Larry Derfner has a great column in the Jerusalem Post about the routine practice of young Orthodox Jews spitting on Christians in the Old City of Jerusalem. These Jews regard Christians as idolators and don’t think they should be there. It’s getting worse in recent years because of Jewish control of the Old City. My questions: Why isn’t this a story in the American papers? Why aren’t more Christians more upset about single governance of a city that Herzl promised would be extraterritorialized so that no one religion would guard the holy sites? The answer to the second question is the first question. Notice that the American Jewish Committee knows what’s going on. I haven’t seen their campaign against it. Derfner:
News stories about young Jewish bigots in the Old City spitting on Christian clergy – who make conspicuous targets in their long dark robes and crucifix symbols around their necks – surface in the media every few years or so. It’s natural, then, to conclude that such incidents are rare, but in fact they are habitual. Anti-Christian Orthodox Jews, overwhelmingly boys and young men, have been spitting with regularity on priests and nuns in the Old City for about 20 years, and the problem is only getting worse.
"My impression is that Christian clergymen are being spat at in the Old City virtually every day. This has been constantly increasing over the last decade," said Daniel Rossing. An observant, kippa-wearing Jew, Rossing heads the Jerusalem Center for Jewish-Christian Relations and was liaison to Israel’s Christian communities for the Ministry of Religious Affairs in the ’70s and ’80s.
For Christian clergy in the Old City, being spat at by Jewish fanatics "is a part of life," said the American Jewish Committee’s Rabbi David Rosen, Israel’s most prominent Jewish interfaith activist…
There was a time when priests and nuns in the capital went virtually unmolested. In the first 20 years or so after Israel conquered the Old City in the 1967 Six Day War, spitting incidents did occur, but only once in a very long while. Old City police would lock the offender up for the night, which proved an effective deterrent, said Hintlian. "Whatever problem we had, we could call [mayor] Teddy Kollek’s office, we could call people in the Foreign Ministry, the Interior Ministry, we could call Israeli ambassadors. In those days, Christians inJerusalem were ‘overprivileged,’" he said.
That era of good feelings came about as a result of two circumstances, continued Hintlian, the leading chronicler of Jerusalem’s Armenian history. For one, he says, Israel in general and Jerusalem in particular were much more liberal in those days, and secondly, Israeli authorities were out to convince the Christian world that they could be trusted with their newly acquired stewardship over the Old City’s holy places.
"Now Israel doesn’t need the world’s approval anymore for its sovereignty over Jerusalem, so our role is finished," said Hintlian. "Now we don’t have anyone in authority to turn to."…
Rosen, [Daniel] Rossing and [George] Hintlian say the most frustrating thing is that there’s no longer anyone in authority who’s ready to try to solve this problem, and the reason is that theChristian community in Israel is too small and powerless to rate high-level attention anymore.
RE: “the routine practice of young Orthodox Jews spitting on Christians in the Old City of Jerusalem” / “Now we don’t have anyone in authority to turn to.”
MY COMMENT: Knowledgeable individuals should not be surprised that this goes on in the ‘Jewish apartheid state of Israel’.
Well, yes. Spitting upon going past a Christian church or graveyard is tradition, the tradition praised by Jews the world over and in American films about Jews. It’s what’s underneath the praise of tolerance. The milkman may not be what he seems. Here’s a hint:
link to thetruthseeker.co.uk
I guess spitting on nuns and priests and Christian pilgrims takes it to a new level, a state-allowed level supported by the USA 98% Gentile population. What losers.
This has been going on for a long time. The haredim are like camels.
What say you, yonira?
Are you sure they mean Haredim when they say Orthodox? I have to confess my knowledge of the branches of Judaism is somewhat cursory, but I actually thought there were several branches of Jewish Orthodoxy — take, for instance, Neuterai Karta. Of course, anti-Zionism doesn’t automatically equate to religious tolerance, one supposes.
Whoops, somehow that slipped uner Oscar’s comment, not potsherd’s, sorry.
But yeah, that’s a rather good question. Though considering he’s our resident camel who spits on anyone that moves on the blog that isn’t a rabid Zionist like himself, it might be a redundancy.
It’s the haredim. It’s a catch-all term that applies to several different cults, usually called ultra-orthodox in English. They spit on Jews, too, particularly uppity women and Nazi Zionist police.
I agree with potsherd, they are like camels. The big difference is camels work and haredi don’t.
If these haredi spit on my goyish mother while we were in the old city i would have kicked their ass, one by one.
But as long as they spit on other people’s mothers? Apparently you don’t have a problem with that. Nor with funding them with American taxpayer money and “charitable donations.”
Gee, your mother is a goy; my mother is a goy too, perhaps we are related?
Here’s what Hagee’s pro-Zionist empire hath wrought. Way to go, end-of-days Christian Zionists!
Oh, please, please, please let one of these nutcases spit on Hagee!
Isn’t there a prophecy about that? “And lo the chosen shall spit upon thee, and ye shall rejoice in that spittle, for it shall be unto thee a sign that my return is nigh.”
The Christian Zionists are still on the move, with Israel’s Mister N using them as foolish tools for his benefit:
The blog program would not allow my single url reference; it said it was “too spammy.”
So I will just send you a repeat that does not cover how Palin fits into this:
link to thetruthseeker.co.uk
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A few years ago, I did some research in the Israeli state archives, involving newly-declassified Foreign Ministry documents from just after the ’67 war. The Israelis were terrified that pressure would be applied to declare Jerusalem a corpus separatum. Consequently they bent over backwards to accommodate the various churches – particularly the two most powerful: the Catholic and the the Greek Orthodox. All problems, no matter how trivial or local, were resolved at high Foreign Ministry level. By the 1990s, the Israelis felt pretty secure about the situation in Jerusalem, and although there was still a special department in the Ministry of Religious Affairs for relations with the respective churches, it was no longer a matter of high priority. At that point, the churches started to get nervous (at least as nervous as they were in ’67), particularly with regard to their exemption from property taxes on vast real estate holdings. The Oslo talks gave the Vatican exactly the excuse it needed to reach an agreement with Israel, without appearing to betray Palestinian and Arab Catholics. The situation with the Greek Orthodox Church was a bit more complicated, but there too, by the 1990s, the Israelis had the upper hand (which they played badly, but that’s another story).
The thing is, that Xtian Zionists don’t consider these churches to be real Christian churches, particularly not the Eastern rite, which is a bunch of weird furriners, worse even than Catholics.
There was a case a while back of a Haredi man arrested for having spat at a priest, during a Christian religious procession in Jerusalem. In court, he claimed that spitting at priests was a part of his religion, and was therefore protected by the “freedom of religion”. When the judges stopped laughing, they sentenced him to a few months in the clink.
No haredi riots? There would be today.
The riots have never been consistent. The battles are carefully chosen, and I guess spitting at priests wasn’t a priority at the time.
Any arrest of a haredi for any reason seems to spark a riot these days.
Haredi do not need riots, they promote gang warfare on “immodest” women, even break into their homes to teach them “lessons. ” The “modesty patrol gangs.”
Too bad the Haredi man doesn’t live in the USA; his spit would be protected, even more so by the new hate crimes-speech bill tacked onto the military budget bill; it’s going to be signed into law by Obama.
We’re sure to read about rabbis marching in solidarity with Christian clergy in the Old City just like Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King in Alabama.
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