RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?i

Evgeny Kissin, the 42-year-old prodigy pianist, rarely gives interviews • But there is a subject that compelled him to talk to the media — Israel, and the manner in which it is treated in the Western world • Last month, Kissin became an Israeli citizen.

Evgeny Kissin rarely gives interviews. The 42-year-old prodigy pianist, who was born and raised in Moscow and currently lives in London, prefers to express himself only while he’s sitting up against his favorite instrument. With one touch of the key, he produces a full, rich note, illuminating every chord in his own special interpretation.

Nonetheless, there is a subject that did compel Kissin to agree to talk to the media. It’s a topic that burns in his bones — Israel, and the manner in which it is treated by the western world.

Dissatisfied with mere statements, Kissin also took action. Last month, he was granted his request to become an Israeli citizen during a special event in Jerusalem. His blue Interior Ministry-issued identiy card and his Israeli passport were awarded to him by Immigrant Absorption Minister Sofa Landver. Also in attendance was Jewish Agency Chairman Natan Sharansky, whom Kissin initially turned to in hopes of becoming an Israeli citizen.

“I’m a Jew, Israel is a Jewish state, and for quite a long time I have felt that even though I live here, Israel is the only country in the world that I can identify with completely,” he wrote to Sharansky in a letter. “If I as a human being and an artist represent something in this world, it is my people, the Jewish people, so Israel is the only country on the face of this earth that I would want to represent in my art and my public activities, irrespective of where I live.”

http://israeltheviewfromhere.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-lies-they-tell-at-stjamess-church.html

The lies they tell at St.James’s Church, Piccadilly, London

Yasser Arafat defied the Christian tradition in Bethlehem, which had been respected and upheld under Israeli authority, by appointing a Muslim governor and engineered a Muslim takeover of the city council. He then put his stamp on this town by converting the Greek Orthodox monastery, next to the Church of the Nativity, into his official Bethlehem residence.

At great risk to his life, Pastor Naim Khoury, of the Bethlehem Baptists Church, exposed the developing threats to Christians within the territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority. “People are always telling Christians to convert to Islam.”

His ministry is based on love and non-violence. He is also a strong advocate for Zionism based on God’s land covenant with Israel through Abraham.
Because of his views, his church has been bombed fourteen times, and he has been shot three times. He has been threatened by the Palestinian Authority to close the doors of his church which they consider as “illegitimate.”

This brave Christian priest needs and deserves the active support of church leaders worldwide. Instead, they boycott him and pick on Israel for their wrath, ignoring the human rights crimes of the Palestinian leadership whom they openly support. How twisted is that?

Elias Freij, the Christian mayor of Bethlehem at the time of the Oslo Accords in 1993, warned Israeli Prime Minister, Yizhak Rabin, to maintain control over his town. “Bethlehem will become a town of churches devoid of Christians if you transfer control to the Palestinian Authority.”

Israel caved in to international pressure, handed over Bethlehem to the Palestinian Authority and, for the middle class Christian residents, their lives became threatened, and the mayor’s warning became the current Christian nightmare.

www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/INTO-THE-FRAY-The-gutting-of-Zionism-336966
Future historians are likely to point to the current government as inflicting the most devastating blow to the spirit of, and the belief in, the Zionist enterprise.

True leadership is tested on the ability to uphold decisions, hard as they may be. We were not elected to lead the State of Israel in order to make easy decisions.
– Binyamin Netanyahu, December 30 Politics in Israel is indeed stranger than fiction. It certainly is more grotesque and macabre than most literary plots of deceit and betrayal.

Beyond belief

The spectacle unfolding before our eyes over the past several weeks in Israel’s theater of the politically absurd defies belief. We see an elected government supported by a ruling parliamentary coalition composed almost entirely of incumbent legislators, who built their political careers on opposing precisely the policy that they now seem powerless to prevent, and, in some cases, are even complicit in promoting.

So once again, a situation is emerging in which we have an Israeli government, whether willingly or unwillingly, embracing – or at least facilitating – the very policy its electoral constituency expected it to prevent.

Prime Minister Netanyahu achieved political prominence largely because of his fierce, and well-argued, opposition to Yitzhak Rabin’s adoption of the Oslo Accords. Yet, inexplicably, after all his criticism has been vindicated, he has embraced a policy even more concessionary than that he excoriated Rabin for.

Defense Minister Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon has been a fierce critic of the two-state-idea, articulating positions totally at odds with the policy proposals being discussed under the current Kerry initiative, whose underlying rationale is that Israel’s frontiers should be based on the indefensible pre-1967 lines. True, Ya’alon has recently come out with strong statements opposing the essential rationale of the ongoing negotiations. However, he has been unable to halt the continued erosion of Israeli positions, much less change the focus of the negotiations to anything remotely resembling the ideas he expounded – correctly – as vital to Israel’s minimal security requirements.