Why Did a Muslim Terrorist Target the Liverpool Women's Hospital?
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A "middle eastern" man got into a taxi carrying a bomb and asked it to take him to the Liverpool Women's Hospital.
The cab driver locked him in the taxi and he blew up, destroying the cab, but without killing anyone else.
Four other men have been arrested, as is commonplace in Europe after terrorist attacks.
Why would a Muslim terrorist have targeted the Liverpool Women's Hospital?
The area around it has plenty of Muslims living there, and Muslims work at the hospital there and are there as patients. The hospital has an Islamic prayer space and a successful attack would have likely killed Muslims.
However, one ongoing issue that devout Muslims have is with male doctors treating female patients. It's possible that it was precisely the fact that Muslim women were being treated at the hospital that motivated the terrorist to engage in his attack.
The Islamophobia Industry
An interview with the author of a new book about Islam’s insidious infiltration of the West.
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Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
“There is an industry at work today, taking advantage of our liberty, infiltrating and influencing Western values and democracy,” writes Canadian author and blogger Diane Bederman in her brand new book The Islamophobia Industry: The Insidious Infiltration of Islam into the West. As the memory of the 9/11 attacks on American soil a generation ago recedes for many, this courageous short new work serves as an essential wakeup call to a Western world that, in the name of tolerance and inclusion, is allowing our rights and freedoms to be eroded as the value system of Islam grows in influence and power.
FrontPage Mag readers may recall that I interviewed Ms. Bederman here about her previous book The Serpent and the Red Thread, a unique history of antisemitism blending fiction, history and myth. She is also the author of Back to the Ethic: Reclaiming Western Values, which I reviewed for FrontPage Mag here.
I posed some questions to Ms. Bederman about The Islamophobia Industry.
Mark Tapson: To paraphrase a question you pose in the preface to your new book, why did you decide to write a book about Islam at a time when saying anything critical of it is immediately denounced as bigotry?
Diane Bederman: It says 365 times in the Bible: Do Not Fear.
Fear is debilitating. We often run away rather than confront.
I am of an age and in a place where being called an Islamophobe does not worry me. I cannot be canceled! I worry more about my children and grandchildren. We have to teach our children the importance of protecting democracy and freedom. Ducking and hiding will only lead to a loss of that freedom. The ethic that underpins our freedom, the Judeo/Christian ethic, is 3500 years old. We cannot let it perish out of fear of being called a name or even under threat of death. Without freedom, there is no life.
MT: What is the Islamophobia industry?
DB: There are two #Islamophobia Industries. One is run by Muslims to fight Islamophobia – what they refer to as the irrational fear of Islam. I would suggest that for many, fear of Islam is rational.
The other is the one about which I write: the Industry set out to silence anyone who criticizes or questions Islam. This Industry has managed to turn Islam, a religion and political ideology, into a race. By doing that they can legally stop any criticism because race is immutable; one, obviously, cannot change one’s race, so attacking race is forbidden.
MT: American parents have had their eyes opened about the relatively recent, insidious promotion of Critical Race Theory in schools, but a pro-Islam agenda has been infiltrating our K-12 classrooms for some time now too, hasn’t it?
DB: Billions of dollars have been spent by Saudi Arabia and Qatar to promote Islam in our schools. In America, Canada and Europe. This has been going on for about 20 years. CAIR, the Council on American–Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights and advocacy group, launched a program in 2015 with the aim of providing up to sixteen thousand public and school libraries across the country with books and writings that it had selected on Islam and the Middle East.
CAIR founder Omar Ahmad had stated how CAIR could eventually gain influence in Congress: “This can be achieved by infiltrating the American media outlets, universities and research centers,” going on to suggest how this would give them an entry point that would allow them to pressure U.S. policymakers.
This is how you get followers. Indoctrination through education. I suggest that our fear of being seen as intolerant pushes us to accept the intolerable in the name of diversity, inclusion and equity – DIE.
MT: You correctly note that few people in the West know what a “Sharia-compliant economy” is. Why is it important that we understand and resist it?
DB: Malaysian Prime Minister Mohamed Mahathir told a banking conference in Kuala Lumpur in November 2002, “A universal Islamic banking system is a jihad worth pursuing.” It is projected that the Muslim world will be doing 50% of their banking needs with Islamic institutions by 2020.
Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, states: “Sharia-compliant finance only empowers Muslim Sharia Law leaders whose real long-term vision is to impose Sharia Law on the world and recreate an Islamic Empire. These leaders want to overpower capital free markets and create their version of an Islamic economy. Bankers and business leaders are being duped.”
The Sharia Compliant economy also appears to discriminate against any product that is associated with a Jew or Israel. Discrimination is not allowed in the West. While Muslims fight against any perceived discrimination against them, this Muslim economy discriminates against others. I think more importantly, a tax, Zakat, is placed on purchases of shares and this tax goes to funding Muslim charities. Unfortunately, some of these charities support Muslim terrorist organizations.
I think, too, there is something not right about a separate “economy” in the West. My Supervisor in Clinical Pastoral Education talked to us about an “ooh” factor. Something in us tells us that here is something unethical but we haven’t quite put our finger on it. To me, there is something unethical about a parallel economy here.
MT: You also note something else few people might have thought of, which is how China and India factor into the Islamophobia industry. Can you elaborate on that a little?
DB: Our media has extensively exposed the infiltration of China into our world: in our media, education and government. There is no shyness, no hesitation to talk about the negative impact of China in our lives. Gordon Chang writes a great deal about this and the Epoch Times always reports. There is no “blowback” of racism; this despite the fact that the Chinese are a race. There is no such thing as Chinaphobia.
We also have no problem calling out the caste system in India. We talk about the “untouchables” and how they are treated as less than human. Yet, we have allowed ourselves to be silenced about Islam.
MT: You argue that by tolerating and even embracing Islam, the West is committing civilizational suicide. Do you see any signs of hope that we can recover a pride in our own civilization, commit to a defense of it, and reverse this trend?
DB: Democracy is fragile. Freedom takes great courage to defend. Islam does not promote free will or freedom of thought. Islam, as clearly stated by the Islamic Circle of North America, is not in any way compatible with the West, yet we in our desire to be open and inclusive, have welcomed this ideology.
Just as we welcomed this ideology we can stand up to it and say no. We are witnessing the rise of parents in America fighting against Critical Race Theory. When we have facts we can push back against the lies. But it does take courage. The same type of courage it took to push back against Nazism or communism or fascism or any other “ism.”
Islam has done a remarkable job of silencing us. We must now do a remarkable job of freeing ourselves from its grip. We must not let fear control us. Fear breeds submission. We must speak up. Silence is Collusion.
Video: Ten Years of Christian Persecution with Raymond Ibrahim
Freedom Center Shillman Fellow breaks down a horrific pattern.
Derek Gilbert, host of View From The Bunker, recently interviewed Raymond Ibrahim, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, on a number of topics, mostly surrounding Islam and religious persecution. The description of the talk (from VFTB’s website) and the 55-minute interview itself, follow:
TEN YEARS of documenting Muslim persecution of Christians every month for the Gatestone Institute hasn’t opened the eyes of Western media, academia, or most Christians outside of the Middle East. Raymond Ibrahim joins us to discuss the reality confronted by Christians in majority Muslim nations over the last 1,400 years—a reality to which most of us in the West are blind.
Check out the must-watch video below:
“Yes, but…” This has come to represent the heart of all Muslim apologetics. Whenever an Islamic doctrine or principle is accused of promoting hatred, violence, misogyny, etc., its defenders rush to argue that, “Yes, a few Muslims twist this teaching for their ends, but the doctrine is really teaching something else.”
For instance, in his defense of the Islamic doctrine of taqiyya, which permits deception—under limited or broad circumstances being the point of contention—Usama Hasan offered the following “yes, but” explanation:
It is true that hardened islamist terrorists, such as the Al-Qaeda & ISIS supporter Usman Khan who murdered two people at Fishmongers’ Hall [after pretending to have been “rehabilitated”], do misuse the principle of taqiyyah in order to further their cause. However, the charge that all Muslims are generally religiously obligated to lie, and do so routinely, is both dangerous and untrue.
But how is the infidel to know which Muslim is and isn’t “misusing the principle of taqiyyah,” particularly since not a few Muslims are convinced that Islam allows them to lie and deceive—so long as doing so can be seen as helping further the cause of Islam (based on their prophet’s own employment of deceit)? In other words, the real problem isn’t that “hardened Islamist terrorists … misuse” this or that Muslim doctrine, but rather that such teachings are fundamentally unethical and, as such, have always, from the very beginnings of Islam, lent themselves to being “misused.”
The Koran
Consider, for example, this Arabic-language video of a Muslim cleric in Egypt addressing how terrorists “misuse” Islamic scriptures to justify killing non-Muslims. He was specifically addressing the bombing of Coptic Orthodox churches, which in recent years have left dozens of Christian worshippers dead in Egypt.
During his sermon, Sheikh Samir Hashish said that those Muslims who bomb churches and kill infidels often cite a sahih hadith (a statement attributed to Muhammad and deemed authentic), where the prophet said, “A Muslim must not be killed on account of a kafir [a non-Muslim, or infidel].” After saying that the hadith does not justify the outright slaughter of non-Muslims, Hashish elaborated:
The hadith itself is of course authentic… However, the hadith does not mean that whoever, without cause, kills any of the People of the Book [Christians and Jews] has done rightly. Not at all—the hadith did not say this; it did not say those who do this are right. The hadith simply excludes the death penalty from among the possible punishments. In other words, the Muslim who kills a non-Muslim without cause—is he wrong or not? He’s wrong. Is he to be penalized or not? He is to be penalized—but without the death penalty. Let him be judged any which way, but do not kill him. Why? Because of what the hadith says. The prophet said, “a Muslim must not be killed on account of a kafir [infidel].” Why? Because their blood is not equal. The blood of the Muslim is superior. Call it racism or whatever you want, but of course the blood of the Muslim is superior. This is not open to debate. [Translation my own.]
Note how that, while the sheikh claims that radicals are twisting the hadith to say something it is not—that any Muslim who kills any infidel is exempt from any punishment—what the hadith is really saying—that the life of a Muslim is more precious than the life of a non-Muslim—is little better and possibly worse.
Or consider how yet another learned Muslim scholar sought to put a gloss on the enslavement and rape of non-Muslim women. While discussing Koran 4:3, which refers to infidel prisoners of war as “possessions,” Suad Saleh, a female professor of Islamic doctrine at Al Azhar university in Egypt, correctly explained that “female prisoners of wars are ‘those whom you own.’ In order to humiliate them, they become the property of the army commander, or of a Muslim, and he can have sex with them just like he has sex with his wives.”
But then the Al Azhar professor proceeded to speak as if the real problem is not Islam’s institutionalization of sex slavery but rather how some Muslims misuse it to the detriment of Islam’s image. She said:
Some [Muslim] opportunists and extremists, who only harm Islam, say: “I will bring a woman from East Asia, [as a sex slave] under the status of ‘right hand possessions.’ And with the consent of my wife, I will allocate this woman a room in the house, and will have sex with her as a slave girl.” This is nonsense. This is not prescribed by Islam at all. Islam says that a woman is either a wife or a slave girl. Legitimately-owned slaves come from among prisoners of war.
What Egypt’s Professor Saleh, Sheikh Hashih, and many other scholars apparently fail to understand is that inherently unjust laws—ones that permit the sexual enslavement of women simply because they are non-Muslims, or that operate on the assumption that the value of human lives is based on their Muslim or non-Muslim status—will always be “abused.”
For instance, Koran 2:256 says there is no coercion in Islam. Yet, because other Koran verses call on Muslims to hate and war on Christians and Jews (60:4, 3:28, 9:29), it is only natural that, past and present, forced conversions have been common. After all, pressuring hell-bound, socially-disenfranchised infidels to embrace Islam can be rationalized as an altruistic act. Moreover, it helps empower Islam, which is always a good thing. As one human rights report explained while discussing the rampant sexual abuse and forced conversion of Christian girls in Pakistan:
The dark side of the forced conversion to Islam is not restricted only to the religious Muslim groups but also involves the criminal elements who are engaged in rape and abduction and then justify their heinous crimes by forcing the victims to convert to Islam. The Muslim fundamentalists are happy to offer these criminals shelter and use the excuse that they are providing a great service to their sacred cause of increasing the population of Muslims (emphasis added).
Similarly, Koran 9:29 says that war on People of the Book can only end when the latter agree to pay tribute (jizya) to their Muslim overlords. And pay they did, for well over a millennium, until the practice was formally abolished thanks to European pressure during the colonial era. Apologists say that Koran 9:29 means that Christians and Jews must pay jizya to representatives of the Islamic state, not just any Muslim. Today, however, criminals from Muslim backgrounds who are acquainted with the basics of 9:29—that infidels are to be warred on until they pay up—see Christian and other minorities in their midst as piggy banks: they are free game for robbing, plundering, and kidnapping for ransom—sometimes even being killed after ransom is paid—as Egypt’s Coptic Christians can attest.
As one Muslim cleric and welfare recipient in the UK who referred to British taxpayers as “slaves” once explained:
We take the jizya, which is our haq [Arabic for “due” or “right”], anyway. The normal situation by the way is to take money from the kafir [infidel], isn’t it? So this is the normal situation. They give us the money—you work, give us the money, Allahu Akbar. We take the money.
In short, the problem is less that some Muslims “misuse” the doctrine of taqiyya—bur rather that a doctrine that sacralizes lies and deception exists in the first place; the problem is less that some Muslims mistakenly believe that they deserve no punishment whenever they kill “inferior” infidels—but rather that Islamic scriptures teach that Muslim blood is “superior” to non-Muslim blood in the first place; the problem is less that some Muslims are not strictly following Islam’s rules concerning the sexual enslavement of infidel women—but rather that the Koran allows non-Muslim women to be enslaved in the first place; the problem is less that some Muslims are ignoring the Koran’s mandate that there be no compulsion in religion—but rather that it calls for enmity and war on non-Muslims in the first place; the problem is less that some Muslims are not strictly following Islam’s rules concerning who has the right to collect jizya from infidels—but rather that it allows the fiscal extortion of non-Muslims in the first place.
It is no solace to learn that Islamic scriptures are being misinterpreted to promote this injustice, when their true interpretation actually permits that injustice.
Photo credit: Max Pixel public domain
Raymond Ibrahim, author of Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.
What Should Be Done With Those ISIS Brides?
Leftists want them brought "home."
A German convert to Islam, who went off to join the Islamic State, bringing her 13-year-old son with her, then returned to Germany, where she is now being charged for belonging to two terrorist groups – Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State – and for allowing her young son to join a terrorist group. Her disturbing tale is told here: “German mother charged after signing up her teenage son to ISIS,” by Paul Peachey, The National, November 3, 2021:
A German woman whose son of 15 died fighting for ISIS in Syria has been charged with terrorist offences.
The woman, identified only as Stefanie A by German prosecutors, travelled to Syria in 2016 with her son, then 13, to try to join up with her husband, who had joined ISIS the previous year.
Unable to reach her husband in the northern city of Raqqa, she travelled via Turkey to the north-western city of Idlib, where she signed up with the Al Qaeda-linked Jund Al Aqsa group and allowed her son to receive weapons training and become a fighter for the extremist group, according to German federal prosecutors.
The following year, she travelled to Raqqa with other members of the group and joined up with her husband in Raqqa.
The family was bankrolled by ISIS and allowed their son to have religious and military training with ISIS.
The child was used in combat operations and died at the age of 15, in a bomb attack in March 2018, according to German prosecutors.
Stefanie A then got in touch with her [older] son who was still living in Germany and asked him to be happy about the ‘martyrdom’ of his younger brother,” prosecutors said.
Fanatical in her faith, Stephanie A. had no qualms about her 15-year-old son’s death in combat; she wanted her older son to be as “happy” as she was with his “martyrdom.”
She wore a suicide belt and carried a rifle while a member of ISIS.
She and her husband remained loyal to the group and surrendered to Kurdish troops in Baghouz in February 2019. They were held at the Al Hawl refugee camp in northern Syria.
Stefanie A returned to Germany and was arrested in March this year at Berlin Airport.
She has been charged with membership of two foreign terrorist groups, breaking weapons laws and committing her son as a fighter to a foreign terrorist group.
It was not immediately clear how she returned to Germany, but the government has been repatriating women and children who are in the camps….
Why should Germany have allowed Stephanie A. back into the country? If it was to punish her with a very long prison term, and then to expel her from Germany so that she would have to live out the rest of her days in some Muslim hellhole, that is understandable. But that is not what has been happening to ISIS brides. If recent history is any guide, she will be given at most only a few years In prison, and then allowed to remain in Germany. She joined two terrorist groups – Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, and allowed, indeed encouraged, her young son to become a terrorist, but there is no evidence that she herself committed a terrorist act. Another German woman who joined ISIS, and helped her husband to murder a five-year-old Yazidi girl whom they had enslaved, and whom, as punishment for wetting her bed, they chained to a post, and then left her to die of thirst under a blazing sun, received only ten years, and that sentence can be reduced even further if she behaves herself in prison.
What will Stephanie A. receive from a German judge? Two years? Three? And then she will, like all the other ISIS wives who have returned to Germany, be allowed to stay in the country that she abandoned, and betrayed, when she joined ISIS. She may not have managed to kill anybody while in the Islamic State – of course, we only have her word for that — but that was because she didn’t get the chance. Her fondest wish as a member of ISIS was to slaughter Infidels and insufficiently fanatical Muslims. She pushed her son to train for, and engage in terrorist acts, and took pleasure in his “martyrdom.”
A fitting punishment for Stephanie A. would not be a few years in prison, followed by living out the rest of her life in the very country that she betrayed when she became an ISIS fanatic and willingly sacrificed her young son to the cause. The German incarceration philosophy is to focus on “normalization”: that is, making life in prison as similar as possible to life in the community. It’s a very soft existence, completely unlike American prisons. And that’s not what the ISIS brides deserve.
Instead, she and the other 180-odd ISIS brides who have been allowed back into Germany should now be promptly expelled to a Muslim land, ideally one like Pakistan or Iran, where Islamic law is most strictly enforced. When these women joined ISIS, they rejected their country and their people. So let Stephanie A.’s former country and people reject her. Let her, now a woman in that strict Islamic land, wake up each morning to the full horror of what she had willingly done, when she gave up her life in Germany for the bleak life in a Muslim country, and now unable to forget that she had sacrificed her own son on the altar of fanatical Islam. Her torment, sooner or later, will be terrible.
Robert Frost once wrote that “home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” The brides of ISIS gave up on their original homes and turned on their own people. Once they joined ISIS, Germany was no longer their home. And when a German ISIS bride thinks that she has to go there, they don’t any longer have to take her in.
The Extinction of Jewish Heritage in Northern Cyprus
Welcome to Islamization by Turkey.
Cyprus and Eretz Yisrael had trade relations by the third century B.C.E., and Jews began to settle the island. In the first century B.C.E., the Roman emperor Augustus gave Herod, king of Judea, part of the management and revenue of the island’s copper mines. Jews were among the miners and copper workers. After Herod’s death, his granddaughter Alexandra married a Cypriot Jew.
The community prospered, and synagogues existed in at least three locations: Golgoi, Lapethos and Constantia-Salamine. Some Cypriot Jews moved to Jerusalem, and the Talmud mentions imports of cumin, wine and dried figs from Cyprus.
The European Jewish Congress gives further information:
In 142 BCE, Cyprus was one of the countries that safeguarded Jewish rights at the request of the Romans. Cypriot Jews seem to have participated in a rebellion in 177 CE against Emperor Trajan. After the revolt was crushed, Jews were strictly forbidden to set foot on Cyprus, but this prohibition did not last long.
“Jews returned to the island shortly thereafter,” adds the World Jewish Congress. “Jewish community in Cyprus continued to thrive throughout the centuries, and between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, there were more Jews in Cyprus than on any other Greek island.”
Cyprus today is a majority Christian country, and its patron saint is a Cypriot Jew: St. Barnabas, who, accompanied by Saul (Apostle Paul) and Mark, sailed to Cyprus to preach there (Acts: 13).
Today, the relations between Cyprus and Israel are thriving. “Throughout the history of Cyprus, Jewish people have always lived on the island,” the project manager of the Jewish Museum of Cyprus, Skevi Philippou, said. “There has always been a bond between Israel and Cyprus, especially now between tourism and business cooperation. Being so close to the Holy Land, Cyprus is a popular place for Jews to visit or make their home. Today, there are over 6500 Jews living in Cyprus. Most are from Israel, UK, Eastern Europe and Russia.”
The Chief Rabbi of Cyprus, Arie Zeev Raskin, has been officially serving the community since 2005. The rabbi and his wife, Shaindel Raskin, together with their four children, arrived in Cyprus in 2003. Five years later, their fifth child was born in the island country. The Chabad house – “Chabad of Cyprus” – was opened in 2005.
Today, the Cyprus Jewish Community Center in the city of Larnaca is open to serve the community all year around. And the Jewish Museum there raises awareness about the Jewish ties to the island. The museum’s current exhibit is the “Nissen hut,” an original WW2 artefact.
According to its website, the museum aims to educate the public concerning the important role played by Cyprus and Cypriots “in assisting Holocaust victims escaping Europe after World War II as they made their way to Israel.”
From 1878 to 1960, when Cyprus became independent, the island was under British rule. After the rise of Nazism in 1933, hundreds of Jews escaped to Cyprus. The British government then set up 12 detention camps there for Holocaust survivors who had immigrated or attempted to immigrate to the then British Mandate of Palestine. The camps operated from 1946 to 1949 and held over 53,000 internees. Once the State of Israel was established, most refugees moved there.
“Conditions in the camps were horrific,” reported the newspaper Cyprus Mail. “But there was one ray of light for those on the long journey home: the local Cypriots who, for three long years, helped to feed, clothe and nurture the interned at their own expense. The brainchild of Rabbi Arie Zeev Raskin, the Chief Rabbi of Cyprus, the museum is the Jewish Community’s way of thanking those who helped the interned.”
“Rabbi Raskin felt an overwhelming need to thank the people he sees as heroes,” Philippou said.
Ordinary people – farmers, workers, people who barely had enough to feed their own families – gave food, water and medicine to the refugees in the camps. And the next generation of Cypriots must know and remember what their ancestors did, so that the cycle of kindness will continue.
Those 53,000 Jewish refugees and their descendants owe their health and wellbeing to Cyprus and to the compassion of the Cypriots; by aiding those who were starting a new life, the Cypriots not only played an important role in assisting Holocaust victims escaping Europe after World War II, but they were also responsible for helping to promote the re-birth of Jewish life, culture, religious observation and Jewish heritage around the world.
Meanwhile, the tradition of opposing antisemitism is ongoing in Cyprus. In 2019, Cyprus endorsed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism. Then-Jewish Agency chair and current president of Israel Isaac Herzog praised the move, as did American Jewish Committee CEO David Harris.
Many Cypriot municipal leaders have also signed the American Jewish Committee’s (AJC) Mayors United Against Antisemitism statement. More than 500 European and U.S. mayors, including 22 mayors from Cyprus, joined the initiative.
“The relations between Israel and Cyprus have never been stronger than today,” AJC Jerusalem Director, Lt. Col. (Res.) Avital Leibovich, said. “They are not only based on mutual interest but also on strategic challenges and cooperation on many levels – from cultural to academic, tourism to startups. In a changing Middle East, such partnerships are important and cherished.”
Since 1974, however, around 40 percent of the Cypriot territory in the north of the island nation has been illegally occupied by Turkey. That year, Cyprus was invaded by the Turkish military twice and exposed to an ethnic cleansing campaign which forcibly changed the demographic character of the island country.
Many crimes were committed by Turkish troops against indigenous Greek Cypriots. Civilian targets such as hospitals were bombed. Greek Cypriots, including children, were murdered. Civilians were arbitrarily detained by the Turkish military authorities and were put either in prisons or concentration camps. Some were made to perform forced labor. The European Commission on Human Rights documented the rape of women and children aged 12 to 71, including those who were pregnant or mentally retarded. The rapes were so widespread that the Church of Cyprus was compelled to relax its previous strictures on abortion.
Nearly 200,000 Greek Cypriots were forcibly expelled from their homes by the Turkish invasion forces and were replaced by illegal settlers from Turkey and Turkish Cypriots. Lands, houses and other properties belonging to Greek Cypriots were seized, looted and distributed to Turks. As a result of this ethnic cleansing, northern Cyprus, which was for millennia a majority-Greek area until 1974, has been turned into a Turkish colony.
Historically, large Jewish population groups lived across coastal towns in Cyprus such as ancient Salamis in the city of Famagusta, which is today under Turkish occupation. Sadly, the invasion campaign has brought widespread destruction to all non-Muslim Cypriot historic sites.
To this day, the occupying forces continue to plunder and destroy the Cypriot cultural heritage, including the Jewish heritage of the occupied area. The Jewish cemetery there, for instance, has been destroyed. According to the 2012 report “The Loss of A Civilization: Destruction of cultural heritage in occupied Cyprus,”
The historic Margo Jewish Cemetery, a national monument for the Jewish people, southeast of Nicosia, has been desecrated and destroyed in the same way as Christian cemeteries in the area occupied by Turkish troops have been desecrated and destroyed.
The Margo Jewish Cemetery is home to the graves of Jews of the diaspora of 1885 and of Jewish refugees who came to Cyprus after the Second World War.
The cemetery is located in a strictly controlled military area and is guarded by an armed Turkish soldier. Jewish organisations and other groups have persistently petitioned for free access to the cemetery to conduct religious ceremonies, but these requests have not been granted by the occupying power and its puppet regime.
“We have visited the cemetery several times,” Philippou confirms. “But we haven’t been able to hold any religious ceremonies, just a quick visit under supervision. We would like to have it restored, but no permission was given thus far.”
See a video of the destroyed Jewish cemetery in the Turkish-occupied part of Nicosia here.
Cypriot-Dutch author, cultural campaigner and activist Tasoula Hadjitofi became a refugee at age 15 when Turkish troops invaded Famagusta, the city of her birth, in 1974. For several decades, she has collected artifacts and other symbols of cultural heritage that has been looted and stolen to bring them back home to Cyprus. Referring to the liberation of prisoners from Nazi concentration camps in 1945, Hadjitofi said:
Cypriots fought alongside the allies as British troops during the liberation of the Jews and other prisoners, for Cyprus was then a British colony. There are no poppies for those heroes on Holocaust Memorial Day in the United Kingdom or in Cyprus and little is known anywhere about them. Most of these forgotten heroes died quietly and took with them so many untold stories. Perhaps a handful are still around? Their stories must be told and their courage must be honored.
“The historical ties are strong between Israel and Cyprus,” added Hadjitofi. “I do hope that our Jewish brothers and sisters worldwide are watching attentively the Islamization of northern Cyprus by Turkey, as well as the destruction of the Christian and Jewish sites in the occupied area. And for the sake of our shared heritage, historical and current struggles for freedom, as well as fundamental principles, they must do their best to stop them.”
Reprinted From Israel National News.
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