Jerusalem News
(27 December 2029, 12 Tevet, 5781)
Contents:
1. "Heroic" murderer serving life sentence in Israel 'kidnapped' by Jewish state, claims PA
2. A stunning ruling against religious freedom. What exactly is the Europeans' problem with kosher and halal ritual slaughter?
by Melanie Phillips
3. Iran's links to international organized crime and narco-terrorism BY MICHAEL SEGALL
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1. "Heroic" murderer serving life sentence in Israel 'kidnapped' by Jewish state, claims PA
https://www.jns.org/heroic-murderer-serving-life-sentence-in-israel-was-kidnapped-by-the-jewish-state-claims-pa/
Extracts:
(December 22, 2020 / PMW) A terrorist who in 1987 murdered a pregnant Israeli mother of four and her 5-year-old son has been hailed as 'heroic' by the Palestinian Authority in a televised report.
In the same report, the P.A. bizarrely described the terrorist, Muhammed Daoud, as the victim of a 'kidnapping' by Israel. In fact, Daoud was jailed for the murders of Ofra Moses and her son Tal, who were killed when he threw firebomb at their car, a crime for which he has so far served 34 years.
The P.A.'s lauding of Daoud came in an official P.A. TV news report aired on Dec. 9. The newsreader introduced the segment by informing Palestinians: "Prisoner Muhammed Daoud has begun his 34th year in the occupation's [i.e., Israel's] prisons."
A journalist then went on to report: "On Dec. 8, 1987, with the outbreak of the First Intifada when young Muhammad Daoud was beginning his path in life, the occupation forces kidnapped him to be a prisoner in their prisons."
However, despite its painting of Daoud as an innocent victim, based on the assumption that Daoud is single and has no children, the P.A. will to date have paid him NIS 1,560,200 ($481,960) under its 'pay-for-slay' program. Some sources indicate Daoud is married with two children, which would raise his remuneration to NIS 1,640,600 ($506,796). Daoud continues to collect at least an additional NIS 12,000 shekels ($3,707) a month under the program.
PMW director Itamar Marcus said that by funding the P.A., European governments were complicit.
"The P.A. is the only government in the world that promotes terror, glorifies and rewards murderers of women and children, and yet receives funding from Western democracies. Unless the E.U., Britain, Norway and the other supporters of the P.A. condition their funding on the P.A.'s total distancing from terror, these countries themselves are fundamentally terror-supporting entities."
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2. A stunning ruling against religious freedom. What exactly is the Europeans' problem with kosher and halal ritual slaughter?
by Melanie Phillips
https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/a-stunning-ruling-against-religious
Extracts:
The European Union likes to pose as the avatar of tolerance, freedom and all civilised values. Now it has ripped off its own disguise to reveal something rather more ugly.
Its highest judicial body, the European Court of Justice, has issued a ruling upholding the ban on kosher and halal ritual slaughter in two regions of Belgium. The ruling supports the requirement that animals being slaughtered should first be stunned, a practice forbidden in both Judaism and Islam.
At present, European regulations ban slaughtering animals without pre-stunning, though exceptions to this have been permitted for religious slaughter.
Some European countries, however, have forbidden such exceptions and thus banned kosher and halal slaughtering practices. These countries include Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark and Slovenia.
Two regions in Belgium, Flanders and Wallonia, imposed a similar ban in 2017. Belgian Jews and Muslims challenged this, and the ruling by the European court has now provided its unpalatable response.
It first acknowledges that pre-slaughter stunning 'entails a limitation' on the rights of Jews and Muslims to the freedom to manifest their religion.
It then says, however, that the law actually permits interference with that freedom.
Thus it states that stunning is 'limited to one aspect of the specific ritual act of slaughter, and that act of slaughter is not, by contrast, prohibited as such.'
This takes sophistry to a high level indeed. Both Judaism and Islam require animals to 'be intact and healthy at the time of slaughter' for meat to be kosher or halal.
Stunning an animal by firing a captive bolt into its head or by electric shock may harm its brain. The animal may thus become damaged and forbidden to eat. The prohibition against stunning is therefore a crucial element in the religious rituals of kosher and halal slaughter.
So the way the court claims to be respecting freedom of religious practice is by taking it upon itself to redefine that practice in a way those religions reject.
This oppressive manoeuvre is supposedly motivated by concern for animal welfare. Yet the court unravels this, too, through its own lack of consistency or logic.
After all, why didn't it insist on equivalent prior stunning of animals that are hunted, trapped or shot for sport or other supposed community benefits?
The court's response to this point was laughable. In those kinds of activities, it said, 'compliance with animal-welfare requirements would adversely affect the very nature of the event concerned.'
'Those activities,' stated the ruling, 'take place in a context where conditions for killing are very different from those employed for farmed animals.'
The idea that stunning is humane is risible. It's often ineffective, causing the animal to be subjected to this assault more than once before it eventually loses consciousness. And even with prior stunning, meat processing plants in Europe are often inhumane places where livestock are factory farmed, pumped full of chemicals and industrially killed.
So if the requirement for stunning actually has little to do with animal welfare, what's the real driving force behind it?
The EU prides itself on the core Enlightenment values of liberalism and tolerance. Those values, however, emerged from British thinkers whose values were framed by the Bible.
In continental Europe, by contrast, the Enlightenment was fuelled by a vicious hatred of religion and the belief that reason could only be advanced if religion was suppressed.
It is that European strain of universalist Enlightenment thinking that forms the values of the European Union. It has also given rise to the west's predominant ideology of moral and cultural relativism, which has propelled the rise of paganism and the veneration of the animal and natural world at the expense of humanity. And that now has Jewish and Muslim religious practices squarely in its sights.
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3. Iran's links to international organized crime and narco-terrorism
BY MICHAEL SEGALL
https://www.jns.org/irans-links-to-international-organized-crime-and-narco-terrorism/?ct=t(Daily%2BSyndicate%2B12-27-20%2B(old))
(December 27, 2020 / JNS) A series of articles published recently in the Turkish, British, and American media indicate that Iranian intelligence is making effective use of major international crime organizations and drug cartels in several countries to advance its goals, notably capturing dissidents in the diaspora. These organizations have affiliates in other countries, for example Romania, a country where a senior Iranian judge was recently assassinated during a mysterious trip.
British and American news outlets reported that Turkish police recently arrested at least 13 members of an international crime organization on charges of collaborating with Iran's intelligence services.
A 'honeytrap'? The recent kidnapping by an Iranian 'Swallow'
A video broadcast on Sky News on Dec. 16 portrayed the kidnapping in October of Habib Farajula Kaab, known as Habib Assyud in Turkey, in what the network called a 'honeytrap.' Assyud was vice president of the Executive Committee of the Arab Struggle Front for the Liberation of Ahvaz (ASMLA), a party working for the rights of Iran's Arab minority. The Turkish Ministry of Justice issued a 'Red Notice' from Interpol to arrest a woman named Sabreen Saeedi, (apparently a 'Sununuh' or 'Swallow' agent) for alleged involvement in the Assyud abduction. The video footage showed Saeedi luring Assyud to fly from Sweden to Turkey and meeting him in a petrol station 80 km from Istanbul. He was then abducted by Zindashti's gang and driven 1,600 km to Iran to stand trial.
Another [female] Sununuh agent, Sherine Najaf, is suspected of luring dissident journalist Ruhollah Zam from Belgium to Iraq, where he was kidnapped. Ram was executed by hanging on Dec. 12, 2020.
Many high-profile murders and abductions of Iranian exiles are attributed to Zindashti's [drug-running] organization: [Zindashi is a personal friend of Erdogan in Turkey]