PRESS TV reports: A number of Jewish rabbis carrying placards of “I’m a Jew, not a Zionist” have met President Ahmadinejad at his residence in New York.
The senior Jewish rabbi welcomed the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and called the meeting an extraordinary good fortune for the Jewish rabbis.
The senior Jewish rabbi said the memory of this meeting would never fade, adding that the Iranian President understands the Jews, and makes a distinction between the violent actions of the Zionists and Jewish religious belief which is of great importance for us.
President Ahmadinejad also expressed his delight at the meeting, saying, “All prophets share one mission, that is, the guidance of mankind. Today people of the world have come to realize the fact that Judaism is different from Zionism. Jews are followers of Moses and Zionists are seeking political opportunities.”
The rabbis offered a silver cup to Iran’s President in commemoration of Ahmadinejad’s friendship toward the Jewish community.
Neturei Karta: Ahmadinejad wants peace
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wants peace and is a friendly leader, Neturei Karta International spokesman Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss said in a statement issued ahead of a meeting between the Jewish organization leaders and the Islamic republic’s president.
“It is always our pleasure to visit with President Ahmadinejad. This will be the third such meeting, in addition to our many visits to Iran in the past. We have each time emphasized to the Iranian leadership that we have found the Iranian people and their leaders to be friendly and respectful,” Weiss wrote.
According to Weiss, the international accusations that the president is a warmonger are not true, and Israel is to blame for the tension in the Middle East. “Likewise, although we as Jews are not to be involved in politics, we have found the Iranian President to be a deeply religious man, dedicated to a peaceful world, based on mutual respect, fairness and dialogue.”
“This State continually oppresses other people in the name of Judaism and the entire Jewish people. This movement has exacerbated anti Semitism throughout the world. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad understands this distinction between traditional Judaism and Zionist distortion”, he added.
In the statement, Weiss added that Ahmadinejad had expressed his good intentions toward Iran’s Jews. “It is sad that so few have actually attempted to speak to the Iranian president or seek the true opinion of Iranian Jewry who live in peace and practice their faith throughout that nation”.
“We have met this man who has demonstrated time and again that he is sincerely interested in the well being of Iran’s Jewish community and has deep respect for world Jewry and their Torah faith, The Zionist attempt to socially isolate this man and his people is immoral and disastrous.” According to Weiss, the international community, and particularly the leadership in Jerusalem, should take an example from the Iranian leader
(For a more complete picture on Neturei Karta International you should also check out what the Anti-Defamation League has to say about them and the excellent Wikipedia article about NKI and its history – VS)
ADL is not some objective trustworthy organization.What else they would say except slime NK. For a more complete picture of ADL please communicate with Norman Finkelstein.
ajit – I did not mean to imply that the ADL is trustworthy (and I am sure they would immediately peg me as an “anti-Semite”). All I meant was to point to a anti-NKI source so that my readers can get a fuller picture. I happen to believe that it is important to hear both sides of any story, not just one. I referenced the NKI site twice, I referenced the rather neutral Wikipedia entry, and so adding an anti-NKI source seemed appropriate to me. That was not an endorsement in any way.
As for Finkelstein, his blog was on my blogroll until he caved in to the DePaul administration after promising his students and colleagues that he would not.
Cheers!
As for Finkelstein, his blog was on my blogroll until he caved in to the DePaul administration after promising his students and colleagues that he would not.
Cheers!
I think it is absurd to expect someone like Finkelstein to become a martyr. He has been targeted so ruthlessly, ever since he became politically involved in this Israel Palestine conflict which became truly unbearable after he showed Dershowitz is a fraud. He has done so much , sacrificed so much and when he finds he can’t fight anymore he is accused of any number of things by his supporters.This is not fair.
See it
here what he underwent.
Having said that, it hasn’t been pleasant. And I wish I could say that it had a sort of morally or politically redeeming element, that it’s a fight about principle. I wish I could say that. But it rapidly degenerated into just mud slinging and a circus. And I wish I could say I debated Professor Dershowitz but you don’t debate with Professor Dershowitz, it’s just a spitball contest, it’s not serious at all. It’s hurling all these fantastic ad hominum claims that I lost my job because I was mentally — previous job — because i was mentally unstable; that my late mother, who was in the Warsaw Ghetto, Maidanek concentration camp, and two slave labor camps and lost, every single member of her family was exterminated, he now claims my late mother was a Nazi collaborator, or I think she was a Nazi collaborator. That’s not debate. There’s no principle. It’s just mud slinging. It hasn’t been a pleasant experience for me and I can’t say there’s been any redeeming value in it. People keep trying to remind me there’s a political principle at stake but I’ve long forgotten it. And, to be perfectly honest, I don’t care what happens any more. If you took a polygraph to my wrist and you told me, you got tenure, or you told me I didn’t, my pulse wouldn’t skip a beat. I’ve been totally wearied by it. People have no idea what happened this year.
So I don’t want to lose sight of the kind of support I got. But unfortunately, the vicious reaction totally shocked me. It really did. I mean, I’m no new boy on the block. JM: Yeah NF: I’m 53. I’ve been thrown out of many universities but it’s almost always done very quietly. Behind the scenes, phone calls, letters, pressures. I did not expect that this… It turns out that Professor Dershowitz was in correspondence with the ex-chairman of my department for 3 years. He was pushing. He had correspondence with the president, it turns out. I wasn’t aware of any of this, though, I felt it in my department. I felt it but I had no idea. And that’s how I thought it would work, it was going to be behind the scenes and then if I make any kind of protests it would be Finkelstein’s paranoia, you know, he’s imagining it. But this time there was nothing left to the imagination. It was all very forthright and it turned into a national hysteria. I didn’t expect that. And I didn’t expect the level of ugliness that it would reach.
I lost a lot of time this year. I lost a lot of time, it was squandered. There were many battles that had to be fought with the pen to prove my innocence of very ugly charges. And it meant squandering huge amounts of time and many weeks which were filled with consecutive sleepless nights trying to answer the barrage of ad hominum, filthy and sordid ad hominum attacks that were being leveled against me.
Professor Dershowitz inundated the Law School, the DePaul University Law School. Sent each member of the Law School a 60 page dossier on me, filled with the most filthy scurrilous allegations.
And many people in the Law School believed it. They were very adamant that I was a Holocaust denier and worse. I had to fight senior members of the Law School administration who were saying scurrilous things because “how could Alan Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, be lying?”
So I lost a huge amount of time this year. As to what will happen, I’ll survive.
Can anyone honestly claim he is a traitor for throwing in the towel. We won’t undergo even a fraction of suffering he was made to undergo.
Can anyone honestly claim he is a traitor for throwing in the towel
Well, I most definitely am not making that claim. All I am saying is that since he chose to declare that he would not back off and then he reached a settlement with DePaul university I have been very disappointed. The reason I removed his website from my blogroll is that I felt that since, as you say, he “threw in the towel” there was not much point in keeping his website on my blog.
This is nothing personal against him, only a recognition of a (sad) state of affairs.
BTW – did you notice that I posted an entry on Naturei Karta rabbis meeting with Ahmadinejad and even a video?