Jews | Ain't Complicated

Holocaust Remembrance Day and the Power of Israel

It seems 70 years is too long for the world to remember...

Yom Hashoah candle and entrance to Birkenau extermination camp

Remember Birkenau!

As he closed his Holocaust Remembrance Day speech today, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu declared:

Unlike our situation during the Holocaust, when we were like leaves on the wind, defenseless, now we have great power to defend ourselves, and it is ready for any mission. This power rests on the courage and ingenuity of the soldiers of the IDF and our security forces. It is this power that enabled us, against all odds, to build the State of Israel.

Mr. Netanyahu is mistaken. No matter how great the military power of Israel and the prowess of her warriors, she is still defenseless. Read it all

Netanyahu’s Bible Study

If the man is a Christian or interested in becoming one, I can understand a Bible study.

Otherwise, I wonder if this is being called something it isn’t.

After all, a practicing Jew doesn’t accept the Bible as a whole, does he?

Makes me wonder: Will this study even be using Bibles? Genuine, sixty-six-book, two-testament Bibles? Read it all

Lest We Forget

January 27 is the day established by the United Nations as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Amazingly, today is only the fifth observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day! What was the UN’s hurry?!

Anyway, here are excerpts from two stories I read/scanned a few minutes ago:

Survivors and world leaders gathered in the bitter chill at Auschwitz on Wednesday to remember the hundreds of thousands who perished in one of Nazi Germany’s infamous concentration camps, 65 years to the day since troops of the Red Army liberated the camp.

[…]

Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau of Tel Aviv, a holocaust survivor, recited the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning, and sirens wailed across the barracks and barbed wire where an estimated 1.1 million people died.

Source: Holocaust Memorial Day marked on Auschwitz liberation anniversary

Here’s one other article excerpt:

During the Holocaust, 6 million Jews and millions of others were systematically murdered in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Yet many lived to tell their stories.

Arthur Berger, spokesman for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, said the first-hand accounts are important, especially in the Internet age when misinformation is easily spread. Those memories must be documented as much as possible, Berger said, in the hope that, by preserving the truth about what happened, future atrocities can be prevented.

Source: Victims, survivors honored International Holocaust Remembrance Day

According to Wikipedia, on this day in 1945, “The Red Army liberates the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.”

In case you forgot, I titled this post “Lest We Forget.” So I ask, Have the world’s powers that be forgotten Nazi Germany as Iran’s leaders make their anti-Israel, anti-Jew comments and threats? We shall see.

Catch Mahmood!

Somehow, that seems like a good title for this:

As Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad plans to speak in the opening of the United Nations General Assembly in New York next week, a major international evangelical Christian group based in Jerusalem plans to send a petition to the U.N. Secretary-General calling for the arrest and indictment of Iran’s president on charges of incitement to genocide against Israel. The petition from the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem (I.C.E.J.) has gathered signatures from tens of thousands of Christians around the world, as the group joins the chorus of prominent voices from many countries demanding that Iran’s president be brought to justice.

“We feel a profound and telling moral duty to speak out against the growing Iranian nuclear threat to Israel,” said David Parsons, media director for the I.C.E.J.

“The silence of most Christian clergy in the face of Germany’s horrific bid to annihilate European Jewry left a deep stain on the churches,” said the I.C.E.J.’s executive director, Rev. Malcom Hedding. “Yet from it has arisen a sense among multitudes of Christians today that we have an inescapable moral duty to earnestly speak out whenever another genocidal campaign threatens the Jewish people.

Have you signed the petition? I haven’t.

To my credit, though, I say (as a Mennonite), “Leave me out of it!” to this next piece as well:

The I.C.E.J.’s Hedding also slammed the leaders of certain Christian groups, among them the Mennonites and the Quakers, who plan to further honor Ahmadinejad by hosting him at a special reception during his visit to the U.S., in which the Christian leaders hope to engage in a “dialogue” with the threatening leader.

To read the entire article: Christian Group: Indict Ahmadinejad for Threatening a Holocaust

It Doesn’t Take an Einstein

For what?

Oh, I don’t know. It just seemed like a good title to use for this news bit:

Belief in God “childish” — Jews not chosen people

“The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.

“No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this,” he wrote in the letter written on January 3, 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, cited by The Guardian newspaper.

[…]

“For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions,” he said.

“And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people.”

And he added: “As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.”

Previously the great scientist’s comments on religion — such as “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind” — have been the subject of much debate, used notably to back up arguments in favour of faith.

Oh, what does he know?!!

I expect he might know more now than he did then.

For sure he knows that he was wrong regarding God and His Word.