A Letter to the Church Times

Sir,
 
There was cause for both hope and despair in Church Times articles this week.

You gave Irene Lancaster space to inform your readers about the place of Zionism in Judaism.  Whilst Eretz Israel is not important to all Jews, Anglicans need to show much more awareness of the importance of the covenant promises about the Land of Israel, cherished over centuries of exile, to the faith of religious Jews.  Her article makes a significant contribution to that awareness.

However, Giles Fraser’s comments elicited a sigh of despair.  Talking to Hamas is simply not like talking to the IRA. Only last week, Osama Hamdan, a Hamas leader based in Lebanon, said in an interview on Al-Kawthar TV that there were no Jews living in Palestine prior to 1917: that people who moved to Israel since 1917 were not Jews at all: and that Israel should prevent members of the public from using public transport so that they won’t be blown up when terrorists target members of the IDF travelling on Israeli buses.  Presumably they should not use restaurants, nightclubs or markets either, on the same principle.

Hamdan ended his farrago of untruth and hatred with “The final goal of the resistance is to wipe this entity (ie Israel) off the face of the Earth.”

When will Giles Fraser and others who put forward similar opinions, pay Hamas spokesmen the compliment of believing what they say, and accept that we should not be talking to governments who threaten their neighbours with annihilation, however they got into power?

Yours sincerely

Frances Waddams
Anglican Friends of Israel

The Archbishop of Canterbury and the two Chief Rabbis of Israel, Shlomo Amar and Yonah Metzger, signed a historic agreement on 5 September 2006. It contained a joint declaration that set out a framework for continual dialogue.

Dr Williams said: “This is a most significant step in developing mutual understanding and trust between the Anglican Communion and the Chief Rabbinate and worldwide Judaism.”

August  14th - 6:00 AM - Israeli based, humanitarian organization, Save A Child's Heart, welcomes its first group of children from Rwanda to be operated on in Israel at Wolfson Medical Center.

Save A Child's Heart (SACH) welcomes the arrival of its first group of Rwandan children suffering from heart disease to be operated on in Israel at the Wolfson Medical Center.  The five children, who range from just a few months old to 15 years of age, will land in Israel on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007, accompanied by a Rwandan Nurse as well as by two mothers.

FrontPageMagazine.com

Ehud Barak, Israel’s seemingly discredited former prime minister and current defense minister, seems ready to steer Israel toward yet another destructive fad. First it was making peace with terrorists—an idea still popular in the Israeli government though less so among the public. Then it was the separation fence that would hermetically seal Israel from the violent Middle East.

Now—with missiles’ ability to surmount a fence constantly and graphically on display in the Gaza arena—it’s missile defense, another supposed cure-all that Barak is already pushing.

Barak is described in the Israeli press as now believing Israel can withdraw from the West Bank in three to five years. By that time it can “develop and deploy an effective anti-missile system . . . capable of intercepting anything from Iran’s long-range Shihab-3 missile to the short-range, relatively primitive Palestinian Qassams.”

We are pleased to note the launch of a new media site dedicated to reporting on innovations in Israel. The site is called israelplug, and you can see it at http://israelplug.com/.  The goal of israelplug is to provide quality content that is updated daily on innovative, unique and original ideas, people and events that are emerging from Israel.

Wiesenthal Centre to Belarus President: "Condemn and Take Measures Against Minsk 'Orthodox Initiative' Dissemination of Antisemitic Publications"

In a letter to Belarus President, Mr Alexander Lukashenko, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Director for International Relations, Dr Shimon Samuels, noted that, as part of a tour of Former Soviet Union World War Two extermination sites and memorials, he last week visited the Minsk Museum of the Great Patriotic War, "which vividly describes the mass murder of Jews and Belarussians by the Nazis and their collaborators."

We are pleased to announce the appointment of Mark Rogers, the writer, publisher and scholar, as a co-director of AFI.

Shocking...

Yet another State Department Arabist takes Jews to task for wanting to survive the Foggy Folks’ less than friendly--if not downright hostile--“peace” (of the grave) plans. We’ll return to this later…

First, imagine, for one moment, that the entire territory of the United States was reduced to the size of New Jersey.