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Liveblogging The Return To Chomesh In Israel

Posted by Lori Lappin on Tuesday, March 27, 2007 5:55:28 PM
 Jameel @ The Muqata is currently liveblogging the situation in Israel and the return to Chomesh here.
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Sanhedrin Plans Temple Mount Passover Sacrifice?

Posted by Lori Lappin on Monday, March 26, 2007 1:07:25 AM
 Say it isn't so Joe.

Saturday, March 24, 2007
Sanhedrin plans for sacrifice of sheep (full article)
RELIGION NEWS SERVICE

In a donated apartment concealed among the narrow streets of the Jerusalem suburb of Nahlaot, 13 Orthodox Jewish men meet every Tuesday to debate matters of Jewish law. They are the management team of a larger developing Sanhedrin, or religious court, in Israel.

They plan to sacrifice sheep on the Temple Mount on the day before or one month after Passover, which will start at sundown April 2. Either date is permissible under Jewish law. "If the government will not resist," said Rabbi Dov Stein, 68, a member of the group, "we will do it."

The Passover sacrifice is the latest of more than 40 legal decisions issued by the modern Sanhedrin.

The Sanhedrin bought a herd of 12 sheep - 110 to 150 pounds each - from a farm in southern Israel. Anyone wanting to eat of the sacrifice can pay seven shekels ($1.67) for an 8-to-10-gram slice, the minimum required by Jewish law, Stein said. The group is hoping to collect 30,000 signatures through its Web site to prove its influence to the Israeli authorities, and gain access to the Temple Mount area.

Hila Lipnick, a 28-year-old Orthodox woman who lives in Cambridge, Mass., used to live in Jerusalem and traveled daily to Gush Etzion, a settlement in the West Bank, for school. Although she says she believes in the eventual rebuilding of the Temple, she is unsure about sacrifice.

"I can't see rivers of blood going all over Jerusalem," she said, "and society just accepting it."

Neither can I. I can't see it and I can't accept it as a Jew or as a human being.

At this point in history, to re-enact literal animal sacrifice on the Temple Mount is such an incredibly barbaric religious de-evolution, it is hard to imagine that the Sanhedrin is even considering such a thing - let alone acting on that consideration.

While I support rebuilding the Temple and even re-establishing a Sanhedrin, I do not support resurrecting animal sacrifice on the Temple Mount at all. It's neanderthal.
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Subtle Propaganda In "The Alexandria Link"

Posted by Lori Lappin on Sunday, March 25, 2007 10:25:13 PM
 From Orson Scott Card's review of Steve Berry's The Alexandria Link:

This book is evil. I don't mean it's about evil.

I mean that this book, to the degree that it is read by people ignorant of history (i.e., practically everybody), will move us closer to a future in which our society permits or even approves of the murder of Jews and the destruction of the state of Israel.

Here's how it works.

At the beginning of the book, we are shown a Palestinian during the 1948 war over the creation of the state of Israel. The scene is about how this Palestinian has been torturing a man he captured in order to find out what he is doing; then he kills him. But the torture is not treated in the fiction as anything other than a regrettable necessity; later, the character does in fact regret his actions that day.

That's not what makes this book evil. No, it's the fact that Berry sets this scene against a background in which Israelis are systematically driving all the Palestinians out of Israel; the Israelis are heavily armed by the British while the Palestinians have no weapons to counter them; and the Israelis have rounded up whole villages of Palestinians and slaughtered them, men and women alike.

These things are not what the scene is about. They are slipped in as background; they are treated as if they were the sort of thing that was really going on in Palestine in 1948.

This is the kind of thing that readers -- especially ones who don't know anything about history -- are likely to assume the writer has researched, so that it can be trusted. The book is fiction, so we know this particular character did not torture and kill the other guy -- that part is obviously made up. But the background is assumed to be real. And readers often come out of books like this thinking they now know something about the real world.

What Berry is providing is pure propaganda -- the propaganda created by terrorists and murderers to "prove" that Jews "deserve" to be blown up by suicide bombers. It is exactly as reliable as the widely-believed propaganda lie that either President Bush or the state of Israel -- or both -- actually carried out the 9/11 attacks in order to provide a pretext for invading innocent Muslim countries.

Read the entire article at the link above.
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In Support Of Military Witches

Posted by Lori Lappin on Sunday, March 25, 2007 10:08:49 PM
This entry calls attention to the plight of our military witches and to the struggle to obtain VA-approval for recognition of the pentacle as a religious symbol.

Witches At War
Campaign aimed at striking down prohibition on pentacle on military tombstones.
By Devon Haynie
Columbia News Service, NEW YORK (Mar 3, 2007)

"Before every dangerous mission in Iraq, Captain Richard A. Briggs Jr. stood on the hatch of his vehicle, drew a pentacle in the sky with his finger and recited the Wiccan Warrior Prayer for protection.

It was a quick, effortless ritual, but one that Briggs was thankful for in the spring of 2003 when his unarmoured cargo truck turned a corner on an Iraqi road and rolled right into machine gun fire.

Briggs, who recently returned from Iraq, is one of thousands of Wiccans involved in a nationwide campaign aimed at forcing the Veterans Administration's National Cemetery Administration to allow the Wiccan pentacle, a five-pointed star enclosed in a circle, to be engraved on military headstones. There are roughly 1,800 Wiccans currently serving in the military, and the Wiccan community has been petitioning for pentacle approval for more than nine years.

Members say the government has refused to make a decision even while giving the go-ahead for other religious symbols -- like the Sikh khanda -- to appear on gravestones.

There are now 38 VA-approved symbols for military headstones, everything from mainstream religious symbols to those of lesser-known faiths like Konko-Kyo -- from Japan -- to the atheist atomic whirl.

The VA argues it cannot rule on the symbol until it finishes updating its policy rules. Wiccans call this an excuse, and say that they've heard it for years.

The VA did not return repeated calls for comment."

to read the full article, see link above
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