangle” Jewishness from Zionism. Sadikov has since deleted the threatening Tweet and his Twitter account.

His Facebook account currently includes the text of his apology, the replies to which indicate that a fair number of his supporters support violence against Zionists. Oliver Melancon, for example, offers to punch a Zionist on Sadikov’s behalf. And sadly enough, Sadikov “liked” this comment, indicating that his apology is insincere. Apparently, he still thinks its OK to punch Zionists.

By the way, international students can expect to pay between $19,000 and $44,000 CDN for one year of attendance at McGill University.

Yusef Daher, a Christian “peacemaker” in Jerusalem who enjoys the support of the World Council of Churches, is at it again. Daher, who serves as executive secretary of the WCC-supported Jerusalem Interchurch Center (JICC), recently posted a statement on Facebook asking for George Habash to “pray for us.”

Daher posted this entry (screenshot above) on January 25, 2017, one day before the ninth anniversary of Habash’s death in 2008. Daher’s friends on Facebook responded with variations of the phrase, “God rest his soul.”

Habash was a terrorist. He was a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which was responsible for the Lod Airport Massacre, which resulted in the death of two dozen tourists, most of them Christians, in 1972. In 2008, Time published an article declaring Habash, “Terrorism’s Christian Godfather.” Here’s a brief excerpt from the article:
(more…)