U.S. Religious Freedom Commission: Saudi Textbooks Refer to Christians and Jews as 'Infidels'
(CNS News) -- In its section on global anti-Semitism, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom's (USCIRF) annual report discloses that Saudi Arabia's textbooks, although much improved, still discuss Jewish "treachery" and refer to Christians and Jews as "infidels."
Overall, in 2020, "far-right (including neo-Nazis), far-left, and Islamist extremists increasingly threatened Jewish communities in Europe, reads the report.
"Textbooks in countries whose governments profess Islam as an official religion continued to contain antisemitic content," said the USCIRF. "Iran’s textbooks portrayed Jews as 'conspirational' and referenced 'Jewish gold hoarders and capitalists.'"
"Saudi Arabia’s textbooks, while significantly improved from previous years, still discussed Jewish 'treachery' and referred to Christians and Jews alike as 'infidels,'" states the report.
In Germany, an investigation found that 29 officers in the security forces had shared "images of Hitler and violent neo-Nazi propaganda in multiple group chats," according to the USCIRF. The officers were suspended.
Also, the "chief of German domestic intelligence acknowledged that nearly all popular Islamist organizations that are active in Germany include antisemitism as a part of their ideology."
In Scandinavia, the "Nordic Resistance Movement harassed Jews in 20 cities ... during the week leading up to Yom Kippur," the report reveals.
For Britain, the commission noted that "the British Labour Party had failed to respond sufficiently to far-left antisemitism within the party, including Holocaust denial and Rothschild conspiracy theories posted by party members on social media in previous years."
Although ritually slaughtered meats are part of many Jews' diets, "the Court of Justice of the European Union (EU) ruled in December [2020] that 'member countries may ban the practice of ritual slaughter in order to promote animal welfare,'" according to the report.
"Jews faced physical attacks and threats of violence at places of worship and in public throughout the year," said the commission. "In Germany, a man with a shovel badly injured a Jewish student leaving a synagogue in Hamburg on Sukkot. Likewise, a man wielding an ax entered a synagogue compound in Ukraine, though security guards stopped him before he entered the building. Assailants attacked Jewish families in Argentina and France as well as a Brazilian man wearing a kippah."
Anti-Semitism was prevalent in Poland's presidential election, said the commission, and there "were multiple instances reported of Jews being refused service due to their faith, Jewish professionals enduring antisemitic stereotypes in their places of work, and even a police request for a list of all Jews living in a Ukrainian city."
"Jewish cemeteries were frequent targets for acts of vandalism, including spray-painted Nazi rhetoric and imagery, smashed headstones, and stolen property," according to the report. "A spate of such attacks occurred in Greece in the fall and winter, and cemeteries in at least eight other countries around the world suffered similar circumstances."
On the positive side, the USCIRF reported that anti-Semitic incidents in France fell 50% in 2020 when compared with 2019. Also, numerous countries "announced Holocaust and antisemitism awareness education programs, millions of dollars in security funding, and comprehensive strategies for combating antisemitism," said the commission.
Today in History: Christian Payback for Muslim Atrocities Begins
The Battle of Nicaea, the first (telling) encounter between Crusaders and Turks.
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Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Today in history, May 20, 1097, witnessed the first battle between Western Crusaders and Muslim Turks: the siege of Nicaea.
Context: In the years following the decisive Battle of Manzikert (1071), which saw the Seljuk Turks defeat the Eastern Roman Empire and conquer that ancient bastion of Christianity, Anatolia (modern day Turkey), mindboggling atrocities were committed. Whether an anonymous Georgian chronicler tells of how “holy churches served as stables for their horses,” the “priests were immolated during the Holy Communion itself,” the “virgins defiled, the youths circumcised, and the infants taken away,” or whether Anna Comnena, the princess at Constantinople, tells of how “cities were obliterated, lands were plundered, and the whole of Anatolia was stained with Christian blood”—the same scandalous tale of woe reached the West.
As a result, what came to be known as history’s First Crusade was launched. Paraphrasing Pope Urban II’s famous call at Clermont in 1095, Crusades historian Thomas Madden writes, “The message was clear: Christ was crucified again in the persecution of his faithful and the defilement of his sanctuaries.” Both needed rescuing; both offered an opportunity to fulfill one of Christ’s two greatest commandments: “Love God with all your heart,” and “love your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27).
Christians from all around Europe hearkened to the call and took the cross. By 1097, the major lords and knights had reached Constantinople, whence they were ferried into the lion’s den, Turkic-controlled Asia Minor. By May they reached Nicaea, site of Christendom’s first ecumenical council (325), where the Nicaean Creed, which is still professed by all major Christian denominations, was articulated. Now the capital of the Seljuk sultanate and occupied by the “enemies of the cross,” the Crusaders quickly laid siege to Nicaea on May 14.
It was long and brutal, but the Turks held their own; from their high walls, the Muslims “shouted their war-like battle-cry in the horrible tones of their language”—the contemporary chronicler, Albert of Aachen, could not decipher the shrill cries of “Allahu Akbar!”—and “fired poisoned arrows so that even those lightly wounded met a horrible death.” Moreover, in order to defend their walls from being “struck and shaken repeatedly by the battering ram, the Turks created a combustible mixture and poured it over the walls, which torched the battering ram.” Smoke and fire rose as the siege went on.
Finally, on today’s date, May 20, Kilij Arslan, the Seljuk sultan and supreme head of the Turks, appeared with a massive Muslim army to deliver Nicaea, his capital. A wild battle ensued. Albert continues:
Duke Godfrey and Bohemond did not curb their horses but let them have their heads and flew in the midst of the enemy, piercing some with lances, unsaddling others, and all the while urging on their allies, encouraging them with manly exhortations to slaughter the enemy. There was no small clash of spears there, no small rings of swords and helmets heard in this conflict of the war, no small destruction of Turks.
But it was the greater force of the crusader army under the command of Raymond of Toulouse with aid from Robert of Flanders that gave the Muslim army its death stroke, routing them.
In this, the inaugural battle of the First Crusade, which occurred 924 years ago today,
The Arabs, Persians, and ferocious Turks soon fled; the savage people showed their backs to the Christians. It was a rout... Prodigious was the slaughter of the fleeing army…. From the third until the ninth hour the destruction, or rather Arabian slaughter, of this battle raged.
This triumphant description is not so much invention and bias on the part of Guibert of Nogent as it is a reflection of the fact that this vast Muslim army was not made of professional soldiers but largely consisted of “peasants, scum herded together from everywhere.” Later Turkish armies would be more formidable.
Having slaughtered countless Muslims, the bloodstained Westerners resumed the siege of Nicaea. As a stark and material reminder to its inhabitants not to hope for deliverance from their coreligionists, the Crusaders “lobbed the severed heads of the slaughtered Turks from their throwing-machines and catapults into the city,” writes Robert the Monk.
There was, of course, a reason that the Crusaders behaved so ruthlessly. Earlier, on first landing in Anatolia, they encountered a horrific sight: “Oh, how many severed heads and bones of the dead lying on the plains did we then find beyond Nicomedia near the sea!” wrote Fulcher of Chartres. “Moved to compassion by this, we shed many tears there.” They had come upon the remains of all those European peasants—men, women, and children—that were too impatient to wait for the professional knights at Constantinople and crossed into Asia alone. Soon after landing in the Nicaean inland in 1096, they “fell into the Turkish ambuscade and were miserably slaughtered,” recollected Princess Anna Comnena:
So great a multitude of Kelts and Normans died by the Ishmaelite sword that when they gathered the remains of the fallen, lying on every side, they heaped up, I will not say a mighty ridge or hill or peak, but a mountain of considerable height and depth and width, so huge was the mass of bones.
Those captured underwent another trial: “Some of the prisoners were challenged about their faith, and ordered to renounce Christ, but they proclaimed Christ with steady heart and voice, and were decapitated,” writes Guibert. The fate of those kept alive—as usual, the young and comely—was often worse:
The Turks divided up among themselves some of the captives, whose lives they had spared—or rather reserved for a more painful death— and submitted them to dismal servitude at the hands of cruel masters. Some were exposed in public, like targets, and were pierced by arrows; others were given away as gifts, while others were sold outright . . . [and taken to Khorasan and Antioch where] they would endure wretched slavery under the worst masters imaginable. They underwent a torture much longer than that endured by those whose heads were severed swiftly by the sword.
How the Islamic lords of Asia Minor must have laughed then! Having annihilated the indigenous Christian population of Anatolia, now European Christians were marching in for the same exact treatment.
But they were not laughing now, as the heads of their coreligionists rained down on them. Along with all the ones the Crusaders had lobbed into Nicaea, another “one thousand of these heads were sent to Eastern Roman Emperor Alexios, a present which won his hearty favor”—unsurprisingly so, as these were the same men who had sacked and taken Nicaea from Alexios in 1092. He responded by sending more supplies, including much needed boats for the Crusaders to cut off Nicaea’s only supply route. These the Crusaders, “during the course of one night, by ropes placed on the shoulders and necks of men and horses,” dragged to Nicaea, “a distance of seven miles or more,” says William of Tyre.
Soon thereafter, on June 19, 1097, the now overly traumatized Turks—these longtime scourges of Eastern Christendom—surrendered Nicaea, on condition that they capitulate, not to the heavily armored newcomers from the West who had so terrorized them, but to Alexios, who had followed the Crusaders with his own army.
And so, the First Crusade began with a victory over the Muslims, just as it would conclude. But that is another story.
Pro-Palestinian Mob Beats Up Jewish Men in Los Angeles
A pro-Palestinian mob brutally beat up a group of Jewish men Wednesday at a restaurant in Los Angeles, the day after a Palestinian Youth Movement-led protest was held in the city.
According to video accounts of the incident posted on Twitter, the pro-Palestinian mob approached a group of men dining at a sushi restaurant in West Hollywood and asked if they were Jewish. When the men replied, "Yes," they attacked them. The mob hurled bottles and yelled anti-Semitic slurs. One bystander said they repeatedly struck one of the Jewish men "with a pole." Police are investigating whether the incident was a hate crime.
The anti-Semitic attack took place in the early hours of the morning after a "Day of Action" Palestinian solidarity march outside the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles. The march coincided with a "Day of Rage" in the West Bank, for which the Palestinian Authority urged residents "to attack Israelis with rocks, molotov cocktails, and car rammings."
In one of the videos of the attack, a man can also be heard yelling into a bullhorn, "Leave him! It's not worth it…. Don't look like this."
Anti-Semitic attacks are on the rise in the United States. The Anti-Defamation League reported a four-decade high for anti-Semitic incidents in 2019, with only a slight decrease from that level in 2020.
Police are also investigating an incident involving an Orthodox Jewish man, who was chased Monday night in Los Angeles by a car full of people waving Palestinian flags.
The attack comes as conflict between Israel and Hamas terrorists reached its 10th day Wednesday.
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