Tag Archives: France

Lots to be said about freedom

Daily writing prompt
What does freedom mean to you?

There is much to be said about freedom. There are also very different opinions of what freedom is or should be. Many people love to aim for the ability to live without anybody telling them what to do. Nobody loves to have chains on or be limited by others. Humans want to have no constraints, no limitations that would bother them,

It is found natural that we as human beings would be allowed to control ourselves and to be ourselves. Though, we do find lots of nations that want to restrict people in what they want to be and in what they want to do with their bodies. Even states that claim that they are for “freedom“, like the United States of America, want to tell women what they have to do with their bodies. The state wants to control them and forbids them to take certain pills, for not having (more) kids.

In this present world, it is not that we would everywhere have the choice and liberty to be ourselves.
We can not go wherever we would like. It is even not possible to dress however we want. People expect us to wear certain clothes at certain occasions, but also in certain countries, even in West Europe, women and men feel that certain dress code is not accepted by lots of people. Strangely enough also France where they insist to be so for “liberty” and “equality” we do find that Muslim women may not wear what they want. Neither may men and women have bare limbs when entering churches or religious places.

Everywhere, be it in Europe, Africa, America, or Oceania, we find certain restrictions on all sorts of levels. This would not be so annoying when those restrictions would be there to secure the freedom of others. But that is not always the case.

In this world, there are expectations to which people want us to live up to. In case we would be totally free we should not worry about that. But society shows us clearly the rules for our society. It would be nice if we all could live without rules imposed by others. Then we can speak about “Freedom”.

When we think of freedom, we have expectations to see how we as humans can be unfettered, and have free choice regarding how and where we want to live, and how to behave and dress, as well as how we may express ourselves. Freedom of thought and speech is something we want to uphold!

But left free, the nicest form of freedom is when everybody can feel united behind a similar drive to build the community of freedom into a world where everyone can also feel that freedom.

Real freedom is when we can live in a world where everyone respects the freedom of one another and does not limit that freedom or does not want to have control over the other.

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Preceding

Freedom is unthinkable without responsibility

Freedom. To dispose of what is surplus.

Your Life: Habit or Freedom?

Freedom for whom?

Freedom. To dispose of what is surplus.

Having put lives on the line to protect the freedoms that we enjoy

3 Things Black People Wish White People Understood

Doing vs. liking

Words losing their meaning

Gender, genderless, androgyny, bisexuality, cisgender and transgender

Tolerance Ends When There Is No Tolerance Shown Towards Us

Looking at an Utopism which has not ended

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Additional reading

  1. If we view the whole world through a lens that is bright
  2. Self-development, self-control, meditation, beliefs and spirituality
  3. Judeo-Christian values and liberty
  4. Two forms of Freedom
  5. Walls,colours, multiculturalism, money to flow, Carson, Trump and consorts
  6. United in an open society relying not on command and control but on freedom
  7. Donald Trump his America
  8. Blinded crying blue murder having being made afraid by a bugaboo
  9. The clean sweeper of the whole caboodle
  10. Hollowness of democracy
  11. Stress-test for democracy #2 A coup d’etat with bloodshed
  12. Those willing to tarnish
  13. Religion and believers #1 Lots of groups and forms of belief to be taken interest in
  14. Not trying to make the heathen live like Jews #2
  15. Belgium showing signs of pre-Nazi Germany making certain people afraid to show up in public
  16. A strong and ambitious counter-terrorism policy is needed for the European Union
  17. Why, in Belgium, not so many youngsters are protesting these days
  18. Hanukkah gathering under the light in the darkness
  19. Helping against or causing more homophobia
  20. Don’t Envy the World
  21. If we view the whole world through a lens that is bright
  22. To be chained by love for another one
  23. The Spirit of God brings love, hope and freedom
  24. Actions to be a reflection of openness of heart

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“Silence clipart, cartoon character illustration“/ CC0 1.0

Related

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  2. Freedom
  3. Freedom (by Rob Gardens)
  4. Free-dom
  5. Saving Freedom
  6. Freedom Means Responsibility
  7. “Uncaged”
  8. Authentically Free
  9. What does freedom mean to you?
  10. What does freedom mean to you? – Freedom is a soaring bird that takes flight,
  11. Freedom To Me Means…
  12. Means Even More…
  13. A talk on Freedom
  14. Is there a such thing as Freedom?
  15. It’s a Human Thing
  16. “Liberte”
  17. The Illiberal Conception of Freedom 1
  18. The Liberal Conception of Freedom 2
  19. Denial or freedom?
  20. No Alibi but Freedom
  21. Love and Freedom
  22. Daily Prompt, Six – that I can follow what makes me happy
  23. Writing Prompt: Freedom in submissiveness
  24. Daily Prompt: 11th May 2023
  25. Unmasked
  26. Unspoken No’s
  27. What You Can Do About the World
  28. Beware of “Exceptions” to Freedom
  29. We Can Have Unity Without Unanimity
  30. The Basic Truths Are The Same
  31. Free Yourself and Live
  32. SimplyMilkoToo May 05, 2023
  33. I feel that death is freeing
  34. Freedom In Christ
  35. “Sunday’s Best”
  36. The Rabbit Hole of Purpose

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Filed under Activism and Peace Work, Being and Feeling, Cultural affairs, Lifestyle, Political affairs, Questions asked, Social affairs, Spiritual affairs, Welfare matters, World affairs

Some wanting a #childfreemillennial in an ‘overpopulated’ world

In the late 1970s and early ’80s by the central government of China there was an official program initiated to restrict the amount of children, reduce the growth rate of China’s enormous population, making that today there are not enough youngsters to pay for the older generation. There were even forced abortions and sterilizations (the latter primarily of women).

The one-child policy produced consequences beyond the goal of reducing population growth. Most notably, the country’s overall sex ratio became skewed toward males—roughly between 3 and 4 percent more males than females.

It seems now several youngsters also have preference not to have children. They seem to forget that when they would be over 60 there shall be no children able for them to take care. The consequence of not wanting children is not providing a generation who shall be at work whilst the elders would be retired, so that there would not be money to provide for those retired people. Something which has become a huge problem in China.

We wonder if those who now say it will be great to have a child-free life still would say that when they passed the age to have children. shall they still say

“You’ve slept in, woken up to a tidy home, it’s quiet, and you’ve got the rest of the day to potter around, no interruptions. A child-free life is a good life.”

when they find themselves in that quiet home where they are just with themselves and nobody to continue their family generation.

The above message floats over a video that captures a scene of serene domesticity. Posted on TikTok a few days ago, it has already racked up more than 100,000 views.

The video’s creator, “Danni ‘childfree’ Duncan”, who seems mainly to be concerned about his own freedom, is among those who have been able to start a movement under their generation which clearly has decided not to have children. That movement even has its own hashtags (#childfreebychoice and #nothavingkids).

One could easily think that all this is a whim of short duration. But we rather have the impression that these young people do not really realise what their childless life might be in a few years.

However, we obviously cannot ignore or overlook this movement, because it involves not just a few but thousands of women all over the western world.

This craze is just one small part of a wider, and highly significant, demographic issue: across much of the world, birth rates are plummeting.

On Nov 15 this year, the global population is expected to reach eight billion. The United Nations predicts it could grow to about 8.5 billion by 2030 before peaking at 10.4 billion in the 2080s. After that – and some predict it will happen 20 years earlier – the world’s population will start to fall.

Some on the other hand argue that we here in the West should curb births because in the poorer countries, far too many children are coming into this world and thus will overpopulate it. In certain countries they thought lots of children would die because of Covid or because of global warming disasters. In the industrialised countries there was a growth of babies born.

“About nine months after the pandemic, we see what we call a ‘baby bump,’”

said Martha Bailey, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and one of the authors of a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

After more than a year, lots of people having been in lockdown, in those countries with economic unemployment we could notice more children being born than normally in the same period over a year. In several countries, lots of 80+ and 90+ people died from the Coronavirus, but still, we can see that the number of 70-79 year-olds increased a remarkable percentage.

We should be aware that usually in countries where conditions for survival are more difficult that more children will be born there, but also more deaths will occur. In the West, similarly, with improved living conditions and a reduction in child deaths, we have had a reduction in births.

The few decades of projected global population growth that remain will be driven by a small number of undeveloped countries, many in the Sahel region of Africa. In countries like Niger, which has the world’s highest fertility rate, economic conditions remain so harsh that women continue to have an average of six or more children in order to survive.

In contrast, for most of the rest of the world – including Britain – it’s a baby bust. And it’s happening now. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), women born in 1975 had on average just 1.92 children. This compared with the average 2.08 children produced by their mothers’ generation (taken as women born in 1949) and is far below the 2.1 children needed for the existing population to replace itself. For a country it is accepted that, to maintain stability in a country, an overall total fertility rate of 2.1 is needed, assuming no immigration or emigration occurs. A total fertility rate (TFR) of 2.1 is known as the replacement rate. Generally speaking, when the TFR is greater than 2.1, the population in a given area will increase, and when it is less than 2.1, the population in a given area will eventually decrease, though it may take some time because factors such as age structure, emigration, or immigration must be considered.

Last year, the French were urged to have more children after the number of births in the country slumped to its lowest level since the Second World War, with 1.83 children born per woman, compared with 2.02 more than a decade earlier. The birth rate in Spain also dropped to a historic low last year, hitting just 1.19 children born to every woman – a 29 per cent fall compared with a decade earlier.

And in parts of Asia the situation is even worse. South Korea’s fertility rate sank to its lowest ever in 2020, a meagre 0.84 children per woman, giving the country the lowest birth rate in the world.

If, on average, women give birth to 2.1 children and these children survive to the age of 15, any given woman will have replaced herself and her partner upon death.

If young people have now decided not to have children, it means that in a few years’ time, we will indeed have a reduced number of people in several countries but there will also be a very ageing population for which not enough young people will be able to care, a problem China is now facing.

Europe and the U.S.A are already facing a similar problem too because although fertility rates remain well above the replacement rate in many parts of the world, the global TFR has declined significantly since 1970. The decline may be so drastic that populations are expected to halve by 2100 in more than 20 countries, including Spain, Portugal and Japan.

While some may think that humans will have to move to other planets due to overpopulation, some also realise that there will be an emerging population reduction. Elon Musk, the billionaire Tesla chief executive, has called it

“one of the biggest risks to civilisation”.

But why, when living standards and freedoms have never been higher, are women across the globe having so few children or rejecting the concept of motherhood altogether? And what if anything can policymakers do to reverse the trend?

What we should be concerned about is why young people, if not out of selfishness, do not want to bear children. Is it because those twens consider children an economic drain caused by housing, education cost and other costs.

Economic stresses and spiralling house prices mean more couples will feel they can’t afford children,

explains Lyman Stone, chief information officer at Demographic Intelligence.

To promote “no children” may also just be an excuse to avoid such an obligation to share each other with a third party and if they find they can no longer have children, hide it behind their so-called “no children policy”. It looks like many youngsters do not want to invest time or money in any other beings in their relationship. Most of them want leisure time, and time to focus on their own well-being and development.

The reverse of the leisurist coin is the “workist” mindset, in which they value their job very highly as a source of meaning and purpose in their life. Getting higher in work has become a very important factor, and that goal of reaching a high position is considered much more important than having children.

Like leisurism, it is not hugely compatible with parenthood. More than one study has suggested a correlation between workist attitudes – which Stone says are prevalent among a growing share of adults – and lower fertility.

A survey last year by the Pew Research Center in the US found a rising share of childless American adults said they were unlikely to ever start a family. Some 44 per cent of non-parents aged 18 to 49 fell into this category, up from 37 per cent in 2018. While some cited financial reasons, climate change or their lack of a partner as a reason, the majority (56 per cent) said they probably wouldn’t have children because they just didn’t want to.

It’s a group that’s becoming more vocal. In 2015 and 2017, the NotMom Summit – billed as one of the world’s first major conferences for women without children – was held in Cleveland, Ohio. In 2021, Erin Spurling, a British woman in her mid-30s, created the Childfree Lounge, an online community for women without children.

Many of those no-children lovers say they love their freedom, spontaneity and peace and quiet. They often also value time alone or just with a partner or even want to change partners regularly.

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Find also to read

Child-free by choice: The birth rate crisis gripping the West

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Additional reading

  1. How the pandemic created an unexpected “baby bump”
  2. Welfare state and Poverty in Flanders #4 The Family pact
  3. Ecological economics in the stomach #3 Food and Populace
  4. How to look back at Cop26
  5. What effect does population have on climate change?
  6. Overpopulation not the cause of overusing our earth

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Filed under Being and Feeling, Fashion - Trends, Headlines - News, Health affairs, Lifestyle, Social affairs, Welfare matters

Hitler and Appeasement: Ideology or Opportunism?

Gregor MacMinto

How much interaction was there between Nazi foreign policy and appeasement? Did Adolph Hitler pursue ideological goals with such determination that nothing could deflect him from a programme of conflict? This article compares the ‘intentionalist’ perspective with the ‘structuralist’ view to ascertain the role played by ideology in Nazi foreign policy. How far did Hitler have a clear plan and how much of Nazi foreign policy was opportunistic?

A Clear Plan
The intentionalist perspective argues that Hitler had a clear and radical ideology, as well as a master plan, both of which he put forward in his book Mein Kampf in 1925-7 and more explicitly in its unpublished follow-up of 1928. In his writings, Hitler expressed two important themes. One was a need for Germans to acquire Lebensraum (living space) in Eastern Europe via the conquest of lands occupied by ‘subhuman’ Slavs, something which was to be achieved mainly through…

View original post 1,070 more words

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Filed under History, Re-Blogs and Great Blogs

Submarine ‘treason’ shows Britain is vassal state of US, say fuming French

France has labelled Britain an American “vassal” and denounced Australia for “treason” over its decision to cancel a €56 billion deal to buy 12 French diesel-electric submarines.
The Australian government has opted instead for more sophisticated nuclear-powered submarines from Britain and America; a move described by a furious Jean-Yves Le Drian, the French foreign minister, as a “stab in the back”. Le Drian announced on Friday that he was recalling France’s ambassadors to Australia and the US in protest, an extraordinary step among such close allies and a sign of the Macron government’s displeasure at having been given only a few hours’ warning of the change, made public on Wednesday.
Clément Beaune, France’s outspoken Europe minister, turned his fire on the UK.

“Our British friends explained to us that they were leaving the EU to create Global Britain. As you can see, it is a return to the American fold and accepting a form of vassal status,”

he told Public Sénat, a state television station.

Andy Walton in his Weekly World Watch comments:

Even though Britain could have forged this new agreement with the UK and Australia before Brexit it is highly unlikely they would have done so. Before Brexit, Britain was in the EU and would have been obligated to tell their partners of something like this. But post Brexit, Britain is looking to become a global power again and forge closer ties with the wider world outside Europe. This has incensed the French as this new nuclear submarine deal cancels their own deal with Australia costing France billions. Again with Bible in hand we see how this fits with Bible prophecy. Britain is NOT part of the EU alliance of nations (political Babel / Babylon) that come together under the false religion of Rome (spiritual Babylon).

Brother John Thomas understood this 150+ years ago!

Britain is not included in the ten toes. She is reserved of God to antagonize Russia” and “The ten toes belong to the image as a united dominion; hence Britain cannot be included among them. (Elpis Israel – written by John Thomas)

the toes of the feet were part of iron, and part of clay, (Daniel 2:42)

 

Download this week’s WWW

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Filed under Headlines - News, World affairs

France, Germany Propose EU Summit With Russia’s Putin, Diplomats Say

Brussels (Reuters) – France and Germany proposed on Wednesday a European Union summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin to try to improve relations, two diplomats said, potentially paving the way for the first such meeting since 2014.

Such an event would follow U.S. President Joe Biden’s summit in Geneva with Putin earlier this month and reflects concern in Paris and Berlin that the EU’s approach to Russia in recent years has mainly been focused on sanctions on Moscow.

“Germany and France have given some ideas for the EU-summit-debate on Russia. Merkel has mentioned before that not only the U.S. should talk with Russia (and China) on the highest level. Russia is a neighbour. Such a format existed already in 2007 in Finland,”

a person dealing with the preparation of the summit told Reuters.

“The entire post-war history of Greater Europe confirms that prosperity and security of our common continent is only possible through the joint efforts of all countries, including Russia,”

the Russian President pointed

A strategy paper by the European Commission and the EU’s diplomatic service said earlier this month that despite years of tensions,

“the EU and Russia have a fundamental common responsibility for peace and security on the European continent.”

It can well be that Russia is open to honest and constructive cooperation with Europe. It calls for the recovery of a comprehensive partnership with it, Russian President Vladimir Putin wrote in an article “Being Open, Despite the Past” timed to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945).

“I reiterate that Russia is in favour of restoring a comprehensive partnership with Europe. We have many topics of mutual interest. These include security and strategic stability, healthcare and education, digitalization, energy, culture, science and technology, resolution of climate and environmental issues,”

the Russian leader said in an article published on the Kremlin website.

“We are open to honest and constructive interaction. This is confirmed by our idea of creating a common space of cooperation and security from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, which would comprise various integration formats, including the European Union and the Eurasian Economic Union,”

he noted.

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Filed under Headlines - News, Political affairs, World affairs

A dangerous turning point – Earth facing the collapse of everything

Despite so much evidence to the contrary, “experts” deny there is any threat to the world’s ecology.
Study Disputes That Earth is in a ‘Climate Emergency’

Brietbart 07-Feb-21 by Delingpole

“There is no “climate emergency”, according to a study for the Global Warming Policy Foundation by independent scientist Dr Indur Goklany.
Dr Goklany concludes:

“While climate may have changed for the warmer:  Most extreme weather phenomena have not become extreme, more deadly, or more destructive.  Empirical evidence directly contradicts claims that increased carbon dioxide has reduced human wellbeing. In fact, human wellbeing has never been higher.

Whatever detrimental effects warming and higher carbon dioxide may have had on terrestrial species and ecosystems, they have been swamped by the contribution of fossil fuels to increased biological activity. This has halted, and turned around, reductions in habitat loss”.

The report would make hugely depressing reading for all environmental activists — even the Pope – if it was
infallibly accurate – which it is not!
Dr Goklany says there is little to scare us:

Yes, there will be more hot days, but fewer cold days. Oh? Where?

In the Arctic and the Antarctic of course – silly!

*There will be less tornados – #in Great Britain?
* There will be less floods, less frequent and smaller!
# Perhaps Goklany slept through last year, but there were half a dozen cyclones causing death by floods, drowning, landslides and inundation from January to December 2020 throughout the Southern Hemisphere!
*There will be less droughts and less wildfires.

# When does this begin? So far so bad in California and many parts of Australia. In October 1917 intense, deadly fires killed 41 people in Spain and Portugal, and in 2020 fires affected Sweden and Northern France as well as Italy and Spain where wildfires are not indigenous!

In 2020 for months, Siberia has been experiencing extreme heat due to a combination of persistent sunny weather and human-caused climate change. In addition to producing Arctic temperatures that cracked 100 degrees in June, the heat has fueled an enormous outbreak of wildfires, including fires on Siberia’s tundra……

Breitbart News Desk February 16, 2021:

The deep freeze that knocked out power in Texas spread across the country this week. The agency that manages power in fourteen states from Texas through Oklahoma and all the way up to North Dakota declared a state of emergency and ordered utilities to initiate rolling blackouts to cut electrical demand and stabilize the grid.
Meanwhile, a lot of fracking for oil has been brought to a halt by the freeze. Twenty percent of the U.S. oil production has gone offline, and some of the biggest refineries have been shuttered. The big problem is that the Texas oil kits are not set up for arctic weather. Up in North Dakota the extraction process is winterized, but that’s not the case farther south. Even something as simple as picking up oil in a truck to move to a refinery can become impossible when your roads are iced over, there are no snow ploughs or road salt, and no one has snow tires.
Crude oil production is down by more than four million barrels a day, twice what was reported a day earlier. Prior to the cold crisis, the U.S. was producing around 11 million barrels a day.
The Permian Basin, America’s largest oil field, has been hard hit. Production in the area that straddles western Texas and
New Mexico is down between 65 percent and 80 percent.

The melting Arctic has been watched closely by countries like China and Russia who are looking to take advantage of the increasingly available shipping lanes. But scientists have lamented the latest milestone, and are sounding the alarm about further environmental degradation due to increased shipping activity.

It is a very dangerous turning point

says Associate Professor Nengye Liu, an expert in international polar law at Macquarie University.

In Revelation 6:8-9 we can see that “Global Warming” is the result of the 4th Vial of God’s Wrath

   8 And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire. 9  And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God, which hath power over these plagues: and they repented not to give him glory.

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‘Too late’:

David Attenborough warns Earth faces ‘total collapse’

Nick Whigham ·Assistant News Editor | Yahoo News| 24.2.20-21

The world’s most famous naturalist has issued a dire proclamation about the state of the planet, warning Earth is facing “the collapse of everything” if we continue on our current path.

94-year-old Sir David Attenborough warned overnight that climate change is the biggest security threat modern humans have ever faced while addressing the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) session on climate, saying it was “already too late” to stem the diabolical impacts of global warming.

   “There is no going back, no matter what we do now, it’s too late to avoid climate change and the poorest, the most vulnerable, those with the least security, are now certain to suffer,”

he said.

“And if the natural world can no longer support the most basic of our needs, then much of the rest of civilisation will quickly break down.”

Arthur Wright, Kallangur, Brisbane

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  16. 60,000 Belgians take government to court over alleged climate inaction

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Filed under Ecological affairs, World affairs

So-called own sacred values under threat

The last few years we have seen populist politicians becoming more popular and getting a stronger following who wanted to cause a fuss here and there. Often they want to have their people believe their nation was great but got damaged by the many immigrants. They say the immigrant population weakens the country and brings democracy in danger.

On the other side there is also a contemporary myth that European societies used to be homogenous. Europe has always been a blanket of a lot of diversity. Always it has been a mixture of all sorts of people and cultures. Throughout the ages we could find a battlefield in the Low Countries. Lots of pieces of land changed hands many times, once belonging to the Romans, than to the Germans, the Austrians, the French, the Dutch. Even the languages and religion changed more than once.

Threat to the security and stability of the nation

Today we can find lots of people who say the land belongs to them and others bring their Judaeo-Christian values in danger. Though many of those crying about their values, do not have any of such juedo christian values at all. The 2016 Islamist fundamentalist attacks showed clearly how far countries as France wanted to go putting liberty of thought, freedom of expression and clothing at the side. France and Belgium so secularised took measures which went totally against real democratic rules and humanitarian freedom.

Big problem in Europe today is that lots of people do not worship God any more and do not keep to the essential commandments of God and as such do not mind not telling the truth, not loving the other, not taking care of others their goods or of nature, they even enjoy being better than the other wanting to have more than they have. For many, hatred and envy are the order of the day. We notice that hatred under Christians is nothing new any more. In the previously Chrisitan countries, we also come to see more hatred against religions in general, many thinking religion is the cause of all the problems. In West Europe we find many that much-vaunted bastions of multiculturalism have become No God Zones.

The last few years we also could see that several countries did not mind to take up again very discriminatory laws.  We could see that even in the so-called most free country of Europe: France; and also in the so-called most progressive liberal country Denmark where they even went so far to go for Nazi-laws.

Too many people do forget our world evolved to a world where lots of people go from one place to another and influence each other. There are already many influencers on the net who cross many country borders and bring people to change their normal and consumption habits, plus eating and clothing customs.

Best examples which show how it is going wrong at the moment, are the United States of America, Brazil, Hungary and Hong Kong. The States takes the cake by having a president who goes in against everything the founders of that State stood for. That country was built on the aspiring hopes of people who came from all sorts of countries, all sorts of cultures and different religious denominations. The land is created or grown by a mixture of peoples. In the few years the 45th president of the U.S.A. ruled he managed to destroy a lot what was build up in the previous decades and created a lot of division between the inhabitants of those states which should be unified.

Instead of all trying to come to one unified Europe we do find more and more people going against the tendency for unification. Several politicians want to create such hammock in the country people get fed up with politics and start wanting to do their own thing in the way they want to do it.

A few years ago there was the beginning of fear created by Islamist fundamentalists. Now an other fear was added. This time it is not the clash between Islam and the West, but the power of a virus, which destroys our free way of life as well. Religious conflict was the norm in the old so-called homogenous Europe. Often the Roman Catholics were the killers to be afraid of. They had a terror regime that forced everyone to Catholicism. The people having most to fear then were the ones who worshipped the Only One True God and not Christ. Many brethren and sisters in the faith had to hide their faith or even had to hide in less easy to reach regions.

The English philosopher John Locke put it, ‘to a foreign prince’, the Pope, whose values were incompatible with those of liberal democracies, and who posed a threat to the security and stability of the nation.

At one point in European history we have two centuries where Jews were seen even more of a threat to European identity, values and ways of being, so much so that they became victims of the world’s greatest genocide. Today many forget that the treatment of Jews as the ‘Other’ was not confined to Germany. It was a central theme in most European nations, from the Dreyfus affair in France to Britain’s first immigration law, the 1905 Aliens Act, designed principally to stem the flow into the country of European Jews. And up in the North lots of Jews got burned in their homes by Russian attacks against them.

In all cases we see that governments and people want to find a victim, someone or some people to point with the finger, to cast them as the cause of all misery.

In the previous centuries high society also looked downwards to the working class. The working class and the rural poor were seen by many as racial distinct.
The French aristocratic anti-egalitarian diplomat, writer, ethnologist, and social thinker Arthur de Gobineau, in his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, 4 vol. (1853–55; Essay on the Inequality of Human Races), remarked already that

‘Every social order represents a racial variety’.

Joseph-Arthur, comte de Gobineau.

Arthur de Gobineau, French diplomat, writer, ethnologist, and social thinker whose theory of racial determinism had an enormous influence upon the subsequent development of racist theories and practices in western Europe.

In the Essai Gobineau asserted the superiority of the white race over others and labeled the “Aryans”—i.e., the Germanic peoples—as representing the summit of civilization. That idea is not killed yet. Also today in Europe as well as in the United States we do find people who cling to that idea, that the fate of civilizations is determined by racial composition, that white and in particular Aryan societies flourish as long as they remain free of black, brown and yellow strains, and that the more a civilization’s racial character is diluted through miscegenation, the more likely it is to lose its vitality and creativity and sink into corruption and immorality.Donald Trump does find this enough reason to make sure everyone comes to understand that, and that it are the white federal troops which are the ones who can and should have everything in control.

Gobineau insisted that

‘We imagine that we are one nation, but we are two nations on the same land’,

each a distinctive race with

‘perpetually contradictory spirits’.

The Christian socialist Phillipe Buchez, giving a talk to the Medico-Psychological Society of Paris in 1857, wondered how it could happen that

 ‘within a population such as ours, races may form – not merely one but several races – so miserable, inferior and bastardised that they may be classed below the most inferior savage races, for their inferiority is sometimes beyond cure.’

The races that he was talking of were not, of course, from Africa or Asia, but the working class and the rural poor. In this century some reflect similar words now also referring to those who work on the fields (seasonal workers) and those who do the jobs the ‘nationals’ do not want to do.

Gobineau’s writings were quickly praised by white supremacist, pro-slavery Americans like surgeon, anthropologis and slaveowner Josiah C. Nott and the Swiss American propagandist for the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War, Henry Hotze, who translated his book into English. They omitted around 1,000 pages of the original book, including those parts that negatively described Americans as a racially mixed population.

In the 19th century in many countries, the poor were

‘a race of whom we know nothing, whose lives are of quite different complexion from ours, persons with whom we have no point of contact.’

explained an article on working-class life in East London in The Saturday Review, a well-read liberal magazine of the era.

‘Distinctions and separations, like those of English classes’,

the article concluded,

‘which always endure, which last from the cradle to the grave, which prevent anything like association or companionship… offer a very fair parallel to the separation of the slaves from the whites.’

Just before the pandemic struck our regions there were already enough signs we were evolving back to a segregation position of modern slaves, the working class.

With the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic, we will have to be very careful that politicians and CEOs do not take advantage of this situation in order to corner the workers and exploit them even more because of the emerging economic crisis.

In the States, we see already how the president got so many people to believe that we should ignore this virus or Chinese disease and should all go back at work making our economy great again. For him, the economy comes first. Human lives are not so important and when they are black or brown they are even less important. For him as for some in Europe as well there should not be Corona restrictions, because they go against our liberty. All such matters to protect the health of people undermine the economy and therefore (according to them) should be annulled. Inc ase there are people dying from Covid-19 they should be considered as just ‘accidents de parcours’.

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Preceding

Tribes Redux

Trans-ability and Identity and Political correctness

Seeds from the world creating division and separation from God

Denmark votes in favour for a Discriminatory Nazi law

American Christians have to think twice before going to vote

Tolerance Ends When There Is No Tolerance Shown Towards Us

Francis Fukuyama and ‘The End of History?’

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Additional reading

  1. Belgium, Belgicae and the fertile floodland
  2. Disturbing language inbalance
  3. Catholicism, Anabaptism and Crisis of Christianity
  4. Morality, values and Developing right choices
  5. Subcutaneous power for humanity 2 1950-2010 Post war generations
  6. 2014 Religion
  7. Europe and much-vaunted bastions of multiculturalism becoming No God Zones
  8. 2016 in review Politics #1 Year of dissonance
  9. Negative views of immigrants, Muslims and Jews
  10. Migrants to the West #5
  11. Built on or Belonging to Jewish tradition #1 Christian Reform
  12. President Trump shall have to recognise that Immigrant Workers Are Vital to the U.S.A.
  13. Secularism in France becoming dangerous for freedom of religion
  14. Christians, secularism, morals and values
  15. Being Christian in Western Europe at the beginning of the 21st century #2
  16. Need to Embrace People Where They Are
  17. 500 Years of Reformation Divisions Have Lost Much of Their Potency
  18. American Christianity no longer resembles its Founder
  19. What Steve Bannon really wants
  20. Is Europe going to become a dictatorial bastion
  21. Challenges of the Post-Pandemic period

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Filed under Activism and Peace Work, Being and Feeling, Crimes & Atrocities, Headlines - News, Lifestyle, Political affairs, Welfare matters, World affairs

Coronavirus disinfectant use alarms scientists

Everywhere a lot of people want to use a lot of disinfectants, antibacterial products, Dettol, Alcohol, a.o..

Once people were confronted with the seriousness of the possible spread of the new 6th coronavirus they wanted to disinfect the surroundings. China, South Korea, France, Spain, and several other countries thought they best would be to spray copious amounts of disinfectant throughout densely populated urban areas. Fleets of trucks, drones, and even robots doused streets, parks, playgrounds, and other outdoor public spaces with virus-killing chemicals.

On television, we could see that in several countries government people even went into the houses spraying loads of chemicals.

China was the first country, in January 2020, to start sanitizing its cities — and as soon as it did, reports of poisoned animals started coming in. In February, an investigation by the Chongqing Forestry Bureau in Chongqing, a huge city in southwestern China, found that at least 135 animals across 17 species — including wild boars, Siberian weasels, and blackbirds — had died after exposure to disinfectants, according to Chinese news agency Xinhua.

Disinfectant ingredients, mostly sodium hypochlorite, chlorine, and bleach, are “acutely toxic to both terrestrial and aquatic animals,” says Dongming Li, professor of ecology at Hebei Normal University and co-author of the Environmental Research analysis, which was based solely on the Chongqing Forestry Bureau’s investigation. Li and his colleagues did not personally examine the dead animals to confirm what had killed them.

Even so, the animals’ deaths are concerning evidence, Li believes, that

“the overuse of disinfectants may contaminate the habitats of urban wildlife.” (Read more about how animals are moving into cities.)

Li’s team is now calling on world leaders to regulate the dispersal of disinfectants in urban areas, which they say is being done without input from the scientific community.

Furthermore, we also want to warn people antibacterial products are of no use against viruses, and an overdose of such products kills also the necessary and good bacteria we do need, whilst it makes the bad bacteria resistant. That will give a lot of problems in the treatment and prevention of bacterial infections.

Antibiotics have been used since ancient times, but the last few years there was such an increase that many bacteria managed to resist those articles. The World Health Organization has classified antimicrobial resistance as a widespread

“serious threat [that] is no longer a prediction for the future, it is happening right now in every region of the world and has the potential to affect anyone, of any age, in any country”. {Antimicrobial resistance: global report on surveillance(PDF). The World Health Organization. April 2014. ISBN978-92-4-156474-8. Retrieved 13 June 2016.}

People should be fully aware that chemical disinfectants kill viruses, bacteria, and other microorganisms by destroying their cell walls and damaging their proteins through oxidation. If inhaled or ingested by people or animals, these substances can irritate or corrode the mucous membranes of the respiratory and digestive tracts. In extreme cases, exposure can lead to death.

We also may not forget that using all those disinfectants, also by washing our hands with such products they all come into our water system. Christopher J. Schell, professor of urban ecology at the University of Washington, in Tacoma, ways:

“If you put toxicants into a system, they are going to travel through the food web,”

While sanitizing frequently touched surfaces can help reduce the spread of the coronavirus, scientists now know that most people get the disease by breathing in droplets in the air from an infected person and not so much by coming into contact with a contaminated surface.

That’s why, in May, the World Health Organization advised against using disinfectants outdoors, both because streets and sidewalks

“are not considered as routes of infection for COVID-19”

and because spraying such chemicals

“can be noxious for people’s health and cause eye, respiratory or skin irritation or damage.”

The WHO didn’t mention the harm to wildlife as well, but many wildlife rangers and animal scientists warn people of the danger of those products contaminating the environment and endangering wildlife. Though with that knowledge there are still several countries which continue to spray disinfectants in public areas.

“The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has caused public fear in many countries. Many health agencies around the world may spray more disinfectants to ensure the virus is fully killed and to alleviate their worries of viral infection,”

Li says.

Politicians who dare to take the right measures, demanding restrictions to where people go, are not risking their popularity and therefore ordered going on the streets with spraying trucks or spraying agents, or drones, and even robots dousing streets, parks, playgrounds, and other outdoor public spaces with virus-killing chemicals, is more visible for many, who then would think their government does it best. Though it would be much better and safer for the environment if people would be encouraged to stay home.

“Rather than indiscriminately spraying high volumes of disinfectants in biodiversity-rich areas such as urban parks, wetlands, and green spaces,”

Dongming Li says,

“it would be preferable to suspend human activities in such places.”

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Please find also to read:

  1. Why antibodies may not be the key to beating coronavirus
  2. Why COVID-19 will end up harming the environment
  3. Antarctica is the last continent without COVID-19. Scientists want to keep it that way.
  4. How Wild Animals Are Hacking Life in the City

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A looming danger for youngsters

It looks like CoViD-19 is going to be here around for many more months and companies are feeling the pressure of more difficult months to come. (Worldwide at the moment 16.341.179 infected, 650.792 deaths)

Some companies already make misuse to re-organise or restructure their business. Several layoffs are in the air.

Shannon Allen, a Second Year Undergraduate student studying Sociology at the University of Portsmouth, gives some advice to her peers at her blog Bloggit. she gives some key tips for gaining experience, especially in digital marketing, and seems herself also on the lookout for groups or media posters, perhaps to find like-minded young women who will literally chat about anything and everything!

She also started volunteering with a local volunteering centre, and with good reason brings this under attention, because many more people should find such a way to use the free time they have now in lockdown. Also, for those who work now from home, a lot of time has come free because they do not have to lose so many hours in traffic for going to work.

For the other free time and for meeting others, at night, she writes

Often, when I see my friends there is alcohol involved, often leading up to a night out. As the clubs have remained shut in England, this has been off the cards so we have had much more trips to the park or the beach, and nights in watching Disney+ and playing on the Nintendo Switch. It is so important to spend quality time with people, especially as after next year we probably won’t see each other very often as we start the next chapter of our lives. {Boost the positive vibes!}

We only hope she does not come together any more with more than 5 people, who would always be the same people from the same circle or bubble. In Belgium and France we have seen too many youngsters gathering in all sorts of venues like nothing is at hand and corona would not exist. Such irresponsible attitude is totally disrespectful to all health care providers.

Instead of clutching or to stick together those youngsters could meet more via social media and use more time to take some extra schooling.

Miss Allen writes

Over lockdown, I have been trying to complete as many online courses as I can. {Experience Unlocks Doors!}

which is a very good idea which we would promote very much.

A good place to look for these, if you’re looking at digital marking related ones, is the google digital garage and futurelearn*. I have also started an 3 day internship with ‘Brightside’, in ‘Business, Operations and Marketing’, which was free to join and you also gain a certificate from! It involves networking with business professionals and learning key skills within this business realm. {Experience Unlocks Doors!}

LinkedIn Logo 2013.svgFor sure what is going to be very important in the coming months is to make sure there are job securities to look at. As such it is not bad to make yourself already be known on the business and employment-oriented online service LinkedIn and to search for job/ voluntary roles and groups

LinkedIn is a great way to start, it tailors role ads to your cv, depending on your experience and where you live. It is also a great place to find groups to join that post related content. Following tags is the simplest way to start, for example I follow #digitalmarketing which is regularly updated with interesting posts. {Experience Unlocks Doors!}

*

Ed.note:

File:MOOC poster mathplourde.pngMassive open online course (MOOC) aimes at unlimited participation and open access via the web

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  18. It’s time to rest and I find that hard to do when there is so much to do and people – my people, my peers – are being abandoned by this government.
  19. Work Readiness Opportunities
  20. Creating Community and Togetherness

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Filed under Crimes & Atrocities, Economical affairs, Headlines - News, Lifestyle, Social affairs, Welfare matters, World affairs

Aalst Carnival and Unia analyses reports

Area of action: Society

Grounds of discrimination: Racism

In December 2018 Unia pressed in anti-Semitism hearings in the Belgian Senate for the reintroduction of an anti-Semitism watchdog. The organisation asked Minister Kris Peeters, at that time responsible for Equal Opportunities, to take the first steps towards an inter-federal action plan against discrimination and racism. Anti-Semitism remains a persistent problem. The calls being made by Unia in 2018 were in response to a large-scale survey of 16,000 Jews in twelve EU countries by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), a human rights agency of the EU.

The findings of the report make for a sobering read. They underscore that antisemitism remains pervasive across the EU – and has, in many ways, become disturbingly normalised. Already in 2018 an overwhelming majority of survey participants felt that antisemitism was getting worse. They also feared for their own safety, and that of their loved ones. Though we also could notice not only the monotheist Hebrews or Jehudi were targeted. Jeshuaists and Muslims, worshipping the same God were not loved either and felt the pressure. Jeshuaists and Jews belonging to different Judaic denominations protect themselves by not coming out to much in the open and by leaving their kippa at home, only discreetly displaying mezuzas, avoiding certain areas in their cities or skipping Jewish events.

The many graphs contained in the report reveal a sobering picture of Belgium. Except for France, Jews do not experience anywhere in the EU as much hostility on the streets as they do in Belgium. Among those surveyed, 81 percent mentioned public spaces as the place with the most hatred of Jews. The European average is about 70 percent.

“These are figures that require a structural approach in the form of a vigilance unit and a plan that overarches policy areas,’

stressed Unia director at that time, Els Keytsman.

Already in 2018, a shocking statistic sended a clear message:

in the past five years, across twelve EU Member States where Jews have been living for centuries, more than one third say that they consider emigrating because they no longer feel safe as Jews.

In the meantime, we know about many Jews and Jeshuaists who left Belgium.

Vlag van het Vlaams BelangMuch too many people seem to forget how antisemitic acts can have a profound impact not only on individuals and those close to them, but also on the Jewish community as a whole. Several manifestations may bring forward all sorts of the types of antisemitic acts which we see increasing since a decade and by the growing popularity of two Flemish National parties, the right-wing populist Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang, with a strong anti-immigrant message that succeeded the right-wing Vlaams Block, and the Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie (N-VA – New Flemish Alliance), a movement that self-identifies with the promotion of civic nationalism, which strives for the secession of Flanders from Belgium.

The last few years in Belgium and France we have seen an increase in desecration of Jewish cemeteries, vandalism of Jewish buildings or institutions, expressions of hostility towards Jews and Jeshuaists in the street and other public places, but also an enormous antisemitism in the media. It is incredible what we can find on the internet, including social media, where nobody seems to be willing or able to silence the hate-speech.
In 2018 antisemitism online was already seen as a particularly widespread problem: a large majority of all respondents in the 12 survey countries (89 %) consider this either ‘a very big’ or a ‘fairly big’ problem, and as many (88 %) believed that it had increased over the past five years. The percentage of respondents indicating that antisemitism on the internet is problematic is especially high (at least 90 %) in Belgium, France, Italy, and Poland. In Belgium and France, a majority of respondents rated almost all antisemitic manifestations that the survey asked about as ‘a very big’ or ‘a fairly big’ problem. These are also the countries with the highest proportion of respondents indicating antisemitism in general as a problem.

The majority of respondents of that survey are aware of legislation that forbids discrimination based on ethnic origin or religion – some 64 %–87 %, depending on the area, indicated knowing about it. They are most aware of anti-discrimination legislation in employment and least aware of protection related to housing. Most respondents (71 %) also say they are aware of an organisation in the country that offers advice or support for people who are discriminated against, but we should be aware that out of self-protection most Jews and Jeshuaists do not dare to react or bring the problem into the public. Respondents most often referred to Jewish organisations specialising in the safety and security of the Jewish community and/or antisemitism, and national equal-ity or human rights bodies. Lots of Jews and Jeshuaists lost their trust in the Belgian State and in Belgian politicians.

Fortunatelyserious incidents are today punishable by law. For example, in 2018 Unia was a civil party in the case against the vandal who caused serious damage in the Jewish quarter of Antwerp.

“Unia was also a civil party in the case concerning the attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels.”

Last November Unia was calling for a more inclusive image for folkloric events and intangible heritage such as the pre-Lent merrymaking and festivity carnival. Unia said local organisers and partners can play an important role in this. That is one of Unia’s recommendations in a report drawn up following the controversy about the anti-Semitic float in the municipality Aalst, on the Dender River, 24 km (15 miles) northwest of Brussels.

Unia feels that dialogue and awareness must be a priority.

“What is offensive to one person is apparently folklore for another. Showing consideration for other people’s sensitivities can never be simply imposed by law. Only through dialogue can we take into account the feelings of others and learn to see things from their point of view. “

That is why Unia organised meetings between Belgium’s Forum of Jewish Organisations and a group of Aalst carnivalists.

“Their float – depicting anti-Semitic stereotypes – was unintentionally reminiscent of Nazi propaganda. We understand that many people were shocked by this connotation, and it led to a highly polarised conflict. We have seen that both parties now have an understanding of each other’s position and context. Talking to each other does not guarantee that stereotypes will never crop up again, but it is a start.”

It could have gone the right way, but this year, it uncovered the hidden agenda more clearly. From what was presented at the cortège was more than just laughing with something that bothered them. It was showing their disgust for another culture and other religion than theirs.

Much too often we hear the excuse

“For carnivalists, freedom of expression means the freedom to make fun of anything and anyone.”

Though, one should question how far one can go with mockery. Unia says

“Conversely, that freedom also means that you are bound to provoke controversy now and then, and you have to be able to deal with criticism.”

People from Aalst seem to have lots of difficulty with the criticism they received over the last twelve months.

Lots of events happening in Aalst real lovers of God would never come to know if they were not shown on television and brought into social media.
Thanks to social media, images of parades and festivities are reaching the general public on an unprecedented scale and are thus amplified and sometimes, or more than once, may be taken out of context. Moreover, while in the past, traditions were not called into question, this questioning has now become appropriate, Unia notes.

“As such, that is a positive thing. Folkloristic events can evolve according to changing attitudes and new insights, allowing them to become celebrations in which no one is left out”,

according to Keytsman.

We do find politicians and organisations for protecting civilians, should recognise historical similarities and see the dangers behind certain events, which, in the beginning may look harmless and childish, but have a very deep and dangerous undertone. Puerile actions may develop into actions out of frustration and dissatisfaction which generates aggression against certain population groups.

This year out of frustration, how they were treated by Unesco, everal people in the parade mocked the specialized agency of the United Nations (UN), using Jewish caricatures as well.

But, from what we came to see and hear in the media, it went much further.

Unia promises to collect all the information and will investigate whether criminal offences were committed. For this, they are in contact with the prosecutor’s office and the police.

We wonder how Unia is going to act or take juridical prosecution against the group who had their float a sign labelled

“regulations for the Jewish party committee,”

and it included a not to misunderstand sarcastic:

“Do not mock Jews”

and a shocking

“Certainly do not tell the truth about the Jew.”

which clearly indicates they have formed an idea about Jews in general and do want others to believe that Jews have something to hide or do not want to have the truth about them told. This means those carnavalists understand the truth about the Jews is not or may not be told!?!

Rudi Roth, a journalist for the Antwerp-based Joods Actueel Jewish paper, said the expressions of anti-Semitism in Aalst this year were more numerous and prominent than last year. He called it a

“backlash effect.”

Coming closer to the event celebrities gave notice not having free time to come to the parade. Several politicians backed out of appearances with Aalst’s mayor, who has defended the parade displays.

According to Christophe D’Haese of the right-wing New Flemish Alliance, carnival is not an anti-Semitic event and should be seen in its context of

“everything is allowed”.

He said the event

“certainly has anti-Semitic elements,”

the likes of which he said had not been on display since the end of the Nazi occupation in 1945.

With good reason Rubinfeld said

“Aalst’s name is now associated with anti-Semitism,and that’s partly because of the mayor’s inaction.”

With questioning eyes, we are very curious to see whether Unia this year will make a real effort to go to court and make it clear that what has been shown this year in Aalst has been far out of proportion in our society and cannot be admitted.

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Preceding

What to do in the Face of Global Anti-semitism

Anti-Semitic pressure driving Jews out of Europe

Perhaps Anti-Semitism for lots of people isn’t always easy to see

What makes you following Christ and Facebook Groups

A Jew and Muslim walking together side by side down USA city streets

Speaking up and Celebration of Purim

Numbers 10:10 Make Your Rejoicing Heard

Niet te negeren gebeurtenissen rond Joden in België

Hoe ver kan men gaan om zich te beroepen op Vrije meningsuiting

Aalst Carnaval: Unia analyseert meldingen

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How a British ‘Master Spy’ Saved Thousands of Jews in the Holocaust

In 2005, the United Nations designated 27 January as an International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. On Monday 27 January 2020 it was a more special International Holocaust Remembrance Day because of the 75th anniversary of the Jewish liberation from Auschwitz.

Underneath you may find a list of articles looking at the commemorations and reactions which were made to those who were allowed to speak at those commemorations. In those articles you shall come to see how we are developing again to a dangerous situation where certain people with ‘other ideas’ and another religion than the ‘main stream’ are again considered as to be outcast and to be silenced or not having the right to speak.

When looking at that horrible period of cruelty and the many years that people stood aside not daring to open their mouth, we luckily may find also dome positive notes of people who dared to help others, risking their own life.

Despite the horrors that occurred at Auschwitz and other concentration camps, thousands of Jewish lives were spared because of the covert operations of unsung heroes.

One such man was Major Francis “Frank” Edward Foley CMG , a passport control officer for the British embassy in Berlin, who “bent the rules” and helped thousands of Jewish families escape from Nazi Germany after Kristallnacht and before the outbreak of the Second World War.

Frank foley.jpg

Major Francis “Frank” Edward Foley (1884-1958) recognised as a British Hero of the Holocaust and as a Righteous Among the Nations.

Though most saw Foley as a “low-level British bureaucrat serving in Berlin” just before World War II, [1 Gragg, Rod. My Brother’s Keeper: Christians Who Risked All to Protect Jewish Targets of the Nazi Holocaust, “Francis Foley,” (Center Street Publishing, 2017). ] he was actually a master spy in the MI6, the British intelligence service. He focused his efforts on the rise of German Communists, then on Hitler’s campaign to reactivate and expand the German military — until he learned what was happening in the Nazi concentration camps.[2 Gradd, 2017] He went on to secretly save thousands of Jewish lives.

To remember the approximately six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, we offer this reflection on Frank Foley’s selfless rescue missions, adapted from My Brother’s Keeper: Christians Who Risked All to Protect Jewish Targets of the Nazi Holocaust

***

Foley’s intelligence operation . . . revealed evidence that Jewish inmates imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps being erected throughout Germany were suffering horrors. Despite his protests, however, his London superiors waved away the accounts as ridiculous exaggerations. Foley then appealed to British immigration officials, asking them to expedite Jewish requests for asylum in Great Britain and its colonies, but encountered more bureaucratic apathy.

Frustrated but determined, Foley decided to help Germany’s Jews himself. Using his official cover as the British passport control officer in Berlin, he began issuing droves of passports to Jews seeking escape from Germany. Like Feng Shan Ho, his Chinese counterpart in Austria, Foley was motivated by more than just humanitarian concerns: his faith as a Christian compelled him to act, he believed—especially when so many of those who were persecuting the Jews claimed that they were Christians.

. . .

The pogrom against the Jews which left thousands of premises, homes and synagogues destroyed and therefore became widely known as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass – its meaning taken from the smashed windows and shards of broken glass strewn across German streets.

After Kristallnacht in 1938, the desperation increased within Germany’s Jewish community. Determined to escape the Nazis and save their families, German Jews began showing up unannounced at Foley’s Berlin flat. As a passport officer, he did not have diplomatic immunity, and he knew what could happen to him if Nazi authorities learned he was issuing thousands of passports or personally harbouring Jews. Despite the danger, he continued his mission. . . . Every month, hundreds of Jews came to Foley seeking escape from Nazi Germany. He realized that most of them would be hauled off to concentration camps before they could be processed by the ponderous, bureaucratic British immigration system — so he developed a streamlined process that severely stretched regulations but still complied with British law.

As relations deteriorated between Nazi Germany and Britain and France, Foley realized that war was imminent and redoubled his efforts to help Jews escape Germany. When warfare erupted in September 1939, Foley disappeared — off on the first of many wartime espionage assignments in which he would distinguish himself as one of the key allied intelligence operatives of World War II.

Obituary of Leo Baeck

A few days before the war began, Leo Baeck, a leading German rabbi and one of Foley’s chief Jewish contacts, received a message to pick up a package from Foley’s office in the British consulate. Foley was gone when Baeck arrived, but the package awaited him. It was Frank Foley’s final outreach to the imperilled Jews of Germany. Inside were more than eighty British passports officially stamped and approved for travel outside Germany, each with the spaces for name and address left blank — to be filled in by escaping Jews whom Frank Foley had never met.

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Find also to read:

  1. Reformed Churches Muzzled but Protest at Barmen
  2. Through the Lens of Faith
  3. Nazi Germany
  4. the Soup will not be eaten as hot as it is served
  5. Black page 70 years Release – commemoration Auschwitz
  6. World remembers Auschwitz survivors
  7. Luca Jahier, EESC President on the present intolerance
  8. Polish commemoration of the liberation of the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau
  9. Seventy-five years ago on January 27
  10. January 27 – 70 years ago Not an end yet to genocide
  11. 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz
  12. 5th World Holocaust Forum
  13. Dedication ceremony for a memorial at Jerusalem’s Sachar Park in honour of the casualties of the Siege of Leningrad
  14. Auschwitz survivors providing a warning of rising anti-Semitism and exclusion of free thinking
  15. What’s the Future of Holocaust Remembrance?
  16. Christadelphians’ role in the rescue of Jewish children from Nazi Germany
  17. Christadelphians, the Kindertransport, and Rescue from the Holocaust

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Filed under Activism and Peace Work, Crimes & Atrocities, History, Political affairs, Religious affairs, Social affairs, Welfare matters, World affairs

the Soup will not be eaten as hot as it is served

“Are they really bringing people to workplaces to give them a better life?”

It was known or said that even if Jews were converted to the Christian faith, they remained “different” because of their bloodline. It was also known that many were jealous for the lifestyle and family feeling which could  be found in the Klal Yisrael or Jewish communities. Many goyim found the Jews separated themselves from the society, but they did not often see it were goyim who themselves gave enough reason not to mix too much with them.

Samuel Morgenstern was one of those shopkeepers who was one of the most loyal buyers of Hitler’s paintings in Vienna, by which Hitler could receive enough money not to be a tramp. Naturally there were also rumours Hitler could not stand Jews because he got a disease from regularly going to some ‘Jewish harlots’.

Portrait of Karl Lueger (ca. 1900), mayor of Vienna. He used anti-Semitism as a political strategy. Collection: Austrian National Library / painter: Alois Delug. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Rights: Public Domain

Hitler, Adolf: Mein Kampf

Mein Kampf, (German: “My Struggle”) political manifesto written by Adolf Hitler. It was his only complete book and became the bible of National Socialism (Nazism) in Germany’s Third Reich. It was published in two volumes in 1925 and 1927, and an abridged edition appeared in 1930. By 1939 it had sold 5,200,000 copies and had been translated into 11 languages.

It perhaps were not just rumours that the politician, co-founder and leader of the Austrian Christian Social Party, and mayor of Vienna Karl Lueger (1844-1910), used anti-Semitism as a political strategy, and that he was also praised as “the greatest German mayor of all time” by Adolf Hitler (In Mein Kampf) who did not mind following his ideas.

The prejudices about the role of the Jews in the Great War were incorrect, but as with many rumours, it spread like a virus. Many Germans did not want to believe how more than one hundred thousand German and Austrian Jews had fought for their homeland, one of them being Otto Frank, the German-born merchant best known as the father of Anne Frank, who witnessed the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

In the 1920ies our family members could already hear how our brethren were compared with germs. It was as if our people had been infecting generations for ages. That Hitler never thought his people were not strong enough to live according to the wishes of their god or according to the mitzvot of the Only One True God, the Elohim Hashem Jehovah. Lots of our friends could not believe that those who said they were “Christian” and as such would, or should, be following the Nazarene Jewish rabbi who preached brotherly love, could do such atrocious things, as others told about them. Perhaps it was to set up Jehudiem against Christians, so that the goyim had all the reason to tell

religion is the cause of war.

The words spread that Hitler said that you cannot fight a disease without destroying the person who caused it, and as such according to him, the influence of the Jews would never disappear without removing the perpetrator, the Jude, from the midst of the Arian race.

Radical ideas paved the way for the mass murder of the Jews in the 1940s, but not many of the Bnei Yisroel or Chosen People of God wanted to believe the rumours at first.

In many families, like ours, it was the saying

“the Soup will not be eaten as hot as it is served”.

They heard about plans which would be taken, but they seemed so unbelievable that they could not be true or would have been exaggerated, as by a circling fire. Others were not so much at ease, and warned

“to be aware of a silent dog and still water”.

Should we look askance at him? Now we can easily say they had much better looked at him out of the tail of their eyes. By not believing the many rumours, lots were woken up with a start, when it was too late.

For a long time, many wondered if it was within the odds, whilst others said

“He is not likely to go.”

Others wanted to be a friend to all, forgetting that then they would be a friend to none. Many debates about what went on in Germany and Austria could bring lots of talks after the children were sent to bed. For sure that what was to be spoken about was not for children’s ears.

It was, and is still, known that there was and is, an existing prejudice that Jews associate with financial power and monetary gain. Many are also convinced Jews are “foefelaars“, who make their pile on the poor white people. Lots of Jews may be looked at as a ramay / nokhel, a fiddler or cheater whilst there was no oysnarn at all.

White movement propaganda poster from the Russian Civil War era (1919), a caricature of Leon Trotsky, who was viewed as a symbol of Jewish Bolshevism.

In many countries people also looked at the Jehudi as the originators or conspirators and spreaders of communism. The vast majority of the communist leaders at that time were Jewish. However, it is only a small part of the Jews that were communists, and what a lot of people did not see is that several Jews were promoting or aiming for social equality, this being considered by many liberals and capitalists a danger for the economy and consumption gain. During the war with the Soviet Union, from 1941 on, it will be the idea of the ‘Jewish communism’ (sometimes also called Marxian-communism or meant to be Jewish Bolshevism, also Judeo–Bolshevism) with terrible consequences. The population and the prisoners of war being brutally treated by the Germans.

When Hitler got into power rumours got stronger, but still many did not want to believe what went around. Others were smart enough to be at the safe site by sending their beloved far away from Germany and Austria. Some thought they would be safe in Holland, but how they were mistaken. Having gone to Holland luckily several managed to cross the channel and find a safe haven in the United Kingdom, but the others got taken and deported.

At the Schalkland, in the “Klein-Brabant” region, less than 25 kilometres from the centre of Brussels and 19 kilometres from Antwerp, to the south of the Dendermonde highway (Mechelen – Dendermonde) was build the “Willebroeck Fort” as a fortified defence to protect the port and city of Antwerp, which by Royal Order dated 12 January 1907 rechristened the fort “Breendonck Fort”. On september 20th 1940 Sturmbannführer Philip Schmitt brought his first victims to Breendonk. The Fort officially became the Auffanglager Breendonk, a transit camp; a major centre for the Sicherheitspolizei-Sicherheitsdienst (SIPO/SD), the german political police.

Words spread that in Breendonk the kaze-the mats were to be removed from the earth in which they were covered. Three or four men had to push a railway carriage that was loaded with the earth. It was not the best marterial the prisoners had to use. Of these vehicles, the wheels were worn out, having to be pushed on worn-out rails, so that a person would have more than it is possible. Was it a rumour or was it true that the SS guards, with their weapons beated on the upper arms, the backs of the heads of the unfortunate ones until the latter were exhausted, but also fell dead?

Former working site at the camp of Breendonk. The regime set up here by the Nazis hardly differed from that of an official concentration camp. The undernourishment and the forced labour wore down the body and mind. The ever-present physical cruelty sometimes caused the death of prisoners. Initially, the camp was only guarded by a few German SS and a detachment of the Wehrmacht. In September 1941, the Wachtgruppe of the SD arrived as back up. This time, these were no longer German SS but mainly Flemings.

Some of the prisoners were to be buried up to the neck, after they were first on a ferocious manner, beaten. The S, S. jailers were there, then settled for the pitiful earth at the face of them. The game lasted sometimes for 1 or 2 hours, and when the victims were about to die, they did not stop to punch and to death. During the singing of the song of Breendonk, the text of which these words were placed on the grave:

” Wir werden nie mehr Breendonk vergessen, das Paradies-tier Juden…’.”

Sturmbannführer (majoor) Schmitt had created and placed a pulley on the ceiling in a folterbunker (torture bunker or blockhouse) of the camp, to make, that the victim’s hands at the back tied up would be drawn to the ceiling.

After that, it was a pizzle of the shot, he was then beaten with a bullepees (bullenpees: baton between a whip and a stick made from dried penis of a bull). When the hoist was released, the unfortunate person fell on two angular boards. Kachelpoken or stove pokers were glowed for immediate use,… because the Jews were not worth the bullet. They had to be sent to death during work and by torture.

When the words rang true for most of the Jews still living in the region, it was too late to find a safe place for their children and for themselves.

After the camps in Belgium or Holland as “Musselmen” (completely emaciated) thousands were deported to Germany to find an end to their unbearable suffering, either of starvation, giving up, or in the gas chambers.

The remaining Jews in Belgium were unable to follow the course of events that their fellow believers underwent elsewhere. Their own concerns were too overwhelming for this and contact with neighbouring countries was too incomplete. The seeping job tidings were considered exaggerated …

Commissioned by the notorious member of Heinrich Himmler’s SS, the Nazi paramilitary corps, Adolf Eichmann, the Sicherheits polizei in Berlin, wrote the following urgent letter, in which the word “Secret” is not missing (22 June 1942):

“From mid-July and early August this year, special trains of 1,000 people each day are planned, first of all about 40,000 Jews from the occupied French territory,
Send 40,000 Jews from the Netherlands and 10,000 Jews from Belgium to employment in the Auschwitz camp.
“The circle of persons to be included extends primarily to Jews who are skilled in work, insofar as they do not live in mixed marriages and do not have the nationality of the British Empire, of the U.S.A., of Mexico, from the enemy states, from Central and South America, as well as from the neutral and related states.

“I may request willing access and assume that there are no objections to these measures on the part of the foreign office either.
Commissioned get. Eichman “

On 12 July 1942 the last restriction on freedom before the local raids started was put visible on billboards. From the onward Jews were no longer allowed to visit cinemas, theatres, sports grounds or public institutions. In the trams they were only allowed to stand on the front platform of the trailer.

Such regulations still did not unbalance many of the Jewish diluted community. According to many the German measures only wanted to deprive the Jews of public pleasures … (Few will then have immediately known that the first nocturnal masses in Paris on Friday July 17, 1942 raffle had taken place.)

Wimpel Organisation Todt.svg

Pennant for Organisation Todt

Bundesarchiv Bild 146-2007-0074, IG-Farbenwerke Auschwitz.jpg

Woman with Ostarbeiter OT badge at Auschwitz

The second Jewish labour team was also confidently leaving the civil and military engineering organisation “Organization Todt” to Charleville-Mèzières (18 July), until on July 22 the second deception beared its bitter fruit.(It was the day that the memorial of the destruction of the Temple took place in Jerusalem in the evening – Tischa be’af – -). Jews were arrested without any excuse! When that day the trains from Brussels and Antwerp stopped at Mechelen as usual, Feldgendarmen were on the platform. All the Jews, both men and women, were taken out. The same happened at the Antwerp and Brussels North terminus stations. (The Brussels-North-South connection did not yet exist.) Their freedom had ended. Some went to Breendonk. Most were sent to the 18th century Dossin barracks, where between 1942 and 1944, 25,484 Jews, 352 Roma and Sinti were deported. Just over 5% returned from Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Kazerne Dossin, Goswin de Stassartstraat 153, B. 2800 Mechelen, where in the old barracks, visitors will find a memorial, which commemorates countless people who stayed there in despair and fear and who died later in unspeakable circumstances.

From the onward the Jews throughout Belgium were being seized by panic. Being an ode alone was therefore sufficient here to be arrested … The Jewish Council was powerless … followed by a reaction of partial sobering among the Jewish population. They forged new flight plans that were kept secret even from close acquaintances.
The panic mood was tempered after a few days. When  people received mail from the internees in Mechelen it all looked not as bad as the rumours went around.

They are not nearly as bad there … Fruits are missing … They may receive packages …

Faces from those who lost their life after being brought to the Dosin Kazerne in Mechelen

These days we remember all those who lost their life in a struggle to survive in a hatefull world.

Let us not forget how politicians can use disinformation and propaganda to mislead many and to create unwanted scapegoats.
We also may not let ourselves be fooled this time that it would not be as bad today with what was happening in the 1930ies. There are people who say

That can never repeat again

but after the Great War all people agreed also that such a horror should never take place again. Only a few years later the world found itself again in such time or terror.

This time let us be more careful, notice the signs of people bringing others on the wrong path, and react wisely to those who want us to believe we are ridiculous seeing ghosts or bad things in what are just jokes or carnavalesc activities.

 

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Preceding

Remembrance and freedom in the Netherlands – Dodenherdenking and Bevrijdingsdag

Niet te negeren gebeurtenissen rond Joden in België

The danger of having less than 25 000 Jews in Belgium

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Additional reading

  1. The Great War changed everything
  2. Reformed Churches Muzzled but Protest at Barmen
  3. 2019 was #4 a Year of much deceit in Belgium and the rest of Europe
  4. Signs of the times – “An object of scorn and ridicule”

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Filed under Being and Feeling, Crimes & Atrocities, History, Lifestyle, Pictures of the World, Political affairs, Religious affairs, Social affairs, Welfare matters, World affairs

Francis Fukuyama and ‘The End of History?’

image from BloggingHeads.tv podcast

American political scientist, political economist, and author Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama in 2015

The American writer and political theorist Francis Fukuyama wrote

“Human beings never existed in a pre-­social state. The idea that human beings at one time existed as isolated individuals is not correct.”

In his seminal 1989 essay ‘The End of History?’ he also wrote

‘What we may be witnessing is the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’

Fukuyama trying to convey silent messages through stories about the evolution of democratic societies he continued

‘With the fall of the Soviet Union the struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.’

The End of History and the Last Man.jpg

The End of History and the Last Man is a 1992 book by Francis Fukuyama, expanding on his 1989 essay “The End of History?”, published in the international affairs journal The National Interest.

Fukuyama did not suggest that the end of history meant the end of wars or conflicts, but rather that capitalism and Western-style liberal democracy were the culmination of human political development and would not, and could not, be transcended. He beliefs that the triumph of liberal democracy at the end of the Cold War marked the last ideological stage in the progression of human history. The initial political challenge having to escape beyond tribalism and the “tyranny of cousins”.

For Fukuyama, tribal organisation responds to structural imperatives in social evolution but also blocks the path to further development. The early account of the origins of state-like forms relies heavily on Lawrence Keeley’s military-focused argument in War Before Civilisation (1996) and does not consider the evidence assembled by Keith Otterbein in How War Began (2004): that warfare greatly declined in importance following the hunting to extinction of the larger mammals. Keeley himself grants that early settlement cultures, such as the Natufian,

“furnish no indication of warfare at all”. {Robin BlackburnThe Origins of Political Order: From Pre-Human Times to the French Revolution, By Francis Fukuyama}

We can see that in the West the majority prefers a capitalist system and in several industrialised countries people are a lot afraid of what smells social or communist. Fukuyama thinks that all states are going to adopt a form of capitalist liberal democracy. It was an argument contested from almost the moment he finished writing his essay.
The rise of Islamism, the unleashing of ethnic conflicts, the challenge posed by China – a myriad developments, his critics suggested, questioned the presumption of an end of history.

Donald Trump’s Presidential victory was one of the signs how politicians would easily be able to lure people in false ideas, by their words. The last few years we have seen a seemingly unstoppable rise of populist forces throughout Europe.

Many will probably see how in the quarter of a century since Fukuyama wrote his essay, politics, particularly in the West, has indeed shifted away from ‘ideological struggle’ towards

‘the endless solving of technical problems’.

The broad ideological divides that characterized politics for much of the past two hundred years have been eroded. Politics has become less about competing visions of the kinds of society people want than a debate about how best to manage the existing political system, a question more of technocratic management rather than of social transformation.

What might more come to an end is the believe of people in political systems and in politicians. Lots of people are convinced that politicians are not listening to them and are mostly just working for themselves and trying to get the best paid job.
The majority of politicians have lost connection with the ordinary people who want to feel as if they are justly recognised and that their voice can be heard. The last few years they feel more they are mocked at, nobody taking their voice seriously. Politicians should come to know that this desire to experience both personal and collective recognition is inescapable to the modern human condition.

Liberal democratic states that Fukuyama so vigorously defended in “The End of History” have not responded well to the challenges of pluralism.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, few believed in an alternative to capitalism, not seeing that the Soviet Union was not really the best representative of communism, because it had more dictators than real communist leaders. Communist parties crumbled, while social democratic parties remade themselves, cutting ties to their traditional working class constituencies while reorienting themselves as technocratic parties. Trade unions weakened and social justice campaigns eroded.

It seemed that not only in Europe social movements and political organizations eroded,  and the far-right movements gained space. Local people wanted to become recognised and wanted to look upon social change through the lens of their own cultures, identities, goals and ideals.

Many sections of the working class have found themselves politically voiceless at the very time their lives have become more precarious, as jobs have declined, public services savaged, austerity imposed, and inequality risen. Many also came to see all those immigrants as a danger for their own position, their jobs and income as well as being afraid of loosing their culture.

Having their world coming to an end.

Lots of people in charge of the working of society did not see the discontent many their votes expressed.

Prominent alt-rightists were instrumental in organising the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017. Here, rally participants carry Confederate battle flags, Gadsden flags and a Nazi flag.

In Europe and America, people have become disaffected with the old order and felt more attraction for those who promised heaven on earth and for them “a great nation” again. Many of the opposition movements that give voice to that disaffection of the labourers, are shaped not by progressive ideals but by sectarian politics, and rooted in religious or ethnic identity. The Islamist AKP in Turkey or the Hindu nationalist BJP in India are the equivalents of the Front National in France or the alt right, far-right, white supremacist, white nationalist, white separatist, anti-immigration and antisemitic movement in America and Europe.

Those growing right-wing and far- or extreme-right-wing groups should make us aware of the severity of the present political situation. We are witnessing a globally disinformation movement which is creating more hatred and racism as well setting up people against others for wrong reasons.

The current tumult is the result of struggles for recognition that remain unshaped by progressive movements, of ideological struggles in a post-ideological world.

Demand for recognition of one’s identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today. In his new book: Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment Francis Fukuyama looks at the new layers of meaning of the voters or citizen’s identity.

Fukuyama believes that the focus on self separates people from their communities. The demand for identity cannot be transcended and therefore people must begin to shape identity in a way that supports rather than undermines democracy.
When coming to know the self one can not ignore the connection with religious feelings. One aspect of wisdom is recognizing your need for The One Being outside man.

Christianity succeeds in diminishing family ties when the Church takes a strong stand against practices which enhanced the power of lineages such as cousin marriage, divorce, adoption and marriage to the widows of dead relatives. The looser family pattern favoured by the practices of Latin Christianity have the effect of channelling assets to the Church itself (eg through widows’ bequests). Fukuyama further urges that “contrary to Marx, capitalism was the consequence rather than the cause of a change in social relationships”. Yet he soon acknowledges that

“the most convincing argument for the shift has been given by the social anthropologist Jack Goody“,

an authority whose work could be seen as a distinctive fruit of Cambridge Marxism. {Robin BlackburnThe Origins of Political Order: From Pre-Human Times to the French Revolution, By Francis Fukuyama}

Fukuyama has the idea that the individualistic sense of identity comes to the fore during periods of modernisation in which people fled from rural areas into the cities and were confronted with a mass of different dialects or languages, religions and cultures and were aware of a sense of the difference between where they were and where they are now. Today in some way many people seem to be lost or are so much afraid of such confrontation they do hope their politicians can solve that problem of difference between the inhabitants of their villages, cities and countries.

Fukuyama notes the ways in which questions of identity politics have come to be regarded as synonymous with the right. Donald Trump supporters are animated around the removal of Confederate statues and the president’s lack of defence to political correctness is a significant mobilising force on the right.

Intimidation and efforts to control people have become the present day norm for many politicians, who gain a lot of popularity because many fall for their lies. That virus threatening democracy has not only infected the United States but also the European Union. As such we may see that identity politics has become the political form of cultural fragmentation of these days, and is corrosive of some features of an effective democracy – social cohesion, talking with strangers and working across the aisle.

According to me the politicians do have to give an identity to the people again and have to show them that we all have more in common with each other than what divides us.

It is a “we” who are the same, and not a “we” who are strangers dwelling together despite our differences. {Jeff RichIdentity Crisis – some theses on identity politics}

The End of the End of History?

History shall continue and show how man tries to find different political solutions and ways to govern a country. Man shall have to find a way to make it that by the globalisation more and more people would be going to see the richness of a multicultural society, instead of fearing it.

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Read also

  1. Our political systems and juggling with human laws
  2. Declaration of war against Islam and Christianity
  3. Declining commitment to democracy : What’s going on around the world ?
  4. Collision course of socialist and capitalist worlds
  5. Subcutaneous power for humanity 2 1950-2010 Post war generations
  6. The Free Market (and all that) did not bring down the Berlin Wall
  7. Common Goods, people and the Market
  8. Pushing people in a corner danger for indoctrination and loss of democratic values
  9. Populism endangering democracy
  10. An European alliance or a populist alliance
  11. British Parliament hostage its citizens for even more months
  12. American social perception, classes and fear mongering
  13. United in an open society relying not on command and control but on freedom
  14. Capitalism and economic policy and Christian survey

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Further related

  1. The Origins of Political Order: From Pre-Human Times to the French Revolution, By Francis Fukuyama
  2. What Do We Mean When We Say Something Is Political? — Recommended Readings
  3. The Sisyphean Task at the Core of Identity Politics
  4. Fukuyama has a new book on identity
  5. Little Theories
  6. The Decline of Liberalism
  7. Identity
  8. Identity Crisis – some theses on identity politics
  9. We’re in This Together Now 
  10. Two Books by Francis Fukuyama
  11. What Fukuyama got right.
  12. From ‘End Of History’ To ‘End Of Democracy’ – Why Fukuyama Now Likes China
  13. “Echoing Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that ‘there is no alternative’ …
  14. Social Psychology and Religious Behavior
  15. Francis Fukuyama and technology
  16. Eurasianism: The Struggle For The Multi-Polar World

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Filed under Being and Feeling, History, Knowledge & Wisdom, Lifestyle, Political affairs, Religious affairs, Social affairs, Welfare matters, World affairs

How to Go Forward without Fear

Lots of our brethren and sisters do not dare to come in the open. Most Jeshuaists prefer to stay in the darkness of this world hidden. They are afraid of being discovered or unmasked as Jew or Jeshuaist.

Many of our friends wonder how we live life when the world seems to be spinning in ways we did not expect it to be and where so many are against other religious people. Many Jews in Belgium and France are afraid. Several already left these regions, because they did not find it safe any-more for their kids to grow up here, and remembering what happened to those who wanted to leave Europe in the 1930ies too late.

Perhaps we should go to the Scriptures to find some advice, for being able to cope with our fear.

The first chapter of the book of Habakkuk is essentially a long complaint followed by God’s response. It then continues with yet another complaint and another response from God. The book concludes with a prayer or a Psalm from Habakkuk. This book was written, proceeding the fall of Babylon, yet the date of composition of the book cannot be guaranteed just by perusing the book itself. Most likely, individuals who lived after the fall Babylonia in 539 BCE understood much of this book is a meditation on life in an unjust world. They wondered how to relate to God when nations “slays nations without pity,” and “seize homes not their own.”

Today we can see many places in the world where nations are slain. We can see that political leaders do not mind what happens to those living in their country. Some even not having a blush on their face when they use gas-bombs on areas where many innocent people (inclusive many children) live.
We find lots of places where there are people who say they fight in the name of Allah (= God) but do the most atrocious things one can think of. Often they say it is the suffering people their own fault, not trusting in the right god.

What do we do when individuals do not place their trust in God, and how can a pious person deal with this unwieldy situation?

God responds that the answer is clearly written on tablets, perhaps as described in the book of Deuteronomy.

He then says:

הִנֵּ֣ה עֻפְּלָ֔ה לֹא־יָשְׁרָ֥ה נַפְשׁ֖וֹ בּ֑וֹ וְצַדִּ֖יק בֶּאֱמוּנָת֥וֹ יִחְיֶֽה׃

“Lo, his spirit within him is puffed up, not upright, But the righteous man is rewarded with life For his fidelity.” (Habakkuk 2:4)

This verse, initially describes a person whose life is swollen with not good things and who lives a twisted or unjust life. Perhaps it is one full of deception or one full of egotism. It then moves to a pious person whose faith is in God even under the most dire circumstances. Even though they must live life where justice is delayed or denied, that time according to God will be short-lived. Habakkuk goes on to draw a parallel with Isaiah chapter 11:9, that there will be a time when everyone will know God…

We agree today does not seem to be such a time, because not many are knowing God. Several people may say they believe in God, but they do not worship God, or many even believing in a three-headed god, they call the Trinity, and as such not believing in the God of Moshe, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Christ and his disciples.

Today sometimes it looks like we are living in a world where everything is permitted, as long as it is not a matter of religious expression. Then suddenly no religious symbols are allowed or persons are not allowed to wear what their religion demands. In several countries we can see demonic people offering themselves as the leader who shall make their nation great again. With the stroke of a pen those men think they themselves can play for god and decide what to do with other people and with other nations. Every occasion, be it even the national day they use for putting themselves in the picture and throwing hate words against others.

Today many people are confronted with difficulties to come around, not earning enough, but working hard enough to have not much time for the rest of the day. Several people in Europe are wondering and struggling, what can they could do to make this world a better place and to assure it to make Europe a safe haven for all sorts of people.

In a world of greed, where materialistic values often take first place, money or financial gain and pleasure have become the gods of today next to the many starlets and idols from entertainment and sports.

In this world today there seems not much place for integrity, the moral value that makes people the same on the inside as they are on the outside — with no discrepancy between what they say and what they do, between their walk and their talk. Many people around us prefer to wear a mask and present themselves differently on social media than they are in reality. that is also an important factor why so many in our community are so afraid to show themselves in public.

Though I believe we should not hide, but come out of our cocoon and show people that it might go different ánd better. The answer is that the most impact we will have is on those who surround us. It is their lives that we can make better. We can and should speak up when we see injustices, and we can remove blind spots by becoming more aware of the world around us and the systems that work in it – systemic poverty and racism for example. We need to focus our energies on walking in the footsteps of God as a community. The book of Habakkuk ends by saying:

“my Elohim Hashem Jehovah is my strength: he makes my feet like the deer’s and lets me stride upon the heights.” (Habakkuk 3:19).

You should know it is inside of us all  that God is found and when we unite our hands together we can bring the divine into this world through our very actions.

Those who believe in God should join hands and show the world their unity. It may not always be easy to live our lives full of tackling difficult and challenging issues, but let those experiences cause ourselves to grow and become better individuals and communities more focused on God and assisting those around us.

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Additional reading

  1. If some of us do not feel safe
  2. Speciesism and racism
  3. Governments need to be more proactive to ensure racism is kept in check
  4. Christian fundamentalists feeding Into the Toxic Partisanship and driving countries into the Dark Ages… #1
  5. Faith related boycotts
  6. Rome mobilisation to say no to fascism and racism
  7. On French beach French police forces woman to undress in public
  8. Allowing dress code according liberty of religion
  9. Today’s thought “When approaching the battle against your enemies today” (May 03)
  10. Religious Freedom in a Multicultural World
  11. Jewish and Gentile Disciples
  12. Martin Luther King’s Dream Today
  13. God Our Refuge
Columbia hate crime

Racist tirade on Columbia’s university campus

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Related

  1. In The Grip Of The Politics Of Disimagination And The Pathologies Of Power
  2. Religious Freedom
  3. On religious freedom
  4. Christian values; Porn stars and religious freedoms
  5. The biggest difference between Israeli and American Jews
  6. Deconstructing Scotty
  7. Where Does It End???
  8. Lansman’s Extraordinary Attempt to Smear Anti-Semitism Whistleblowers
  9. The fight against anti-Semitism on the arena of international sports
  10. Critics who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones about anti-semitism. Chaos arrived at Labour HQ before Corbyn did
  11. Jeremy Corbyn’s time has run out to solve Labor’s anti-Semitism crisis
  12. The Bigotry Of The ‘Anti-Racists’
  13. Jennie Formby goes to Tom Watson’s home in union anti-Semitism
  14. Corbyn Criticizes the “Inaccuracies” of the BBC Concerning Labor Anti-Semitism | politics
  15. Jewish figures stubbornly resist Labor’s treatment of anti-Semitism charges | Policy
  16. Hopefully, the Labor nightmare will be over soon, for Jews and for the country
  17. “HATE: The Rising Tide of Anti-Semitism in France (and What It Means for Us),” by Marc Weitzmann
  18. Jewish German group says news article els fueled anti-Semitism ‘
  19. A Question of American Values
  20. “Who Is My Neighbor?” – Sermon on Luke 10:25-37: The Good Samaritan
  21. From Whence Anti-Semitism?
  22. Muslim Women Debate Anti-Semitism
  23. Abandon Ship!
  24. Snakes Slithering From ‘Neath The Rocks …
  25. Muslims seek voice in a changing Uzbekistan
  26. 25-Year-Old Woman Says She Was Kicked Out Of Golden Corral For Dressing ‘Too Provocatively’
  27. Normal, Odd, and Different
  28. Florida father wears ‘short shorts’ to teach daughter dress code lesson
  29. Black & Yellow for the festive ready at the office!!
  30. No Hats in School: This is Not a Bar-B-Que
  31. This School Now Has One Dress Code for All Genders — But Why Doesn’t Every School?
  32. Combating Racism, One Day at a Time
  33. After the Trump attack: “US President’s blatant racist attack” – Politics
  34. For Trump It Is About Skin Color
  35. Tuesday’s Quick Hits
  36. Quacks like a duck
  37. Trumpian Hypocrisy: Rep. Ilhan Omar Has Been A U.S. Citizen Longer Than Melania Trump
  38. Why the Republican silence talks about Trump’s racist tweets volumes – France 24
  39. Donald Trump: Graceless Under No Pressure
  40. Racial injustice in America
  41. Donald Trump branded ‘racist’ by Humza Yousaf over ‘hate crime’ comments about US Congresswomen
  42. Opinion: I learned a valuable life lesson at the barbershop. It takes courage to speak out against hatred.>
  43. Integrity Takes Effort
  44. Dignity Check

4 Comments

Filed under Activism and Peace Work, Being and Feeling, Crimes & Atrocities, Lifestyle, Political affairs, Religious affairs, Social affairs, Welfare matters, World affairs

For Jews wanting to learn more about Jeshua and of other Jews following Jeshua

Many Jews prefer to stay in the background or in the shadow. Some Jews become curious in the Nazarene rebbe Jeshua and would love to come to know more about him and his followers.

In Israel, Great-Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands are Jewish brethren and sisters who would not mind to tell about this incredible master teacher. As followers of Jeshua or Jeshuaists, in the Netherlands also some calling themselves Jesjoeaansen or Jesjoeaist (from another Dutch way of writing Jeshua’s name: Jesjoea), are hoping to bring more people to see that Jeshua or Jesus Christ is the way to God and the long awaited promised sent one from God, the anointed or Messiah (the Moshiach = Kristos or Christ).

On the web you may find

From the Flemish part of Belgium and the Brussels region there is published the general website: Jeshuaisten / Jeshuaists Volgers van de Nazarener Joodse rebbe Jeshua – Followers of the Nazarene Jewish rebbe Jeshua

and additional two more personal sites of a Jeshuaist and of Immanuel Verbondskind

From the Walloon site of Belgium you may find: Jeshuaists (from Genvalin mainly in english and some French) and the site discussing Jeshuaism (from Genval in Dutch)

with its blog

with its blog

and both also with a Forum

Naturally both Jews and non-Jews are very welcome to those sites which want to shed a light on the set apart or Holy Scriptures and our way of life, in the prospect of our hope in the Messiah and the coming Kingdom of God.

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Filed under Announcement, Religious affairs

a Call to stop the growing anti-Semitism

It is not new. Already several months we can see there is a growing anti-Semitism again in France and Belgium. The home to the biggest Jewish community in Europe, France , represents around 550,000, a population that has grown by about half since World War Two, but anti-Semitic attacks remain common. Government statistics released last week showed there were more than 500 anti-Semitic attacks in the country last year, a 74 percent increase from 2017.

Alarming it should be that it seems that the Jewish communities across West-Europe feel much more endangered that non-Jews think they are.
A 28-country survey by the European Commission, published last month, revealed a gap in perceptions between those in and out of the Jewish community.
According to the report, 89% of Jewish people said anti-Semitism had “significantly increased” over the last five years. Only 36% of non-Jews believed the same.

Among the incidents arousing worries of renewed anti-Semitism was a torrent of hate speech directed at Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut during a Saturday march by yellow vest protesters.

In recent incidents, swastika graffiti was found on street portraits of Simone Veil — a survivor of Nazi death camps and a European Parliament president who died in 2017. The word “Juden” was painted on the window of a bagel restaurant in Paris, and two trees planted at a memorial honouring a young Jewish man tortured to death in 2006 were vandalized, one cut down.

Friday , two youths were arrested after they allegedly fired shots at a synagogue with an air rifle in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles, where a large Jewish community lives. Sarcelles mayor Patrick Haddad told BFMTV on Tuesday that prosecutors believe the motive was anti-Semitism.

According to sociologist Danny Trom, author of “France Without Jews,” thousands of Jewish people leave France every year because of anti-Semitism.

“This is a low-intensity war, perhaps, but let’s not forget the murder of children killed at close range by Mohamed Merah in a school,”

Trom told French magazine Telerama, referring to the 2012 slayings of three children and a teacher from a Jewish school by an Islamic extremist in the southwestern city of Toulouse.

In West Europe since the dawn of time there have been Jews. In the previous century they had a terrible time, but one would have thought after that period everyone would want that human scandal to remain covered for good. Though the last few years it seems there are again seeds of weed sawn. Now, the pressure is such that several Jews are led to consider their country inhospitable.

In a tweet last week, Olivier Faure, first secretary of the Socialist Party, first called on people to gather in Paris for a protest on Tuesday. The event was later organised with the endorsement of more than 50 political parties, unions and associations.

No official number has been reported, but similar demonstrations were reported in 60 cities including Marseille, Bordeaux and Nantes.

Thousands of people rallied across what should be “the Land of equality” (France) after a surge of anti-Semitic attacks in recent weeks that culminated on Tuesday with vandals daubing swastikas and anti-Jewish slogans on dozens of graves in a Jewish cemetery.

Political leaders from all parties, including former Presidents Francois Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy, gathered in Paris filling the Place de la Republique, a symbol of the nation, to decry anti-Semitic acts with one common slogan:

“ça Suffit” = “It is Enough!”

Protestors during a rally in Paris' Place de la Republique

The French have enough of racist acts and of discrimination and hate for others

French President Emmanuel Macron, after he had visited the vandalized Jewish cemetery in Quatzenheim, a small town in the northeastern Alsace region, said he felt shame at the sight of the defaced grave markers. He clearly was very much impressed and the grieve and disgust for what had happened was on his face. Macron observed several moments of silence in front of the vandalized graves while local Jewish community representatives stood by.

“We will take action,”

he promised.

Afterwards he went to the Shoah Memorial, a Holocaust museum in Paris, to observe a moment of silence with parliament leaders, and said

“Every time a French person, because he or she is Jewish, is insulted, threatened — or worse, injured or killed — the whole Republic” is attacked.”

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*https://www.bbc.com/news/av/embed/p071cd8v/47300117*

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Filed under Activism and Peace Work, Crimes & Atrocities, Headlines - News, Political affairs, Religious affairs, Social affairs, World affairs

Need to reject an archaic, racist inspired interpretation of the Bible and animosity against other believers

In Belgium and France we see a growing hatred against lovers of the One and Only One True God, the Elohim Hashem Jehovah. Several Jews have been attacked physically or were made afraid by all kinds of threats or intimidations. That made many of our brethren and sisters leave for Israel. In France Jehovah’s Witnesses, Bible Students and Christadelphians are prohibited to proclaim the Good News or the Gospel of the Kingdom in public, for example by speaking to people on the street or by billing leaflets. In several regions people look down at Muslims or show their hate, giving the impression that they must be all so terrible or be believers of the faith IS promotes.

The Netherlands for years already had their very conservative Calvinist groups, but the last 30 years they were joined by other radical Christians. Many of those follow the Bible literally and can’t read in between the lines nor showing understanding Hebrew thinking or Hebrew way of talk.

As a college professor, the writer of Help from Heaven looks at this world and sees how we have come to a period people want to have eye-flaps, but also finds that the present youngsters could perhaps be more interested in and learning from stories that illustrated the teachings he was bringing but also about the teaching the Holy Scriptures wants to bring to mankind.

Is it

Archaic, bygone, ancient, passe, primitive, old. {Bonkers away blog: daily-prompt: Archaic}

that makes us not fitting in this world any more, giving us the impression it is becoming less accepting, more limited of views, less free thinking, more prudent, less receptive to other opinions. We clearly feel how youngsters today look more hostile to different thinking people, otherwise believers and to those who belong to a different culture.

Also certain communities are guilty of bringing limitations to free thinking. We even do not have to go far. In our own regions we have very conservative Jews who want to have the children over protected and also want them to believe in literal Biblical interpretation, holding fast on a six day creation and as such with their thought on the same line as the growing group of Christian Creationists. You may call it a response to modern evolutionary theory, which explains the emergence and diversity of life without recourse to the doctrine of God or any other divine power. Mainstream scientists generally rejecting creationism may find several believers in God joining them too, but worse is to see how by the growing pressure of certain religious groups trying to get diversion or war between other religious groups, we can see many more people getting fed up with religion and putting it aside.

Certain people want to to overwrite history and think they can make for it a better picture that covers the archaic marks and portray a new picture. They have the impression the strokes that they shall strike this time shall be much stronger and sharper just like the person they have become in the journey of their life … {“Life is like an Old Sketch”}

The article “The Racist Bible” brings a view of the recent problems our world is facing. There is written:

We live with such an archaic interpretation of the Bible. People interpreted the Bible in different ways 100 years ago, 500 years ago, and 1500 years ago. We need to know why those interpretations came into being. Once we do, we can see how it is hurting us. Only then can we move on to a powerful Biblical interpretation, one that is vibrant and appeals to the modern non-Christian. {The Racist Bible}

In several of the Jeshuaists their articles they try to bring a view how the ancient Hebrews saw the beginning of the world and how the Adonai handled the rebellion of man. We can see how by the years ‘Church‘ made use to bend words or twist interpretations to get people under the spell or in their ban. Several religious groups love to have control over their flock and found it most appropriate to do that with fearmongering and with hard language (sometimes even going so far to use abusive language or enormity). Scaring people or trying to intimidate them has become more popular these days. We can find certain preachers (like Mr. Dave Norris) happy to present all sorts of lies about other religious groups than their own church, (for Mr Norris: the Bible Church), which must be the only one true church every one should have to become a member, because otherwise they shall have to burn in hell for ever. Strangely enough in several articles he attacks groups which say we are saved but still have to do works.  He then claims (like Mr. Cross Roman)  we do not have to do any works any more because we are saved by Christ his blood. Norris also knows about the problems of human tradition and writes

All this is ridiculous and pits Apostolic Authority against scripture. Judaism regards the Torah or the first five books of the Bible highly but not quite as high as the Talmud which is Jewish tradition. Tradition can be classified as a philosophy written by men. Whether you believe it or not the Bible was not written by men per se but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. Christadelphians and Bible students also follow their own traditions which supersedes the word of God and each Congregation of those bodies believe differently as there is no uniform Doctrine. Just like in the Book of Judges when everyone did what was right in their own eyes yes. I follow the word of God and place very little impetus on tradition. {Precious Spiritual Children- 2}

He tells others lies about the Belgian Biblestudents and Christadelphians, so called claiming Jesus would return a certain day or year (what they certainly do not)  but he himself writes that the Jewish people will accept a guaranteed peace covenant secured by the countries of the now 80% Islamic Roman Empire.

Norris on return of Christ + Jews+ Islamic world + doctrine of imminence+end-time prophesies

Some preachers, because they believe the world shall come to an end, try to call others false prophets and try their believers to belief that those groups would have prophesied such dates for the end of the world, whilst those groups, like the Belgian Bible Students and the Christadelphians already have spend many articles saying that we should be careful with people claiming that Jesus would return on such or such a day, because even Jesus did not know it and we also can not know the exact day of the return of Jesus. But for sure we may be sure that the world shall not come to an end, not because the Belgian Bible students and the Christadelphians belief so , but because that is just the biblical truth and God’s promise  to our Patriarch Abraham, that we may look forward to a big state of united people under God’s King his reign her on earth and in heaven.

Lots of present teachers attacking Jews, Non-Trinitarian Christians and Muslims do have much self-esteem and though they seem to recognise it as part of the possible signs of the end-times do not see the beam in their own eyes but blame the splinters in someone else’s skin, claiming that at all dates setters fail to do is to rely on the words of the scripture which they only are able to do, them being able to see how fast Satan is working to cause chaos and evil, deceiving this world (like Mr. Norris is doing), because all others are “kindergartners” or “have no brains” (Norris his words).

The kettle blames the pot that it looks black but does not see the beam in its own eyes while it complains about the splinters in someone else’s skin. Mr. Dave Norris blaming others to tell and warn about end-times sings, but giving himself also some recognition to those signs in his series over the The End Times (namely part 4)

It might look honourable when people try to talk about that nice prospect of their Messiah coming back. But then they would have to follow the footsteps of that Nazarene master teacher Jeshua, Jesus Christ, who preached peace and not war, like they are doing. So many preachers may be happy with the contemporary technology making it very easy to bring the Word of God all over the nations. To our regret we also find lots of people finding in it a tool to spit their gal and to do everything to have their poisonous words to obscure all reality and decency.

Internet evangelism is how the nations will have an opportunity to hear and receive the Good News. No longer can one person reach only as many as he knows or comes into contact with. Today one person, right out of the comfort of his home, can reach millions of people in places he has never been and most likely, never will go. One person can invest a little time, without investing thousands of dollars in travel expenses, and can do much more, plant more seeds, and encourage more brethren than if he were to board a plane and go somewhere. {Today’s “Roman Road” – the Internet}

But at the same time we can see how one person can manage to bring all sorts of writings on the different denominations which exist in the world of religion, to break them. He even attacks the people of God and let his readers believe that we give more attention to human teachings and traditions than to the Torah.

Dave Norris of the Bible Church on Jews + Talmud + Rabbinical teaching

Mr Dave Norris of an American bible Church wanting his readers and all people in the world to believe the Jews are using the goyim as their slaves and would find raping women and killing whites ok, clearly wanting to create hatred against the Jewish people (Picture from The Shocking Jewish Talmud Revealed)

Concerning founders Mr. Norris has shown, about other denominations too, he also has a strange view, him believing it were the Hebrews who founded Judaism, though it was the Most Almighty Elohim Who has chosen us as His people and promised us by the seed of Abraham a great nation.

He also seems to forget one of the main points of a monotheist religion, which according to him our ancestors would have created. In Judaism part 101-1 he mentions the essence of a monotheist religion, namely worshipping only One True God above all gods, whilst he is a worshipper not of “One and Unique” God, but of the trinity and as such worships three gods: a God the Father, god the son and god the Holy Spirit, and by doing so should fall under the polytheists. When he considers the Hebrew religion as the mother religion of his religion, we would like to ask him why he went so far away from his mother and betrayed her?

Judaism – Jews chosen by God practising and teaching monotheism

For Mr. Norris it seems to be clear that all those who preach peace between Jews, Christians, Muslims and non believers are oxymorons.

Mr Dave Norris finds all those who want to live in peace together and accept the other religious groups “biblical oxymoron” finding they falter between two opinions following Baal considering that (according to him) God and Baal are oxymorons as is this question of the agreement the temple of God has with idols. (Though he himself belongs to a church with several idols or gods.) (picture of his article: The Coexist Movement- 2)

Like he does not seem to see the many differences between the Bible students he also does not seem to know much about the different forms of Judaism, only mentioning three.

Dave Norris limited vision on Jewish groups

Though people like him are being followed by many as if they are the gurus of truth.

Perhaps he, living in the United States, feels united with the many creationists and conservative and fundamentalist Christians. Him also for the whites, thinking Jews love to kill them, can find  confirmation in the writing of the professor who writes

In fact, it was not until Luther that people started taking the Bible more literally. The Creationist movement, though, including the world-wide flood didn’t really take root until the southerners of 1850+ started promoting it. Thus, we had a racist theology demand that their interpretation was the only one. Many were convinced to write on it, without referring to slavery. Slowly the arguments strengthened, until many who are not racist accept the arguments. This, though has saddled us with a theology that contradicts science. Now, we have to invent miracles that are not mentioned in the Bible to fit this theology. For example, a single flood doesn’t leave layers, it jumbles up everything.  {The Racist Bible}

For the professor it might be clear that certain Western Christians have perhaps taken a too restricted look at the Scriptures and perhaps in their thought that the King James Bible is the only true Bible, many Americans even thinking those Hebrews, like Abraham, Isaiah and Jesus all had English Names and as such find, it can not be that the rebbe his name is Jeshua or that God is called Jehovah.

Perhaps it is getting time that people from the West Northern hemisphere start looking at the Bible with other eyes. They also should start questioning their attitude to Jews, real Christians, Muslims, other and non-believers. If they want to win souls or if they want to convert people, loving to see them as members of their Christian faith, it will certainly come down not to follow the way of preachers like Dave Norris serves his community of the Bible Church, because I think he is at the moment getting more people away from faith and religion than getting them in his group or into becoming a Christian. The way we see many Christians act against other Christians and how there is a growing number of Christians reacting cruel against other faith groups or pushing others not to believe in the existence of dinosaurs or that the earth is flat and that NASA would be fooling us about the round earth, it is understandable why so many Christians are leaving the Christian Faith.

We need to reject the archaic, racist inspired interpretation of the Bible. We need to look at it afresh. The interpretation I suggested is not necessarily right, but is a reasonable alternative. Right now, because we are stuck with the racist inspired creationism, we are losing Christians when they go to High School and college and study science. They see how the two conflict, and are rejecting the Bible in great numbers. If we study the Bible fresh, we will see that there are literal interpretations that do not conflict with science, and we can then focus on talking about Jesus without people saying, “I don’t believe that stuff. It is just an archaic myth that science has shown to be wrong.” {The Racist Bible}

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Preceding

Confrontation by people telling lies to force others to avoid the targetted groups

The written, the spoken, and the audible a part of the soul and a blessing to humanity but also the trigger to those who love Crusades and the Inquisition

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Additional reading

  1. Dave Norris and his writings on the Belgian Bible Students
  2. Trusting present youngsters who are not necessary evil
  3. Overprotection and making youngsters drifting away
  4. The way of looking at the Scriptures and the people in this world
  5. Knife-trust in democratic sore back
  6. Pushing people in a corner danger for indoctrination and loss of democratic values

+++

Related

  1. The Watchtower Belgian Biblestudents
  2. Comfort Zone Gospel
  3. Jonah; Wake Up
  4. The Missing Piece to Salvation
  5. Saved From What?
  6. Selling Jesus
  7. Think About It…
  8. Entering the Trail to True Freedom
  9. Main Reason to Share the Gospel
  10. Evangelism as a lifestyle
  11. How to Overcome Fear of Sharing the Gospel – The Story of the Waldensians
  12. Forgetting that the Gospel is Good News, Romans 1:7
  13. Salty Agape
  14. Communicating the Wondrous Truth of God’s Love and Mercy
  15. Eschatology for beginners (part 1)
  16. The Return of Yeshua Ben Joseph, also known as Jesus – by New Dimension – 12-23-17
  17. Exit Strategy End Times: “Unforgiveness and the Band Aid of agreement.” “
  18. This is NOT the Time to be SILENT
  19. Eastern Lightning | The Awakening of a Deceived Spirit (Part 2)
  20. Keep Racing!
  21. How to Teach About the Second Coming
  22. Today’s “Roman Road” – the Internet
  23. The Antichrist in the Holy Place Church
  24. The Historical Lesson Historians Need to Learn
  25. Scoffers
  26. Why Is Christ’s Return Not Widely Taught?
  27. The Beginning and the Ending
  28. Seven Reasons For Six Day Creation
  29. The Creationism
  30. Elmore Fundamentalism, Part 1: Matter
  31. More on Evolution: From the Mail Room, by Fred Reed
  32. Is There Biological Evidence of Life’s Recent Creation? – Part I
  33. Scientists Identify a Key Cognitive Error that Could Explain Why People Believe in Creationism and Conspiracy Theories
  34. Why Evolution is True Review
  35. Teleogical views predict not just creationism, but conspiracy theories
  36. A Creationist Surprise
  37. Is Creationism racist?
  38. God and Science
  39. Eric Hedin, prohibited from teaching intelligent design at Ball State, retires and moves to a Christian university
  40. Claim of creationism taught in school linked to National
  41. School response on creationism, claims evolution ‘controversies’
  42. School response on creationism, claims evolution ‘controversies’ — Your NZ
  43. Origin Story: A Big History of Everything
  44. There IS Purpose!
  45. Your Mythology is not Science
  46. Where Were You Radicalized?
  47. The Ends of the World
  48. Civil Debate? Catcall? Or Creationist Ruse?
  49. Faith abates reason at Edmonton’s first Flat-Earth International Conference
  50. #1: Inexplicable Species and the Theory of Evolution
  51. Evolutionary psychology: The naturalistic and agency fallacies
  52. A creationist makes the dumbest criticism of evolution ever
  53. Noah’s ark: the most ridiculed story in the Bible
  54. Tel Aviv’s new natural history museum (built to look like Noah’s Ark) deliberately omits mentioning evolution
  55. Why Do the Fundamentalists Love Tracey Ullman Now?
  56. InfightingNon-Physical Fighting 2
  57. Sikh Radicalisation in Britain
  58. Waitress Denied Tip for ‘not loving Jesus’
  59. Christian-hating transgender VT gubernatorial candidate DUPED by satire site: ‘Some evangelists just crazy!’
  60. The Nashville Statement (A Plain Language Translation)
  61. Love and Hate

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Filed under Activism and Peace Work, Being and Feeling, Crimes & Atrocities, Headlines - News, History, Lifestyle, Religious affairs, World affairs

French rabbis of the suburbs confront anti-Semitism

Last year 50 000  Jews left France for better pastures. In Belgium we also find many who preferred to go to Israel and to face the difficulties there between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers.

When rabbi Prosper Abenaim first arrived at La Courneuve’s Ahavat Chalom synagogue in 1992 there were over 4,000 Jews in the neighbourhood then and at that time it was a struggle to fit them all into the synagogue on Yom Kippur. Today, at this Paris suburb’s only Jewish facility, he serves sweet tea to his synagogue’s most frequent and reliable guests: machine gun-toting troops of the French Legion which entered the seen on January 2016 to defend Jews in this heavily Muslim and crime-stricken municipality bordering the capital. This dwindling community, which has lost thousands of congregants over the past two decades to Israel and safer areas of Paris has now on some mornings, troops outnumbering worshippers.

That wasn’t the case when Abenaim first arrived at La Courneuve’s Ahavat Chalom synagogue in 1992. There were over 4,000 Jews in the neighbourhood then and it was a struggle to fit them all into the synagogue on Yom Kippur.

“The shul overflowed onto the street,”

Abenaim recalled.

Since then, improved economic fortunes and repeated anti-Semitic attacks have driven out all but 100 Jewish families from the neighbourhood, where drug dealers operate openly on streets that residents say police are too afraid to patrol. The remaining Jews are mostly a greying bunch, stuck here for financial reasons.

“We have two big problems, extremism and criminality, and they often mix,”

said Abenaim, who lives in Paris’ affluent and heavily Jewish 17th arrondisement and has encouraged his congregants to leave for Israel.

“I understand why people don’t want to raise children here. I’m here myself only because of my duties. Otherwise, I’d be in Israel.”

Rudy Abecassis, a Marseille-born computer specialist who moved to the Paris region in 2009 to find work, had a good job at a time of rising unemployment. In 2016 his family also left behind their comfortable lives and moved to Israel, joining nearly 8,000 French Jews who Abecassis said

immigrated to Israel in 2015.

“We’re not fleeing,”

He had found a nice life in France and he loved France for it,  leaving it with sorrow. For him it being important

“to live in a Jewish country of our own, where we are not outsiders who need to be tolerated.”

Tolerance is the big word we have to look for these days. When we hear small children saying Jews are dangerous people we can wonder what they hear their Muslim parents telling about Jews.

Most Jews in France are not affiliated with any synagogue, while the majority of those who are belong to Orthodox synagogues. The third major current of Judaism in France is the Conservative or Massorti movement (with a.o. rabbi Haim Fabrizio Ciprian in Marseille). Next to them there are the Liberal and Reform Jews. The “Libérale” in French corresponds to the Reform movement in the UK and the US, though for some Americans its approach might appear to be midway between Reform and Conservative.

‘For French who do not have the American connection, if you’re Jewish, Israel is the easy place to go. Otherwise the other ambitious entrepreneurs of that age who are not Jewish and are not going to think of going to Israel tend to go to London, which is now the seventh largest ‘French’ city.”

says the American Rabbi Tom Cohen from the synagogue Kehilat Gesher in Paris’s 17th arrondissement.

In those suburbs Rabbi Michel Serfaty is not afraid to go to talk to the Muslims and to create events for Muslim kids. He also created a community or “French Jewish Muslim Friendship Association” for which he hopes to recruit several more young people to help with community outreach in the largely Muslim, immigrant communities where most people have never even met a Jewish person.

A poster for the French Jewish Muslim Friendship Association, which works in many poor, immigrant neighborhoods. – Eleanor Beardsley/NPR

 

The rabbi is convinced that Jews can live together in peace with Christians and Muslims as well with atheists. He also believes they can help and foster each other and can work together to build up France’s future.

“In these places they often have specific ideas about Jews,”

says Serfaty.

“And if they’re negative, we bring arguments and try to open people’s eyes to what are prejudices and negative stereotypes. We try to show children, mothers and teenagers that being Muslim is great, but if they don’t know any Jews, well this is how they are, and they’re also respectable citizens.”

The rabbi takes advantage of funding from a government program that helps youths without work experience find their first job. First of all Serfaty takes time for the Muslim youngster and unites them by creating opportunities to have games, like a football match together. Two days ago we could see on television how a coloured boy was proud to present his equip, which was constructed of youngsters from different origin. Serfati lets them feel how other young kids feel and have similar aspirations. He tries taking away the borders and wrong ideas their parents or some radicals imposted on them.

The rabbi offers them also tuition and for a period of three years, gives them valuable training in mediation and community relations. Serfaty’s recruits also study Judaism and Islam. And he takes them on a trip to Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp.

Though French laws on secularism forbid him from asking applicants about their religion, he tries to have also Muslim employees for his work, who harbour no anti-Semitic feelings, which is not always so easy to find.

The people helping the rabbi are aware of the task to are wake up people’s consciences. They say

“This is a job that counts and we could have a real impact if there were more of us.”

Rabbi Michel Serfaty, third from right, and employees of his French Jewish Muslim Friendship Association. He says he has only grown more determined to do his bridge-building work since the terror attacks in Paris in January. – Eleanor Beardsley/NPR

Now there is also signed a manifesto where is demanded that the fight against this democratic failure that is anti-Semitism becomes a national cause before it’s too late. By the people who put their signature under it can be found politicians from the left and right including ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy and celebrities like actor Gerard Depardieu.

The signatories condemned what they called an “quiet ethnic purging” driven by rising Islamist radicalism particularly in working-class neighbourhoods. They also accused the media of remaining silent on the matter.

“In our recent history, 11 Jews have been assassinated — and some tortured — by radical Islamists because they were Jewish,”

the declaration says.

Condemning the “dreadful” killing, President Emmanuel Macron had reiterated his determination to fighting anti-Semitism.

“French Jews are 25 times more at risk of being attacked than their fellow Muslim citizens,”

according to the manifesto.

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Preceding

Bringers of agony, Trained in Belgium and Syria

Dr. Miller looking at Jews in France

Apocalyptic Extremism: No Longer a Laughing Matter

Anti-Semitic pressure driving Jews out of Europe

Growing anti-Semitism possible sign of certain times

What to do in the Face of Global Anti-semitism

Jews In France Ponder Whether To Stay Or To Leave

When will it stop

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Additional reading

  1. 2015 Human rights
  2. 2016 in review Politics #1 Year of dissonance
  3. As there is a lot of division in Christendom there is too in Judaism
  4. Propaganda war and ISIS
  5. Religious Practices around the world

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Related

  1. Russian chief rabbi: France’s Jews should leave if Le Pen wins
  2. ‘Cowardly, Odious’ Attack on Jewish Family Condemned by French Government
  3. ‘Caught, Kicked, and Gagged’: Jewish Family Tells of Brutal Anti-Semitic Robbery Outside Paris
  4. Exodus: Jews Flee Paris Suburbs Over Rising Tide of Anti-Semitism
  5. Paris Taxi Driver Threatened To Kill Passenger Because He Was an Israeli Jew
  6. Jews Are Being Murdered in Paris. Again.
  7. 300 French Personalities Sign Manifesto Against ‘New Anti-Semitism
  8. 300 French Personalities Denounce ‘Islamist Radicalisation’, Sign Manifesto Against ‘New anti-Semitism’
  9. Religious Muslims in France submit twice as many job applications as Christians to get callbacks

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