Video - A Comparison of Violence in the Bible and the Koran.

Russia, Jewish Torah texts with "extremist content" confiscated from a school.

Source picture.

Russia, Jewish Torah texts with "extremist content" confiscated from a school. (AN).

Moscow (AsiaNews) - The Yekaterinburg prosecutor's office, has confiscated a number of Jewish sacred texts (Tanakh), from a Jewish high school including the Torah, because deemed to contain extremist content.

Meduza news website reported the news, quoting a Jewish community activist who spoke with Kursor newspaper. The activist points out that the books were confiscated at the end of Mays and results of the investigation have yet to be released.

A year ago, the same school - linked to the Jewish 'Ohr Avner' center - had been under threat of closure, after an inspection launched by the local prosecutor together with Rosobrnadzor, the federal agency that monitors education.

The authorities then had registered a number of violations, including failure to comply with national education standards. Earlier, a court in Yekaterinburg had decided that the school had to pay for many years of rent arrears. The school maintains that they have the right to use the property for free because they had undertaken renovations of the building.

According to the Newsru website, the authorities have decided "turn from administrative violations to ideological issues", with the accusations of extremism.

"None of the books confiscated are on the federal list of books banned for extremism", denounced a school administrator to the site Politsovet, who believes the sacred texts are not under inspection rather some study manuals.

So far the Prosecutor of the Sverdlovsk region, which includes Ekaterinburg, has declined to comment on the reports.

In 2013, the Commission for Inter-Ethnic Relations and Freedom of Conscience at the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation discussed a proposal to be sent to the Russian Prosecutor General's Office to improve controls on extremist religious literature.

The same proposal also suggested "protecting" the sacred texts of traditional religions from such controls. Experts are concerned that, during inspections, there are no consultations with religious scholars and religious communities. As a result it is impossible to adequately assess, on the basis of language and of modern legal thought, texts written many years ago and with specific religious significance.

The prosecution’s investigation of the Jewish community has also focused on the 'Hesed' center in Novgorod, where every Sunday members of the Jewish community of the city meet to study Hebrew.

On June 1, the participants in the meeting were forced to present their ID  to representatives of the public prosecutor, who arrived unannounced on-site and without explanations for an inspection. Hmmm....Next they'll say 9/11 was carried out by people shouting 'Mazzle Tov'?

How We Know the Bible Was Written by Human Hand(s).

How We Know the Bible Was Written by Human Hand(s).HT: Forward.

Writing The Bible: The Torah is actually a redaction of texts, threaded together from different traditions.

According to a Gallup poll taken last month, 40% of Americans believe that the Bible is the literal record of words spoken by God. A new crop of books from Yale University Press shows why this belief is illogical and incoherent.

All three cover ground that is largely familiar to scholars of religion, but still has the capacity to shock traditionalists. Far from being a unified set of texts, the Bible is the product of multiple hands, contradictory agendas, and a gradual process of codification that proceeded according to the prevailing political agendas of the times. Indeed, the boundaries of biblical literature were themselves contested over an extended period of time, settling only in the first centuries of the common era.

This is true even of the Torah itself, which scholars have long understood to be a redaction of multiple texts, threaded together from different traditions. This view, known as the “documentary hypothesis,” has been remarkably successful over its 150-year lifespan.

Joel Baden’s 2012 volume, “The Composition of the Pentateuch,” surveys the history of the documentary hypothesis, observing that subsequent scholarship has provided better evidence for the hypothesis than did the original theorists.

Baden emphasizes that this hypothesis is, first and foremost, a literary solution to a literary problem. Traditionalists sometimes treat it as a religious point of view — a matter of opinion, much like some fundamentalists regard the theory of evolution. But neither evolution nor the documentary hypothesis is a “point of view.” They both try to explain otherwise perplexing evidence.

In the case of the Pentateuch, Baden thoroughly summarizes the “problem”: The text as we have it is rife with factual and doctrinal contradictions, repetitions, omissions and errors.

Some are well known, such as the two versions of the Ten Commandments, and the stitched-together narrative of Joseph being sold into slavery, which makes no sense as a single narrative. Others only reveal themselves upon close inspection.

Traditional commentators were familiar with most (though not all) of these issues. But they worked from a premise that dictated their conclusions: The Bible was a work of divine authorship, and therefore it must somehow make sense. 

No interpretation was too contorted: God speaking the words “remember” and “preserve” at the same instant, Joseph being sold into slavery twice, whatever. If the axiom is that the text absolutely must make sense as the product of a single author, anything goes.Read the full story here.

Thanksgivukkah Foretold in Talmud Over 2000 Years Ago.

Thanksgivukkah Foretold in Talmud Over 2000 Years Ago.HT: JewishJournal

This year, we Jews have a unique opportunity to restore a proper sense of gratitude to our Festival of Lights. Hanukkah falls on Thanksgiving, a "coincidence" that won't recur in our lifetimes. I believe God speaks to us in the language of events, and coincidences are exclamations. If that's true, then Thanksgivukkah, which won't return for another 79,811 years, must be an important message.

I looked into the origin texts of the two holidays, and discovered that Thanksgivukkah can save from us from not one but two colossal blunders.

Worse than commerciality, our American Hanukkah has become a testament to assimilation, and that's a blunder because the holiday is specifically about not assimilating. Unlike most of our enemies throughout history, the Syrian Greeks who ruled the Middle East in 165 B.C.E. did not desire to kill or enslave the Jewish people. Jews were free to live among them so long as we gave up being Jewish. They banned circumcision, Torah study, and prayer services under pain of death, and then desecrated our Holy Temple by slaughtering a pig upon the altar in honor of their gods.

Tragically, many Jews gave in to the pressure and chose to lead a Hellenized life of scintillating symposia and idolatrous orgies. A few held fast to our then thousand-year-old religion and its precious link to our Creator. War ensued, and against all odds, a small band of warriors led by Yehudah Maccabee freed the Holy Temple from the Greeks. Though the war would rage on for many more years, the Macabees rededicated the Temple immediately, and a small cruse of oil that should have lit the menorah for only one day burned for eight.

One might have thought that the Sages would institute a holiday like Purim to celebrate the miraculous military victory - a holiday which incidentally includes gift-giving. Instead, the Talmud notes:

A miracle was performed with the oil when they kindled the lights of the menorah. In the following year, the Sages established these eight days of Hanukkah as permanent holidays with the recital of Hallel and Thanksgiving. (Shabbos 21b, B. Talmud)

Imagine that. From the very beginning, Hanukkah has been linked to Thanksgiving, in this case, the thanksgiving blessings we add to the Grace After Meals, thus forever linking Thanksgiving with a festive meal.

It is often said that the Talmud addresses every aspect of our lives, but who would have thought it would presage Thanksgivukkah - a once-in-a-lifetime "coincidence" 2,000 years in the future! As always, there are no coincidences.

Iranian official: Jews used sorcery against Iran

Iranian official: Jews used sorcery against Iran.(Jpost).An official close to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei accused Jews of using sorcery against the Islamic Republic, according to a report on the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

"The Jews have the greatest powers of sorcery, and they make use of this tool," Mehdi Taeb told students at a religious seminary in Ahwaz on April 20.

Taeb blamed the Zionists of being responsible for "all the measures that have been brought against" the Islamic Republic. The Zionists made the US, that is "a tool in their hands," impose the strict economic sanctions on Iran, he said.

The Zionists, he claimed, also used their magic to try to interfere in the 2009 presidential elections in which they attempted to oust Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"So far, they have not used the full [scope of] their sorcery against us. Sorcery was the final means to which they resorted during the Ahmadinejad era, but they were defeated. This ability of the Jews was eliminated by Iran. Five years ago they tried to oust Ahmadinejad [by this means]," he said.

Rasanews.ir, a website associated with the religious seminaries in Qom, posted an article on March 7 that elaborates on the use of sorcery and numerology in Jewish mysticism.

"The Jews have always tended to resort to divination, [a practice] that has its roots in astronomy, astrology and sorcery, [which they picked up] when they consorted with various peoples in the course of history. They cherished this [knowledge] like a treasure, generation after generation. In most cases, they base their predictions on the holy book [the Old Testament], especially on the book of Daniel, and they create an ideological climate in which the appreciation of sorcery and the yearning for it increase," the article translated by MEMRI said.

"The [Jewish] people think that ruling over man, nature, and divine traditions can be achieved only by means of sorcery. They believe that it is possible to conquer nature and control the world, and even to control God's decisions, by using sorcery methods…" it continued. Hmmmm......I knew it it's 'Zionist plot'.Read the full story here.

Iranian director prepares 70-episode TV series on prophet Moses.

Iranian director prepares 70-episode TV series on prophet Moses.(TI).Iranian director Farajullah Salahshur, who is known for his religious movies, is preparing to shoot a 70-episode TV series about Prophet Moses (Musa), Fars reported. Moses was, according to the Hebrew Bible and the Quran, a religious leader, lawgiver and prophet, to whom the authorship of the Torah is traditionally attributed. He is considered an important prophet in Christianity and Islam, as well as a number of other faiths. Salahshur said thus far about half of the script has been written under supervision and guidance from various religious leaders and advisers of Iran's Qom province. Salahshur said that according to statistics, Shiite religious films tend to attract a much wider audience, as these films are more interesting to viewers. "These series would describe various aspects of the prophet's life, and content of this story itself is very rich," Salahshur, who is both writer and director of the film, said. Based on the agreement signed with the Iranian state television channels, where the film will be showing once completed, Salahshur said the script would be fully done in about a year. Earlier, Salahshur directed the film about the Prophet Yousuf which tells the story of Prophet Yousuf from the Quran and Islamic tradition. The film achieved great success in the Muslim countries. Hmmm......Lets hope the streets won't be filled with raging & Rioting Christians and Jews.Read the full story here.

Israeli scholar completes mission to ‘fix’ Bible.

                                                    Leningrad Codex

Israeli scholar completes mission to ‘fix’ Bible.(AA).For the past 30 years, Israeli Judaic scholar Menachem Cohen has been on a mission of biblical proportions: Correcting all known textual errors in Jewish scripture to produce a truly definitive edition of the Old Testament. Though his edits won’t mean much to the average reader - they focus primarily on grammatical blemishes and an intricate set of biblical symbols - it marks the first major overhaul of the Hebrew Bible in nearly 500 years. Poring over thousands of medieval manuscripts, the 84-year-old Cohen identified 1,500 inaccuracies in the Hebrew language texts that have been corrected in his completed 21-volume set.
The final chapter is set to be published next year. The massive project highlights how Judaism venerates each tiny biblical calligraphic notation as a way of ensuring that communities around the world use precisely the same version of the holy book. According to Jewish law, a Torah scroll is considered void if even a single letter is incorrect or misplaced. Cohen does not call for changes in the writing of the sacred Torah scrolls used in Jewish rites, which would likely set off a firestorm of objection and criticism. Instead, he is aiming for accuracy in versions used for study by the Hebrew-reading masses.
For the people of the book, Cohen said, there was no higher calling. “The people of Israel took upon themselves, at least in theory, one version of the Bible, down to its last letter,” Cohen said, in his office at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv. The last man to undertake the challenge was Jacob Ben-Hayim, who published the Mikraot Gedolot, or Great Scriptures, in Venice in 1525. His version, which unified the religion’s varying texts and commentaries under a single umbrella, has remained the standard for generations, appearing to this day on bookshelves of observant Jews the world over. Since Ben-Hayim had to rely on inferior manuscripts and commentaries, numerous inaccuracies crept in and were magnified in subsequent editions.

The errors have no bearing on the Bible’s stories and alter nothing in its meaning. Instead, for example, in some places the markers used to denote vowels in Hebrew are incorrect; or a letter in a word may be wrong, often the result of a centuries old transcription error. Some of the fixes are in the notations used for cantillation, the text's ritual chants. Almost none of the errors Cohen found are in the sacred Torah scrolls, since they do not include vowel markings or cantillation notations. 

Cohen said unity and accuracy were of particular importance to distinguish the sacred Jewish text from those sects that broke away from Judaism, namely Christians and Samaritans. To achieve his goal, Cohen relied primarily on the Aleppo Codex, the 1,000-year-old parchment text considered to be the most accurate copy of the Bible. For centuries it was guarded in a grotto in the great synagogue of Aleppo, Syria, out of reach of most scholars like Ben-Hayim. In 1947, a Syrian mob burned the synagogue, and the Codex briefly disappeared before most of it was smuggled into Israel a decade later. Now digitized, the Codex, also known as the Crown, provided Cohen with a template from which to work. But because about a third of the Codex - nearly 200 pages - remains missing, Cohen had to recreate the five books of Moses based on trends he observed in the Codex as well as from other sources, such as the 11th-century Leningrad Codex, considered the second-most authoritative version of the Jewish Bible. Cohen also included the most comprehensive commentaries available, most notably that of 11th-century Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, known as Rashi. The result is the completion of Ben-Hayim’s work. “It was amazing to me that for 500 years, people didn’t sense the errors,” said Cohen, who wears a knitted skullcap and a gray goatee. “They just assumed that everything was fine, but in practice everything was not fine.” Rafael Zer, the project’s editorial coordinator, called Cohen’s work “quasi-scientific” because it presents a final product and does not provide the reader a way of seeing how it was reached. He credits Cohen for bringing an exact biblical text to the general public but said it “comes at the expense of absolute accuracy and an absolute scientific edition.”Read the full story here.

Video - Rapper - Why i love Jesus but reject Islam.

HT: Shoebat.

NY Times: “Ultra-Orthodox Jews Rally to Discuss Risks of Internet”.

NY Times: “Ultra-Orthodox Jews Rally to Discuss Risks of Internet”.(NYTimes).It was an incongruous sight for a baseball stadium: tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men, all dressed in black suits and white shirts, filing through the gates of Citi Field on Sunday, wearing not blue-and-orange Mets caps but tall, big-brim black hats. There was no ballgame scheduled, only a religious rally to discuss the dangers of the Internet. More than 40,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews were expected to attend - a sellout in a season where the average attendance at a Mets game has been barely half that. The organizers had to rent Arthur Ashe Stadium nearby, which has 20,000 seats, to accommodate all the interested ticket buyers. The organizers had allowed only men to buy tickets, in keeping with ultra-Orthodox tradition of separating the genders.
Viewing parties had been arranged in Orthodox neighborhoods of Brooklyn and New Jersey so that women could watch, too. For the attendees, many of whom said they came at the instructions of their rabbis, it was a chance to hear about a moral topic considered gravely important in their community: the potential problems that can stem from access to explicit content on the uncensored, often incendiary Web.
Inside the stadium, a dais was set up by the back wall of center field, where rabbis led the packed stadium in evening prayers and offered heated exhortations to avoid the “filth” that can be found on the Internet. English translations of the speeches appeared on a jumbo digital screen, beneath an enormous “Let’s Go Mets!” sign. Still, many attendees readily conceded that the Internet played a big role in their lives. Shlomo Cohen, 24, of Toronto, said he used the Internet for shopping, business and staying in touch with friends - “Everyone needs e-mail,” he said.Mr. Cohen said he came to Citi Field on Sunday because the rally was a good way to remind his community to keep temptation at bay. “Desires are out there,” Mr. Cohen said, adding that men could be particularly susceptible. “We have to learn how to control ourselves.” For an event billed as taking aim at the Internet, signs of the digital age seemed to pop up everywhere.The rally was also a hot topic on many Twitter feeds on Sunday evening. The gathering had the feel of a gigantic family reunion, but many guests had arrived with only a friend or two. “It may look like a community because we all look the same,” said Mr. Cohen, of Toronto. “But I don’t know almost any of the people here.” For some attendees, the dangers of the Internet seemed more in line with the usual complaints voiced by any New Yorker tethered to a BlackBerry or besieged with Twitter messages. Raphael Hess, 29, of New Jersey, pointed at his LG phone and said he found peace in simply keeping its Internet connection turned off. “Life is more pleasant without it sometimes,” he said with a shrug.Read the full story here.

Moses was a Muslim who led Muslims in Exodus from Egypt, says PA university lecturer on PA TV .

Moses was a Muslim who led Muslims in Exodus from Egypt, says PA university lecturer on PA TV.(PAW).By Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik.A Palestinian university lecturer taught during a recent Palestinian Authority TV program on religion that Moses, a Muslim, brought "the Muslims of the Children of Israel out of Egypt." He refers to the subsequent Israeli conquest of the Land of Israel as the "first Palestinian liberation... of Palestine." This conquest, he taught, was led not by Joshua, as the Bible tells, but by Saul (Talut) who is also said to have slayed Goliath.

While some of this is retelling of Islamic tradition, some of it is a distortion of even the Quran for political purposes. The Quran refers to the "Children of Israel" in their land in many chapters (e.g., Sura 5), but it never refers to them or anyone else as "Palestinians." Likewise the Quran never refers to Israel's conquest as a "Palestinian" conquest. The lecturer on PA TV, however, deviates from Islamic tradition, and calls the nation of Israel's conquest of the Land of Israel "the first Palestinian liberation through armed struggle to liberate Palestine."

This is another example, among many documented by Palestinian Media Watch, of PA historical revision for political purposes, in this case, rewriting even their own Islamic traditions.The following is the interview with Dr. Omar Ja'ara, lecturer at Al-Najah University in Nablus and specialist in Israeli affairs, on PA TV religion program:

"We must make clear to the world that David in the Hebrew Bible is not connected to David in the Quran, Solomon in the Hebrew Bible is not connected to Solomon in the Quran, and neither is Saul or Joshua son of Nun [of the Bible].
We have a great leader, Saul, [in the Quran] who defeated the nation of giants and killed Goliath. This is a great Muslim victory. The Muslims of the Children of Israel went out of Egypt under the leadership of Moses, and unfortunately, many researchers deny the Exodus of those oppressed people who were liberated by a great leader, like Moses the Muslim, the believing leader, the great Muslim,
who was succeeded by Saul, the leader of these Muslims in liberating Palestine.
This was the first Palestinian liberation through armed struggle to liberate Palestine from the nation of giants led by Goliath. This is our logic and this is our culture."

[PA TV (Fatah), Feb. 15, 2012.

"Verbum Domini" ("The Word of God") Ancient Bibles and Torahs in rare Vatican show.

"Verbum Domini" ("The Word of God") Ancient Bibles and Torahs in rare Vatican show.(Yahoo).
Ancient Torahs and Bibles have gone on show in the Vatican in an "inter-religious exhibition" aimed at exploring the common heritage of two of the world's main monotheistic religions.
The show "Verbum Domini" ("The Word of God") in St. Peter's Square puts on display for the first time outside the United States the contents of the Green Collection -- the world's biggest archive of ancient biblical texts.
The exhibition, which runs until April 15, is organised with the support of Pope Benedict XVI who wants "a renewed passion for the word of God," organisers said, adding that it "shows the common roots of Christianity and Judaism."
Among the most precious texts is the "Codex Climaci Rescriptus" -- one of the oldest Bibles written in Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ.
There is also the first-century Jeselsohn Stone tablet which contains 90 lines of Hebrew text and a rare Byzantine manuscript from the 11th century.
Visitors are also shown fragments of Torahs that were destroyed or damaged under the Nazi and Communist regimes in the 20th century.
The exhibits include shoe insoles made from a Torah during the Nazi occupation of France and a soldier's sack made from the binding of a Torah.Hmmmm......"Verbum Domini"Guess who's missing.“Violence does not build up the kingdom of God, the kingdom of humanity. On the contrary, it is a favorite instrument of the Antichrist, however idealistic its religious motivation may be,” Pope Benedict XVI .Read the full story here.