The Putin I Know – Interview!
Interview With Archbishop Gabriel
By Brother Nathanael Kapner January 25, 2018 ©
___________________________________
ARCHBISHOP GABRIEL, born in 1961, serves
Upon graduating from Holy Trinity Seminary in New York in 1984, he became an instructor of Russian culture at the Seminary until 1989.
After serving as an assistant to his superiors, he was ordained as a hieromonk and soon consecrated as a bishop in 1996.
Steeped in the history and culture of Russia, Archbishop Gabriel speaks with authority on the religio-political scenario of that nation of which he and his peers call “Holy Russia.”
His “Monarchy Must Come To Russia” reveals a penetrating perspective on world events.
____________________________
Brother Nathanael: You were in Russia this past December for a Bishops Conference of the Russian Orthodox Church. Did you see President Putin?
Archbishop Gabriel: Yes. Like last spring, he made a special effort to meet with us again.
Br Nathanael: What’s your impression of him?
Abp Gabriel: He’s intense, a quiet intensity bounded by an air of confidence.
He’s a driven person without the harsh edges. For along with his drivenness is an air of inner calm. It’s really remarkable since he’s under severe attack from the West.
Br Nathanael: Is Putin interested in Church affairs?
Abp Gabriel: Very much so, both in Russia and abroad.
Soon after his first term, Putin worked to hasten the reestablishment of unity within the Russian Church which had separated during the Revolution, with part in the Diaspora and the other part in Russia.
We were separated due to the Communists taking control of the Church which the Bishops abroad opposed.
Putin was convinced that unity was necessary for the entire Russian world, and by the time of his first term the Church was free from government control.
Br Nathanael: When did you first meet Putin?
Abp Gabriel: In 2001, ten days after 9/11. Putin came to the Russian Embassy in Washington DC to give a talk at which many people were present including the media. After the talk, I, together with a few others, was invited to meet with him privately. Afterwards, we had a short one-on-one chat.
Then in 2003, we, the bishops who comprised the Synod of Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), were invited to greet him at the Russian Consulate in New York City which is just two blocks away from the Synod building.
Instead of an expected short session, we had dinner with him and ended up talking for over 2 hours, which surprised everyone.
Putin set aside much more time for church matters than for meetings with heads of state.
Br Nathanael: What do you make of that?
Abp Gabriel: He’s comfortable with us. His body language is unmistakable. Yet it’s not in the realm of familiarity but in the realm of respect. Respect, yet comfortable.
For example, in 2005 he specifically asked to visit our Church headquarters at 93rd and Park while on official business to venerate the famous Kursk Root Icon which has been in ROCOR’s possession since 1920.
Metropolitan Laurus, of blessed memory, and I welcomed him. Then we did a short prayer service, he venerated the Icon, and afterwards we had tea for another half hour. It seemed he could’ve stayed all day.
Br Nathanael: Many say Putin poses as a Christian for political points. Is his faith sincere?
Abp Gabriel: There’s nothing for him to gain by ‘parading’ his Orthodoxy, as many say, since he’s immensely popular and will easily win the election come March.
I personally believe Putin’s faith is sincere, and let’s mention that just this past Christmas he attended the church where his father was baptized.
Another reason I’m convinced of his sincerity is that he always wears and treasures the Cross his grandmother gave him, which once saved him from a serious mishap.
He’s also a frequent visitor of Valaam Monastery, much more than people know about. I’m told this is where Putin has a Spiritual Father.
Br Nathanael: Does Putin’s Orthodoxy translate into a vision for the future?
Abp Gabriel: Putin understands full well—since he didn’t grow up as a Christian (he makes no secret of this) and like millions of others has returned to his Orthodox roots—that Russia’s future well-being hinges on how the current and next generation is brought up, that good Orthodox Christians can only strengthen Russian society.
The old Soviet system based on atheism could in no way strengthen the nation and we see by contrast in the short 20 years since the fall of communism it’s come a long way.
Br Nathanael: What’s missing in Putin’s presidency?
Abp Gabriel: The same thing that was missing in Yeltsin’s and Medvedev’s presidency.
Br Nathanael: What’s that?
Abp Gabriel: Monarchy – the ideal form of government, with the understanding that the monarch would be an Orthodox Christian who’d rule the country in conjunction with the Church’s teachings and act as a defender of the faith, both domestically and globally.
This, for the most part, is the historical reality of Russia. Russia’s culture was built upon the life of the Orthodox Church, especially before the era of Peter the Great. The hope is that Monarchy in Russia will be reinstated.
But the people aren’t ready for it. To this day there’s still not a proper evaluation of the tragedy of the Russian Revolution.
Br Nathanael: How so?
Abp Gabriel: First of all, we still see Lenin lying in Red Square with the paradox of various towns, streets, and even subway stations bearing the names of Bolsheviks who were in fact “executioners” of ordinary Russian people and foremost of Orthodox Christians.
Even recently a monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Bolshevik persecutor of Orthodox Christians, was erected in Kirov. The residents were given the option to return the city’s original name to Vyatka but they voted for the communist name instead.
How can we talk about monarchy when Russians don’t fully comprehend the tragedy of their history?
Br Nathanael: How do you deal with it?
Abp Gabriel: I pointedly ask Russians, “Why are you indifferent to Lenin and the Revolution when he and his cronies murdered tens of thousands, if not millions, of Orthodox Christians?”
They answer, “It’s part of our history.”
I respond, “It’s not just history, it’s the wrath of God that came down on Russia because the people abandoned their Orthodox Christian roots.”
The American writer, Pat Buchanan, said that this is something Americans should be thinking about as well. America was founded on Christian principles and most Americans in some way identify as Christians.
If we also stray from Christian principles, God can only be patient for so long.
For More See: Monarchy In Russia Must Come Click Here
And: Putin’s ‘Anti-Evangelism’ Law Revealed Click Here
And: The Religion Of Vladimir Putin Click Here
And: Russia Turns Christian…America Turns Jewish Click Here
And: The Future Belongs To Russia Click Here
And: How Putin Celebrates Christmas Click Here
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What is Putin doing to bury the bloodthirsty degenerate Lenin in Red Square?
Br. Nat, this interview with Archbishop Gabriel is, indeed, quite amazing.
I’m also happy to hear the Archbishop was able to dine with Vladimir Putin and discuss Church matters with him.
He’s the best statesman in the world, and Chinese Pres. Xi Jingping isn’t too far behind. The last real statesman the US had was, of course, John F. Kennedy.
His Inaugural Address was magnificent. I was just a 15-year-old kid watching JFK’s Inauguration on TV, deeply engrossed in what he was saying. He mentioned men landing on the moon within this decade (the 1960’s) and addressing the people: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country”. His Boston accent was rather interesting, I’d say.
Pres. Putin still has a lot of work to do, even though he accomplished much for his country since 2000, when he first became President. You, Br. Nat, had a a great opportunity when you interviewed Archbishop Gabriel; And, who knows? You may have a great opportunity of continuing your mission right before your eyes.
God bless you forever.
Eileen
@Eileen Kuch
You wrote: “You, Br. Nat, had a a great opportunity when you interviewed Archbishop Gabriel.”
I write back: Archbishop Gabriel gives me HUGE Spiritual support. He’s got my back, so to speak, and I honor him as one of the prominent bishops in Orthodoxy today.
Why? He’s got so much going for him. He’s smart, very committed to the Church, and understands how politics and the Church interface. We have much in common!
What we don’t have in common is that his humility far exceeds mine, like light years away.
He never, ever uses the “I” word, nor the “me” word, but always integrates his views with that of the Church, not with his own.
And his name, “Gabriel,” is very fitting. He looks very angelic in spite of his large Russian frame. And an electric warmth radiates from his person.
He also can be the “life of the party” when he hosts an after-church meal. He has everyone rolling on the floor! +bn
PS Archbishop Gabriel has agreed to do regular interviews with me. He will soon be known in cyberspace as THE expert on Russian affairs. Saker beware!
I guess this interview was conducted before this news story.
Putin: Communist ideology similar to Christianity, Lenin’s body like saintly relics
https://www.rt.com/news/415883-putin-communist-ideology-christianity/
@Douglas
Wrong. This interview was conducted the past few days and finalized today. The Putin piece you cite was published almost 2 weeks ago.
Putin stated some “similarities between” NOT “identities of” communism and Christianity. And besides, Putin’s remarks are lost, if not mangled, in the shabby English translation.
The archbishop felt it was needless to comment on Putin’s remarks due to it being clearly a “comparison” and not an “identification” when heard in the Russian voice of Putin. +bn
HUMBLE……
What about Putin’s relationship with Chabad?
A fine article, indeed. And forgive me, but I stray a bit off topic here, but this needs to be said: after waves of market domination, and consolidation, the reigns on free speech are being tightened. There is no place to speak the truth, on the internet, anymore. People say, Reddit, Facebook, Youtube, comments sections of news outlets, etc., but those are all business operations with centralized levers of control.
Nothing compares to the freedom of Usenet, the original usenet. A place where people could say whatever they damn well pleased.
I am so sick of censorship, and even worse, self-censorship. Everybody is afraid, and lives in fear: fear of having their comments deliberately misconstrued as being threats to powerful people, fear of speaking truth to power, fear of political correctness, and fear of being called a “racist” or an “anti-semite”.
We have nothing, now. Nothing but a cheap, self-serving entertainment platform (on the front end) that has very real, and sinister, surveillance aspects on the back-end.
15 years after the quiet death of Usenet, I officially declare the Internet to be dead. Everything it stands for has been destroyed, or co-opted. Yes, a few of the quirks of usenet have been neologized into the common parlance, such as “FAQs”, but the spirit and gist of the internet has been lost or completely misunderstood.
Boys, the golden age is over. It ended when the tidiness-demanding women, police in tow, arrived.
The only good thing to come out of the last 10 years of the internet is adblockers.
Nice interview with Archbishop Gabriel about Putin and his faith.
On a slightly different note, it is a mysterious announcement by Putin and his cabinet of their plans to largely withdraw their presence in Syria. Surely they must realize that up ’til now has helped saved Syria from zionist takeover.
The vultures of destruction will swoop in and bring nothing but misery on an expanded scale. Not a wise move if Putin follows through.
If Russia being delivered into the Jew’s hand in 1917 was punishment from God for their sins, then we here in Jewmerica had better hold on to out butts – it’s gonna get real ugly.
Jewmerica’s sins make pre-Jew Russia’s look like Mary Poppins.
It must be understood that Marxism, communism, socialism, progressivism, lib’relism and its derivatives or variations are rooted in the spirit of Antichrist.
Too many former communists in Russia cling to the ideal of their “workers paradise.” Once they repent of that, or die off, repealing the seventy-two years (1917 to 1989) of communism will be easier to accomplish.
If President Putin will renounce any and all communist ideals, principles and objectives, it will certainly add support to his leadership. The “quiet intensity bounded by an air of confidence” shows a strength not seen with any other current world leader. Not even our own.
Putin is like a snow leopard. Give him the callsign “Snezhneyy Bars.” As for reinstating the monarchy in Russia, that is going to take some effort.
Personally, I would like to read/see further interviews with Archbishop Gabriel. Any chance of getting him to appear on the Brother Nathanael Channel?
I’m confused.
Why is Putin helping to open Mosques, and also being friendly with hardcore Jews?
The Englishman… does your reply mean you’re going to fast for Brother Nate’s intention? I hope so, sir.
I am.
Anyone else?
Kalin, your 0929 was right on the money.
Yep, it’s gonna get very ugly here. But America has been begging for it.
Putin IS the Russian monarch, in my opinion.
You will never get more Russian and more “monarch” than Putin. It’s just that they don’t use that word.
A monarch in modern times requires a good government around him.
The Kremlin and Russia are no longer little vichys ruled over by a “monarch” in the traditional sense.
The apparatus of government is immense and necessarily so.
Life, government, the economy, defence etc are far more complex now than in the days of the traditional monarchy.
Britain has a “monarch” in the traditional sense but reduced to a figurehead, allowed to survive, if only to divert peoples attention away from “The City” which really rules them, for its own interests and always has from its inception, when they were given the power to charge interest on loans contrary to Christian church law and coincident to the decline of Catholicism in Europe.
That is the “monarchy” which we are fighting against in the world, with every ounce of strength, courage, intelligence and commitment.
Kalin and Citizenfitz I cannot help but to say I too see hard times ahead for America.
Ruled not by the original Founding Fathers intent but Zionism.
I remember as a child growing up in the U.S. Midwest we would pray in the Church for Russia to rid itself of Communism, over a period of time, Gods time, that did happen.
But meanwhile Jewry moved into our highest offices of political power and the well was poisoned for all of America.
This was an interesting article many thanks and may God Bless you Brother Nathanael.
Please remember to pray for the evil to leave America .
God is not imputing wrath anywhere right now.
We are in the dispensation of grace.
Dear Citizen Fitz,
Is not ‘fasting’ a Catholic observance?
Born as I was into Protestantism, personally I have viewed fasting ( and have conducted it) as a lament.
In all truthfulness we are what we are, so long as we each here recognize the significance of +BN’s modern day Crusade on behalf of Jesus, +BN’s Resolve will Triumph.
The Great Divide.
http://rockthewesternworld.com/index.php/2017/04/02/stephen-colledge-popish-plot-treason/
Is not Archbishop Gabriel mistaken in suggesting that The Monarchy is the missing link between Church and State?
I would agree with Desert, Russia’s Putin is “Royal”. His Act will be a hard one for any to follow.
Look at the British Royal Family (blood relatives of Tsar Nicholas,) can’t for the life of me see why or how Russian Orthodoxy would want the likes of them inhabiting it’s Glorious Palaces.
@Desert
Archbishop Gabriel is calling for the reinstatement of “The Monarchy,” NOT the implementing of “a monarch.” There IS a difference you should know. +bn
As a Russian Orthodox and a member of the Jordanville Congregation, I find Putin’s refusal to denounce communism along with his close friendship with Lazar of the Chabad to be very unorthodox like.
The Chabad are talmudical and to be friends or even hang around with this crowd is puzzling.
Orthodoxy we are not to hang around the ones who mock Jesus Christ. For Putin to put on the Jewish beanie on when in Jerusalem is just a bit too much.
The cause of the great tribulation seems to be coming into focus. It looks like the tribulation will be caused by Jews trying to replace the old Christian order of the world with the Jew World Order.
The prophet Daniel described the “time of the end” at Daniel 11:40 – Daniel 12:2. The overthrows of Egypt, Libya, and Sudan prophesied at Dan 11:42-43 was fulfilled in the year 2011.
Rothschild bankster control of central banks and treasuries matches Dan 11:43 which says the ruler will control gold and silver treasures and all Egypt’s treasuries.
It was the Rothschild banking cartel working through Jews like George Soros who directed Obama to order the military overthrow of Egypt’s President Mubarak, Libya’s Ghadaffi, and the overthrow of the government of Sudan.
Just as Daniel’s predictions about Egypt, Libya, and Sudan being overthrown proved true in 2011, the prophecies about Edom, Moab, and Ammon escaping at Dan 11:41, also proved true. Edom, Moab, and Ammon are all in what is now known as the nation of Jordan and Jordan escaped unharmed in 2011 as neighboring nations fell.
Dan 11:44 But news from the east and the north will frighten him. This news seems to be the opposition from Russia to the north of Israel; North Korea / China, Syria, Iran, to the east of Israel.
In late 2017 the capital of Israel was announced to be moving from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Trump announced that the US embassy in Tel Aviv would move to Jerusalem. Construction of a synagogue at the temple mount in Jerusalem was finished and the synagouge was opened in December 2017.
The Zionist Jews are now poised to set up their Leader / top Anti-christ / Nasi / Messiah at the temple mount in accordance with prophecy at 2 Thess 2. Political and religious headquarters both are now being set up at the temple mount in Jerusalem.
Dan 11:45 – He will set up his royal headquarters between the seas at the beautiful holy mountain. Yet he will come to his end, and no one will help him.
Between the seas means between the Dead Sea and the Mediterranean sea which is where Jerusalem is situated. The holy mountain is the temple mount which is in the neighborhood of the Knesset (congress) and the President’s residence, the royal headquarters. Royal comes from the word roy which meant king or leader in archaic english. Viceroy means vice king.
Daniel 11 ends with this – Yet he will come to his end, and no one will help him.
No one will help Israel anymore, at some point. This implies the wool will slip off the sheep’s eyes and many will realize they are being led to the slaughter, are being trained to self destruct, and so on. The Zionist gig is up when that happens.
When the nations quit helping Israel, international Jewry can be expected to crash stock markets, destroy economies, incite race riots, cut off food, water, electricity, instigate wars, etc, all over the world to put down opposition, enforce obedience, and force gentile leaders to support the Jew World Order.
Jews in powerful offices trying to impose their devilish rule on the masses of the nations will apparently cause the great tribulation prophesied for the end times.
The last 2 verses in the end times of Dan 11:40 – Dan 12:2 has this –
12:1 Michael, the chief of the angels, is the protector of your people, and he will come at a time of terrible suffering, the worst in all of history. And your people who have their names written in The Book will be protected. 2 Many of those who lie dead in the ground will rise from death. Some of them will be given eternal life, and others will receive nothing but eternal shame and disgrace.
This is the same worst suffering in history / unequalled distress as that prophesied at Matt 24:21-22 and Mark 13:19-20. It looks like Satan and his children, the Rothschilds and International Jewry, will bring the great tribulation because no one will help Israel anymore as shown by Dan 11:45.
Egg Man: “Nothing compares to the freedom of Usenet, the original usenet. A place where people could say whatever they damn well pleased.”
The only recourse was you could trace their IP address through the message headers to their web host unless they were using an anonymous remailer and complain to their ISP. I never knew of anyone to do it though. Even some of the authorities had a hard time tracking posters (a lot didn’t know about it, how to subscribe, or how it worked).
And it was all through the familiar email format.
Had a few really ugly run-ins but most of it was congeniel; there were lots of flame wars. I don’t think any word was censored. Some of the groups were moderated.
Now google owns the archives. Maybe other companies bought copies, parts or all of the archives, too, don’t know, and you can subscribe through google groups. I searched their archives a couple times and found posts I wanted to use again.
Most people have moved on but there are still a few regulars I was familiar with left.
Beautiful, heartwarming, and inspiring interview with Archbishop Gabriel. Thank you so much, and please give my heart-felt appreciation to His Eminence as well.
The montages are perfect and very expressive in symbolic “grammar”. All of them convey the spirit of Symphonia between Church and State.
In Orthodox political theology, the ideal Polity in this world is that of Autocracy.
All the major States of antiquity were absolutist monarchies or despotisms, starting with the biblical Kingdom of Cain.
The defining characteristic of such a State, and it will be true of the realized Kingdom of the Jewish Antichrist — is the concentration of all power, secular and religious, in the hands of one man. In pagan societies this was combined with worship of the ruler as a god.
The Hellenistic Hasmonean “Maccabee” dynasty of high priest-kings skirted dangerously close to this temptation after defeating the Seleucid King Antiochus IV Epiphanes [“God Manifest” or “the Glorious/Illustrious”] in their heroic defense of Faith, one of the great types of the Antichrist in the Old Testament, and for which Hanukkah was originally instituted as a Temple feast. Now, it blasphemously exalts the Jews in their festivity of self-glorifying Zionist Nationalism and self-idolatry as “Jewish light” of the world.
The worship of a created being is a blasphemous lie and places the state under the control of “the father of lies”, Satan, such a state can be called a satanocracy.
Israel was the opposite of this State system insofar as it worshipped no man as God, and had no ruler but God; and so it can be called a theocracy.
However, pure theocracy is an extreme rarity and cannot in practice be sustained for long: the only true theocracy in history has been the Church of Christ – which is not, and cannot be, a State like other States, since its essence and heart is not of this world, being in essence the kingdom that is not of this world.
If, therefore, the people of God are to have a State organization in this fallen world, a system of government that comes as close as possible to rule by God must be devised.
The form of government that is closest to theocracy is what Lev Alexandrovich Tikhomirov called “delegated theocracy” – that is, Autocracy — the Symphonia (“symphony of powers”) between Church and State working in harmony in mutual submission to each other’s spheres of responsibilities.
The seeds of Autocratic Symphonia which were first planted by Emperor Constantine and later more fully cultivated by Emperor Justinian in the cradle of Christian Rhomania, whose essence consists in a division of powers between a king and a high priest, with both recognizing the supreme lordship of the One True God.
Both Constantine and Justinian perceived the Symphonia between Church and State in the embryonic forms found in the Old Testament — primarily Moses and Aaron.
From Wikipedia: Symphonia (Greek: συμφωνία “accord”) is a normative theory or concept in Orthodox Christian theological and political thought, especially within the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire, which posits that church and state are to complement each other, exhibiting mutual respect with neither institution presuming to dominate the other.
The theory can be traced back to the policy of Roman Emperor Constantine I (r. 324–337).
Emperor Justinian I (r. 527–565) expressed this position when he said: “A distinction is drawn between the imperial authority and the priesthood, the former being concerned with human affairs and the latter with things divine; the two are regarded as closely interdependent, but, at least in theory, neither is subordinated to the other.”
Such a position is scripturally based as evidenced in several Old Testament texts; the most notable references being that of Melchizedek the priest-king and the brotherly relationship between Aaron, the high priest, and Moses, the leader of Israel from Egypt.
The theory is believed to have been embodied in the Roman Empire from the time of Justinian’s reign, when ecclesiastical and civil law were indivisible, that is, canon law promulgated by the Church came to be enforced by the emperor. It was reasserted in the Stoglav, a church code promulgated in the Tsardom of Russia in 1551.
In Stanley Harakas’ view, “there are almost no existing presuppositions for its implementation as a system of Church–state relations in our times,” and “at most, it presents ‘an impossible ideal’ in the contemporary world, which may illumine some attitudes for Orthodox Christians regarding their views of the well-ordered state as well as the relationship of the Church toward the state.”
Symphonia became the subject of political discussion in Russia when it was brought up and dwelt upon by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow in the presence of President Dmitry Medvedev the day following Kirill’s accession to the Russian Orthodox patriarchal throne on February 1, 2009:
Patriarchia.ru (excerpt, online translation): President of the Russian Federation Medvedev stressed:
“At the core of all our achievements and victories, the ideas of a confident development of the state in the future lies the moral strength of the Russian nation, faith in the ideals of kindness, love and justice. The source of this power for many centuries is the Russian Orthodox Church. Without any doubt, it will continue to be so. ”
In a reply, His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia, on behalf of the Episcopate, clergy, laity of the Russian Orthodox Church, on behalf of the members of the Local Council, heartily thanked the Head of State for the attention that Russian state authority has shown to the events of church life that took place in recent days.
“I heartily thank you for the words you have just said. As in a drop of water the sun reflects, so in your words all our experience of church-state relations is displayed, – the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church underlined. –
“This is a difficult way. Its origins are in Byzantium. When the best minds of the Church and the best minds of the state worked on the formation of a model of church-state relations, they used for its description the remarkable word “symphony. This concept implies a harmonious combination of interests, the distribution of responsibility, and the outlines of the symphony are imprinted in the canonical tradition of the Orthodox Church.”
Noting that this model of relations has invariably remained an example, although for many reasons it has never been fully realized, His Holiness Patriarch Kirill stressed:
“The Russian Orthodox Church has gone through the hardest path, full of many historical events, vicissitudes, difficulties. And about any symphony could not be a speech when the will of state power liquidated the Patriarchate.
“There could be no talk of this and when the government became the persecutor of the Church. Under the new conditions, we are conscious of the impossibility of realizing the ideal that was born in the first millennium. But, on the other hand, we, as the Church, are conscious of the need for the spirit of the symphony to direct our thoughts and deeds in building a model of church-state relations.”
“We live in a modern democratic state, and those our brothers and sisters who live in other states, and many of them among us, also exist in the system of law that is universally recognized today,” the Holy Bishop further said.
“The principles laid down in the constitutions of our states are also universally recognized, therefore the spirit of the symphony, but not the letter, must realize itself within the framework of that legislative field and on the basis of those constitutional provisions that exist.”
This opens a wonderful perspective for the development of church-state relations in such a way that the states and the church, without interfering in each other’s affairs, respect each other’s mutual positions on internal affairs and simultaneously build a broad system of interaction, dialogue and cooperation, His Holiness stressed.
http://www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/548365.html
While Putin figures a bit larger in the montages, they way they are set up to “read” from left to right reads from the secular power of Russian polity represented by the servant of God, First Citizen and President Putin, to the spiritual power and moral authority of the Church, with Archbishop Gabriel’s humility and spiritual power actually doing the shining forth on the right side of two of the montages.
In other words, in a take off from a title of one of the types of Icons, Putin is he who points the way to Orthodox Christian Symphonia of Church and State in your montages.
The last montage is exceptional. We have Putin who points the way of the Secular, Democratic World to Orthodox Christian Monarchy through the “bridge” of the Orthodox Church.
With the conversion of Constantine I to Christianity, the Roman Emperor, no longer considered deified embodiment of a pagan god, was the first Christian Caesar Augustus as God’s vice-regent on earth, and the supreme representative of the Laity before God like the Father of a Family.
As such, the Orthodox Tsar is beholden to and in submission to the moral power, authority and patristic witness of the Church — entire Body of Christ — which the Holy Spirit operates through (and not just vested in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, as is often the attitude of Papal-Western Christianity.)
The anointed Crown of Monarchy is a charismatic and Eucharistic Holy Mystery of the Church, a gift of the Holy Spirit endowed by the prophetic ministry of Holy Orthodoxy symbolized by both Holy Prophet Samuel and Holy Prophet and Baptizer John the Forerunner.
Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality (Pravoslaviye, Samoderzhaviye, Narodnost’), also known as Official Nationality was the dominant ideological doctrine of Russian Emperor Nicholas I. It was “the Russian version of a general European ideology of restoration and reaction” that followed the Napoleonic Wars.
“The Triad” of Official Nationality was originally proposed by Minister of Education Sergey Uvarov in his April 2, 1833 circular letter to subordinate educators. It was soon embraced by Nicholas and his establishment and gained wide public recognition, vocally supported by intellectuals like Mikhail Pogodin, Fyodor Tyutchev and Nikolai Gogol.
Critics of the policy saw this principle as a call for Russification. Yet the very fact of its existence, being Russia’s first statewide political ideology since the 16th century, indicated the nation’s brewing transition to modernity. Narodnost, Nationality, is not the same as Nationalism. It means the national principle, a system of national doctrine, in action the closest sense is “national-patriotism”.
Putin and like minded thinkers of his party have revived the spirit of Official Nationality to meet contemporary times. The latest example of this modern “Official Nationality” is exampled by what the Commander of the Russian Military Police Battalion, Major Muakhadjiev Ruslan Mukhashevich, said in an Anna News documentary on deployment in Syria, recorded in early 2017.
The Formation of the Russian Military Police was finalized in March 2015. As the first deployment outside of Russia, they were deployed to Aleppo, Syria in December of 2016 just after.
Expressing the spirit of national-patriotism in the Armed Forces, Major Mukhashevich said:
“The majority of our battalion are Chechen, but we have other nationalities, too. One might say that our battalion is international. For example, I have under my command four nationalities and four religions.
“I am a Sunni Muslim, a Chechen. My deputy personnel Chief is a Shia. Also I have under my command a Buddhist from Buryatia and Orthodox Christians” [since this is a Caucasian battalion, the Orthodox Christians are probably Dagestani].
“Let no one be confused, first and foremost we are all Russian citizens, then we are soldiers of the Russian Army, and everything else comes afterwards.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrELzu5ccCs
I’ve contemplated on this a very long time reading through the Bible, Orthodox political theology, and the different Orthodox prophecies and legends of the restoration of Orthodox Monarchy in combination with all of the teachings of Antichrist etc.
It is my personal sense that God will not raise an Orthodox Monarch until after the deluded Jews rebuild their Temple (in the wrong place) and eventually the Antichrist reveals Himself.
He will start out as the Protocols describe him, a subservient tool of the Babylonian Pharisee Rabbis, a theme that Rabbi Akiva set in motion with his declaration that King Simon bar Kochba was the Jewish Messiah.
According to the Christian church historian Eusebius (c.260-c.340), Simon claimed to be a luminary who had come down to the Jews from heaven (History of the church 4.6.2). On some of his coins and in his letters, he calls himself ‘Prince’ (Nasi), a word that had very strong messianic connotations (cf. Ezekiel 37.24-25 and several Qumran documents).
His loyal followers liked to make a pun on his name: his real name was Simon ben Kosiba, but he was usually called Bar Kochba (son of the star), which again is a messianic claim. Some miracles were attributed to him: there were reports that he had been seen spewing out flames.
Rabbi Akiba, the president of the rabbinical academy at Yavne and the official religious leader of the Jews in this age, declared that the successful Jewish commander was the Messiah; at least two rabbis — rabbi Gershom and rabbi Aha — agreed, but others remained skeptical, and said that grass would grow in Aqiba’s cheeks before the Son of David would come.
The revolt was clearly religious in nature. The rebels were convinced that this was the apocalyptic war that had been predicted by prophets like Daniel and Zechariah. Their coins show a star on top of and the Ark of the Covenant inside the Temple; the legend is written in archaic Hebrew letters. Some coins were struck with the legend ‘Eleazar the priest’, which strongly suggests that a new high priest was elected and was ready to perform sacrifices.
Moreover, since the coins themselves are struck with an image of the Temple, this would be evidence that the Temple had been rebuilt before the war against Hadrian in a bid for a new independent Kingdom of Judaea.Coins and their symbolism were a form of spreading news and propaganda about some concrete event, and would not have been struck simply to convey future hopes and wishes.
Not everybody agreed to Akiva’s view that Simon was the Messiah. The Judaean-Christians refused to accept this claim; the Christian author Justin Martyr tells that Simon commanded Christians ‘to be lead away to terrible punishment,’ unless they denied Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah and cursed the man from Nazareth (First Apology 31.6).
In his Apology to Antoninus Pius, Justin says that ‘the Jews count us as foes and enemies, and like yourselves they kill and punish us whenever they have the power, as you may well believe. For in the Jewish war which lately raged, Barcochebas, the leader of the revolt, gave orders that Christians alone should be led to cruel punishments’.
Bar Kokbah is the original prototype of the Jewish Antichrist persecuting Christians of the circumcision in Judaea. And Akiva, whose hatred for Christians was bottomless, set it up that way. The Judaean Christians might have fought under Bar Kokbah if he’d been merely a Jewish king, but by anointing him as also the Messiah, it forced the Christians to refuse to fight under him, and they were persecuted and executed for treason.
Rabbi Akiva ben Joseph was earlier instrumental in pushing the Rabbinic Patriarchal Sanhedrin in it’s hounding of Christians of the circumcision from out of the Judean synagogues, a process we see begun in the book of Acts when Saul the Pharisee was commissioned to be a kind of prosecuting attorney of the circumcised Christ-followers on behalf of the Jerusalem Great Sanhedrin.
We meet Saul first at the stoning of Protomartyr Stephen in Jerusalem, and later on his way to the church at Damascus at the order of the Great Sanhedrin in Jerusalem.
God blessed the institution of the monarchy in Deuteronomy 17:14-15,18-20 but stipulated three conditions if His blessing was to continue to rest on it.
First, the people must itself desire to have a king placed over it.
Secondly, the king must be someone “whom the Lord thy God shall choose”; a true king is chosen by God, not man. Such a man will always be a “brother”, that is a member of the People of God, of the Church the (re)Newed Israel: if he is not, then God has not chosen him.
Thirdly, he will govern in accordance with the Law of God, which he will strive to fulfil in all its parts.
I also don’t believe that the Orthodox Monarch will be of any of the known royal houses in existence today — all of the hereditary royal dynasties of the world are spoiled, just as King Saul’s Benjaminite dynasty was spoiled as kings of Israel.
On the other hand, it is also possible that an Orthodox Monarch, in the likeness of Christ’s own humble beginnings in His Incarnation as the Messiah and royal Son of David into an obscure and impoverished Davidic house, could be called forth from a very obscure cadet branch of pious and right-believing royals.
The pious Orthodox Monarch will be known by his Christian Power, not by his genealogy, for after all, when Saul failed, God sent Samuel to find the young shepherd, David, and anointed him in the sheep field as the King of Israel.
The Orthodox Monarch might have obscure beginnings from a royal house as did David and the Son of David. (By now, every single person on the face of the earth is surely related genetically to David and Solomon).
And also it seems to me, that similar to the biblical fact that the identity of the Woman prophesied about in Genesis 3:15 who would bear the Son-Messiah was kept a divine secret from Satan from generation to generation until the fullness of time and the birth of the Virgin Mary, then in my opinion so could the identity of the Orthodox Monarch be preserved from Satan until the time is right for the birth of the Kingdom of God.
And, similar in type as to what happened to Tsar Nicholas II and the Royal Family who became almost universally reviled and hated outside as well as inside of Holy Russia in Great Britain, France and New York, unlike the prophecies concerning the great supernaturally demonical delusion of universal adulation and worship of the Antichrist, the future Orthodox King will also be hated and reviled by many in the world, and not be universally loved and adored as the Church Fathers have taught will be the delusional charm of the Antichrist.
However, Our Lord and Savior’s Sheep, the metaphoric “7000 Faithful of Israel of God” down through time, will know His voice through the Orthodox Monarch.
Perhaps we can even pray for the restoration of the Orthodox Family of Pious Kings as it was at the height of the Byzantine Commonwealth of Rhomania before the Great Schism of 1054.
@Zionism Will Bring Great Tribulation
The so-called “Great Tribulation” is an evangelical Protestant Jew-inspired construct.
The “tribulation” that Christ warned his disciples of already occurred in 70 AD.
This is the teaching of the Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church who know better than Scofield and his disciples like John Hagee. +BN
PS See St John Chrysostom’s Homilies on the Gospel According To St Matthew online.
Dear Brother Nathanael,
Thank you for clarification and for revisiting your May 2015 piece for us. If Putin was baptized into the ROC as an infant then, indeed, God has had his hand upon him.
He wears the Orthodox cross (given by his mother) well.
I get all of what you teach.
What is his marital status and did he really divorce his wife of 31 years, Lyudmila Putina (or can we know?).
Here he is with a young chick.
P.S. contribution forthcoming soon!
God Bless you for your work!
https://imgur.com/gallery/VMEd80D
In Case You Missed This
Dear All,
I LOST my Street Evangelism sponsorship at end of 2017. I really hope to continue this as the response is HUGE.
If any would like to sponsor me for this very important endeavor please email me at: bronathanael[at][yahoo][dot] com
AND, please help me REVIVE my Street Evangelism with your online donation!
Donate by Click and Pledge @
https://connect.clickandpledge.com/w/Form/b783a9c0-c8f5-459b-8e7a-e4ad02c23f79
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MAIL: Brother Nathanael Foundation; POB 547; Priest River ID 83856
God Bless Us All! +Brother Nathanael
Dear Ironkraft,
A big perceptual problem is globalizing the Western concept of the nation-state.
The nation-state as it evolved in the West, then as it finally developed in 19th century Romantic Nationalism era is something of the exception to the political norm of empires throughout world history.
As laid out in the first article of its constitution, Russia is also known as the Russian Federation, the two terms being “equal.”
A federation, strictly speaking, is not a nation-state; its constituent geographical entities and peoples remain officially distinct.
This multinational state characteristic is spelled out clearly in Article Three of the Russian constitution, which states: “The bearer of sovereignty and the only source of power in the Russian Federation shall be its multinational people.”
The multinational character of modern Russia is rooted in its imperial past.
Like most other empires, that of the Tzars was based on what Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper call the “politics of difference”; imperial rulers emphasized distinctions among their subject peoples, both legally and institutionally.
Formerly the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), a republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Russia became the Russian Federation following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.
After the Soviet era, the area, population, and industrial production of the Soviet Union (then one of the world’s two Cold War superpowers, the other being the United States) that were located in Russia passed on to the Russian Federation.
The Russian Federation comprises 85 federal subjects, namely:
–47 oblasts (provinces)
–21 republics (states) which enjoy a high degree of autonomy on most issues and which correspond to some of Russia’s numerous ethnic minorities
–eight krais (territories)
–six okrugs (autonomous districts)
–two federal cities (Moscow and St. Petersburg)
–the Jewish Autonomous Oblast.
Federal subjects are grouped into seven federal districts, each administered by an envoy appointed by the President of Russia.
Unlike the federal subjects, the federal districts are not a sub-national level of government, but are a level of administration of the federal government.
Federal districts’ envoys serve as liaisons between the federal subjects and the federal government and are primarily responsible for overseeing the compliance of the federal subjects with the federal laws.
For economic and statistical purposes the federal subjects are grouped into 12 economic regions. Economic regions and their parts sharing common economic trends are in turn grouped into economic zones and macrozones.
The RF is two times the size in land mass as the United States, with about 1/2 the total population.
The RF is home to as many as 160 different ethnic groups and indigenous peoples, although the majority (81 percent) are ethnic Russians.
The 2002 census revealed the other 19 percent as other ethnicities: 3.7 percent Tatars; 1.4 percent Ukrainians; 1.1 percent Bashkirs; 1 percent Chuvashes; 11.8 percent other or unspecified.
Nearly all groups besides Russians live compactly in their respective regions. Ethnic relations are stressed with tension resulting from centuries of Russian and Soviet domination and were activated by the collapse of the Soviet state.
Conflicts center on political control, rights to natural resources, relocation of ethnic groups, and the revitalization of ethnic cultures, religions, languages, and identities.
The Soviet regime compelled the use of the Russian language, forcibly relocated whole populations, installed ethnic Russian political elites in non-Russian regions, and drained regional resources.
Putin, who is the president of all Russian citizens of 160 different ethnic groups and four religions, has dedicated the 18 years of his political life to improving the ethnic and inter-religious relations, social conditions, and cultures, of all the citizens and their ethnic groups of the Russian Federation.
The standard way to refer to *citizens* of Russia is “Russians” in English and rossiyane (Russian: россияне) in Russian.
However, there are two Russian words which are commonly translated into English as “Russians” which is where a great deal of confusion lies.
One is “русские” (russkiye), which most often means “ethnic Russians”.
Some ethno-nationalist Russians complain about the internal migration, not foreign immigration, of other Russian citizens from the Caucasus and other predominantly Muslim federal subjects moving to the large cities for work, such as the cities and oblasts of Moscow or St Petersburg.
Another is “россияне” (rossiyane), which means “citizens of Russia, regardless of ethnicity”.
Translations into other languages often do not distinguish these two groups.
Jews in Russia are not “russkiye” but “rossiyane,” and when they first come to America are at first not accustomed to being called “Russian Jews”.
They are Russian citizens “rossiyane”, but ethnically not “russkiye”.
In the Constitution of the Russian Federation there are four traditional religions in Russia recognized as being the historical, indigenous religions rooted in early Tsarist/Imperial eras: Christianity (predominantly Orthodox), Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism.
The ancestors of today’s Russians adopted Orthodox Christianity in the tenth century. The majority of Russian citizens, and as many as 80 percent of ethnic Russians, self-identify as Russian Orthodox.
The Orthodox Church is widely respected by both believers and non-believers, who see it as a symbol of Russian heritage and culture, and the backbone and heart of Russian civilization. Small numbers of other Christian denominations exist.
The number of Roman Catholics is estimated to be approximately 400,000 to 500,000; Armenian Gregorian, about 1.2 million; and Protestants, about 1 million.
Russia has from 10 to 20 million Muslims, constituting the largest religious minority.
Not only Christians who make up the vast majority of victims and martyrs, but Muslims, Buddhists, and even religious Jews suffered much under official State Militant Atheism and persecution.
Most Muslims live in the Volga-Ural region, as well as in the North Caucasus, Moscow, Saint Petersburg and western Siberia.
In Russia there are more than 6000 mosques (in 1991 it was about 100). A particularly large number of Muslims live in rural areas, mainly in the Caucasus.
Buddhism is traditional for three regions of the Russian Federation: Buryatia, Tuva and Kalmykia, and those practicing Buddhism number 1.5 to 2 million.
Some residents of the Siberian and Far Eastern regions, including Yakutia and Chukotka, practice pantheistic and pagan rites, along with the major religions.
Of course “Putin is helpin to open Mosques” for Muslim Russian citizens. He’s their President, too.
The smallest of the four traditional religions is Judaism.
According to the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, the number of Jews in Russia is about 1.5 million.
Of these, according to the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, Moscow is home to some 500,000 Jews, and Saint Petersburg about 170,000. In Russia there are about 70 synagogues.
“Chabad-Lubavitch” is, in fact, an indigenous Russian Judaism. Putin has also generally been supportive of Jewish institutions—this one Jewish institution in particular.
It was founded in 1775 by Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, Russian Empire.
The name “Chabad” is a Hebrew acronym for Chochmah, Binah, Da’at: “Wisdom, Understanding, and Knowledge,: which represent the intellectual underpinnings of the movement.
The name “Lubavitch” is the Yiddish name for the originally Belorussian village Lyubavichi, now in Russia, where the movement’s leaders lived for over 100 years.
In the 1930s, the sixth Rebbe of Chabad, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, moved the center of the Chabad movement from Russia to Poland.
After the outbreak of World War Two, the sixth Rebbe moved the center of the movement to the United States in 1940.
In 1951, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson became the seventh Chabad Rebbe.
The seventh Rebbe transformed the movement into one of the largest and most widespread Jewish movements in the world today.
Under Rabbi Menachem Mendel’s leadership, the movement established a network of more than 3,600 institutions that provide religious, social and humanitarian needs in over 1,000 cities, spanning 100 countries and all 50 American states.
One of the more intriguing aspects of contemporary Russian Jewish life is the close relationship between the Kremlin and Chabad, also known as Lubavitch, the Hasidic sect known in the United States for its street-corner proselytizing to fellow Jews and reverence for the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson.
Founded in Western Russia in the 18th century, the Lubavitchers decamped to the United States in 1940, setting up their new headquarters in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood.
The Hasidic Jewish movement has dispatched hundreds of emissaries throughout the world to promote their messianic faith.
Just after the fall of Communism and just prior to his own death, Schneerson sent Rabbi Berel Lazar to represent Chabad in Russia.
Today, Lazar, who was born in Italy and educated in the United States, is Russia’s chief rabbi.
He appears frequently at Putin’s side at public events, and is the leader of the Federation of Jewish Communities (known by its Russian acronym FEOR), the country’s most important Jewish organization.
As Chief Rabbi of Russia, Lazar is the go to guy for any contacts by Chabad in the US, which sometimes ocassions that Lazar run interference, so to speak, for the Kremlin at times.
Such as over decades old international diplomatic “book brawl” over the Schneerson Library, a collection of thousands of rare religious Hasidic books and documents that was started by Rabbi Joseph I. Schneersohn in the Russian city of Lyubavichi in the early 20th century.
Part of it was nationalized by Soviet Russia because there were no legal heirs in the Schneerson family.
https://www.rt.com/news/russia-library-congress-schneerson-725/
In 2013 the Schneerson Collection, a special branch of the Russian State Library, was moved to the Russian Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow.
Materials of the Schneerson collection are utilized by several research projects aiming at study of Jewish booklore in Russian Federation.
But the title of Russia’s most important rabbi is not an uncontested one, as there is more than one Jewish association.
Adolf Shayevech, a prominent figure in the community since the late Soviet period, was considered chief rabbi until 2000, and still claims the title.
Kanner’s group, the Russian Jewish Congress, also recognizes Shayevech. But since Putin came to power in 2000, he has preferred to work with FEOR.
Lazar, who is sometimes referred to as “Putin’s Rabbi,” now sits on the country’s public chamber, a government-appointed oversight committee.
Lazar has been nothing but appreciative, praising Putin publicly as a friend of the Jews and calling Russia “one of the safest places for Jews in Europe.”
There are fewer than 200,000 self-identified pious Jews in Russia today—less than the number of pagans—though the number of Russians from Jewish backgrounds who no longer identify with the religion is likely much higher.
I believe it’s still true (but I may be wrong) that for ethnic census purposes, Russian Jews are still ethnically identified as ‘yevrey’ (Hebrew) while religous Jews are identified as iydei (Jude).
They are what remains after a mass exodus that saw more than 2 million Jews leave the countries of the former Soviet Union shortly before and after its collapse, mainly for the United States and Israel.
The average age of religious Jews in Russia is 45, which means they are not replacing themselves with offspring.
The formation of modern Jewish identity in Russia differs from Jews elsewhere.
A major distinction is the fact that many Russian Jews don’t have the victimhood mentality born of the “holocaust” consciousness.
Instead of the concentration camp experiences, they fought as Soviet citizen-soldiers and partisans in the Great Patriotic war, and many of them consider themselves victors.
In brief sketch, the overall effect of Imperial Russian (which encouraged conversion to Russian Orthodoxy in the 19th century) and, particularly, Soviet policies toward the Jews resulted in a strong separation of national and religious identities.
This is reinforced linguistically, where the term Jewish (evreiskii) has only an ethnic meaning, with a distinct term referring to Judaism in the religious sense (iudeistvo).
In particular, Soviet antireligious policy repressed Jewish religious belief and practice while ethnic identity was reinforced by their identification as Jews on the “fifth point” (nationality) on internal passports.
Soviet Jews were “acculturated without being assimilated,” that is, they were Russian culturally but Jewish officially and socially.
As a result, the notion of a Jew converting to Christianity was much less shocking for Soviet Jews than it would be for American or Israeli Jews, for whom conversion to Christianity typically means ceasing to be a Jew.
In Israel, most Russian Israelis, while considered Jewish by the state if they had one Jewish grandparent during the Soviet immigration, are not considered Jews by the Israeli relgious authorities.
Many Russian Israelis are so culturally Russian, they don’t keep kosher, and they’re fond of pork and seafood.
Battles have been raging for decades over pork, but the Russian Israelis (some of whom are married to Orthodox Christians) generate a small niche market for the pork industry, which is monopolized by only a few pig farms, mostly in Israel’s northern Arab-Christian area.
Tel Aviv has a big problem. Jewish hipster foodies and immigrants are defying Israel’s deepest culinary taboo, and enjoying BBQ pork ribs at the very popular soulfood hangout, Truck De Luxe, Tel Aviv’s only BBQ joint.
There are some Orthodox Christians today in Russia of mixed ancestry who descend from 19th century Russian Jewish converts — “Russian Israelites” — who were forbidden to change their last names from the Hebraic patronymic form, and still retain their family names.
On the same hand, Old Testament Hebrew names are commonly adopted as baptismal names among the Orthodox people in general along with Greek as there are a number of Old Testment Righteous who are honored as saints and martyrs in the Orthodox Church.
Given that most Russians with Jewish backgrounds range from casual observers to entirely indifferent to their religion, it’s a bit unexpected to the Westerner that their official representatives hail from one of the more doctrinaire sects of Orthodox Judaism.
Government support has been good for FEOR, which has restored dozens of synagogues and built Jewish community centers throughout the country.
It has also gotten funding to develop the Jewish Museum, which opened in 2012 just around the corner from the organization’s Moscow headquarters.
Chabad members—a small fraction of a small religious community—have become the dominant force in Russian Jewish life.
Perhaps eighty percent of all synagogues, the rabbis are Chabad, but the people who come, many are just young people who want to come and learn something about Judaism.
The chief rabbi is the representative of the Russian tradition, it’s not like America. A number of other Eastern European countries have chief rabbis, and in Ukraine, as in Russia, it’s a disputed position.
How exactly has Chabad reached its position of influence?
For one thing, it has some influential backers.
The Uzbek–Israeli billionaire diamond magnate Lev Leviev was an early and enthusiastic backer of FEOR.
Roman Abramovich, the billionaire investor, governor, and owner of the Chelsea soccer team, has also been a backer, donating $5 million to build the Marina Roscha Synagogue.
Chabad, which unlike many other Jewish groups is a centrally organized hierarchical organization, also looks familiar to the Kremlin. It replicates in a way the structure of the Orthodox Church.
There is a center answerable ultimately to the Kremlin that sends its ambassadors into the communities.
Putin long ago cut a deal with the soon to be ex-Oligarchs, now reduced to billionaire business men. He would not go after them for taxes, fraud, and their ill-gotten gains, if they stayed out of politics, and reinvested inside Russia.
One way of keeping Jewish billionaire money inside Russia is to encourage competition between the Jewish clans in funding the repair, reconstruction, and building of synagogues, as well as invest in philanthropic projects such as the tons of private money the billionaire business men poured into The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow.
The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center opened in Moscow in November 2012 and is thought to be the largest Jewish museum in the world. Construction of the museum is estimated to have cost $50 million.
It is NOT a holocaust center. It is a museum of the history of Russian Jewry.
Vladimir Putin personally donated one month of his salary towards the construction of the museum, in effect priming the pump. At the opening of the museum, nationality-minded Putin reportedly said, “It will be named the Russian Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, right?”
This huge museum is dedicated to the complex history of Russian Jewry, and I understand is very engaging to go through without the doom and gloom of Shoah Business “museum” indoctrination centers in the West.
The exhibitions are divided chronologically, helping visitors to understand the life of Jewish communities as they travelled across medieval Europe, settling in shtetls before moving to the cities.
The role of Russian Jewry in public life in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries is well presented as is the fate of Soviet Jews and the role of Jewish soldiers during World War II.
Visitors of Russian-Jewish origins also hear about what it meant to be a ‘Soviet Jew’ and finding out how and why so many left the USSR.
Instead of stark representation of pogroms, holocaust, hardships and suffering, Russian Jewish history is presented as something much more complex, filled with both struggles and achievements. The museum is located in the northwestern Moscow neighborhood of Marina Roscha, and is all privately funded. Putin personally donated about $10,000.
The new Jewish Museum occupies the restored Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage. The 8,500-square-metre space is a landmark of the Soviet avant-garde 1920s. Designed by architect Konstantin Melnikov and structural engineer Vladimir Shukhov in 1926.
Vaulted ceilings and clean architectural angles echo an early Soviet mantra: ever higher, comrades, toward the radiant future. Melnikov and Shukhov even designed the interior lighting to resemble slanted rays of sunshine.
In the 1990s, a fire left the garage decrepit and dysfunctional.
Following mass restoration efforts it re-opened in 2008, initially to house the Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture.
And then in 2012, thanks to generous funding from billionaire Jews like Roman Abramovich and Viktor Vekselberg, from Jewish organisations like FEOR and Chabad Lubavitch — even with the personal support President Vladimir Putin himself – a site that had once represented another aspect of Soviet state control became home to the world’s largest Jewish museum.
The Board members (which includes a representative of the Orthodox Church and the Muslim Mufti Board of Russia):
Vekselberg Victor Felixovich
Chairman of the Board of Renova Group of Companies
Vaino Anton Eduardovich
Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office
Blavatnik Leonard
Chairman of the Board of Access Industries
Boroda Alexander Moiseyevich
President of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia
Gutseriev Mikhail Safarbeckovitch
OAO Russneft President
Klyatchin Alexander Ilyich
Chairman of the Board of AZIMUT Hotels
Metropolitan Juvenal
The Patriarchal vicar of Diocese of Moscow
Gainutdinov Ravil Ismagilovich
Chairman of Mufti Board of Russia
David Rene James Rothschild
Chairman of Rothschild Group
Lord Browne
Chairman of the Advisory Board of Stanhope Capital
Ronald S. Lauder
World Jewish Congress President
Zhukova Darya Alexandrovna
Founder of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art
Diskin Iosif Evgenyevich
Vice-chairman of the Research Council of the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center
Moshkovich Vadim Nikolayevich
Representative of the Russian Federation Council
Roger David Kornberg
Nobel laureate in chemistry (2006), professor of structural biology of Stanford University
The billionaire Jews mostly keep out of the way of politics, as promised, reinforced by the example of the Khodorkovsky case, but they act out their political instincts in real estate development and Jewish philanthropy, and sitting on the board of trustees of the Jewish Museum.
“The Board of Trustees of the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center approves the strategy of Museum development, realizes programs aiming at attraction of financial resources of sponsors and controls expenditures on the Museum development.
“Moreover, the Board of Trustees defined for itself a number of moral and ethical tasks which are meant to reduce national and religious tension in the society.
“These tasks include: contribution to the creation of the atmosphere of interchurch and interethnic tolerance, the Museum promotion as an opened discussion platform for the representatives of all religions and cultures, of people with different views and world outlook.”
https://www.jewish-museum.ru/en/about-the-museum/board-of-trustees/
Neat way to keep Chabad corralled, yes?
Goy communists never understood that communism was/is the replacement of a modest Christian elite by a very cruel Jewish elite.
A Russian monarchy is a Christian elite group which guarantees a flow of money from Russian society to the Russian Orthodox Church. The Church must be financed for all the good reasons.
There will be a day Putin retreats from public life, and who knows how much respect and money will be given to the Church by the next president of Russia.
That is why a stable and Christian elite, independent of politics, is important for the future of Russia. Who are the present day Romanovs?
Dear Brother Nathanael,
Be careful, keep your yes open. Mossad is not to be underestimated.
I know they usually don’t assassinate Jewish people, but a wild animal that is cornered and feels threatened is capable of anything.
Just saying: be super awake and keep your eyes open. Jesus will protect you.
( dailystormer.red/we-told-you-so-explosive-proof-of-world-wide-jewish-assasination-plots/ )
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-01-25/explosive-allegation-israel-planned-blow-passenger-plane-arafat-assassination-plot
Any comments on this?
https://forward.com/news/breaking-news/197664/holocaust-deniers-in-russia-now-face-five-years-in/
@Koen
“First of all, we have to understand what communism is. I mean, to me, real communism, the Soviet communism, is basically a mask for Bolshevism, which is a mask for Judaism.”
Bobby Fischer: Press Conference, September 1 1992
“And such elements as cannot be traced to Christianity can be traced to Judaism, the ‘fossilized’ parent of Christianity which had been preserved by a Jewish Diaspora and volatilized through opening of the ghettos and the emancipation of Western Jewry in the generation of Marx’s grandparents.
“Marx has taken the goddess ‘Historical Necessity’ in place of Yahweh for his deity, and the internal proletariat of the Western World in place of Jewry from his chosen people, and his Messianic Kingdom is conceived of as a Dictatorship of the Proletariat; but the salient features of the Jewish Apocalypse protrude through the threadbare disguise.”
Arnold J. Toynbee from “A Study of History”
“Tel Aviv has a big problem. Jewish hipster foodies and immigrants are defying Israel’s deepest culinary taboo, and enjoying BBQ pork ribs at the very popular soulfood hangout, Truck De Luxe, Tel Aviv’s only BBQ joint.”
The rural expanse of Texas has a big problem as well, an ever-growing population of destructive feral hogs.
Problem, Reaction, Solution time!
I had no idea that the Jewish hipster community had developed a fondness for barbecued pork.
Perhaps this is a side effect of the heavy Jewish involvement in the growing cannabis industry as one of the well-known side effects of the herb is appetite enhancement.
Texas feral pigs feed on a natural diet in the wild and provide a much leaner and environmentally friendly protein option than factory farm pork.
Texas is well known for its culinary expertise in all things BBQ. This sounds like a business opportunity via an export market for the abundant wild hog population down in the Lone Star State.
This presents an outstanding opportunity to expand Texas’ export market and rid the state of the rapidly expanding wild pig problem.
The Texas Agriculture Commissioner needs to be made aware of this situation as he has had little success in attempting to deal with this agriculture/feral hog problem. He already has made a trip to Israel on official business during his first term in office.
Kosher cannabis cafes which serve delicious wild boar BBQ from Texas — How is that for Jewish-style progressiveness?
Make it reality and then we can once again say, Thanks Jews!
YEEHAW YALL!
Oh, while my old cranky brain is rolling, there is one more thing.
I am aware that Putin did remind Jewry awhile back that 85% plus of the Bolshevik leadership was Jewish.
The massive Russian Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center does indeed thoroughly document and present the overwhelmingly dominant role of Talmudic Jewry in the starvation, torture and imprisonment/slavery of the Russian Christians during the first half of the 20th century right?
I wonder is this painting is there as part of the exhibition.
http://russia-insider.com/sites/insider/files/styles/1200xauto/public/smashing_of_the_church_at_easter_night_ilya_glazunov.png
This too:
https://cache.boston.com/resize/bonzai-fba/Globe_Photo/2008/08/04/1217904439_3205/539w.jpg
Promote Brother Nathanael
With Brother Nathanael T-Shirts, Coffee Mugs and Stickers etc,.
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All profits go to the Brother Nathanael Foundation.
@Dave
You wrote: “God is not imputing wrath anywhere. We are in the dispensation of grace.”
I write back: Then why did God execute His wrath upon Jerusalem in 70 AD and then again in 130 AD?
And again upon Jerusalem in the 4th Century when Julian attempted to rebuild the Temple? And, in many other instances throughout the centuries.
Or perhaps you need to tell us exactly when this “dispensation of grace” began? And what are the determining factors of its initiation? (It’s dangerous dogma to put God in a box, you know.) +bn
Hello Bro. Nate:
I’m getting information on the Web that says Putin’s mother is Jewish thereby making him Jewish.
Can you confirm/deny that? TYVM for your time and attention!
@Flek
The headline say “Holocaust Deniers in Russia Now Face Five Years in Prison” but the article it headlines says nothing about “Holocaust Deniers “.
@Doug P.
Putin’s mother Jewish? What credible biographer of Putin has said that?
I’ve read a few. Never saw it. AND: There is absolutely NO proof. +BN
PS Be careful what you cart away on the internet ESPECIALLY with Google’s LYING JEWS all over their censored cyberspace.
Dear Doug P,
I researched this lie about Putin’s mother being a Jew a couple of years back, and have made several posts on it.
Putin’s documented ancestry of descent from Orthodox Christians on both sides of the family are contained in the Church records of a rural, peasant town which today has no more than about 3000 people.
Here is a repaste of one:
http://www.realjewnews.com/?p=1033#comment-1733555
Dear Jack,
No truth to it at all.
Putin is not Jewish, nor does he have Jewish ancestry on either side of his family.
As far as I’m concerned, Makow is a crypto-Zionist living in Canada, which is part of the Zionist-loving British Commonwealth, and he often just makes up crappy lies and calls it “Freedom of Speech,” if it is not rank propaganda disinformation.
As he is the son of Russian-Polish Jews, if memory serves me, Makow appears to have a “bias” against Russia to begin with, and has a particular animosity against Putin.
You can read what I wrote about why I think he’s a crypto-Zionist here:
( realjewnews.com/?p=1002#comment-1698818 )
Apart from the fact that one of the favorite ways in Russia among ethno-nationalists is to attempt to slur and discredit a politician is to call him a Jew, the internet rumor that Putin was Jewish appears to have surfaced around 2006, originally from a (ex?)British intelligence source.
Vladimir Vladimirovich (VV) Putin is the third son in the family – two elder brothers were born in the mid-1930s died early in childhood, one during the Seige of Leningrad.
The Putins were a working family who lived in a shared apartment in Leningrad. VV was born in 1952; his mother was 41 at the time of his birth. Putin’s mother’s maiden name is Shelomova. Shelomova is an old Russian surname. It is definitely not from Hebrew “shalom.”
Some Internet (nit)wits decided Shelomova was a Jewish name just because it sounds similar to Shlomo.
The surname Shelomov is attested in several archival registries dating back to the 14th, 15, 16th centuries besides Putin’s. The Russian root word shelom (m) or sheloma (m) means “helmet.” Shelomova is the feminine form of the surname.
VV’s late mother was Maria Ivanovna Shelemova.
Maria Ivanova was from the Zarechye village. Her mother, VV’s maternal grandmother, Yelizaveta Shelomova, is buried in this village’s old Orthodox Christian cemetery.
VV’s parents met in Pominovo, and both were married in 1928 at the age of 17 in the village church. They later moved to Leningrad before the war (now St. Petersburg) and VV was born in 1952 when his father was around forty-one years old.
The Russian middle name is derived from the father’s first name, as is common in Orthodox naming traditions. My Greek father’s father was Antone, so my dad was name Constantine Antone, for example.
Russian names are the same way, and they have suffixes in masculine and feminine genders added to the patronym.
Shortly after winning the election to the presidency for his first term, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin became interested in his genealogy. A distant relative named Putin on the paternal side of VV’s family was doing independent amateur genealogy, and discovered his family relationship to VV Putin. I believe that it was this distant relative’s research which inspired VV’s own desire to look at his ancestral roots.
Professional genealogists were able to trace VV’s genealogy back 13 generations from various archived records. He comes from a family of peasant serfs who belonged to one of the Romanov family.
Since a peasant serf’s family was closely bound to their master and estates, Vladimir Putin’s ancestral family records are more traceable than most, since his family records are linked to, and preserved because of, a cadet branch of this famous royal family.
Until the late 19th century and the beginnings of industrialization in Russia and the emancipation of the serfs, the estate and manor village, town or city you were born in was usually the one you died in, and your marriage was arranged to someone from the same or close-by village or town by your families.
A peasant serf needed a certificate to travel off of the estate. The average free peasant in an agricultural society probably didn’t travel more than 20-25 miles from home in his lifetime. A peasant merchant or peddler might travel farther.
The great noble estates were self-contained units with their own villages and towns and churches which a peasant serf might not ever leave at all.
In 1861, Tsar Alexander II liberated the serfs.
Spiridon Putin is VV’s paternal grandfather who was born in Imperial Russia, as all of VV’s grandparents were, sometime after the emancipation.
VV’s paternal grandmother was Olga Putina, who married Spiridon.
His paternal grandparents were from different villages near the same rural town, Turginovo. Both were baptized in its Protecting Veil of the Mother of God Orthodox Church, and both are buried in the church cemetery.
VV’s late father, Vladimir Spiridonovich (VS) Putin was born in St Petersburg in 1911, his mother born in Zarachye village near Tver. When World War I began, famine and starvation hit St. Petersburg, so his father’s entire family moved back to VV’s paternal grandmother’s home in Pominovo in the Tver region.
Her house is still standing today, and members of the family still spend their vacations there.
It was in Pominovo that VV’s father met his mother. They were both 17 years old when they got married.
Putin’s family had been in the Turginovo area for several centuries, which has the village church his grandparents were baptized in, and it was exclusively Orthodox Christian.
I have kind of a rule of thumb when it comes to Jewish communities. If they were never expelled from an area, or complained about their treatment in an area, it’s certain that didn’t live there to begin with.
Jews are obsessed with their own history and genealogies, and complain about everything which ever happened to them as “persecution” and “pogroms” in Christian societies, no matter how trivial.
Another thing that they give great priority to are Jewish cemeteries, because that anchors their place in history and other claims.
As Turginovo was in the territory of Moscovy Russia proper, Jews were forbidden to settle in Moscovy Russia by Empress Catherine or within 50 miles of its borders.
They were restricted to the Pale of the Jewish Settlement inside the empire after the partition of Poland (”Polish – Lithuanian Commonwealth” which included most of the Ukraine territory).
The Pale of Settlement was the term given to a region of Imperial Russia in which permanent residency by Jews was allowed and beyond which Jewish permanent residency was generally prohibited.
In terms of territorial size, the Pale’s landmass was fully a third the size of the continental US, and largely corresponded to historical borders of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; it included much of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Moldova, Ukraine, and parts of western Russia.
Tver Oblast was never a part of the Pale of Jewish Settlement.
I have yet to find any Jewish cemeteries in the area around Turginovo, or mention of minor Jewish communities in or near Turginovo in any of their own voluminous histories and genealogies. If there were no Jews in or near Turginovo, then it is not possible for Putin to have any Jewish ancestry.
By the way, Putin’s mother, always a devout Orthodox Christian but married to a staunch atheist Communist Party member, had him quietly baptized as a baby (he was born in Leningrad in 1952), as many Russian mothers did back then, especially if the fathers were adamant atheists.
My late husband was also born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) about the same time, and his mother also secretly had him baptized as a baby as his father was a passionate atheist, so this was nothing unusual.
Turginovskoe rural settlement, as it is now called, is still a very rural and agricultural locale with less than 3,000 population, which are all listed as ethnic Russian with no other ethnicties. The Protecting Veil of the Mother of God village church where Putin’s grandparents are buried was renovated in recent years.
Putin’s family village house (cabin) is still in the family, has been renovated, and I understand VV and his family still stay there every so often.
The people of Turginov are very proud of their kinsman, friend, and native son, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, and he of them.
Information about Turginovo settlement (Russian)
http://turginovosp.ru/informaciya-o-turginovskom-sp.html
Presentation of the [Putin] book in the Turginov library (Russian)
http://turginovosp.ru/photo/kniga-o-putine.html
I hope this settles the question of Putin’s ancestry for you.
Since there is interest in Putin’s maternal line to see if there is any hint of Jewishness lurking about, here is a brief summary taken from this geneology blog site of excerpts translated from Russian, which includes images of local Church Metric parish books which register the births, baptisms, marriages and deaths of Orthodox Christians.
Putin has probably one of the most well researched genealogies in Russia, the most recent release has been a book by well-known professional geneologists who researched a variety of government and ecclesiastical archives.
His interest in searching out his ancestors after a cousin had started an amateur project, and Russians also interested in his ancestors, has sparked an entire generation of Russians looking for their own ancestors and genealogical researches.
The blog at this link uses materials from this professional book of Putin’s geneaology, which is titled similar to Putin’s Rising Genealogy which has been researched to seven generations and 13 tribes so far through his paternal ancestry. There are images of the pages of the Church Metric books at this blog:
http://zavtra.ru/blogs/k_genealogii_prezidenta_rossii_vladimira_putina
Before the early 20th century, religious intermarriage between Orthodox and heterodox Christians was not permitted unless there was a conversion to Orthodoxy.
In rural areas, peasant marriages would have been between a man and a woman of many generations of Orthodoxy.
Outside of the Pale of the Settlement where Polish Latin Catholic and Uniate Greek/Russian Catholic churches were concentrated, foreign Christian denominations were restricted to major urban areas in order to accommodate foreign diplomatic missions and trade and business projects.
Putin’s maternal female ancestors to his maternal great-great grandmother are peastant women recorded in village Church Metric books as baptized at birth as Orthodox Christians, marked with ** in these excerpts.
No other Christian denominations were ever present in Putin’s ancestral lands in and around the Turginovskaya Volost which at one time belonged to Orthodox Christian princely estates.
In earlier East Slavic history, volost was a name for the territory ruled by the knyaz, a principality; either as an absolute ruler or with varying degree of autonomy from the Velikiy Knyaz (Grand Prince). Starting from the end of the 14th century, volost was a unit of administrative division in Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Poland, Muscovy, lands of modern Latvia and Ukraine.
Since about the 16th century it was a part of provincial districts, that were called “uyezd” in Muscovy and the later Russian Empire. Each uyezd had several volosts that were subordinated to the uyezd city. After the abolition of Russian serfdom in 1861, a “volost” became a unit of peasant’s local self-rule, and the parish Metric books continued as the legal administrative registries.
Prior to 1918, dates are recorded per the Julian Old Style calendar.
Information is taken from Geni.com search entry for Vladimir Putin and ancestral links which obtained much of its data from the above mentioned blog:
http://zavtra.ru/blogs/k_genealogii_prezidenta_rossii_vladimira_putina
_____
Vladimir V Putin’s Maternal Ancestry, all were born within Turginovskaya Volost:
1) Mother: Maria Ivanova PUTINA (nee: SHELEMOVA)
PUTIN (SHELOMOVA) Maria Ivanovna (4 October, 1911 (**5 October, 1911 – baptism), village of the District of Turginovskaya Volost of Tver county of Tver province ([16, p. 9], [19, p. 411], [23], [24, 353-335]), 6.7.1998, Pesochny near St. Petersburg ([19, pp. 411, 413], [23]))
Note 1: in the book A M. Putin’s “The Kind of President V. V. Putin” is erroneously indicated in 1997 [3, p. 42].
_____
2) Maternal Grandmother: Elizaveta Alekseevna SHELEMOVA (nee: BUYONOVA)
SHELOMOVA (BUYONOVA; aka “Chebotukhin” ) Elizaveta Alekseevna (Birth: 2 September, 1881 (**3 September, 1881 – baptism)
Melechkino village of the Turginovskoy volost of the Tver district of the Tver province, d.11/13/1941, Zarechie village, Turginovsky district, Kalininskaya region.
Note 1: in The name of Vladimir Putin’s book “The Kind of President Vladimir V. Putin” is erroneously indicated by the maiden name Elizaveta Alexeyevna-Tomashova
Note 2: in the Putin’s encyclopedia, the date of birth was erroneously indicated – 02.10.1881 .
Note 3: died during the shelling, buried on the bank of the river Shoshi. The inscription on the grave cross of black marble contains errors a full-time information such as date of birth and month of death “. Shelomova Elizabeth A. 2.IH.1881 – 1941.13.H. Killed Nazi invaders”, also erroneously as “2.H.1881 – 1941.13.H”.
_____
3) Maternal Great-grandmother: Ulyana Petrovna CHEBOTUKHINA-BUYANOVA (nee: KAMACHKINA; married twice)
CHEBOTUKHINA-BUYONOVA () Juliana P. (Birth 16 February, 1857 (**17 February 1857 – baptism), d district Turginovskoy Parish Tverskoy County Tver province [54, L-112 111ob..] -. 9.5 .1930, d district Turginovskogo area Tverskoy district, Moscow region).
Wedding 4 (16) .2.1876, p. Turginovo Turginovskoy Parish Tverskoy County Tver province [53, l. 496nd-497]
_____
4) Maternal Great-great grandmother: Fedosya Andreevna KAMACHKINA
Fedosya Andreevna (Birth: 23 May, 1827 (**27 May, 1827 – baptism), Brykovo village of the Turginovskoy volost of the Tver district of the Tver province [83, p. 63], after 1880, village Zarechye of the Turginovskoy volost of the Tver district of the Tver province [66, sheet 466])
Dear Elder of Zyklon B,
Back in 2011, the Chief Rabbi of the Zionist entity permitted imports of “Kosher Pork,” aka organic goose meat, “which according to three non-Jewish chefs, tastes exactly like pork.”
http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-News/Hamming-it-up-Kosher-pork-coming-soon
My first in-laws, on the liberal Christian side of things, always had an early annual Christmas party for family and friends which included a Jewish family of three who always came — he was a Czech Jew “J”, and she was a Russian Jew “S and they were observant, if liberal, Jews.
My mother-in-law always had Christmas ham among other dishes, and J. & S. were particularly fond of her Christmas ham. They broke the kosher taboo against pork just that one time a year to enjoy a couple of slices.
When their only child, a daughter was old enough to start asking questions about why they didn’t have ham for Hanukkah, they told her that the ham was really “Christmas dinosaur meat” and it became the family joke.
“Oh, are J., S., and R. coming for Christmas dinosaur meat this year?”
Try being critical of Stalin (mention Katyn Forest etc) in the ‘Russia Today’ article posted 26/01/18 titled…‘Red God’: Stalin statue erected in Berlin street’.
Going by that state news outlet, Russia is a lost cause.
Dear Aussie Dave,
I don’t quite get the connection between a Stalin statue erected in Berlin, Germany for a temporary German historical exhibition titled “The Red God: Stalin and the Germans,” organized by a museum and a memorial to the victims of political oppression which opened in the former central prison of the notorius East German Communist Ministry of State Security, the Stasi, and how “going by that state news outlet, Russia is a lost cause.”
Or is it the number of deleted comments you’re going by, with no idea of what the content of those comments actually were?
RT America is based in America, it’s an American corporation, registered now as a foreign agent.
In other words, it’s the Germans exhibiting a part of their own East German history when Germany was divided into East Germany (German Democratic Republic) and West Germany (Federal Republic of Germany):
Per RT: “The exhibition shows how the officials of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) adopted and cultivated the cult of Stalin.
“Notably, it outlasted the Soviet leader himself, becoming stronger after his death. One German town was named after Stalin and his monuments were erected across the country on “voluntary donations,” the German Tagesspiegel daily reports.
“In the GDR, Stalin was described as the “greatest genius of our era,” a description of the exhibition at the German capital’s museums’ internet portal says. The installation features “numerous rare objects, including films and photos” showing the extent of the Stalin cult in East Germany.
It also exhibits photos of the Germans who were arrested and sent to the USSR during Stalin’s rule.”
It doesn’t make a lot of sense unless one also takes a look back in time, wading through the multi-level labyrinth of Official Soviet Historiography trying to sift fact from fiction, finding some kind of clear pathways to real history to Kruschev, who denounced Stalin and his cult of personality back in 1956.
History Today:
The twentieth congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union assembled in Moscow in the Great Hall of the Kremlin on February 14th, 1956.
It was the first since the death of Josef Stalin in 1953, but almost nothing was said about the dead leader until, in closed session on the 25th, 1,500 delegates and many invited visitors listened to an amazing speech by Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the party, on ‘The Personality Cult and its Consequences’.
Khrushchev denounced Stalin, the cult of personality he had fostered and the crimes he had perpetrated, including the execution, torture and imprisonment of loyal party members on false charges. He blamed Stalin for foreign policy errors, for the failings of Soviet agriculture, for ordering mass terror and for mistakes that had led to appalling loss of life in the Second World War and the German occupation of huge areas of Soviet territory.
Generations in the Soviet Union had revered Stalin and linked their lives and hopes with him. Now the past was being shattered and what they had all lived by was being destroyed. ‘Everything crumbled, never to be made whole again.’
It was an extraordinarily dangerous and daring thing for Khrushchev to do. Solzhenitsyn believed that he spoke out of ‘a movement of the heart’, a genuine impulse to do good. Others have pointed out, more cynically, that it tarred other party leaders with the Stalinist brush, to the ostentatiously repentant Khrushchev’s advantage.
It deflected blame from the party and the system on to Stalin’s shoulders. A few months later it was announced that the congress had called for measures ‘for removing wholly and entirely the cult of the individual, foreign to Marxism-Leninism… in every aspect of party, governmental and ideological activity.’
…
The speech was reported in the foreign media the next day. In March the Central Committee had the text distributed to the party branches, where it was read out. Inside the Soviet Union it would help to create greater freedom, in time.
Plenty of Stalinist henchmen and functionaries were still determined to resist de-Stalinization, but thousands of political prisoners were released and others posthumously rehabilitated. Abroad, Khrushchev’s words cut the ground from under the feet of Communist party members and leftwing intellectuals who had spent years denying reports of what was going on in the Soviet Union. Many party members left in disgust.
At the party congress in 1961 Khruschev repeated his attack on Stalin’s memory, this time in open session, and other speakers denounced Stalin’s crimes.
The late leader’s body was removed from its place alongside Lenin in the mausoleum in Red Square, and the names of Stalingrad and other such places were changed. When Khrushchev fell from power in 1964, he became an un-person, but was not executed, imprisoned or even banished to Mongolia. The Soviet Union had changed.
http://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/stalin-denounced-nikita-khrushchev
Essentially, as Stalin was denounced and the cult of Stalin was totally repressed by Kruschev and the Communist Party inside the USSR, among East German Communist Party members the cult of Stalin actually grew for a time, the way I read the RT article on Stalin’s statue.
Kruschev was also exercising the perogatives of the Communist Party’s Official Soviet Historiography.
A few lines from Wikipedia describing Soviet historiography: Soviet historiography is the methodology of history studies by historians in the Soviet Union (USSR). In the USSR, the study of history was marked by restrictions imposed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Soviet historiography is itself the subject of modern studies.
“Since the late 1930s, Soviet historiography treated the party line and reality as one and the same. As such, if it was a science, it was a science in service of a specific political and ideological agenda, commonly employing historical revisionism
“In the 1930s, historical archives were closed and original research was severely restricted. Historians were required to pepper their works with references — appropriate or not — to Stalin and other “Marxist-Leninist classics”, and to pass judgment — as prescribed by the Party — on pre-revolution historic Russian figures. Nikita Khrushchev commented that ‘Historians are dangerous and capable of turning everything upside down. They have to be watched.'”
“The state-approved history was openly subjected to politics and propaganda, similar to philosophy, art, and many fields of scientific research. The Party could not be proven wrong, it was infallible and reality was to conform to this line. Any non-conformist history had to be erased, and questioning of the official history was illegal.”
Thanks, Wiki. Russia is still digging through 70 years of Soviet historiography to get to historical revisions and truths of their own. The historical repression of Stalin was so great, that his rediscovery by Russians since 1991 makes him a fascinating new character to study, especially for younger people.
It would be like nearly everything about President Eisenhower and his place in US history had been suppressed including his role in WWII, and then 50 years later, he’s rediscovered.
RT hasn’t done the best job lately on some of their latest articles, like the so-called comparison Putin made between Orthodox Christianity and Communism which had everyone in a flap.
They did, in fact, a rather schlock job of putting the story together, as well as leaving the historical and present context in the lurch, and missed the point of Putin’s whole discussion.
Sputnik did a little better job than RT in clarifying the purpose behind Putin’s comparisons but not much:
“Faith has always accompanied us, it strengthened when our country, our people faced particularly difficult times,” Putin said in an interview for the documentary film “Valaam,” a clip from which was broadcast by the Russia 1 TV channel.
“There were such severe years of militant atheism [during the Soviet period] when priests were killed, churches were destroyed. But at the same time a new religion was being created — Communist ideology, which is very similar to Christianity, in fact. Freedom, equality, brotherhood, justice — all of this is enshrined in the Holy Scripture, it’s all there.
“And what about the Code of the Builders of Communism? This is a sublimation, it’s really just a primitive excerpt from the Bible, nothing new was invented,” the president said.
Sputnik then ends with this closer about the national debate inside Russia:
“Vladimir Lenin was the leader of the communist revolution in the Russian Empire in 1917, and became the first leader of the Soviet Union when it formed in 1922. After he died in 1924, his body was embalmed and put on display in a mausoleum in Red Square in Moscow.
“Since the Soviet collapse, Russians have remained sharply divided in their views regarding the revolution and proposals to bury him.
“A recent poll by the Levada Center revealed that the country is split down the middle in terms of support for the revolutionary’s burial, with 41% saying they favoured a formal burial and another 41% opposing the idea. Another 18% couldn’t make up their minds.”
( sputniknews.com/russia/201801141060750482-putin-lenin-communism-christianity/ )
There’s still a lot of context missing to this Christian-Communist comparison story, and the Western media doesn’t help, in fact, they cherry-pick the pits for even more factoids of their own.
It’s like eavesdropping on your neighbor in the middle of a conversation, and your hearing aid is cutting in and out.
The fact that Putin says any of this during a documentary titled “Valaam” gives a major clue as to Putin’s perspective he is actually speaking from, the Christian faith as the strength of the Russian people, and he’s not all that complementary towards Communism. In fact, he’s a little dismissive.
On Valaam Island far from the mainland in Lake Lagoda, the Valaam Monastery of the Transfiguration of the Savior is one of the Russian Orthodox Church’s holiest and most isolated sites. It is a fundamental piece of Russian national identity and Orthodox civilization and history.
Step to the Skies – Valaam Monastery Documentary is a documentary a few years old about the life of Russian Orthodox monks on the Island of Valaam. Valaam Monastery is often referred to as the Athos of the North, referring to the Monastic Republic of Athos in Greece, one of the holiest places in the Orthodox world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdGUnSu49hg
Valaam Monastery was an outpost of evangelism in the north of Russia. In the 1790s the monastery provided the group of eight missionaries that was sent to Alaska in the North American northwest to evangelize the natives for Orthodox Christianity.
This group of 18th century monastics included St Herman of Alaska and St Juvenaly, Protomartyr of America.
If you search for “Orthodox Alaska” you will find Orthodoxy very much alive today from the missionary work of these Russian monastics, complete with old Russian churches and monasteries, particularly vibrant among the First American tribes in Alaska and the Aleutian Islands.
For that matter, the natives were Russian citizens before they became US citizens after the US purchased the Alaska Territory from Imperial Russia.
Situated in the frontier of civilization the Valaam Monastery was often attacked and burned as the area was contested by both Russians and Swedes. As the monastery is not mentioned in documents before the 16th century, different dates — from the 10th to 15th centuries — have been proposed for its founding.
In Church tradition the founding of the Valaam Monastery of the Holy Transfiguration Monastery has been attributed to Ss. Sergius and Herman who were among the first missionaries to the city of Novgorod in the tenth century. They created a monastery on Valaam Island in Lake Ladoga, north of Novgorod.
In the sixteenth century, Karelia became the battleground between Swedish and Russian forces as the Swedes pushed their borders eastward. Situated in Lake Ladoga, Valaam Monastery was in the midst of these struggles.
In 1578, monks and novices were beaten to death by the (then) Lutheran Swedes. After another attack, the monastery was depopulated between 1611 and 1715. The buildings were burnt to the ground, and the Karelian border between Russia and Sweden was drawn through the lake.
As the eighteenth century continued, the monastery recovered. Buildings were restored and built as the monastery prospered. By the beginning of the twentieth century the monastery had become very wealthy with about twenty smaller sketes under its control.
In 1793, the abbot of Valaam Monastery, Nazarius, was tasked by Catherine II with recruiting missionaries for the Russian colony in Alaska. A group of eight monks was assembled and departed Valaam on December 25, 1793 for Alaska.
After a long journey through the length of Siberia the group arrived in Kodiak, Alaska on September 24, 1794.
In 1809, Sweden ceded Finland to Russia, which became an autonomous Grand Duchy. As the monastery was located in the Grand Duchy of Finland, when Finland gained its independence in 1917 Valaam became part of the Church of Finland.
The Finnish Church became autonomous under the Church of Constantinople. During the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union in 1940, the monks from the monastery were evacuated to Heinavesi, Finland. With the end of the war the border was moved westward so that all of Lake Ladoga was within the Soviet Union.
Having lost their former home, the monks who had moved to Finland formed the New Valaam Monastery at Heinavesi. It is the only monastery in the Finnish Church.
With the loss of its monastic community and the inclusion of Lake Ladoga in the Soviet Union the buildings of the original monastery on Valaam Island remained unused as a secular population moved on to the island. In time the island became a Soviet military base.
As restrictions on the Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union eased during the 1980s, the original monastery was reactivated in 1989 and the facilities restored over the years. In the late 1990s, Valaam Monastery gained significant legal power over the island under the Patriarch Alexei II.
In an effort to return to a state of spiritual seclusion and enticed by the prospect of monopolizing the vast tourism industry on the island, the monastery forced many longtime residents to move out to the mainland. After years of fruitless legal proceedings, many residents of the island chose to leave rather than continue the fight, though a few still remain.
On May 1, 2016, the day of Orthodox Pascha (Easter), a massive fire broke out in the historic “Winter Hotel” next to the main chapel.
Although there are no casualties reported, between 50 and 70 people reportedly had to be evacuated, and an emergency fire-fighting helicopter needed to be deployed from St. Petersburg to fight the blaze.
The hotel building dated back to the 1850s and was considered a national heritage site. This was the same date on which St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Cathedral in New York City, USA burned as well as two more Orthodox Churches in Australia.
Strange, no?
However, Putin’s point was that the Communist Party and its Militant Atheism didn’t invent anything new, and that they took it all from Christianity to form their quasi-religious ideology of Materialism, eliminating God. The Bolsheviks “sublimated” the Christian power of the Russian Church, the Empire’s dynamics and religious and social institutions, structure, and culture, the people’s Christian psyche, and transformed it into a pseudo-religion and Party dynamo of their own.
~~~*~~~
Valaam Monastery carries their own article concerning the Rossya 1 documentary about them which includes a video excerpt of Putin’s interview while he was at Valaam. The excerpt is in Russian only.
But even in online translation from the Valaam Monastery website, the article makes much better sense of where Putin’s thoughts were from, than the hash that RT put out:
IN THE WORLD RELIGIONS THERE IS MUCH IN COMMON, BUT IN THE BASIS OF – CHARITY, JUSTICE, HONESTY, LOVE.
On Valaam, suffering from devastation, Putin came as a pilgrim, and since then the head of state has been here regularly. During this time, Balaam was transformed – the sketes were rebuilt, the churches were restored, and the renovated Transfiguration Cathedral flaunted in the center.
“In my heart, in the heart of the Russian people, it has always been there and I am sure, will always remain the same way as in the soul of all our citizens who profess our other traditional religions — Islam, Judaism and Buddhism. The world’s religions have much in common, but in the basis of charity, justice, honesty, love. We have a multi-confessional state, but these moral foundations of the multinational Russian people are common, they unite us.”
“Valaam — one of Russia’s mirrors, which have quite a few have a very interesting and even somewhat dramatic story of Balaam is linked, in fact, with the development of a national of the Russian state…”, – said Vladimir Putin in an interview with the journalist Andrey Kondrashov. His film “Valaam” on January 14 will be shown by the TV channel “Russia – 1”.
“The Patriarch told me that when the Soviet troops were ready to enter the archipelago, for some reason they stayed on the beach, invited clergymen from the monastery.” One of them went, and suddenly a Soviet officer said to him: “How much time do you need to collect and leave?”
“They asked for a few days, collected all the most precious, all the holy things. They themselves left and all were taken out. And in this connection, I thought: of course, during the hardest days of civil war and the war against God, then, when the seeds of schism were laid in Russian society, the seeds of unity always remained with us.
“First of all, thanks to the Russian Orthodox Church. And the fact that the officers then allowed the monks to leave and take away the shrines is the best evidence that the seeds of unity have never left us.”
“The Orthodox faith always accompanied us, it was strengthened when it was especially difficult for our country and our people. There were very hard theophany years when they destroyed priests, destroyed churches, but at the same time they created a new religion.
“Communist ideology is very much akin to Christianity, in fact. Freedom, brotherhood, equality, justice — it’s all laid in the Holy Scripture, it’s all there. And the code of builders of communism? This is sublimation, this is a primitive excerpt from the Bible, nothing new has been invented.
“Lenin was put in a mausoleum – how is this different from the relics of saints for the Orthodox, but just for Christians? They say to me: “No, in the Christian world there is no such tradition.” How not? Go to Athos, look, there are holy relics, and here, too, the holy relics of Sergius and Herman.
“That is, in fact nothing new then the government did not come up with, it just adapted under its ideology what mankind has long invented.”
https://valaam.ru/publishing/43380/
This very last line said by Putin is the missing line from both RT and Sputnik, and it puts it all in the context it’s supposed to be in the way Putin meant it to be.
Not even Lenin’s mausoleum and encasement in glass is a total novelty in Orthodox burial traditions. The Bolsheviks buried him in a secular burial in form which mimicked the burial rites of holy relics of Orthodox saints and martyrs left in view for veneration. In the West mausoleum burials are far more common than in the Eastern Church, but in Orthodoxy it’s not unheard of.
The major difference is that Lenin’s body requires a great deal of science, chemistry and labor to embalm and keep preserved.
The holy relics of genuine saints and martyrs are buried without embalming, and sometimes are discovered to be desiccated, but incorrupt, even in impossibly damp crypts and graves, such as the relics of St. John the Wonderworker of San Francisco and Shanghai.
The debate about burying Lenin has been going on since 1990. Some observers have drawn a parallel between the veneration of Lenin’s body and the veneration of saints’ relics as practiced by the Orthodox Church. It’s not up to Putin to decide to bury Lenin, it’s up to the Russian people to decide, and he’s said that several times over the years. Moreover, some of the debate seems to be at times about giving Lenin a specifically Christian burial.
Like myths and legends about saints, the cult of Lenin has developed its own lore.
According to one story, soon after Lenin’s death in 1924 the original wooden mausoleum was flooded due to a sewage leak.
The Russian church’s leader of the time, Patriarch Tikhon, commented ironically: “For relics such as these — an appropriate oil.”
Lenin was a baptized Russian Orthodox Christian. Stalin was a baptized Georgian Orthodox Christian.
Both were apostate twice the sons of hell and forerunners of Antichrist.
Orthodox Russia’s national resurrection is certainly proof that Christ Conquers All.
IC XC
NI KA
The Gentile does not want anything. He waits to be told what the Jew wants!
By Michael Lesher
April 18 would have been the 115th birthday of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the late Lubavitcher Rebbe. Schneerson, who took over a struggling Brooklyn-based Hasidic sect in 1951, was by his death in 1994 arguably “the most influential Jew since Maimonides,” and it is about that influence I wish to write — particularly because, in the 20-odd years since his death, recollections of the Rebbe’s personal charisma have largely eclipsed the record of his actual teaching.
I note at once that I have neither the expertise nor the desire to try to analyze the whole range of the Rebbe’s religious doctrine. Of his role as clergyman and community leader I have little to say, never having lived in a predominantly Lubavitch enclave. Moreover, since I had no contact with him, I am clearly unequipped to write about the Rebbe’s personal qualities; I am prepared to grant that these were impressive.
I am more concerned with the darker side of what the Rebbe taught.
For that darker side — the farrago of apocalyptic messianism and overt racism at the core of the Rebbe’s teaching — is likely to be his lasting contribution to the Jewish world, in which his prestige (thanks in no small part to popular hagiographies by Joseph Telushkin and Adin Steinsaltz) continues to rise even as serious discussion about his legacy has all but disappeared.
Worse, the Rebbe’s teaching invites serious practical consequences. Some of his most vehement sermons were devoted to the promotion of Mideast militarism. While Israel’s violence against its Palestinian Untermenschen intensified and its attacks on neighboring countries reached new heights of savagery, the Rebbe rationalized the occupation and egged on Israel’s military assault against Lebanon in 1982, as he would cheer on the American-led carnage in Iraq nine years later.
Certainly a Muslim cleric who preached similar things would be anathematized throughout the Western world. Why, then, is the Rebbe given a pass for his warmongering in support of the oppression of Palestine — surely the ugliest blot on Jewish tradition in modern times?
The question cannot be shirked. The Rebbe didn’t just tolerate Israeli oppression. He encouraged it.
In Eyes Upon the Land, a book explicitly “based on the public statements and writings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe,” the reader is told that “every inch of territory in Israel,” including “the lands taken in the Six-Day War,” must be held by the use of Jewish military force, regardless of international law or the consequences for the non-Jewish population.
Why? Because “the ordinary Arab in the street” seeks nothing less than “Arab dominion over the entire land of Palestine” and regards all Israelis with “deep-seated hatred.”
The Rebbe never produced evidence that a nonexistent Palestinian army would somehow overwhelm Israel’s massive military forces — there being none — but the darker question is why the Rebbe’s insistence on Jewish dominion over the same land, and the deep-seated hatred of Palestinians and other Arabs he encouraged (during Israel’s slaughter of over 17,000 people in Lebanon in 1982, the Rebbe repeatedly criticized the Israelis for being too timid) didn’t justify the use of force by Arabs against their Jewish attackers.
The only possible answer is the obvious one: Jews were different from non-Jews by definition. Jewish goals mattered to the Rebbe. Arab lives didn’t.
And Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza? During the First Intifada, the Rebbe preached emphatically against the slightest easing of the oppressive conditions that had spurred the desperate (and overwhelmingly nonviolent) popular revolt. “[C]oncessions convince the Arabs of Israeli weakness,” he claimed. “Even mere talk of possible concessions is harmful because it encourages terrorist activity.” Meir Kahane himself could not have said it more brutally.
The mainstream reader seldom hears about any of this: much of what passes for commentary on the Rebbe’s work is mere propaganda.
In Toward a Meaningful Life, a book intended as a distillation of the Rebbe’s teachings, Simon Jacobson claims that “the Rebbe taught – and embodied – a distinctly universal message, calling upon all humankind to lead productive and virtuous lives, and calling for unity between all people.”
In fact, Schneerson based his teaching on the traditional Hasidic text known as Tanya, a deeply racist work according to which only Jews are endowed with fully human souls. True, Schneerson was far from being the world’s only racist preacher; but it is hard to imagine panegyrics like Jacobson’s being circulated about, say, David Duke.
Nor have only the faithful been playing such games. In her review of two recent biographies of Schneerson for the Wall Street Journal, Dara Horn – after describing the efforts of the Rebbe’s emissaries to persuade Jewish men to don phylacteries and Jewish women to light Friday evening candles — insists that although “[i]t all seems suspiciously cultlike,” these “bearded enthusiasts aren’t out to convert anyone.”
Really? It’s true that the only targets of Lubavitch’s missionary activities are Jews — but to deny that they’re “out to convert anyone” makes sense only if you accept the underlying premise that all Jews ought to be Orthodox Jews, if not Lubavitch Hasidim, a position that aligns Ms. Horn with a highly tendentious theological position she fails to acknowledge, let alone to justify.
Schneerson’s warmongering was partly a product of his doctrinal Jewish chauvinism — but it also drew on his fanatical insistence that the end of days was rapidly approaching. “We are now very near the approaching footsteps of Messiah, indeed, we are at the conclusion of this period,” he claimed as far back as 1951.
Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman, in a relatively clear-headed review of the Rebbe’s career, call it “the story of how one man and some of his followers were swept away by his beliefs and expectations and led to assume that death could be denied and history manipulated.”
But Western media generally disdain religious fanatics who believe they can defy death and turn back the course of history. The Lubavitcher Rebbe alone is treated with kid gloves — even though violence was among the tools with which he sought to change reality. Witness the silence that followed this fulsome encomium from Rabbi Shmuley Boteach in the Observer:
“His [the Rebbe’s] moral authority and unparalleled humanity inspired in all who met him a desire to be better…. [S]eeing the dignity he accorded all who came to seek his blessing his admirers ceased judging people who were different.”
Those fine sentiments will be news to Palestinians, for whom the Rebbe expressed nothing but loathing and contempt. And the Rebbe’s “unparalleled humanity” had no problem with extolling Israeli massacres in Lebanon and the slaughter of Iraqis in 1991.
Yes, religious leaders can be complicated figures, and I am willing to grant that other aspects of the Rebbe’s teaching may be genuinely inspirational. But until we come to terms with the dark side of his career, we will not be able to shake off his complicity — and ours — in the long-running crimes of the Jewish state which, in the Rebbe’s perverse preaching, became acts of piety.
Only the very ignorant or the very innocent still believe politicians are working for a better world. Even if they had the intention, they cannot do it. The powers that lead the world today are so strong that have their tentacles in every walk of life. It is revolting to learn how most succumb to their poisonous evil ways and bribes.
Chabad came to prominence under the guidance of ‘The Great Rebbe’ Menachem Mendel Schneerson. His policies led Chabad through a period of great expansion establishing institutions in 900 cities around the world.
‘The Great Rebbe’ gave regular talks on the coming of the messiah. Over time, Lubavitchers began to realize that he meant himself. The belief that Schneerson was the Messiah was first openly professed by Rabbi Shavom Dol Wolpo in a 1984 book and quickly gained acceptance.
Absurdly, even though he died in 1994 ‘The Great Rebbe’ is still the official leader of Chabad, like ‘Great Leader’ Kim Il-Sung is the leader of North Korea.
In Chabad schoolhouses children chant and salute the invisible Rebbe.
RACIAL SUPREMACISTS
Chabad believes Jews are God’s chosen people and everyone else is trash. In the book “Gatherings and Conversations” the Great Rebbe tells his followers that Jewish people are an extension of God and Gentiles are destined to serve the Jews.
“Two contrary types of soul exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness.”
“A Jew was not created as a means for some [other] purpose; he himself is the purpose, since the substance of all [divine] emanations was created only to serve the Jews.”
Rabbi Ginsburgh, a leading Chabad Rabbi, has argued that because Gentiles are genetically inferior to Jews, a Jew should be able to take Gentiles organs if he needs one. He was recorded saying, ‘As for the goyim… Zalman’s attitude (was): “Gentile souls are of a completely different and inferior order. They are totally evil, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.”
‘If every single cell in a Jewish body entails divinity, is a part of God, then every strand of DNA is a part of God. Therefore, something is special about Jewish DNA.’
‘If a Jew needs a liver, can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has an infinite value.’
The Jewish Daily Forward reported a talk given by Chabad Rabbi Mani Friedman.
Asked how he thinks Jews should treat their Arab neighbors Friedman responded, ‘The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle).’
ZIONIST APOLOGISTS
Chabad’s extremism makes them perfect apologists for Israeli crimes. A perfect example is Alan Dershowitz, a Chabad member.
Dershowitz is the premier Zionist apologist rolled out in front of the mainstream news cameras across the world to explain that Israelis are the victims of every massacre they carry out.
An unhinged and creepy individual, during a recent speech he gave at Oxford University he took off his glasses and told the students that he has “Zionist eyes” as do all “reasonable people,” Dershowitz is one of many Jewish extremists in sheep’s clothing who lead mainstream political discourse in the West.
As further evidence that Wikileaks is an intelligence operation, Dershowitz recently joined Julian Assange’s legal team.
INFLUENCE
One of the policies of the Chabad is to send Rabbis across the world to set up Chabad houses. This movement, known as shilchus, has given Chabad a global support network.
Lubavitchers mix with the upper echelons of each host country. Their influence in each country varies.
The Canadian government recently gave the cult $800,000 for the building of a Chabad center in Montreal. Relations with Russia are less warm; the Russians recently refused to hand over two major collections of Chabad texts seized by early Soviet governments. Where is Chabad’s influence the greatest? You guessed it- the US.
Rabbi Shemtov is Chabad’s Washington representative, and his enormous influence was illustrated when he lobbied successfully for the Great Rebbe to be posthumously awarded the congressional gold medal in 1995, the only religious leader ever to be given the award.
Rabbi Shemtov is an all-pervasive presence in D.C. Sue Fishkoff, author of ‘The Rebbe’s Army: Inside the World of Chabad-Lubavitch’, writes: “It’s not enough that Chabad’s man in D.C. knows the name and phone number of just about every congressman, senator and foreign ambassador in the nation’s capital — he also knows their legislative assistants, their secretaries and the people who clean their offices.”
Shemtov says that the vast network of shelichim inside the US generates his political power. “We have shelichimin forty-seven states and in [at least] 310 districts. … People sometimes view the world of shelichim as three thousand people, but it’s not only three thousand people, it’s three thousand interconnected networks. So we can place a call from a constituent to almost any member of Congress.”
“Most shelichim have good connections with their senators, congressmen and governors, who represent the most remote places in the United States. For example, when Sarah Palin, a Republican, burst onto the scene, she had already known about Jewish issues and Chabad specifically from Rabbi Yosef Greenberg in Alaska.”
Members of the cast of ‘Friends’ recorded a piece for a Chabad telethon. Bob Dylan appeared on another.
CRIMINAL AND TERROR ENTERPRISES
Chabad is a criminal organization with ties to Mossad. Chabad houses provides safe houses and storefronts for Israeli intelligence and criminal activity. This includes everything from terrorism to money laundering, drug running to prostitution.
For instance, in March 1989 U.S. law enforcement rounded up a criminal network in Seattle, Los Angeles, New Jersey, Colombia, and Israel that involved a Chabad House that was involved in money laundering and currency violations.
Wayne Madsen writes:
‘In Bangkok, Israeli military pilots and drivers who stay at the Chabad House there train Thai Army commandos, divers, and pilots who are fighting a Muslim secessionist movement along the southern border with Malaysia.
‘Bangkok police have long suspected Chabad House as a center for the Israeli Mafia, which runs its Ecstasy and Ice trade from Bangkok for all of Southeast and East Asia. The Israeli Mafia also reportedly runs heroin labs in Myanmar, where an Israeli military officer serves in Myanmar’s feared military counter-intelligence agency.’
Retaliation against the Chabad mafia can be seen in the Mumbai terrorist attacks when Lashkar-e-Taiba militants took hostage of the Mumbai Chabad house and murdered nine Jews, including Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg.
Wayne Madsen has reported that mafia overlord Dawood Ibrahim ordered the attacks partly in response to Israeli mafia attempts to take over his Mumbai drug trade.
‘[Wayne Madsen Report] has learned from Asian intelligence sources that the Russian-Israeli gangsters operating out of Chabad House tried to take over Mumbai’s drug trade with the help of local Jewish mobsters so Ibrahim, while settling scores with India, the CIA, and Britain, decided to have his subcontractor LET terrorists pay a visit to Chabad House and “collect on a debt with high interest.”‘
Chabad are allowed to exist as a powerful international force because they serve Israel in two ways: working with them in intelligence and criminal activities, and a source of extremist ideology to fuel Zionist crimes.
Chechen leader Kadyrov praises Putin’s support for Islam.
Ramzan Kadyrov has said that President Vladimir Putin stayed true to his pledge to support Muslims in Russia and around the world, adding that Western policies have only brought war and destruction to Islamic nations.
In a new message posted on the Telegram social network, Kadyrov thanked Putin for his support to Chechen Muslims. He wrote that Putin was fulfilling his promise to protect religious freedom and equality for all major confessions in Russia. In addition, Kadyrov said that such policies were further proof that the Russian Federation is a reliable partner for all Muslim nations.
“These are not just words, Vladimir Putin has constantly proven that he is fulfilling his promises. While the United States and their allies are bringing wars and destruction to the Muslim world, Russia is consistently defending the interests of the Islamic nations and peoples,” the Chechen leader wrote.
The promise mentioned by Kadyrov was made by Putin in 2005, when he delivered a speech before the Chechen parliament. Back then, Putin promised support for traditional Muslims in Russia and across the world, saying that Russia would remain a reliable partner for Muslim countries.
In his message, Kadyrov also drew attention to a more recent statement by the Russian president. Last Wednesday, Putin met with representatives of Muslim clergy in the city of Kazan, and said that Russian authorities would support Islamic education through major state universities and other means.
Putin also emphasized that studies in traditional Islam were an important part of countering harmful extremist ideas and radical groups. “These ideas, even destructive ones, can only be tackled in one way – through other ideas. Those, which are being promoted and taught to the people in the Theological Academy, which was created here [in Kazan] and in other academies and educational institutions… in Moscow, Ufa and the Caucasus,” he said.
In his Telegram message, Kadyrov supported Putin’s stance on the issue.
“In Chechnya alone there are two Islamic universities, six Hafiz schools [dedicated schools for studying and memorizing the Quran] and dozens of Madrasas. For this, we are sincerely grateful to Vladimir Vladimirovich. But all rights are tied to responsibilities, and I am convinced that Muslims must actively counter the destructive and anti-Islamic movements such as Wahhabism.
“Conciliatory positions never lead to anything good, and we will always adhere to our position that we must never allow Wahhabism to rear its head in any of the Russian regions,” the Chechen leader wrote.
The Verse
5:51{/quran}
Translations
Before discussing the problems in the various published translations of the verse, it is necessary to look first into the literal translation of the verse without added parentheses:
O you who have Iman! Do not take the Yahud and the Nasaaraa as Awliyaa
Some of them are Awliyaa of others
Whosoever turns to them from among you, would then become part of them
Certainly Allah does not guide wrongdoing people.
Our attention here is firstly directed to the word Awliyaa and the following phrase in the verse, “they are Awliyaa of each other,” and then secondly to the overall meaning of the verse.
Various translators of the Quran have translated this verse with only slight variations in the choice of words but not in the meaning. All of the translations that I have checked unanimously mention the same meaning of the verse prohibiting alliance and friendship with the Jews and the Christians because (by implication, as do most of the classical commentators have pointed out) they are friends, helpers, guardians, comrades, allies, confidants, and protectors (different choice of words for translating the word Awliyaa) of each other.
It is important to note here that in all of the existing English translations of this verse, there is an implied “because” before the phrase ‘they are Awliyaa of each other’ for which reason it seems, from these translations, that Allah has prohibited alliance and friendship with them.
Abdullah Yusuf Ali, Pickthall, Asad, Maududi, Daryabadi (whose commentary on the verse will be quoted later), Arberry, Muhsin Khan, Zafrullah Khan, Syed Abdul Latif, Maulana Muhammad Ali, the Bewleys, and a number of others, all have translated the verse in the same manner with only variations in the choice of words when translating the word ‘Awliyaa’. …
Here is Maulana Imran Hosein’s explanatory translation that is clearer and which differs quite largely in meaning from the rest:
Oh you who have faith, do not take (such) Jews and (such) Christians as your Awliah (friends and allies) who (themselves) are Awliyah (friends and allies) of each other. And whoever amongst you turn to them for friendship and alliance, would belong to them (and therefore not to us). Surely Allah does not provide guidance to a people who commit Dhulm.
The first point to note here is that this translation does not nullify all other previous translations of the verse. It adds on to the meanings of the verse; it has in fact opened a new dimension in understanding the verse according to our times; it sheds new guiding light for a political and communal response to the modern world situation that Muslim communities around the world find themselves in.
The differences in meaning between Maulana Hosein’s translation and others are:
— The prohibition of taking the Jews and the Christians as Awliyaa, does not apply to all Jews and Christians.
— Not all Jews and Christians are Awliyaa of each other as history testifies. There has been strong enmity between these two religious communities in the world.
In fact Jews and Christians have never been Awliyaa of each other except only until a certain period in history from which moment onwards this new strange alliance has persisted till today, and daily grows stronger. In the last 100 years this alliance/friendship (Wilaayah) has intensified with certain clear objectives within the ranks of this particular alliance.
Not only that, even within the Christian world, there persists till today a violent enmity, particularly between Western (Catholic and Protestant) and Eastern (Orthodox) Christendom.
The prohibition only applies to those Jews and Christians who have formed an alliance amongst themselves. It is this particular community that Allah has prohibited us from taking as our Awliyaa, i.e. those who ally between themselves against the Muslims.
Since this Wilaayah between the Jews and the Christians did not occur in the time of the Prophet (SAWS) and since it did not occur for some centuries after the Prophet (SAWS), this verse in fact was a foretelling at the time of revelation that there will come a time in the future (which we now have the records of history to testify) when this would happen and at that time when this would be fulfilled, we should bring this verse of the Quran to attention and refrain from taking that particular group as our Awliyaa no matter what the circumstances demand.
Due to the daily unfolding signs of the Last Day or Islamic Eschatology pertaining to the end of history, or ‘Ilmu Akhiruzzaman – knowledge of the end times – and due to what events have unfolded in the last few centuries that alarmingly indicate the appearance of Dajjal the false messiah in our spatio-temporal dimension, and the sequence of events that would lead to the culmination of Nabi Isa (AS) ruling the world from the throne of Nabi Dawud (AS), in the words of the Messenger of Allah (SAWS), Hakimun ‘Aadil – a Just Ruler – this particular verse shines as a warning for believers to pay particular attention to those amongst the Jews and Christians who would be Dajjal’s foot soldiers and who would facilitate Dajjal’s mission on earth.
These Jews and Christians, who have joined hands putting aside their own political, social and theological differences to prepare the grounds for the world order of Dajjal, have themselves betrayed their own people and religion.
It is this very verse of Surah al-Ma-idah that has always indicated the appearance of such a group of people from among the Jews and Christians who would be allies of each other in especially assisting Dajjal, who would come to deceive both Jews and Christians to believe in him as the true messiah they have been all the while waiting for.
He would deceive them into believing in the truth of his mission on earth and demonstrate to their eyes that the golden age of the Prophets Dawud and Sulaiman alayhimassalam has returned. It is ‘Ilmu Akhiruzzaman that throws new light on the verse and demands a new explanation to the verse. To be straightforward, this verse is the only verse in the Quran, which has foretold of the essentially European, Zionist Judeo-Christian alliance.
…
As much as Allah, Most High, has spoken of Nabi Isa [Jesus] (AS) in this Surah, so much has He also spoken of Nabi Musa (AS).
As Nabi Isa is for the Christians, so is Nabi Musa for the Jews (AS). They did not fight with Nabi Musa to conquer the Holy Land by which they openly rebelled against Allah and His Messenger, but there would come a time when they would go and fight under the sway of the false Messiah (Dajjal) with a Christian backing and the Christians too would go and fight under Dajjal’s sway with a Jewish backing (as it was the case during the Crusades) to take control of the Holy Land.
This alliance revolving around controlling the Holy Land and the Levant is directly founded on this 51st verse of the Surah.
…
Well, what exactly is it regarding the modern world situation that they fail to explain using the Quran?
Before we answer that question, let us firstly turn to three important modern commentaries of the Quran – written within the last hundred years – that have thrown new light on the verse, all of them adding more strength to Maulana Hosein’s interpretation:
Modern Tafaaseer – Prof. Hamka, Dr. Asad and Maulana Daryabadi
In 1964, Pope Paulus VI, declared an official Christian (Catholic in particular) forgiveness for the Jews; that they are free of their sins, one of it being their attempt to crucify Nabi Isa alayhissalam. This is none other than political forgiveness. It is the strength of the Jews, who have a lot of wealth, to work together with the Christians in fighting what they consider the threat of Islam.
Immediately after that, in 1967, Arab countries were attacked by the Jews (Israel) for four days (referring to the Six Day War) and Bait al-Maqdis was seized from the hands of the Muslims even though they – the Muslims – had control over Bait al-Maqdis before this for fourteen centuries.
Perhaps during the time of Rasulullah (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) this was not yet seen because in Madinah a large group of Jews were congregated as a community but the Christians were in Shaam. But due to the miracles of the Quran, we see today what has happened in the passage of time and we see with crystal clarity how the Christians and the Jews collaborate in turning against the Muslims and Islam.
The verse in fact says that the two religious communities that were enemies of each other will one day come together in facing their enemy, that is Islam, until the state of Israel will dominate the lands of Islam with the help of the Christian communities who are actually supposed to be more inclined to help the Muslims.
This is because the Jews oppose the Christians not only by rejecting Isa (AS) as a Prophet and Messiah, but also that he was an illegitimate child while Muslims affirm Isa (AS). This makes Muslims closer to Christians and therefore make Christians more inclined to help Muslims. However, what has occurred is the opposite.
“The Jews and Christians have much in common, and can, and do, readily form a combination against Islam. As the most recent instance of their animosity against Islam, witness the Christian Britain’s zealous sponsoring of ‘Zionism’ and ‘Jewish home in Palestine.’”…
In his note to verse 51 of Surah al-Ma-idah, the verse of our subject, he says: “According to most of the commentators (e.g., Tabari), this means that each of the two communities extends genuine friendship only to its own adherents – i.e., the Jews to the Jews, and the Christians to the Christians – and cannot, therefore, be expected to be really friendly towards the followers of the Quran
…
However, as has been made abundantly clear in 60:7-9 (and implied in verse 57 of this surah), this prohibition of a “moral alliance” with non-Muslims does not constitute an injunction against normal, friendly relations with such of them as are well-disposed towards Muslims.
It should be borne in mind that the term waliy has several shades of meaning: “ally”, “friend”, “helper”, “protector”, etc. The choice of the particular term – and sometimes a combination of two terms – is always dependent on the context.
While Maulana Daryabadi’s commentary points out that this verse refers to the Zionist attempt in establishing the State of Israel, in the context of his time, more relevant to our time too, and while Dr. Asad’s commentary succinctly summarises one part of the classical commentaries to the verse in the light of a “moral alliance” – namely the commentaries to that part where Allah says: “those from you who turn to them for alliance is part of them…” – it is in fact Prof. Hamka’s commentary which strongly supports Maulana Hosein’s commentary to the verse.
It is Prof. Hamka’s tafsir that comes closest to Maulana Hosein’s commentary.
Now, in thinking things through, let us look at the context of the verse in Surah al-Ma-idah. It is important to read the verse together with what precedes it and what follows it.
Context
The passages throughout the Surah linked to our study here are verses 5-19, 32, 41-88, 110-120. In these passages, Allah, Most High, addresses the Jews, the Christians, the Muslims and the hypocrites. It is clear that in the attempt to explain Maulana Hosein’s commentary on the verse, the whole Surah should be read first. It should be clear in one reading that:
From the context of the verse therefore, we should be able to understand that the Euro-Zionist, Judeo-Christian alliance in their attempt to rule the Holy Land and dominate the Levant cannot include all Christians and all Jews. Those who initially constituted its ranks were small in number in comparison to the whole of the Judeo-Christian world and did not appear in history except about five hundred years after the Quran was revealed.
That community of people gradually grew stronger and became superpowers of the world in the last hundred years. More importantly, the people of this alliance took control of the Holy Land, established the State of Israel and have now successfully raised it to the level of a nuclear superpower capable of defying any other power in the world.
They have done all of this while a large number of Christians and a significant number of Jews not only loathed at them and refused to join them, but were even so much as victimised by them.
The verses of Surah al-Ma-idah read in context will prove beyond doubt that Muslims are not prohibited from allying with such vicitimised Jews and Christians who recognise injustice and who are courageously willing to defy the Judeo-Christian Zionist alliance. All of this becomes clear only in context. For that the whole Surah must be read.
The verses of the Quran are interconnected. In Surah al-An’am, verse 114, Allah, Most Wise, describes the Quran as Mufassalan – joint together and fully explained, meaning all the verses are well connected and explain each other. They are neither isolated nor does each stand alone. In order to think things through it is not correct to look at this verse alone. It is a requisite to connect it with other verses of the Quran.
It is more enlightening as is always the case with the verses of the Quran if it is read as a finely arranged part of the entire Surah of al-Ma-idah.
Does the Quran explain the world today?
Let us now return to answer the question: What exactly is it regarding the modern world situation that Muslim scholars trapped in religious conservatism fail to explain using the Quran?
In attempting to understand the modern world using the Book of Allah, Most Wise, one must have a grasp over the trails of history that has built up to the present world situation. …
With that light, let us first remember that we are now looking at the Judeo-Christian world. There is a faction of this group of people who are waging war on Islam and there is another faction amongst them who have defied them and have refused to join them in their hegemonic rule, which latter faction have consequently been subjected to economic and political victimisation.
In the words of German legalist, Carl Schmitt, there is no justis hostis in the world today. In other words, for those who rule the world today there is no tolerable enemy; the enemy has no right to exist; he must be demonised and depoliticised; he must be eliminated. Amongst those who are subjected to such victimisation, are Christians and Jews too.
Not all Christians and all Jews are hell-bent on a hegemonic control over the world. Here is where we have to question:
If Allah, Most Wise, has prohibited believers from taking as their Awliyaa all Jews and all Christians, and even if this prohibition is conditional on the count that this refers only to those who are hostile to Islam and the Muslims, then how do we deal with those Jews and Christians who not only defy the perpetrators of this political and economic bullying, but who are similarly victimised together with the Muslims and who have willingly opened their doors to Islam and the Muslims?
The perfect example of this happened in the very blessed lifetime of Rasulullah (SAWS) in the case of the Christian King, Najashi, of Abyssinia. He was not part of the Qurayshi and Jewish hostility against Islam and the Muslims; he further offered his territory as a place of asylum that the Muslims could seek refuge in, and he finally defied the serpentine negotiations from the part of the Quraysh to hand over the Muslims to them.
He continued to protect them until he died, long after the 51st verse of Surah al-Ma-idah was revealed. The Messenger of Allah, (SAWS), went to the extent of accepting him as a believer and offered the Salat al-Janazah for him from Madinah when he passed away in Abyssinia.
The most important point to note here is that when this verse of the Quran was revealed, the Prophet (SAWS) did not demand the Muslims to give up the asylum they had sought in Abyssinia, which means to give up the Wilaayah with Christian Abyssinia they were under, and return to Madinah.
…
Who are these people who have imposed their hegemony over the rest of the world? They are surely Christians and Jews who were themselves never allies of each other. They are Christians and Jews whose alliance in the trails of history commenced with their joint political and martial objective to liberate the Holy Land from Muslim rule.
In fact the story could begin as early as the first Crusades in which an Euro-Christian world was funded by Jews to gather enough military strength to conquer the Holy Land – Jerusalem – and establish a Jewish national home there. They did not succeed but briefly until Sultan Salahuddin Ayyubi courageously and brilliantly wrested control of Jerusalem again.
It is significant to register into our study the fact that while Europe in her Judeo-Christian effort fought wars with the Muslim world to conquer Jerusalem, they similarly perpetrated such abominable crimes on Eastern Orthodox Christians, who were part of the kingdom of Constantinople, that it would be utterly unjust on our part to include the victims of that crime in the same Judeo-Christian alliance that commenced a hostile religious struggle against the Muslims and Muslim lands.
In fact the story could even begin with the Khazars – also known today as the thirteenth tribe of the Jews – who embraced Judaism overnight when they clinically surveyed the world for a religion to embrace.
Or, we could come down in history to a later time when colonialism and mercantilism ravaged Muslim lands by a forceful storm as it were and replaced their rule, when they left the lands in the hands of the people, with what we today call the secular nation-state. These colonial powers were made up of the same Judeo-Christian alliance that started the Crusades.
However, such a historical narration would require another separate book to be written. What would suffice here is to look merely at what happened to Jerusalem – the blessed land where the three Abrahamic faiths had existed under Muslim rule for thirteen centuries – within the last hundred years.
When Fir’aun’s body was discovered, the Zionist movement was established very soon thereafter. Within two decades came the Balfour declaration – 1917 – which promised the Jews a national home in Palestine. Those who did so were part of the same Christian world that had commenced the Crusades with the same objective.
It was Britain, Christian Britain. America and Europe hopped onto the wagon and constituted a joint alliance with their Jewish funders who were primarily European Jews. By this time, the hatred the Christians had for the Jews had already been done away with. The Ottoman Empire was dismantled; the backbone of Christian Russia – or the Third Rome – was similarly broken and replaced with Communism.
It was this very same alliance that mysteriously shook hands with Joseph Stalin, the Jew, just before the commencement of the Cold War (in fact, even Lenin and Trotsky, who were as Jew as Stalin, themselves originated from the same ranks).
At that moment, just when the Cold War commenced, the Jewish state of Israel was established and their independence declared as a follow up and success of the Balfour Declaration. That Cold War was a sham because those who were leading it were only two factions within the same ranks of Gog and Magog who liberated the Holy Land from Muslim rule, who shook hands when they wanted to and had no qualms about fighting each other like waves crashing onto each other when they deemed it fit.
During the Cold War, the secular nation-state of Israel rose to power in the region and being armed to the teeth, ready for a display of her military strength was further supported by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which was already established by that time as a response to the Cold War sham.
Then Pope Paulus VI declared a religio-political forgiveness for the Jews from the part of the Catholic world, as Prof. Hamka pointed out in his tafsir to the Quranic verse in discussion, thereby cementing the alliance further. The Protestants had no objection to it. They shook hands again. It was at this time that the Six-Day War commenced as a demonstration of the power that Israel – not baby Israel anymore – possessed.
The persecuted Orthodox Christians and the persecuted Orthodox Jews never joined this American-Euro-Israeli alliance. They were victimised as much as they were during the Crusades, and the victimisation of them continued until recently when they were challenged by the nuclear, economic, political and military power that energy-rich Russia and her allies possess.
Here it is necessary to point out that a spilt occurred in the Christian world that drew a line between Western Christianity and Eastern Christianity, and it requires experts in the history of Christian polity, beyond the scope of this essay, to explain why geography had a part to play in this, so much so that Catholicism and Protestantism belonged to the geographical West and Orthodox Christianity belonged to the geographical East.
African Christianity that always maintained friendly ties with the Muslim world was hijacked by this Western Christianity in the last hundred years, so much so that today we find brutal wars between Christians and Muslims in Africa utterly unbefitting African history. These wars are funded and presided over by NATO in maintaining their strategic hegemony over the natural resources and lands of Africa, and that is population control too by implication. These forces are the same that belong to the ranks of the American-Euro-Israeli alliance.
For a complete study of the split that occurred in the Christian world, please refer to Graham E. Fuller’s splendid book, A World Without Islam, which explains the subject in the most detailed manner. Russia and the world of Orthodox Christianity are not on the side of that Judeo-Christian alliance, which gave to Israel her secular nation-state. Greece too is not.
A new Cold War commenced with the Iraq War in the year 2003. Russia and her allies have ever since been treated like an untrustworthy and unwanted power in the United Nations who is the only other power capable of challenging the American-Euro-Israeli hegemony. The American-Euro-Israeli alliance has not been able to deal with Russia and her allies the way they would have wanted to. Furthermore, Russia and her allies today, after the commencement of the Iraq War in 2003, have proven to be an ally that Muslims can turn to in these times.
Today twelve years have passed after the Iraq War commenced. Twelve years is enough time to test the waters for an effective political ally in challenging the political crimes that have been visited on the Muslims for a hundred years now.
That means, we cannot anymore hold on to the view that the 51st verse of Surah al-Ma-idah is referring to all Jews and all Christians. Those who say such a thing will have to remain politically and historically uneducated for as long as they continue to say so. They cannot then say that Allah, Most High, said so and put the blame on the Quran for prohibiting them from doing so, let alone putting the blame on Allah, Subhaanahu Wa Ta’ala.
This ignorance of history, and particularly the political history of the world, even the political history of the first community of Madinah al-Munawwarah, must be attributed to their own incompetency, at least academic incompetency if not incompetency in the capacity to think. Muslim scholarship in our days has failed in this regard and has no solution to the political problems of the Muslim world today. However, this meaning that Maulana Hosein has given to the verse is not merely due to giving a solution to the political problems of the world today. It is in fact the only way to be coherent in our approach to the Quran as a whole, to history and to the modern world situation.
As for now, what we see in the world today is that America and her pool of allies dominate political and economic control over the world. America remains the ruling state in the world, and that means she has the capacity to defy any other political challenger. Israel on the other hand, has risen to a nuclear power capable of waging war against any other state; she defies her very protectors – the United Nations Security Council, Britain and America and many other states in Europe. She is poised to become the ruling state in the world.
It is this verse in Surah al-Ma-idah that explains the powers that dominate the world today. It is precisely this political alliance that comprises of a mysterious Western Judeo-Christian pool of hell-bent perpetrators of fasad in the lands and in particular the Holy Land, including the Muslim world, that Allah, Most Wise, has referred to here.
These are those who have allied amongst themselves, while having been enemies in all of history before, to facilitate for something more ominous to yet unfold in the Holy Land not long from now.
If we understand this verse to mean all Jews and all Christians, then we will never be able to explain the contradictions it will create with the rest of the Quran; the political turmoil that the unsuspecting populations of the world is being churned in today; we will never understand the new Cold War that is unfolding before our very eyes; we will never understand and be able to explain history; we will never understand what is happening in the Holy Land after two thousand years.
Most importantly we will never be able to understand this mysterious Judeo-Christian alliance that controls the world today. This alliance will then remain forever a mystery to us. This verse in Surah al-Ma-idah is the most important verse that explains all of this.
This verse in Surah al-Maidah is the most important verse that explains what Allah, Most High, has mentioned in the opening verses of Surah al-Rum (31).
He said that Rome will be victorious and “on that day, the believers will rejoice.” Why would a Roman victory against her enemies be a reason for Muslims to rejoice? Why would Muslims rejoice over a Christian victory if Allah has forbidden Muslims to enter into any kind of alliance with all Jews and all Christians?
It is this verse in Surah al-Ma-idah that explains which part of the Judeo-Christian world we are allowed to enter into an alliance with and which part of that same Judeo-Christian world we are prohibited from allying with. This verse does describe to us in parallel which part of the Christian world will be closest in faith to the Muslims mentioned in verse 82 of the same Surah al-Ma-idah.
Dajjal and the destiny of Jerusalem
Let us now return to Israel and the Balfour Declaration before we conclude. It would not be justified to conclude this essay without including Dajjal and his role towards the end of history. This verse of Surah al-Ma-idah is certainly linked strongly to Dajjal’s role in impersonating the Messiah when he comes into our dimension of existence, primary because of what we have witnessed of events unfolding in the last hundred years.
In order for Dajjal to successfully deceive the world into believing in him as the Messiah who would, according to scriptural basis, rule the world from the throne of Nabi Dawud alayhissalam in Jerusalem, he would have to do a number of things:
— Liberate the Holy Land from Muslim rule.
— Establish the state and consequently the kingdom of Israel.
— Raise that power to the ruling state in the world.
— Then appear and sit on the throne and declare that he is the prophesied Messiah and that the throne of David has returned.
Now, it is impossible for anyone to deny that it was precisely this Judeo-Christian alliance that we have discussed so far, which has successfully fulfilled numbers one and two above. If Dajjal is to come and declare himself the Messiah, that cannot happen unless number three too comes to pass.
It therefore only remains for us to witness Israel taking over from the United States of America as the ruling state in the world. Whether India and China becomes the ruling state in the world as it has been of much debate, cannot be the concern of those who study the modern world using the Quran. It is Israel that we would have to pay particular attention to.
More than two thousand years after Allah, Most Majestic is He, expelled the Jews from the Holy Land for the crime they committed against His Messenger, Nabi Isa, alayhissalam, they returned to the Holy Land gradually over a matter of about three decades to reclaim it as their own.
This occurred between the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The reference to this has been mentioned in the Quran in the 91st and 92nd verses of Surah al-Anbiya, where Allah laid down clearly that it would be the function of Gog and Magog to cause the Jews to return to the Holy Land.
From the testimony of history, what we witnessed in the world from 1917-48, it is clear that those who facilitated the return of the Jews to the Holy Land were precisely those very same Jews and Christians who allied amongst themselves in the very beginning effort of the First Crusades. Though they were not successful then, they eventually became successful in 1948.
It should therefore be established from the clear and distinct link between the two verses (91 and 92) of Surah al-Anbiya and the 51st verse of Surah al-Ma-idah that Gog Magog is located in the very Judeo-Christian alliance that would cause the return of the Jews to the Holy Land and who would, as we witness clearly unfolding now before our very eyes – for those who have eyes to read the modern world using the Quran – raise that state of Israel to become the ruling state in the world for Dajjal to finally appear in our dimension of existence and declare himself the King of the Jews, the Promised Messiah.
If we fail to grasp the meaning behind the 51st verse of Surah al-Ma-idah to be the very description of Gog and Magog, then we will remain blind to Allah’s warning in the Quran not to take them, this particular Judeo-Christian alliance, or in other words Gog and Magog as our Awliyaa.
We will never understand who Gog and Magog are and we will never understand that after all that have already unfolded in the political world today, what remains is only Israel’s rise to become the ruling state in the world. We will never understand that it is this Judeo-Christian alliance, in which ranks will be Dajjal’s foot soldiers.
For full commentary: http://www.imranhosein.org/articles/understanding-islam/550-a-commentary-to-maulana-imran-hoseins-interpretation-of-the-verse-.html
part II
Conclusion
The problem with modern [Islamic] scholarship is that anything new that comes out from a credible scholar is rejected on the grounds that the scholars of the past did not hold such opinions. This is what may be called religious conservatism.
Secondly, anything new that comes out from a credible scholar is rejected on the grounds that it contradicts the scholars of the past, while it actually may not. Why should it not be taken as something that adds on new knowledge to the scholarship of the past?
The essential question now is: Are we going to understand and attempt to explain the modern world using the Quran or remain in the dark about what has happened in history and what is to unfold tomorrow because of our holding on obdurately to what the noble scholars of Islam had written down in the past, without allowing ourselves any room to think things through? Consequently, we should also ask: Does the Quran prohibit us from doing that?
We cannot afford to reserve knowledge of Allah’s Book, Most Wise is He, to the noble scholars of the past.
They could not have seen what would unfold in the years between 1917-48, for example, simply because it did not happen in their time. Prof. Hamka saw what happened in his time and gave new meaning to the verse of Surah al-Ma-idah according to what he saw. He did not put a full stop to the meanings of the verse there.
Similarly Maulana Hosein has explained the same verse in a better light now about four decades after Prof. Hamka, quite simply because he was able to read all the world events that occurred thereafter using the Quran.
Let us now read Maulana Hosein’s translation of the verse again after having gone through all of the analysis above that has led us to where we are now:
Oh you who have faith, do not take (such) Jews and (such) Christians as your Awliah (friends and allies) who (themselves) are Awliyah (friends and allies) of each other. And whoever amongst you turn to them for friendship and alliance, would belong to them (and therefore not to us). Surely Allah does not provide guidance to a people who commit Dhulm.
This therefore is a modern attempt to translate the verse in as coherent as possible a manner to all the other verses mentioned above in our analysis that it would otherwise clearly contradict.
This translation explains our times; it explains Akhiruzzaman [End Times]. It is further an attempt to be as coherent as possible to the trails of history.
It is also a credible attempt of a scholar of integrity who found it necessary to add on to the meanings of the verse that the noble scholars of the past had explained and interpreted. Lastly it must be noted that the Maulana’s intention, as some would wrongly have it so, is not to contradict the scholarship of the past.
This does not contradict previous explanations provided by the noble scholars of the past; it does not nullify all other explanations of the verse that have been given before. It has rather added on to them.
For example, when Dr. Asad succinctly summarised the classical explanations of credible scholars in the past, he stopped quite shortly at a prohibition of what he called “a moral alliance,” meaning an alliance with the Jews and the Christians in their Deen.
This then would not only refer to all Jews and all Christians, but also happens to summarise only the commentaries provided by the classical commentators on that part of the verse where Allah, Most High, mentioned, “…And whoever amongst you turn to them for friendship and alliance, would belong to them (and therefore not to us)…” This does not explain the earlier part of the verse where the divine prohibition was laid down.
Now then, when we actually look at the classical commentaries to the verse as a divine prohibition on taking all Jews and Christians as our Awliyaa in treating them as our confidants by morally inclining towards their Deen, then Maulana Hosein’s commentary to the verse does not contradict any of the previous classical commentaries.
That is clearly prohibited in other parts of the Quran as well. In that case, even if this verse were not revealed that would have been clearly understood.
However, when we bring to mind the meaning of Barakah in the Quran, that the Quran explains all times and that the Quran offers new and fresh knowledge in every age, we would not look at Maulana Hosein’s explanation of the verse as something which contradicts the previous classical commentaries to the Quran. We would only look at it with gratitude that a Muslim scholar, ripe of age, knowledge and experience, has added on fresh knowledge to the meanings of Allah’s kalam.
Lastly, it would suffice to conclude that modern global events that occurred in the last hundred years have demanded this interpretation to come out from the Quran and it had to be Maulana Hosein whom Allah, Most High, had chosen to bring this forward to those who would now turn to the Quran to understand the ominous events unfolding in our world before our eyes, especially in the Holy Land.
This has only given a new direction and meaning in the application of this verse in these times, especially in Akhiruzzaman.
For fullest commentary: http://www.imranhosein.org/articles/understanding-islam/550-a-commentary-to-maulana-imran-hoseins-interpretation-of-the-verse-.html
Russian Faith.com:
Church Leader’s Brilliant 1918 Letter to Lenin Speaks the Truth About the Revolution
” … rivers of the blood of our brothers, pitilessly murdered at your rallying, cry out to heaven and force us to tell you the bitter truth.”
” … you have given them a stone instead of bread, and a serpent instead of a fish.”
Patriarch Tikhon was head of the Russian church during the revolution, and courageously condemned what he saw as a demonic attack on a Christian civilization.
Previously he was a bishop in the US, from 1898 – 1907, where he was a very successful missionary.
The first Bolshevik government, which consisted mostly of atheist Jews, tolerated the popular Patriarch for a while, realizing that if they martyred him, it would only increase the Church’s influence, but eventually they pushed him out, put him under house arrest, and demonized and harassed him until his death in 1925. The Russian Church made him into a saint in 1989.
This remarkable letter survives as a testimony of what was really happening in Russia at the time, and to the extraordinary courage of this man to speak the truth, knowing it would cost him his life.
It is all the more important because the accounts to the West that came out of Russia at the time, and subsequent histories, were mostly written by left-leaning sympathizers who cheered the revolution on, having little idea what it really was.
This obfuscation continues to this day.
Take a few minutes to read this passionate and poetic condemnation of evil. Its startling clarity comes down to us through the years with great force. We highlighted a few of the more moving lines, but honestly, almost every sentence is gripping.
This view of what actually happened during the revolution is as important today as it was 100 years ago.
The 100 year commemoration of the Russian revolution shows starkly divergent views of what it was continue to our own day.
This excellent translation is by Nun Cornelia Rees.
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We address this prophecy of the Savior to you, the current makers of our Fatherland’s fate, who call yourself “the people’s” commissars.
For an entire year, you have been gripping the power of the government in your hands, and you are already preparing to celebrate the anniversary of the October revolution; but the rivers of the blood of our brothers, pitilessly murdered at your rallying, cry out to heaven and force us to tell you the bitter truth.
You have traded the Fatherland for soulless internationalism, although you yourselves know perfectly well that when it comes to defending the Fatherland, the proletarians of all countries are those countries’ faithful sons, and not their betrayers.
Having seized power and called the people to entrust themselves to you, what promises have you given them, and how have you kept these promises?
Truly you have given them a stone instead of bread, and a serpent instead of a fish (cf. Matt. 7:9-10). To a people worn out by a bloody war you promised to give peace “without annexation or contribution”.
What victory could you have turned down, you who have led Russia to a shameful truce, with humiliating conditions that even you did not resolve to make fully public?
Instead of “annexations and contributions” the great Motherland is conquered, diminished, dismembered; and as pay for the tribute placed on it you secretly transport to Germany gold that you yourself did not amass.
You have taken away from the soldiers everything for which they had valorously fought. You have taught them, only recently brave and invincible, to leave off protecting the Motherland and to run from the field of battle.
You have extinguished in their hearts the inspiring consciousness that there is no greater love than should one lay down his life for his friends (Jn. 15:13).
You have traded the Fatherland for soulless internationalism, although you yourselves know perfectly well that when it comes to defending the Fatherland, the proletarians of all countries are those countries’ faithful sons, and not their betrayers.
And although you have refused to protect the Motherland from external enemies, you are ceaselessly gathering armies.
Against whom will you lead them?
You have divided the entire nation into warring camps and cast it into a fratricide unprecedented for its cruelty.
You have openly exchanged love of Christ for hatred, and instead of peace you have artificially fomented enmity between the classes.
And there is no end in sight to the war you’ve generated, since you aim to deliver triumph to the phantom of world revolution with the hands of Russian worker and peasants.
I will not speak of the collapse of a once great and mighty Russia, of the total fracturing of our railroad, of unprecedented agricultural devastation, of hunger and cold that threatens death in the cities …
It was not Russia who needed the disgraceful peace with its external enemy but you yourselves, who have plotted to irreparably destroy Russia’s internal peace.
No one feels safe; everyone lives in constant fear of searches, robbery, eviction, arrest, and execution.
Hundreds of defenseless people are seized, then languish for whole months in prisons, are often executed without investigation or trial, even without going to the court you have simplified.
Not only those who are somehow guilty before you, but even those who are in no way guilty, but were taken only as “captives”—these unfortunate people are killed to answer for crimes committed by persons who not only are not of one mind with them, but very often your own followers or those with convictions similar to yours.
Bishops, priests, monks and nuns who are guilty of nothing are executed simply because of some wild accusations of vague and indeterminate “counterrevolution”.
This inhuman execution is made even more onerous for the Orthodox because they are deprived of the final consolation before their deaths—the Sacraments—and the bodies of the slain are not given to their families for a Christian burial.
Isn’t this the height of aimless cruelty on the part of those who pretend to be the benefactors of mankind and who themselves supposedly suffered from cruel rulers?
But it’s not enough for you that you have reddened the hands of the Russian people with their brother’s blood; hiding behind various names—contributions, requisitions, and nationalization—you have pushed them into the most barefaced and wanton thievery.
At your hinting were plundered or seized lands, mansions, factories, houses, farm animals, money, personal things, furniture, clothing.
First the wealthy, whom you’ve called “bourgeois”, were robbed; then under the epithet of “kulaks” were the more well-off and industrious peasants also plundered, thus increasing the number of paupers—although you cannot but recognize that with the impoverishment of a great multitude of individual citizens the wealth of the nation as a whole is lost, and the country is impoverished.
Tempting uneducated and ignorant people with the opportunity for easy and unpunished gain, you have fogged their consciences and muffled in them the awareness of sin; but no matter what names you hide this evil-doing behind, murder, violence, and robbery will ever remain serious sins and crimes that cry out to heaven.
You promised freedom.
Freedom is a great good, if it is properly understood—like freedom from evil, not oppressing others, not turning into lawlessness and willfulness.
But you have not given that freedom; the freedom you have given consists in all manner of indulgence to the lowest crowd instincts, in murder and theft with impunity.
All manifestations of both truly the civilian and higher spiritual freedom of mankind have you mercilessly crushed.
Is it freedom when no one can bring home food or rent an apartment without special permission, when families, and sometimes all the inhabitants of whole buildings are evicted and their possessions are thrown into the street, and when citizens are artificially divided into ranks, certain of which are consigned to hunger and being plundered?
Is it freedom when no one can speak his opinion openly without fear of being accused of counterrevolution?
Where is freedom of speech and press, where is freedom for preaching in church?
Many bold preachers have already paid with their martyrs’ blood; the voice of social and governmental discussion and criticism is being stifled; all press, other than the narrow Bolshevik press, has been completely strangled.
Especially painful and cruel is the violation of freedom in matters of faith.
Not a day goes by when the most monstrous slanders against Christ’s Church and her servants are not published in the agencies of your press, along with malicious blasphemy and mockery.
You deride the servants of the altar, force bishops to dig trenches, and send priests to do dirty work.
You have raised your hand against the Church’s inheritance gathered through many generations of the faithful, and have given no thought to violating their posthumous will.
You have closed a large number of monasteries and churches without any excuse or reason. You have blocked access to the Moscow Kremlin—that sacred inheritance of the faithful people.
You are destroying the ancient form of church community—the parish; you destroy brotherhoods and other charitable and educational Church institutions, close and rout diocesan meetings, and interfere with the Orthodox Church’s internal government.
By banishing sacred images from schools and forbidding the teaching of faith to children there, you deprive them of the spiritual food necessary for an Orthodox upbringing.
What else can I say? The time fails me (Heb. 11:32) to describe all the catastrophes that have stricken our Motherland.
I will not speak of the collapse of a once great and mighty Russia, of the total fracturing of our railroad, of unprecedented agricultural devastation, of hunger and cold that threatens death in the cities, and of the lack of everything needed for maintaining a household in the villages.
This everyone can see.
Yes, we are experiencing terrible times in our reign, and it will not be erased from the peoples’ soul for a long time, having darkened the image of God in it and stamping in it the image of the beast. The words of the prophet have been fulfilled:
Their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed innocent blood: their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity; wasting and destruction are in their paths.(Is. 59:7).
We know that our rebukes will evoke only anger and indignation in you and that you will look for an excuse in them for accusing us of opposition to the authorities, but the higher your “column of wrath” rises, the more proven will be the testimony to the truth of our rebukes.
It is not our business to judge earthly authorities; all authority, allowed by God, would attract our blessing if it were truly “God’s servant” for the good of its subjects, and not a terror to good works, but to the evil (Rom. 13:3).
Now to you, who are using your authority to persecute your neighbors and decimate the innocent, we extend our word of instruction: celebrate the anniversary of your coming to power by freeing the prisoners, putting a stop to the bloodshed, violence, devastation, and persecution of faith; turn not to destruction but to the establishment of law and order, give the people their desired and deserved rest from civil war.
Otherwise all the righteous blood you have spilled will be required of you (cf. Lk. 11:50), and you who took sword in hand will yourselves die of the sword (cf. Matt. 26:52).
Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia
October 25 / November 7, 1918
http://russian-faith.com/persecution/church-leaders-brilliant-1918-letter-lenin-speaks-truth-about-revolution-n1265
@Albert
Exactly! Sure am glad people are wide awake to the BS propaganda.
-flek
Christendom in general and Russia in particular has nothing to gain by venerating the Judaeo masonic systems of democracy, communism and what most people call capitalism which is really just the rule of money and globalist oligarchs.
The focus for European humanity must be on Faith, Family, Folk and the Nation.
The one thing that must be said is that democracy is the only way to go
The problem is that like Christianity it has never really been tried
@KJ
How brave of the bishop to tell the Communists what naughty boys they were as if expecting them, naively to change and be good boys from now on.
Just like the Czar Nicholas II, thinking blindly these demons would be reasonable despite the example before him of the French Masons overthrowing his cousins 120 years earlier.
And Gorbachev in reverse so to speak again allowing the rape of Russia by these same demonic forces.
Again we have in our day in a clerical call at a high level for the restoration of the same failed monarchy.
May history not repeat.
Dear Desert,
You wrote: “How brave of the bishop to tell the Communists what naughty boys they were as if expecting them, naively to change and be good boys from now on.”
How naive of you! Do you know whereof thou speakest from history?
Patriarch Tikhon struggled mightily and suffered terribly along with the Russian people in defense of Church and Faith under the Bolshevik revolution as the only Christian leader left for the Russian people. Millions of people looked up to him and were inspired by him, drawing courage and consolation from him as the Christian Patriarch of his people and champion Defender of the Church.
Not only that, the Martyr Patriarch has a very strong historical and spiritual connection to Christian America. He, from Moscow, inspired many Americans to do what they could economically, politically, diplomatically, and charitably to help Russia and stand up to the Communist regime after the Bolsheviks took power alongside the Russian emigres and exiles here in the US.
He was personally persecuted, mentally tortured, imprisoned, by the Bolsheviks after already living through the apocalyptic ravages of the revolution, political instability and civil wars, disease, famine, starvation, mob rule, and the massive persecution of the Church hierarchy and laity.
Not only did Russians witness and know of Patriarch Tikhon’s heroic and martyric efforts to preserve the Church, so did Americans in Russia who lived and worked there as a part of overall diplomatic and Christian relief and charitable missions to Europe during WWI, and were caught up by the events of the day.
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From OrthodoxChristianity.com:
“PATRIARCH TIKHON IS ONE OF THE GREATEST UNIVERSAL SAINTS.”
A talk with Archpriest Vladimir Vorobiev
—Fr. Vladimir, what role did Holy Patriarch Tikhon play in the history of the Russian Church and the history of Russia?
—This year marks the ninetieth anniversary of Patriarch Tikhon’s repose, which occurred on the feast of the Annunciation of the Mother of God—April 7, 1925.
He died in the Bakuniny hospital, not far from the Monastery of the Conception on Ostozhenka Street. When he died, everyone suspected that he was poisoned.
Although it was written many times that he “had not been poisoned,” he died “simply from a heart attack,” nevertheless, the version that he had been poisoned has not been dismissed because it is highly probable. This version has never been proved. I do not know whether it can be proved, but there has never been any attempt to investigate it.
If it is poisoning, then Patriarch should be called a hieromartyr. If his death was from a heart attack, then it is anyway the death of a confessor. St. Tikhon lived under conditions of serious persecutions against the Church and went through seven years of Patriarchal service as truly a way of the cross, the path to Golgotha.
These very years led to his untimely end. He died at sixty years of age; that is, he did not live a very long life.
Today, looking back at the history of the twentieth century, we can say that Patriarch Tikhon is one of the greatest Russian saints, and he undoubtedly stands among the greatest universal saints. He was chosen by the most remarkable Council in the history of the Russian Church.
…
Everyone knows the testimonial Patriarch Tikhon wrote to the Bolsheviks, they know about his epistle with the anathema against iniquitous Bolsheviks. He tried through his epistles to protect the Church from the persecutors and bandits.
In 1922 he was arrested. He was interrogated in court. A brochure of this interrogation with his comments survives.
Then there was a year of strict imprisonment in Donskoy Monastery. From there he was taken for interrogations to the Lubyanka. He spent some time in the Lubanka prison. There is very little known about this.
The politburo pronounced the death sentence on him. Not the judge, but the Politburo itself made this secret decision. The sentence was not carried out, because the people’s commissar for foreign affairs G. Chicherin convinced the Politburo that the murder of Patriarch Tikhon will not be useful to the soviet government.
The entire Christian world—in Europe and America—rose to protect the Russian Patriarch. The world “abroad” threatened the Soviet Union with what would now be called economic sanctions.
It was decided not to shoot the Patriarch, but to demand a letter of repentance from him instead. Having received what they wanted, they released him.
—Couldn’t this be viewed as a sign of weakness?
—Patriarch Tikhon, of course, could not in any way have known what was going on in the upper echelons of the Bolshevik government—after all, he was a prisoner. How do Christians act in such cases? They ask God’s will. The guards who were watching him wrote in their diaries, “The old man is good to everyone, only he prays all night.”
He prayed, and the Lord instructed him on what to do. Patriarch Tikhon agreed to sign the “repentance letter” that compromised him.When he was released, the provocation activities of the “Living Church” [a Bolshevik anti-Patriarchate counter-altar comprised of “liberal” priests] immediately collapsed.
A huge number of people understood what was going on, stopped going to the Living Church churches, and returned to Patriarch Tikhon. The clergy that had joined the Living Church came to the Patriarch with repentance.
The Patriarch’s “repentance letter” did not damage his authority in the people’s estimation. The people knew that Patriarch Tikhon was a holy man.
The Bolsheviks arrested the holy Patriarch’s closest zealots, put them in prisons, sent them into exile, and executed some of them. Before his eyes they closed churches, monasteries, and theological schools; they confiscated holy shrines and opened reliquaries.
Many archpastors could not summon any courage and tried to “agree” with the Soviet authorities, going in this way against the head of their Church. Patriarch Tikhon had at times to stand all alone against the soviet persecutions and seek the right path for the Church.
Even while he was alive, the soviet newspapers slandered Patriarch Tikhon unremittingly, humiliated him and mocked him. When he died, a falsified “will” was published in him name. But no one believed this falsification.
Those who knew Patriarch Tikhon believed that he was a holy man. The people trusted him limitlessly, as a saint. Patriarch Tikhon possessed moral authority, which turned out to be an extraordinarily powerful force that united the Church, the clergy, and the entire Russian people.
When Patriarch Tikhon reposed, even worse times began for the Church. The lack of a spiritual leader produced adverse consequences. After his death the soviet authorities began picking people who suited their purposes to fill the position of patriarch.
As long as the Patriarch was alive he could be arrested, but it was impossible to compromise him. The people trusted him.
More: http://orthochristian.com/88587.html
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Saint Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia
“Like the ancient leader of the Hebrew people, I shall also be calling to God, exclaiming, “Wherefore hast Thou afflicted Thy Servant? And wherefore have I not found favor in Thy sight that Thou layest the burden of all these people upon me?’.. From now on my d u t y shall be to take care of all the churches of Russia, and to die for their sake every day.”
With these words the future Patriarch of all Russia greeted the news that he had been elected to ascend the patriarchal throne. He knew full well that he was being handed a bitter cup: the throne was his Cross and the white patriarch’s hood-his crown of thorns.
For nearly eight years he was to endure great sufferings which fell to him as to the head of the Russian Church during one of the most difficult periods in her history.
Patriarch Tikhon was born Vassily Ivanovich Bellavin on Jan. 19, l865, — the son of a priest.
As an outstanding student in the Ecclesiastical Seminary of Pskov, he was both loved and respected by his classmates. Tall and fair, he was already characterized by firm yet unaffected piety which he pre served to the end of his life.
Later, in the St. Petersburg Academy, his fellow students affectionately nicknamed him “the patriarch.” How prophetic this proved to be Who could have foreseen that this quiet and modest young man was to be elected the first patriarch after 217 years of church administration by the Holy Synod.
In 1891 he received the monastic tonsure with the name of Tikhon. In 1898, at the age of 33, he was ordained bishop and appointed to the Aleutian-Alaskan diocese of North America. For seven years he tirelessly labored there in the Lord’s harvest fields, winning the love and respect of his flock.
Soon, however, the spiritual and administrative talents of the young hierarch were recognized and in 1907 he was appointed as Arch bishop to Yaroslavl-one of the most important dioceses of Russia. His simplicity, accessibility and modest demeanor won the hearts of people every where, and only he was surprised to hear that the people of Moscow had elected him as their archpastor.
Three years later, on August 15, 1917, [after Tsar Nicholas II’s personal abdication from the throne on March 2] he was raised to the rank of Metropolitan and elected Chairman of the Council. This Council was comprised not only of learned theologians, but also of simple peasants one of whom said, “We no longer have a Tsar, no father whom we can love; it is impossible to love the Synod; therefore we, the peasants, want a Patriarch.”
[Since 1905 or so, Tsar Nicholas II, nominal head of the Church, intimately worked with the Church Council to help organize and re-establish the Patriarchate with the goal of restoration of the classic political theology of the Symphonia between Church and State.
Ecclesiastical preparations were already nearly in place for the anticipated elections to Patriarchal throne which then moved forward after his abdication. Tsar Nicholas II’s abdication was two-fold: as secular head of the Orthodox Church well as political head of Imperial Russia-Kj].
Prompted by the intense difficulties facing the Church at that time and the fear that the communists may soon dissolve the Council, it was decided to proceed quickly with the election of a patriarch who could provide the sorely needed spiritual leadership. They chose three candidates by general vote and then cast lots, leaving the final decision to God’s will.
Thus did Patriarch Tikhon enter the arena as a spiritual warrior, to combat an enemy whose malice was to surpass that which anyone had anticipated or even imagined.
The consecration took place in the Cathedral of the Dormition on Nov.21, 1917. The communists had not yet taken a definite stand against the Church and the ceremony was performed amid great triumph and rejoicing. Crowds of people filled the Kremlin and religious processions from all the churches of Moscow gathered on Red Square. Never again was there to be such a display of the Church’s might and popularity.
The hostile attitude of the godless authorities towards the Church and her faithful servants was soon fanned into a raging blaze of anger and hatred, and hundreds, thousands of the faithful were led like innocent lambs to the slaughter. The Patriarch tried to bring the evil tyrants to their senses, and called upon the faithful to resist the communists-whom he anathematized as servants of Satan -and, if necessary, to suffer martyrdom.
( holynewmartyrs.org/tikhon.html )
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As the bishop, and later archbishop of the Diocese of Alaska and North America in New York, Tikhon became known, loved and respected by very many Americans at the time, including many of the political elite at the highest levels of US government. Not only the Orthodox people came under his archpastoral care, he offered counsel, guidance and spiritual wisdom to heterodox Christians as well.
Antiochean Orthodox Church: “The American Mission was rapidly expanding, while Russian Government funds supporting it were remaining static. [Tikhon] would need to grow into a very delicate role as the de facto representative of all of Eastern Orthodoxy in the New World, at a time when that Church was attracting the attention of many denominations seeking rapprochement and friendship.
“Simultaneously, he would be viewed as the representative of Holy Russia (despite the presence of a formal diplomatic corps), the “icon,” as it were, of the friendly relations which had traditionally existed between the two peoples from the time of the Civil War and the amicable sale of Alaska in 1867.
“He would have to weigh his every word and action for their potential effect. Indeed, filling the shoes of Bp. Nicholas’ shoes would be a formidable task for the young hierarch.”
…
“The year 1899 was very full for the new bishop. From late April through early June, he crisscrossed the continent, becoming acquainted with eighteen communities. In Minneapolis he spent time with his seminarians. He held conferences with the clergy. He presided at a convention of the Russian Brotherhoods Organization, and enjoined them to practice true brotherhood.
“Returning to New York May 20-22, he celebrated with the Syro-Arabs even before his own Russians. En route to Galveston, TX, on the return leg west, Tikhon made the best of a layover in Houston, to invite representative of the small colony of Christian Arabs to discuss their spiritual needs with him.
“Before leaving the bishop’s quarters late at night, a poet delivered a florid, impromptu poem expressing his people’s “profound love for the Archpastor of all Orthodox” in America. Late June through early September, he dedicated to a 9,637-mile visitation of the largest and most accessible settlements in seaboard Alaska.
“In Sitka’s St. Michael Cathedral, he communed with the spirit of his great predecessor, Abp. Innocent Veniaminov, venerating the altar cross with which he had blessed the faithful, celebrating on the antimension which he had signed, standing on the eagle run which his daughter Polyxenia had woven with her own hands.
“Making a point of visiting the Serbian community in Jackson, CA, he was welcomed by Fr. Sebastian Dabovich, the first American-born Orthodox priest, with the following words:
“‘May you and this little-cultivated field enjoy forever that blessing of the Apostles, the success of the great Hellenic hierarchs, the power of the Syrian martyrs, the prayers of the Russian monks, and with them, the Serbian miracle-worker, Bishop Savva. Amen.’
“In December he again headed east to celebrate the holidays in New York and to inspect final plans for the building churches there and in Chicago. On the day after Christmas he honored Archimandrite Raphael’s request and ordained Michael Husan to the diaconate and assigned him to the Lowell, MA, church; on the eve of his departure west, he stood as godfather for a Syrian baby.”
( antiochian.org/Bishops/tikhon.htm )
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Tikhon loved America and Americans of all sorts with a generous, gracious Christ-like love. In fact, he loved all people with a Christ-like love offering guidance and counsel to all who asked, which on the same hand did not prevent him from also speaking out, firmly but gently when he felt the need to do so.
Strictly adherent to Holy Orthodox Tradition and highly disciplined over himself, Tikhon could say firmly “No” to something without hesitation if circumstances warranted and draw clear boundaries, and yet, he did so in a way which left very few people offended or feeling slighted.
Tikon lived in the very spirit of humility and meekness of Christ in all that he did in love of God and of neighbor. Tikon’s “neighbor” was any person was nearest to him at any given time, and Tikon devoted his fullest attention to that person.
But he was no “pacifist” if we remember that Christ was “meek” in the way of a Man having superb control over his own power and strength. He sought God’s will in everything while striving to be a reconciler and peacemaker at the same time.
_____
“[Tikon’s] reputation grew steadily in the diocese, to the point that late in 1896, Abp. Flavian nominated him for the newly-vacant Vicarate of Lublin. Since Tikhon had not yet quite attained the canonical age of 33, the Holy Synod refused, and the archbishop went without help until the archimandrite’s birthday, when he again petitioned the Synod.
“On Oct. 19, 1897 (O.S.) he was consecrated to the holy episcopacy. Lifting the banner of Orthodoxy and Russian ethnicity, he steadily gained a reputation as a respected peacemaker and unifier, not prone to using force but issuing ‘a gracious call from his kind heart, and helping hand, and happiness.’
“He celebrated solemnly on Sundays and feastdays, and Saturday services before the beloved wonderworking Our Lady of Chelm icon. In eleven months as bishop, he made over 120 pastoral visits, preaching every time, always before a large congregation.
“When word came of his appointment on Sept. 14, 1898 (O.S.), to the Diocese of the Aleutian Islands and Alaska — in actuality, all of North America — tears flowed in Chelm in abundance.
“Even Abp. Flavian’s successor, Ieronim, is said to have wept publicly when informed that he was losing such an effective assistant. Crowds even larger than normal flocked to his final services, and many delegations appeared to pay their respects.
“Even the Jews,” records his archdeacon, “were amazed at why they would take from Chelm ‘such a good Bishop.'”
http://www.antiochian.org/Bishops/tikhon.htm
_____
Tikon enjoyed the free political and cultural relations and exchanges ongoing between the two very friendly countries first established by the Russia-US Entente formed by treaty dating to the 1820s.
He loved America and Americans.
There is probably no picture of the special place in Tikhon’s heart for America that expresses this any better than this portrait of him before leaving for Russia and saying goodbye to his Alaskan flock:
( theinnerkingdom.wordpress.com/2008/10/08/how-should-we-conduct-ourselves-in-relation-to-other-people/
Tikhon thought so much of America’s Christian roots and spirit of his day, and was so struck by the fact that George Washington had declared a national Day of Thanksgiving devoted to worship, fasting and prayer in thanksgiving for all of America’s blessings acquired after the new Republic’s independence from England, that Tikhon composed a portion of special Orthodox liturgy to be prayed on the national holiday.
He thought it not inappropriate at all that immigrant Eastern Orthodox Christians should join their voices in prayer, fasting, and thanksgiving along with the rest of their Protestant Christian compatriots in gratitude to God for His providential care over America — like Abraham of old, America was the hospitable host to the diasporas of the Orthodox Church and others.
Tikon enjoyed a close friendship with the leadership of the YMCA, which was doing important co-missionary, relief and charitable work at the time inside Russia along with other American ministries under supervision of Tsar Nicholas II’s government before and during WWI.
There was certainly doctrinal differences between the Orthodox Church and American Protestant denominations, yet on the same hand, there was great cooperation between the two on a variety of social issues and programs they collaborated on.
Tsar Nicholas II saw great value in the organized operations of the Geneva-based Young Men’s Christian Association as a potential for Russians through an outreach for “muscular Christianity” and as a potential way to help pull up the recently urbanized, poor, impoverished elements of Russian urban society, further ravaged by alcoholism and criminality, that had become victims of Russia’s own industrialization and modernization and uplift their lives.
The YMCA was founded by George Williams, a London draper, who was typical of the young men drawn to the cities by the Industrial Revolution. He and his colleagues were concerned about the lack of healthy activities for young men in major cities; the options available were usually taverns and brothels. It was founded on 6 June 1844 with the aim to put Christian principles into practice by developing a healthy “body, mind, and spirit”.
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The YMCA would have been nothing peculiar to St. John of Kronstadt, a very gifted preacher, who worked tirelessly in Christ to bring health and dignity to the poorest of the poor and even the criminal class, including setting up workshops and artisan industries to help them help themselves to improve their own condition:
“Saint John of Kronstadt was born in the village of Sura in Archangel province on October 19, 1829, and was called John in honor of Saint John of Rila (August 18).
“His parents were very poor but were very devoted to the Church. Even though he was poor, as a young boy John learned to feel compassion for others in their misfortune. His neighbors frequently asked him to pray for them, as they noticed this special grace-endowed gift in him.
“He was ordained a deacon on December 10, 1885, and then priest on December 12. He was assigned to Saint Andrew’s Cathedral in the city of Kronstadt. He said, “I made myself a rule to be as sincere as possible in my work, and of strictly watching myself and my inner life.”…
“Father John wanted most of all to earn the love of the people in his care, because only a loving attitude could provide the firm support and help he needed as he faced the difficult work of the priesthood. His constant thought was how he would come before the Last Judgment and have to give an account, not only for his own deeds, but also the deeds of his flock, for whose education and salvation he was responsible.
“To him no one was a stranger; everyone who came to him for help became a friend and relative. He would tell people “The Church is the best heavenly friend of every sincere Christian. He conducted divine services daily and offered the prayers of the faithful.
“He called all who rarely receive Holy Communion to prepare themselves and live their lives in a Christian way so that they could receive more often. Listening to Father John, many people changed their lifestyle, repented sincerely, and joyfully received Holy Communion on a regular basis.
“At that time the government exiled murderers, thieves and other criminals to Kronstadt. Life was horrible for the exiles. Even children of exiles would become thieves and criminals. He would go to their dugouts, hovels and shacks to visit with them.
“Not satisfied with staying for five or ten minutes to administer some rite and then leave, Father John believed he was coming to visit a priceless soul, his brothers and sisters. He would stay for hours, talking, encouraging, comforting, crying, and rejoicing together with them.
“From the beginning he also concerned himself with the material needs of the poor. He would shop for food, go to the pharmacy for prescriptions, to the doctor for help, many times giving the poor his last few coins. The inhabitants of Kronstadt would see him returning home barefoot and without his cassock.
“Often parishioners would bring shoes to his wife, saying to her, “Your husband has given away his shoes to someone, and will come home barefoot.”
“He would also write articles for the newspaper exhorting the people of Kronstadt to “support the poor morally and materially.” These appeals touched the hearts of many and Father John organized many charitable efforts.
“Realizing that his individual charity was insufficient for aiding the needy, he founded the Orthodox Christian House Parish Trusteeship of Saint Andrew the First-Called. This brotherhood coordinated many charitable efforts throughout the city and helped many needy people.
In 1857, he began teaching in the local city schools. He would tell people, “If children cannot listen to the Gospel, it is only because it is taught like any other subject, with boredom and indifference. Such teaching defeats the purpose of the Gospel. It fails because it forces students only to read words and memorize them instead of making them live in their lives.”
To Father John there were no incapable students. He taught in such a way that poor pupils as well as good ones were able to understand. His attention was aimed not so much at forcing students to memorize as to fill their souls with the joy of living according to Christian values, sharing with them the holy thoughts which filled his soul.”
( oca.org/saints/lives/2000/12/20/103598-repose-of-st-john-of-kronstadt
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The YMCA published Bibles for world wide use, even in Russian. Their missionaries abroad in the Russian Empire established YMCA-like facilities and programs for devoted to instructing and educating Russian peasants and recovering wounded and disabled soldiers behind the front lines how to read and write in their own language, caring for POWs, and all kinds of things.
When all hell was breaking lose in Russia after Tsar Nicholas II’s abdication, the growing turmoil under the democratic Kerensky government then caused its collapse with the Bolshevik revolution, and shortly after Patriarch Tikhon assumed the throne and began steering the great ship of the Russian Church through the great times of troubles after his election, the head of the YMCA in Moscow, Donald A. Lowrie, asked Tikhon, “What can we do?” during an interview.
Tikon answered his friend, “Send us more Bibles!”
Alexander Palace Time Machine: WMF Report – 1923 American Interview with Patriarch Tikhon: from “The Light of Russia” by Donald A. Lowrie:
(From a rare book published by the YMCA in Prague in 1923. Tikhon was murdered by the Communists soon after the book was published. – Bob Atchison)
Excerpt: “After the decision to restore the Patriarchate, the most important act of the Sobor was the election of the man to fill that office.
“In the midst of the three days battle which resulted in the taking of Moscow by the Bolsheviks, the Sobor in orderly sittings earried out the routine it had defined for the election of a Patriarch.
…
“All those who know Patriarch Tikhon enjoy his well-developed sense of humor. I believe it is this which has helped him retain his poise and cheerfulness through the past three years.
“I asked him how he had been treated. He told me he had been under “home arrest” for more than a year, had been permitted to go out to conduct service in other churches about once in three months, but aside from this had suffered no personal violence; this in marked contmst to many of the Church’s dignitaries who had been sent to jail or even condemned to execution.
“‘They think,’ the Patriarch smilingly remarked, as he patted my hand confidentially, “0, he’s an old chap: he’ll die soon….. we won’t bother him”‘. ‘Wait and see,’ he went on, shaking his finger, schoolmaster-fashion – ‘I’ll show them, yet’.
“And the roguish twinkle in his eyes, remarkably young in contrast to his grey hair, gave you confidence that when the present nightmare has cleared in Russia, her Church’s leader will be found ready to take a most active part in the affairs of the new day.
“But not a political part: we spoke of several churchmen who had dabbled in politics, and the Patriarch expressed his sorrow and disapproval; ‘What is right and just one may openly approve, and what is evil and unrighteous one must as openly condemn”, he said, “that is the Church’s business. But to meddle with the affairs of secular politics is neither the course of wisdom or of duty for a priest”.
“‘What is the most urgent need of the Orthodox Church which the Christian world outside can supply?’ I asked the Patriarch.
“‘Send us Bibles’, he replied.
“‘Never before in history has there been such a hunger for Scripture in the Russian people. They clamor for the whole book – not only the Gospels but the Old Testament as well – and we have no Bibles to give them. Our slender stocks were exhausted long ago, and our presses have been confiscated, so that we cannot print more’.
“I assured him that Christians in other lands would doubtless find a way to supply this need.
“It happened to be Thanksgiving Day at home, and the Patriarch remembered, and smilingly referred to its being known as “Turkey Day” in an American family he used to visit in New York.
“This brought on a discussion of American and Russian holidays and this in turn led to an interesting conversation “bout the present religious situation in Russia. At every step in this recital the Patriarch’s clear insight into men and events and his statesmanlike grasp of the affairs of the whole Church were clearly evident.
“I left him with a renewed conviction of his fitness for the high post he occupies.”
Much more: http://www.alexanderpalace.org/palace/tikhoninterview.html
Donald A Lowrie (1889-1974) was a very important American Christian observer to all the events and disasters which struck Russia and the trials and Golgotha of the Russian Orthodox Church, as well as good friend of Patriarch Tikhon and personal witness to his extraordinary life and sufferings.
In many ways, scratch beneath the surface, and one will find a spiritual kinship with one of Russia’s great modern saints, St. John of Kronstadt in their shared devotion to the poor and disadvantaged and determination to uplift the dregs of Russian society and restore them to Christian dignity.
Lowrie, who had international stature in the YMCA was also witness of world events leading up to and through WWII, and the early half of the Cold War.Before World War I, Lowrie worked as the Assistant Secretary in the Cleveland YMCA and as Membership Secretary in the Association in Hamilton, Ohio.
From 1916 to 1920, Lowrie worked at YMCA as Secretary (Russia/Eastern Europe), his wife Helen at the YWCA as Secretary during that time as well.
In 1916, Lowrie volunteered for service in Russia as a War Prisoners’ Aid Secretary for Central Power POW’s in Siberia [German, Austro-Hungarian and perhaps even Ottoman Christian conscripts]. After the United States entered the war, Lowrie became the General Secretary of the Odessa and Moscow Associations from 1917 to 1918.
He transferred to Archangel in northern Russia in 1918 to work with White Russian and Allied soldiers.
Lowrie moved again in 1919, working as a Student Secretary for Russian students in Russia, Germany, and the Baltic States.
Beginning in November 1919, he supervised WPA operations in Germany for Russian prisoners of war. This work included establishing educational, religious, and recreational work for these stranded prisoners. Lowrie also worked at Stettin supporting repatriation operations for the exchange of Russian and Central Power prisoners via Baltic ports.
From 1922 to 1928, Lowrie served in Czechoslovakia, working with Russian students for the first three years and then leading student work across the republic. In 1928, he transferred to Yugoslavia to supervise student work in that kingdom. Lowrie retired from the YMCA in 1932 and became the Director of the United States House at the Cité Université in Paris.
The approaching world war and rising wave of refugees convinced Lowrie to return to the YMCA in 1938. He worked with Paul B. Anderson to provide American Association relief to Russian, Czech, and Bulgarian refugees in France. Lowrie remained in France until October 1942, when he relocated to Switzerland to provide YMCA services to refugees there.
From 1945 to 1950, Lowrie represented the World’s Committee of the World’s Alliance of YMCA’s in relief work for displaced persons in France.
St. John of Kronstadt and Donald A Lowrie were both cut from the same Christian moral cloth and laborious devotion to improvement of human life and elevation of spirit throughout the most turbulent times ever in world history.
From 1855 St. John worked as a priest in Saint Andrew’s Cathedral in Kronstadt, the naval base near St Petersburg. Here he committed himself to charity, especially to those who were remote from the Church, and travelled extensively throughout the Russian empire. He was a member of the conservative Union of the Russian People, but did not commit himself politically.
By the early 1890s St. Father John had become well known, and people from all over Russia came to him every day in thousands Even the dying Tsar Alexander III of Russia, in 1894, summoned Father John to Livadia Palace (in the Crimea) so that he could receive communion from the holy man.
Born in 1825, St. John reposed in 1908 a few years after the 1905 revolution, having lived through out the decades of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary rumblings and violence in the latter half of the 1800s.
In 1909 Tsar Nicholas II wrote an order to establish the commemoration of St. John in the Church. Subsequently the Holy Synod issued an edict to commemorate St. Father John annually on the day of his death.
Lowrie died in 1974, and I believe is buried in Medina Ohio, in the Bible-belt of Middle America. American Christians should know a little about his labors for Christ, and that of the YMCA publishing on behalf of Russian Orthodoxy.
It was Lowrie’s efforts and the continued participation of the American Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) with Russian-language publishing from its beginnings to the end of the twentieth century which helped preserve Russian Orthodoxy and its literature for the emigres of the Russian diaspora.
A Hunger for Books: the American YMCA Press and Russian Readers:
“During the period between the two world wars YMCA publishing was the primary source of Russian Orthodox theological and philosophical literature. In addition, it served as a catalyst for ferment within Orthodoxy by providing a forum for heated debate, especially in the pages of Put’, a unique interdisciplinary journal of Christian thought.
“The unique role of the YMCA Press in the Russian emigration has been noted in a variety of studies. However, such evaluations usually do not pay attention to the original Protestant leadership of this remarkable Orthodox publishing house, the political impact of its avowedly non-political efforts, and the recent activities of the YMCA Press in Russia and Ukraine after the end of communism.
“The Press played a major role in preserving an important aspect of prerevolutionary Russian culture in Western Europe during the Soviet period until the repatriation of this culture following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In this way, the Press contributed to the expansion and enrichment of Eastern Orthodox Christianity.”
( tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09637490903500515 )
And He who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. And we know that God works all things together for the good of those who love Him, who are called according to His purpose — Romans 8:27-28
Putin is entirely correct. The Communists invented nothing new in the world for their ideology.
They simply hollowed out Christian life and society and sought to reduce peoplehood to its bare, materialistic form by outlawing God.
Truthteller.com: What Happens When Jews are Placed in Charge of WW II Civilians
Goon Squad — Jan 26, 2018
The world conquerors
Is this those ‘good Jews’ we keep hearing about in the MSM?
From the excellent book, “The World Conquerors,” written in 1958 by Louis Marschalko a Hungarian who escaped this madness and who World Jewry wanted to execute for being a war (thought) criminal.
Gosh, so many holocaust survivors to fill the ranks of these Jew butchers.
Excerpt: Actually, Europe did not fall under the Russians, British or Americans, but under Jewish occupation. Everything that had rightly or wrongly belonged to Europe for 2,000 years now disintegrated. The avengers continued doing (but more cruelly) the very things they had set down as crimes against Hitler.
This was no occupation by the forces of American democracy or Bolshevism but by those of a victorious Jewish nationalism glowing with hatred.
Ensconced in key positions among the occupying powers, they were able to punish everyone, whether innocent or guilty. In their eyes there was but one crime ~ to have opposed, or to be in a position to oppose ~ Jewish nationalism.
To be a Jew in Europe became a greater privilege than any enjoyed by even reigning princes of the Middle Ages.
The railway stations were guarded by special Jewish police and an identity check of Jews could be carried out by Jewish police only. They received their food ration cards without queueing.
For a while, immediately after the war, only Jews received travelling passes, thus securing for themselves free movement and the unrestricted monopoly of the black market.
In the refugee camps they were the chief caterers for U.N.R.R.A. as well as the privileged beneficiaries of this relief. Thus, they snatched the best rations from Poles, Ukrainians and Czechs, their former fellow-prisoners in the concentration camps.
At the same time, on the roads, military policemen overturned cans and spilled milk to deprive German children and hospital patients of their diet.
In German cities, working-class families were turned out of their homes by the tens of thousands, thus rendering vacant the nicest workers’ settlements. The victims had to leave behind everything ~ furniture, kitchen equipment and cooking utensils, clothing and even linen, thus forcing the German people to recompense three times over in the form of Wiedergutmachung (reparations) the actual value of the goods confiscated from the Jews.
Uniformed Zionist guards were posted at camp gates and, at first, for a while, even the Military Police of the victorious American Army could not enter Jewish camps.
Victorious Jewish nationalism was granted (116) similar rights in the East, in Slovakia, in some parts of Rumania, in Hungary and Bohemia. They took possession of the flats and furniture of the Gentiles, occupied key positions in government offices and in editorial posts of the national press.
Concurrently, former Jewish journalists returned to Germany and took complete charge of the newspapers of the occupied zones, and began to incite revenge upon the German nation on its own soil. …
When Edvard Beneš, the great humanitarian, the “bel espirit” and master of freemasonry entered Prague on Sunday, May 13th, 1945, German citizens were burned alive in his honour in St. Wenceslas Square. (Document No. 15 concerning the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans.)
Many Germans were hung up by their feet from the big (119) advertising posters in St. Wenceslas Square, then when the great humanitarian approached their petrol-soaked bodies were set on fire to form living torches.
Six hundred thousand Sudeten Germans were killed during the massacres in the earthly hell of the death camps of Czechoslovakia. The Sudeten German White Paper records these horrors with full details on more than 1,000 pages, horrors for which there is no precedent in the history of mankind.
Armed Czech women and Jewesses continued hitting the womb of expectant mothers with truncheons until a miscarriage followed, and in one single camp ten German women died daily in this way. (Document No. 6.)
In another camp, the inmates were forced to lick up the bespattered brains of their fellow-prisoners who had been beaten to death. German prisoners were forced to lick up infectious feces from the underwear of their fellow-prisoners suffering from dysentery. (Document No. 17.) The Czech and Jewish doctors refused all medical aid to German women raped by the Russians.
Hundreds of thousands died by these means or sought salvation in suicide, as, for instance, in Brno (Brun), where on a single day 275 women committed suicide.
Naturally, the Western” humanitarian” press, the American radio network and the B.B.C. commentators took good care never to mention these facts, although they themselves were in the first place responsible for this campaign of revenge to which they instigated the members of their own nations.
They were thus guilty of poisoning the soul of Christendom by the hatred they induced.
But Czechoslovakia was not the first state where horrors of this type occurred. Ana Rabinovich Pauker returned to Rumania as early as August, 1944, and under the orders of the Eastern Jews who arrived with her, massacres began there too.
According to authentic Bulgarian emigrant sources, 30,000 members of the professional classes were murdered in the trail of the invading Soviet armies by Bulgarian “proletarians,” led by those “ladines” whose forefathers had been expelled from Spain by Catholic Ferdinand.
Similarly, in Belgrade and Southern Hungary the name of Moša Pijade is connected with bloody “purges” the victims of which were Serbian intelligentsia, prosperous German settlers and the most intelligent Hungarian peasantry.
When, in October, 1944, the German and Hungarian armies left the territories of Yugoslavia (120) and Southern Hungary an unprecedented wave of mass-murders broke over the unprotected population.
Thirty thousand Hungarians, mostly peasants and smallholders, died in this bloodshed, under the savage terror regime of Moša Pijade’s partisans. The Katyn Wood murders are a modest, amateurish effort in comparison with it.
According to documentary proof in our hands, Hungarians, Germans and Croatians alike, died slow and horrible deaths wracked with agony.
Besides the 30,000 Hungarians, nearly 200,000 Germans died in the death camps of the “liberators,” where powdered glass was mixed with the children’s food and where with the finesse of Chinese executioners those to perish in the biological class-warfare were dispatched, in order that their places as civic leaders and police officers could be taken by the revengeful representatives of Jehovah.
In this classic age of race murder, the case of Hungary is quite extraordinary. This unfortunate nation, even in its dismembered state after the 1920 Parish treaties, had provided 560,000 Jews with peaceful and safe homes.
The Hungarian nation did not take vengeance on Jewry even after the first Communist dictatorship of Bela Kun in 1919-1920, despite the fact that Jews, almost exclusively, were the commissars and leaders of this Communist régime…
One million Hungarian women were raped by the Russian Bolshevik troops, usually led by Jewish commandants. Six hundred thousand prisoners of war, as well as 230,000 civilians, were dragged off to extermination camps in the Soviet Union.
At the most modest estimate, 500,000 people were murdered by the Jews in the cells of 60, Andrássy út, Budapest, in internment camps or in the open streets.
All the characteristic features of biological class-warfare can be distinguished in this campaign of revenge. The Hungarian middle classes, the intellectuals and the national leaders had to be slain so that their places could be taken by another middle-class by the Jews!
And, moreover, those who presided as judges in the revolutionary tribunals were almost all Jews.”
Truthteller asks, “What does the USA have to look forward to?”
Embedded video (must see): Greg Felton; AMERICA IS NOW FULLY CONTROLLED BY ZIONIST SAYS CANADIAN RESEARCHER
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEdJDJgyYxs
But don’t read this book [The Host and the Parasite] you should spend your time worshiping the most Holy Holocau$t™ GOY and be glad you are still alive… for now.
Much more: http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=164872
The Host and the Parasite: How Israel’s Fifth Column Consumed America shows how the Lobby, evangelical Christians and neocons rode to power in the 1980s and proceeded to turn the United States into Israel’s willing executioner.
Greg Felton is an investigative journalist specializing in the Middle East, Canadian politics, the media and language.
He holds a Master’s Degree in political science from the University of British Columbia and speaks French, Russian and Mandarin.
For six years he wrote a political column for the monthly Arabic/English Canadian Arab News, and his articles have appeared on whatreallyhappened.com, informationclearinghouse.info, rense.com, dissidentvoice.com, and in Middle East Times, Tehran Times, and other publications.
http://thehostandtheparasite.com/
‘I Am an Educated Woman!’: Israeli PM’s Wife’s Mad Outburst Caught on Tape.
The leaked tape comes as Sara Netanyahu faces another lawsuit (the third, so far) from an employee who alleges staff are treated like “slaves.”
The recording of the Israeli Prime Minister’s wife yelling at a family publicist over a piece of news, where the aide ostensibly downplayed her professional qualifications, has surfaced on the Israeli website Walla! News.
The incident happened nearly a decade ago, when the aide published news of her fundraising activities in a column, mentioning how Sara Netanyahu was “obliged” to engage in public service.
“I’m doing it. As a professional, as an ed-u-cated woman. A psy-cho-lo-gist,” Netanyahu can be heard furiously screaming and exclaiming each syllable. “BA, MA,” she yells, referring to her bachelor and master’s degrees.
While the publicist argues that “it says in the first sentence that you’re a psychologist,” she responds abruptly, ordering him to reprimand the editor.
“This prime minister’s wife does public service every day,” she shouts. “In her professional capacity.”
Watch here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=122&v=Kp4bUFDhZ84
Benjamin Netanyahu attempted to defend his wife on Facebook, claiming that everyone “gets angry and says a few words that he didn’t mean.” He posted several pictures of her, saying that the media had ignored her public activities, including helping Holocaust survivors, children with cancer and bereaved families, for decades.
In October 2017, a 24-year-old ultra-Orthodox Jewish woman who worked as a cleaner at the official residence in Balfour Street filed a lawsuit against Sara Netanyahu, alleging she had verbally abused her. The legal claim added that she regarded employees as “slaves.”
In March 2015, Menny Naftali, the former caretaker at the Prime Minister’s Residence told a labor court of an “atmosphere of fear among the employees, who were afraid of being victims of minor incidents that would escalate into difficult, rage-filled outbursts, especially after she would drink large amounts of alcohol that I and others would bring to her room daily”. A year later, the court awarded Naftali about $43,735 in compensation for the years of mistreatment.
https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201801291061159811-netanyahu-wife-mad-tape/
I want to comment on Kath Juliane posts from today and yesterday.
The killing and intermarriage of Jews with Christians is the reason there are so many Jews in this world today, especially in the US.
Fom yesterday: The Jews are smart-Street smart. They can discern things as they are predatory proven by their actions. So they figured out how to get primarily Christians to support their ideal economic system.
They set up the USSR with the guiding principles as espoused by Our Lord Jesus Christ and then made it appear as the work of the devil by doing away with Him and producing murder and mayhem in his place.
In this way they pushed the selfish style of Capitalism, of which it generally is, and the theories of Ayn Rand on the western countries which they wished to exploit.
Since the word Communism came to mean bloodshed and revolution, Western folks chose the selfish Capitalism without realizing that that was not what our Lord intended.
In short they told the truth but made it look Satanic and ugly. The same with the writings of Karl Marx. He wrote the truth. But he was a Satanic communist so what he wrote must be bad for mankind. A little reverse psychology if you will.
This all reminds somewhat of the Bible saying that the Antichrist would seem like a savior and mirror Jesus Christ in his actions.
Signs of the Last Day stands for the ‘Last Age’,
or the age which would culminate in the end of history—when the true Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, would return to rule the world from Jerusalem with justice and ‘eternal’ rule.
Imran N Hosein
MINOR SIGNS
According Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him) prophesied of the Last Age that:
• “People would follow a way of life other than mine, and give guidance other than mine”…“I fear for my people only the leaders who lead men astray”…“Before the Last Hour there will be great liars, so beware of them”…
“When the most wicked member of a tribe becomes its ruler, and the most worthless member of a community becomes its leader, and a man is respected through fear of the evil he may do, and leadership is given to people who are unworthy of it, expect the Last Hour”.
All of these warnings have already been dramatically and ominously fulfilled. Around the world today, with but few exceptions, and even here in my native Caribbean island of Trinidad, people, including Muslims, now have the worst leaders.
This ominous sign of the Last Day has come to pass, yet there are so many who do not, or cannot see, and they blindly rush as dumb cattle to endorse or to follow such leaders for personal gain, or fear, or due to sheer ignorance;
• “Women would arrange their hair to look like the hump of a camel”, and this sign has already occurred, we see it everyday;
• “Women would dress like men,” and we already see them today with trousers, jacket and, perhaps, a tie; and “women would be dressed and yet be naked,” and this prophecy, also, is now fulfilled. When women parade in public :dressed, yet naked,” as they do today, and when Muslims cannot prevent such, they should then seek to flee from such mainstream society rather than to remain a part of it until the women are fully naked and “donkey-like” sexual intercourse is on public display.
If they foolishly choose to remain a part of such corrupt and decadent society then they or their children would eventually be ruined by such a society.
• “Men would dress like women,” and already this sign also has come to pass. Almost no one can tell that ‘she’, the so-called ‘crossdresser’, is really a man;
• Homosexuality (and lesbianism) would become commonplace, and that is now happening before our very eyes. Social acceptance and legal protection for this abominable sexual perversion is gaining ground. Indeed those who hold fast to the divine prohibition of such sexual perversion are now demonized as a people who suffer from a disease called ‘homophobia’;
• Children born outside of marriage would become commonplace, in fact marriage itself now seems destined to become obsolete;
• Fornication and adultery would become commonplace, that, also, appears to have already been fulfilled in a modern world in which virginity and marital fidelity are becoming old-fashioned;
• Disproportion in balance of men and women to such an extent that “one man would have to maintain (not marry) fifty women”, that is yet to occur but could be linked to the impact on male sperm production of such things as environmental pollution and genetically modified food;
• Universal consumption of alcoholic beverages, this “mother of all evils” has already become a horrendous plague in which no one is safe from the drunk driver; the unborn baby drinks when his mother drinks and suffers unimaginably for such; people, including Prime Ministers, drink and become drunk, and then behave in public like asses;
• “Religious knowledge would disappear,” since the rightly-guided scholars of Islam are demonized, marginalized, “banned,” or declared to be “great security risks”.
Only those scholars who can skillfully skip and dance to the tunes of those who control power are allowed the unfettered freedom to preach a sanitized cosmetic version of Islam acceptable to the godless rulers of the world.
Institutions of Islamic learning are forced to submit to the control of those waging war on Islam. If they do not submit, they are shut down. Foreign students are prohibited from studying Islam in certain so-called Islamic Republics;
• “Time would move swiftly—a year passing like a month—a month like a week—a week like a day” etc., and already the perception of swiftly moving time is a universal experience;
• Such prevalence of random killing, murder and violence that “a killer would not know why he is killing and the one who is killed would not know why he is being killed,” and “every age is followed by one which would be worse”—already around the world senseless random killing has arrived and is constantly escalating;
• “Nothing would remain of Islam but the name, and nothing would remain of the Qur’an but the traces (of its writing) (i.e., the Qur’an would not be studied, no one would follow its guidance, it would be recited mechanically etc.); the Masajid (mosques) would be grand structures but would be devoid of guidance; and the Ulama (religious scholars of Islam who represent such people) would be the worst people beneath the sky.
From them would emerge Fitnah (trials) and they would be the centers of Fitnah (since they betray Islam)” — there are many distinguished scholars of Islam who declare that this prophesy, also, has today found fulfillment.
The evidence of such is overwhelming. The Islamic Khilafah (Caliphate) has been long destroyed, Zakat is no longer collected and distributed by the state, money itself is now corrupted, the universal Shirk of the modern state has corrupted all of mankind, Riba is universally prevalent, the Hajj would probably soon be abandoned;
• Universal consumption of Riba (i.e, money lent on interest, and transactions which ‘rip off’ people through deception in business, etc.) Around the world today Riba in modern banking and insurance, as well as in the monetary system, has already taken total control over the market and over economic life. There are some minor signs which have been couched inenigmatic language such as,
• “A slave woman would give birth to her mistress,” made possible through a combination of Riba and the modern feminist revolution, and;
• “Naked barefooted shepherds would vie with one another in the construction of high-rise buildings”.
This is already being fulfilled when wealth is wasted in grandiose and expensive public relations construction projects commissioned by people who hanker for visible symbols of status in a modern world which recognizes the rich as a ‘somebody’ and the poor as a ‘nobody’ (see story of the rich man and the poor man in Surah al-Kahf of the Qur’an).
And then there are minor signs which have not as yet occurred such as:
• “The Last Hour would not come until there issues from the land of the Hejaz (which is in Saudi Arabia) a fire which will illuminate the backs of the camels in Busra”.
But for the exchange of Basra for Hejaz, this prophecy perhaps, anticipates a nuclear attack in or around Iran which would formally launch Israel into the club of nuclear powers.
So many of these minor Signs of the Last Day, and so many more not here mentioned, have already occurred, that we can now turn to the major Signs with a clear recognition that we are already living in that Last Age.
MAJOR SIGNS
Hudhayfah ibn Usayd Ghifari, the companion of the Prophet, said,
“Allah’s Messenger came to us all of a sudden as we were (busy in a discussion). He asked: What are you discussing? (The Companions) replied: We are discussing (the subject of) the Last Hour.
Thereupon he said: It will not come until you see ten signs. And (in this connection) he made a mention of the ‘smoke’, ‘Dajjal’, the ‘beast’, the ‘rising of the sun from the west’, the ‘descent of Jesus son of Mary’, ‘Gog and Magog’, ‘sinkings of the earth in three places, one in the east, one in the west and one in Arabia’ at the end of which ‘fire would burn forth from Yemen, and would drive people to the place of their assembly’ (i.e., the place where mankind will be assembled for judgment).”
(Sahih Muslim)
Here, then, are the ten major Signs of the Last Day as prophesied by Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him):
• Dajjal — the false Messiah or Anti-Christ,
• Gog and Magog,
• Smoke,
• The beast of the earth or land (most likely the holy land),
• The sun would rise from the west,
• Three sinkings of the earth
• one in the east
• One in the west
• and One in Arabia,
• A fire would come out of Yemen and would drive people to their place of assembly (for judgement),
• The son of Mary would descend. Although these signs were not given by the blessed Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him) in their chronological order of occurrence I have made an effort to put them in that order, with the ones that have not as yet occurred at the bottom of the list.
How did I arrive at the above order? We know from the prophecies of the blessed Prophet that the third major ‘sinking of the earth’, i.e., the one that would occur in Arabia, would swallow an army that would be heading south to Makkah. That army would be on its way to attack Imam al-Mahdi, the descendent of Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him).
It was prophesied that he would restore the Islamic Caliphate (or Islamic model of a state) in the Arabian peninsula. It is after that sign has occurred (i.e., the third major earthquake) that the Son of Mary would descend from the sky with his hands resting on the wings of two angels, and would kill Dajjal the False Messiah or Anti-Christ. The Qur’an itself has described Jesus (i.e., the return of Jesus) as the ‘ilm (which here means the very key to the subject) of the Last Hour:
“And he (i.e., Jesus) shall be a Sign (for the coming of) the Hour (of Judgment): therefore have no doubt about the (Hour), but follow Me: this is a Straight Way.” (Qur’an, Zukhruf, 43:61)
It follows that his return must come chronologically at the end of the list. We also know that the ‘fire’ from Yemen would follow the third earthquake. And so now that it appears that the major earthquake in the East has occurred, we await four more major signs that still remain to occur. When did the first six ‘major’ signs occur?
DAJJAL
I have argued in my book, ‘Jerusalem in the Qur’an – An Islamic View of the Destiny of Jerusalem’, that Dajjal the False Messiah or Antichrist was released into the world in the lifetime of Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him).
He has already completed the first stage of his mission that lasted for “a day like a year,” and is about to complete the second stage that lasts for “a day like a month”.
The third and last stage of his mission (of impersonation of the true Messiah) that would last for just “a day like a week” would, I believe, commence when Israel replaces USA as the ruling state of the world.
And that would occur when Israel wages a big war that would result in dramatic territorial expansion “from the river of Egypt to the river Euphrates”. Israel would then seize control of the Suez Canal and all the oil of the Arabian Gulf.
By the end of that third stage, Dajjal the false Messiah or Antichrist would have been born into the world of Jewish parents, would have risen to become ruler of Israel and, hence, would have completed his mission to rule the world from Jerusalem. And Allah Knows best!
An entire chapter of the book is devoted to explaining the subject of Dajjal. I am now writing a quartet of books on Surah al-Kahf of the Qur’an, and one of the four books would be entirely devoted to a comprehensive explanation of the subject of Dajjal, the false Messiah or Anti-Christ in Islam Insha Allah.
GOG AND MAGOG
I have also argued in my book that Gog and Magog were released into the world in the lifetime of Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him).
The Qur’an itself has made mention (Qur’an, al-Anbiyah, 21:94-5) of a ‘town’ which was destroyed by Allah Most High, and the people of the town expelled, and then banned from returning to reclaim their town until Gog and Magog were not only released but, also, had spread out (around the world) in all directions.
“But there is a ban on a town which We have destroyed: that they (the people of the town) shall not return (to reclaim that town as their own); until Gog and Magog are let through (their barrier), and they swiftly spread out in every direction (replicating themselves amongst all the peoples of the world).”
(Qur’an, al-Anbiyah, 21:95-96)
I identified that ‘town’ to be Jerusalem. And since the Jews have already returned to Jerusalem to reclaim it as their own, it follows that Gog and Magog, like Dajjal, are also close to the end of their mission. And Allah Knows best!
Another entire chapter of ‘Jerusalem in the Qur’an’ is devoted to explaining the subject of Gog and Magog. In addition, the fourth of the quartet of books on Surah al-Kahf will be devoted to a comprehensive explanation of this subject Insha Allah.
http://www.imranhosein.org/articles/signs-of-the-last-day/76-ten-major-signs-of-the-last-day-has-one-just-occurred.html
*second part
DUKHAN (SMOKE)
This appears to be totality of environmental pollution (not just smog and haze) that is already wreaking havoc on the earth itself and is bringing about global warming with the consequent impact of earthquakes, hurricanes, flooding etc. The modern industrial economy that Dajjal has authored, appears to be the greatest culprit of environmental pollution in the world today.
In other words, we have been tricked into causing Dukhan (smoke) which in turn spawns global warming and eventual climatic disaster. And Allah Knows best! However, it is important that we note that there are several Ahadith in Sahih Bukhari that declare the sign of Dukhan (smoke) already appeared in the lifetime of the blessed Prophet.
D’ABBATUL ARD (THE BEAST OF THE LAND OR EARTH)
I have argued in ‘Jerusalem in the Qur’an’ that the beast of the earth’ is, in fact, the imposter State of Israel that now occupies the Holy Land. The learned Shaikh, Safar al-Hawali, holds the view that the ‘beast’ is the Zionist Movement. And Allah Knows best!
THE SUN WOULD RISE FROM THE WEST
Those who interpret this sign literally assume that the order of nature would be reversed despite the Qur’anic declaration that there can be no change in Allah’s creation (of that natural order):
“So set thou thy face steadily and truly to the faith: (establish) Allah’s handiwork according to the pattern on which He has made mankind: no change (can there be) in Allah’s creation: that is the standard religion: but most among mankind understand not.” (Qur’an, al-Rum, 30:30)
They also do so despite the specific declaration of Prophet Abraham (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him) that his Lord-God causes the sun to rise from the East. Abraham then proceeded to challenge the King to cause the sun to rise from the West if he possessed power greater than Allah’s:
Hast thou not turned thy vision to one who disputed with Abraham about his Lord, because Allah had granted him power? Abraham said:
“My Lord is He Who giveth life and death.” He said: “I give life and death.” Said Abraham: “But it is Allah that causeth the sun to rise from the East do thou then cause it to rise from the West!” Thus was he confounded who (in arrogance) rejected Faith. Nor doth Allah give guidance to a people unjust. (Qur’an, al-Baqarah, 2:258)
And so they wait for that western sunrise as an event that would literally occur, while ignoring the basic rule that no Hadith can contradict the Qur’an.
But this sign has provoked numerous other non-literal interpretations, all of which agree that it has already occurred. Our view is that the rising of the sun from the West symbolizes an upside– down world in which mankind is led by their noses to a way of life which would be the very opposite of that natural way ordained by Allah.
Natural money, for example, so identified in the Qur’an, is derived from precious metals. When such money is in short supply in a market such as Madina’s, then a substitute in the form of commodities such as wheat, barley, dates, salt, etc., can temporarily take its place. Around the world today that natural money with intrinsic value has been displaced by artificial money with no intrinsic value and it is used as an instrument of oppression.
That upside-down unnatural way of life has already been accepted by most of mankind. In this sense, therefore, the sun is already rising from the West. And Allah Knows best!
THREE SINKINGS OF THE EARTH
Many terrible earthquakes have already occurred in history. They have no relevance to our subject.
We are concerned with three major ‘sinkings of the earth’ that would occur at a specific moment in history, i.e., they would occur at a time that would herald the return of Jesus, the Messiah, the son of Mary, and Messenger of Allah Most High. One would occur in the East, the second in the West, and the third in Arabia.
When the third one takes place, the world of Islam would suddenly and dazzlingly reenter the affairs of the Arabian peninsula, as well as of the world, in the same revolutionary way that it did in the lifetime of Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him).
This appears to be the meaning of the last of the major signs (prior to the return of Jesus) mentioned by the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him), i.e., that a fire would come out of Yemen and drive people to their place of assembly (i.e., for judgment) which is Arafat in Arabia.
THE EARTHQUAKE IN THE EAST
I believe that the recent massive earthquake and resultant Tsunami in South East Asia which has claimed many more than 100,000 lives, is the earthquake of the East mentioned by Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him) in the ten major Signs of the Last Day. It could thus be the first of three such earthquakes heralding the return of Jesus (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him). I came to this conclusion because of the following reasons:
Firstly, the prophecy of the blessed Prophet is that a ‘khasf’ would occur in the East, i.e., the earth sinks down or caves in.
A ‘Tsunami’ is defined as a sea wave of local or distant origin that results from large-scale seafloor displacements associated with large earthquakes, major submarine slides, or exploding volcanic islands. When this recent displacement of the earth occurred under the sea, and consequently resulted in the massive Tsunami, it ensured that those who have maliciously concealed the Truth time and again in history could not conceal this major Sign of the Last Day.
The magnitude of the event, i.e., the severity of the earthquake (9 on the Richter scale) and, more importantly, the massive damage already done and still unfolding, makes it absolutely unique for mankind today.
Secondly, I am impressed by the location of the event – it occurred in that East which is clearly east of Madinah.
Thirdly, and most important of all, I would like to direct attention to the time that it occurred.
This was after the liberation of the Holy Land (1917), and return of the Jews to reclaim the Holy Land as their own (1918-1948). It was also after the restoration of a State of Israel in the Holy Land (1948) and the growth of Israel to become a superpower in the world (i.e., the present).
Finally it occurred at precisely that time when Israel is about to wage her big war of massive territorial expansion after which Israel would replace USA as the ruling state in the world. Jesus cannot return until all these things have occurred.
It has also occurred at that time when the prophecy of the Prophet concerning the abandonment of the Hajj seems about to be fulfilled. The Hajj would pose a gigantic security threat to the present Saudi ruling elite whenever Israel wages its big war and assumes rule over the world.
And it has occurred at just that time when the US dollar has begun its perhaps irreversible decline that might culminate in its collapse. Such a collapse would also bring down all the paper-money in the world and electronic money, controlled by the Jewish-controlled banking system, would then control all the money in the money-system of the world.
This momentous Sign in the East that occurred at the end of December 2004 appears, therefore, to be a sign to mankind warning that dangerous change in the world will soon take place.
It appears to be the first of the three major earthquakes, or ‘sinkings of the earth’, as prophesied by Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him), which would herald the return of the true Messiah, Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah Most High.
If we are correct, and Allah Knows best, then the world has to await only two more such major events before the son of Mary returns to liberate us from the oppressors who now rule the world.
THE SECOND EARTHQUAKE IN THE WEST
When a second massive earthquake (with a sinking down, caving in, or displacement of the earth) eventually occurs in the west, after the recent one in the east, that would further confirm the analysis presented in this essay. All that would then remain to occur for Jesus to descend from the clouds would be the third earthquake in Arabia that would swallow an entire army, and the fire that would come out of Yemen.
We are so close to that event that we can already feel the heat of that fire. Although what appears to be the first of the three major earthquakes occurred underwater and resulted in the massive Tsunami in South East Asia, it is not necessary that the second that would occur in the west would be similar.
After all, we know that the third and last major earthquake would have its epicenter on land just north of Makkah in Arabia. But it would seem that the mid-Atlantic (rather than the Pacific) may be the location of the major earthquake of the west that is to come.
In case the second major earthqake occurs in the mid-Atlantic, the islands of the Caribbean and the eastern coast of USA and Canada as well as South America would be likely to be affected. It could also be a big earthquake in California along the fault.
THE THIRD EARTHQUAKE IN ARABIA
Narrated Aisha: Allah’s Apostle said, “An army would invade the Ka’aba and when the invaders reach Al-Baida’, all the ground would sink and swallow the whole army.” I said, “O Allah’s Apostle! How would they sink into the ground while amongst them would be their markets (the people who worked in business and not invaders) and the people not belonging to them?”
The Prophet replied, “All of those people would sink but they would be resurrected and judged according to their intentions.” (Sahih al-Bukhari)
Narrated Umm Salamah, Ummul Mu’minin: The Prophet said: “Disagreement will occur at the death of a Caliph and a man of the people of Madina would come flying forth to Makkah.
“Some of the people of Makkah would come to him, bring him out against his will, and swear allegiance to him between the Corner and the Maqam. An expeditionary force would then be sent against him from Syria but would be swallowed up in the desert between Makkah and Madina.”(Sunan Abu Daud)
It is quite clear from the above prophecy of Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him) that the third earthquake would take place at the time of the advent of Imam al-Mahdi. But the Imam cannot emerge to liberate the Arabian heartland of Islam until Israel has become the ruling state in the world. And Allah knows best!
THE RETURN OF THE TRUE MESSIAH, JESUS, THE SON OF MARY
Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him) has spoken extensively and in minute details about the event of the return of Jesus (peace and blessings of Allah Most High be upon him). But that event is so rich and complex that it lies beyond the scope of this paper.
However, my book, ‘Jerusalem in the Qur’an’ has dealt with the subject in some detail, and it is to that book that I now refer the gentle reader.
ONE FINAL WORD
The destiny of Jerusalem is such as to give to Muslims the greatest confidence and hope that Truth will triumph over falsehood and oppression. ‘Jerusalem in the Qur’an’ was written for precisely this purpose — i.e., to explain to Muslims the strange world in which we live today.
It is a world in which the cause of Islam appears to be a lost cause. But having read the book the reader would know, if he or she had not already known it, that the reality is quite different.
When they know for certain that it is the destiny of Jerusalem to give a spectacular validation of Islam’s claim to truth, Muslims should be able to summon the strength to resist the present war on Islam in which the godless world is making the greatest possible effort to destroy their faith in Allah Most High.
http://www.imranhosein.org/articles/signs-of-the-last-day/76-ten-major-signs-of-the-last-day-has-one-just-occurred.html
James Zogby, of Lebanese Maronite Catholic heritage and faith, the founder of Arab American Institute, composed a real zinger about uber-Zio evangelical Pence’s pilgrimage to the Zionist state to pay homage to his lord and savior, Israhell.
~~~*~~~
Arab American Institute: Washington Watch: Pence’s Middle East
POSTED ON JANUARY 27, 2018 IN WASHINGTON WATCH
by James J. Zogby
US Vice President Michael Pence’s recent foray into Middle East politics has been nothing short of a disaster. Because he sees the world through the lens of right-wing Evangelical Christianity, he trampled on regional realities, leaving a mess in his wake.
One might have hoped that American political leaders had learned the dangers of an ideologically-driven foreign policy from the failed presidency of George W. Bush.
Bush, whose world view was a mish-mash of Evangelical and neo-conservative doctrines, led the US into a disastrous invasion of Iraq. Guided by ideology, Bush saw that war as a necessary battle of good versus evil that would inevitably be won by the “good”.
As his Administration framed the war: the tyrant would be overthrown, America would be celebrated as the liberator of Iraq, democracy would take root, and then spread throughout the entire Middle East.
To the true believer—it was that simple. Reality dictated otherwise.
What the ideologues hadn’t factored into their simplistic vision were complex regional realities, in particular, the history and social make-up of Iraq’s people and the ambitions of its neighbors.
Within short order, the country descended into a sectarian civil war, Iran gained a foothold in Iraq becoming an emboldened regional force, and US troops became ground down in a long, deadly, and demoralizing war—with still unfolding consequences.
The real danger of seeing the world through a narrow ideological lens is that while the lens may be your own, the world being viewed through it is not yours to control.
What you see may “fit” your understanding of the way “things ought to be,” but the reality your lens filters out won’t “behave” or go away just because you deny or don’t acknowledge that it exists.
Pence’s recent descent into Middle East’s troubled waters displayed this same ideological blindness.
His heterodox Christian faith celebrated President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, because he sees Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and a necessary prerequisite for the “final days” leading to the second coming of Christ and the conversion of the Jews.
At times Pence’s visit to Israel appeared to be more of a religious pilgrimage than a diplomatic mission.
His speech before the Israeli Knesset was filled with biblical references and theological imagery.
He mentioned Abraham and David and spoke of the Jewish exile and their coming to the Promised Land (both of which he brazenly compared to the American experience). And he concluded with this:
“Israel is like a tree that has grown deep roots in the soil of your forefathers, yet as it grows, it reaches ever closer to the heavens. And today and every day, the Jewish state of Israel, and all the Jewish people, bear witness to God’s faithfulness…
“It was the faith of the Jewish people that gathered the scattered fragments of a people and made them whole again…and it was faith that rebuilt the ruins of Jerusalem and made them strong again. The miracle of Israel is an inspiration to the world.”
This almost breathless ecstatic testimonial wasn’t all that Pence said. He made a not-so-oblique reference to the Trump Administration’s hoped for so-called “Israel-Sunni” alliance, saying “long-standing enemies are becoming partners…the descendants of Isaac and Ishmael are coming together in common cause as never before”.
In near biblical language, he pledged to “drive radical Islamic terrorism from the face of the earth.”
He also noted that the US has “redirected funding [from traditional aid groups that provide relief and reconstruction assistance to all groups impacted by war]…and, for the first time…providing direct support for Christian [whom Pence has referred to as “our fellow Christians”] and other minority communities” in Iraq.
What Pence’s ideology did not allow him to see was that by his full-throated embrace of a biblically-inspired vision of Israel, he put the final nail in the coffin of a US-led peace process.
Only once, in passing, did Pence even mention Palestinians. Because he could not see Israel doing wrong, he made no mention of the harsh occupation or settlement expansion.
And Palestinian Christians, who refused to meet with Pence in protest of the US embassy move, were not included in Pence’s beleaguered “fellow Christians” needing US support.
What Pence also wasn’t able to factor into his distorted view of the region is just how irreconcilable his stance on Israel and Jerusalem are with the deeply held sensibilities of the Arab World’s leaders and peoples.
While Egypt’s and Jordan’s leaders met with the Vice President, they kept him at arm’s length (and, in the case of Egypt, did their best to keep press away).
What the US appears not to understand is that despite Arab leaders’ concerns with Iran and extremism, they are not about to trample on Palestinians and their rights in Jerusalem in order to join forces with or normalize ties with Israel.
In fact, Trump’s embassy move and Pence’s performance, if anything, have fueled extremist currents, emboldened Iran, and put the US’ Arab World allies at risk.
Finally, a word about Pence’s efforts to reprogram US aid toward Middle East Christians. While celebrated by Evangelical Christians in the US, this move has been criticized by the hierarchy of the Middle East Christian churches.
While every religious community has suffered at the hands of ISIS, there is no doubt that Arab Christians and other regional minorities were singled out by the extremists for the harshest treatment.
Nevertheless, the region’s Christian hierarchy fear being too closely embraced by the US or singled out for special treatment since that would exacerbate sectarian tensions, putting them at greater risk in their own countries.
In the end, the only group celebrating Pence’s pilgrimage to the region is the far-right in Israel. He embraced their vision of a Jewish state in their “Promised Land” and ignored Palestinian rights.
This uncritical support has already further emboldened them to accelerate their efforts to expand settlements, annex the occupied territories, and bury, once and for all, hopes for a just and lasting Israel-Palestinian peace—thus demonstrating, once again, how adherence to blind ideology can be a dumb and dangerous way to shape foreign policy.
The Arab American Institute is a non-profit, nonpartisan national leadership organization that does not endorse candidates.
http://www.aaiusa.org/pence_s_middle_east
PS to Chris M,
Work on the historical roots of Zio-christianism is still in process.
I haven’t forgotten, as I usually often do when too many “senior moments” string together.
Just busy sorting through a mess of files and books on the history of the Church of England and its developmental factors that combined into a powerful messianic/apocalyptic worldview of the 17th century.
Excellent interview with Archbishop Gabriel.
I like what he said to you about “How can we talk about monarchy when Russians don’t fully comprehend the tragedy of their history?”
I pointedly ask Russians, “Why are you indifferent to Lenin and the Revolution when he and his cronies murdered tens of thousands, if not millions, of Orthodox Christians?”
Here is what I want to share: Russians might gain a better comprehension of their own history if they read the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (the rest of the world, too, I might add):
“You must understand. The leading Bolsheviks who took over Russia were not Russians. They hated Russians. They hated Christians. Driven by ethnic hatred they tortured and slaughtered millions of Russians without a shred of human remorse. The October Revolution was not what you call in America the “Russian Revolution.”
“It was an invasion and conquest over the Russian people. More of my countrymen suffered horrific crimes at their bloodstained hands than any people or nation ever suffered in the entirety of human history. It cannot be understated. Bolshevism was the greatest human slaughter of all time.
“The fact that most of the world is ignorant of this reality is proof that the global media itself is in the hands of the perpetrators.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), Nobel-Prize-winning novelist, historian and victim of Jewish Bolshevism (Marxism). (Holodomor: The Jewish Ethnic Cleansing Of Europeans) https://holodomorinfo.com/
Wall Street Funded the Bolshevik Revolution – Professor Antony Sutton https://youtu.be/PaFklTLNy8c
Bolshevism https://www.facebook.com/notes/david-cutter/bolshevism/10155183828138018/
Thank you and GBY for all you do, Brother Nathanael
–David
Important read (and beautiful photo essay at website):
Russia Feed: Vladimir Putin’s support of moderate Muslim education reveals difference between Russia and the West
by Nick
‘Destructive ideas can only be tackled by other ideas’ said Putin, stressing Russian patriotism is an inclusive concept
Vladimir Putin said that Russia will “definitely support” Islamic education via “major state universities” in a meeting with top Muslim clergy in Kazan, RT reports.
https://www.rt.com/politics/416980-putin-muslim-education-russia/
I can already hear some voices gasping, but rest assured, this is still Putin, the traditional Russian Orthodox man, who in some publications is portrayed as a communist, and likewise in others as a Czarist, in some as an anti-immigration nationalist, while in others as a friend to Chechnya.
We have already covered how a variety of ideologies each like to claim Putin as being of their school of thought, when in reality he is far more moderate than people realize.
Putin tries not to divide people into sectarian or ethnic lines, but rather to unite the entire country for the greater good of the whole.
Before we explain what this support of Muslim education means in the context of Russian culture, let us first listen to Putin’s words in full before immediately taking our favorite soundbites and appropriating him to justify our cause.
Putin spoke on the importance of education for young Muslim people, as there exist many harmful ideas which target them. Dangerous radical groups often seek to recruit new members among young people in the Muslim regions of Russia.
The Russian president realizes the truth applies here that education is paramount.
Far more effective than guns and tight border control, or the disastrous immigration policies we have seen in Europe, letting in murderers and rapists disguised as refugees, education is the key to turning young Muslim people into opponents of radical ideologies, rather than becoming radicalized by terrorists.
Education is preventative in nature. It is crucial to teach critical thinking skills which can actively prevent young people from supporting radical thought. Putin described this when meeting with Russian Muslim leaders in Kazan…
Putin also said that:
“Traditional Islam is an important part of Russia’s cultural code and that the Muslim community is, undoubtedly, a very important part of the Russian multinational population.”
Russian Muslims from the core Russian territories like Kazan (Tatarstan), Bashkortostan, Chuvashia, (as opposed to the more volatile Caucasus) are some of the most peaceful and well integrated [into a European society] Muslims in the world.
Cynics who imagine Muslims are all terrorists should realize that the idea of a terrorist attack in Kazan perpetrated by local Tatars (as opposed to terrorists from the Caucasus, or abroad) is almost unthinkable.
[There is also a minority Tatar group of Orthodox Christians, treated as a separate ethnic group in the census – Kj].
So why is it that a Muslim region of Russia can be quite peaceful, whereas there are around 3000 violent extremists in Sweden with Islamist ideology.
What is the difference between Muslims who have lived in Russia for centuries, and those from abroad?
The difference between how Russia successfully deals with and educates Muslims vs the western model reveals a critical failure of education from every level of society, particularly in two fields:
1) Very poor knowledge of one’s own European, Christian culture and history.
How can anyone begin to respect a foreign culture if they have zero understanding of their own culture and history?
2) Very poor knowledge of Islamic history, and Muslim cultures. Very poor experience dealing with ANY foreign culture.
Most westerners have a very poor understanding of foreign cultures. Even those who wish to welcome Muslims often know very little about them, their languages, their histories, and often confuse the religion for a race.
Comparing a shamanistic Tatar-Mongolian Muslim to a Saudi Arabian Sunni Muslim, to a most secular Azerbaijani is like comparing the English, Italians, and Russians. They have some basic religious and European roots, beyond which they are totally different.
— Ignorance of one’s Own Culture
It is surprising and sad how many Western Europeans have fallen victim to internationalist globalism, which disdains local culture.
It is simply not fashionable in Western Europe to be a patriot. One can talk about “European values” which allows Ukraine to tear itself apart, and Scandinavian women to fall victim to brutal sexual assaults, but it is considered almost extremist to be willing to defend one’s culture.
You may find more French young people who sing American pop songs, and read Japanese comics than those who would proudly sing la marseillaise or read Les Misérables.
In Russia, the situation is quite different. The entire country isn’t filled with Cossacks riding bears on every street constantly singing folk songs and screaming “Glory to Russia”.
Sadly, you can still find amongst some groups, lack of enthusiasm towards one’s own culture and history, but generally speaking, Russians are far more patriotic than western Europeans.
— How the West Approaches Foreign Cultures
The West’s general lack of self-consciousness often displays itself in two opposite ways:
1) A rabid, xenophobic, hatred of foreign cultures. Like all racist ideologies, it’s largely based on ignorance. These people are not unlike small dogs who bark and bite at strangers because they feel constantly threatened and insecure about themselves.
Perhaps if they studied their own history and culture, they would find something to be proud of. These people claim to be patriots, though xenophobic racist suits them better.
2) A naive, disingenuine professed love for all peoples, more the result of virtue signaling and a desire to fit in with the globalist elite and the PC crowd than a genuine understanding of another culture.
These people are like prey animals that simply lay down and cower when threatened, and they’re allowing violent extremists into Europe by the literal boatloads all for the sake of proving to the world how tolerant they are, even unto death. These people claim to be cosmopolitans, with a hatred for nationalism.
[And on micro-scale, this destructive Western xenophobia is playing out inside America with the ‘Northern’ (Judeo-neocon capitalist Establishment and liberal race-baiting) Marxist-Leninist assault on the American South and its authentic sub-culture and history and destruction of the South’s monumental memory dedicated to its heroes and symbols of the Confederacy. — Kj]
Russia has an entirely different approach.
— How Russia Approaches Foreign Cultures
Russian patriotism is one of the most unique and ancient in the world. Historian Egor Kholmogorov, a living legend amongst conservatives goes as far as to say Russia is the birthplace of patriotism, with the most primordial sense of continuous nationhood in Europe – and I agree.
Whether or not you agree with that statement, it is undeniable Russia approaches Patriotism different from the west.
This is how Vladimir Putin is able to be a devout Orthodox Christian, but support Muslim people in establishing schools for their children in Russia.
This is how Russia is able to shake hands with the Prime Minister of Israel in one moment, and in another, the President of Iran, receiving both with statesmanship and respect, even if Russia does not agree with either.
Russia, in fact, does not agree with one of those aforementioned “gentlemen”, more than the other, but I’ll leave our readers to guess who.
You’re all smart, you’ll figure it out.
Of all the worlds superpowers, only Russia could do such a thing, as meeting two diametrically opposed powers, while maintaining it’s own strong interests and national pride.
It is in this unique Russian mentality that reveals how Russia is able to reconcile itself, and Kholmogorov describes it perfectly:
“Russian national awareness evolved in a different way. It was not directed against a neighbor…Russian self-awareness was based on a positive patriotism, on love for one’s own land, people, culture, and ruler.
“The rejection of others expressed itself not in hatred but in a good-natured gibe similar to the manner in which The Lay of the Ruin describes the neighbors of Rus’.
The “foreign” becomes a threat only if it is injurious and harmful to Russian identity. It is menacing not as an external but as an internal threat, as demonstrated by the Time of Troubles.
— How Russia Approaches Muslim Cultures
That quote above is key to how Russia deals with Muslim cultures. Russians are able to be profoundly patriotic, but lacking the xenophobia and racism of western extremists like white nationalists and Neo-Nazis.
Russia approaches Muslims from a position of gentile strength, like it does all cultures. Russia says “This is not your land, this is Russian land, it is ours, but you are welcome to share it. In time…maybe you will become Russian”.
Russia will respect all foreign cultures, but always honor Russian Orthodox culture above all else, teaching foreigners how to integrate into Russian society rather than teaching Russians “cultural sensitivity” and forcing them to adapt to strangers.
American conservative Russophiles upset at finding a Spanish language option in their country may be surprised to know every republic in Russia with its own ethnic group has the right to use their own language on official papers together with Russian.
The difference is the strength of the Russian culture in society means indigenous people often choose to use Russian above all by their own accord.
Russian foreign policy is epitomized in the words of Saint Alexander Nevsky
“Those who come to us with the sword will die by the sword.”
His example of allying with the Mongols to fight the German Catholic knights is touted by Eurasianists and Western Nationalists alike as proof Russia choose to be an Asian culture, but this is false.
Saint Alexander preferred the Mongols because unlike the Teutonic Knights, who wanted Russia to convert to Catholicism, they simply wanted money, and did not pose a threat to the Russian culture.
Russia welcomes all peoples, but she will always defend her culture.
In the 16th century, Czar Ivan the Terrible famously defeated the Khanate of Kazan destroying the last great remanent of the Golden Horde.
His victory is depicted on one of the most famous Icons in the world “Blessed be the Hosts of the Heavenly Czar”
The icon depicts Ivan’s victory of Kazan as an army of Angles and Saints departing burning Sodom and Gomorrah towards a heavenly city.
Russians are not ashamed of this icon, even as Kazan is a major city in Russia. The idea of Russians apologizing to Tatars for conquering them hundreds of years ago is unthinkable. Russia abolished slavery amongst them, built their roads and cities.
For centuries they lived together, they defended Russia together, and Tatar children learn in Russian schools. It is thanks to this education that Tatar people were uplifted to space, joining the ranks of Russian cosmonauts.
This is Putin’s strategy, when he spoke to Kazan people about the need for Muslim education. Like it or hate it, the reality is Muslims have lived in Russia for hundreds of years…they’re part of the country.
Putin refused to take the xenophobic approach which empowers the rhetoric of extremists, nor does he let radical Islam pose a threat to Russia.
While the idea of radical Islam is Kazan is mostly unthinkable – the people there are heavily Russified and almost totally assimilated, more prone to agnosticism than devout Islam, the threat in the Caucasus is very real.
Unlike the more core Muslim regions in Russia like Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, where most of the population is Russian or mixed, the Caucasus were incorporated into Russia later in history, and lacked the centuries of Russian integration and education that pacified the Tatars.
Putin’s leadership proves that Russia will take a proactive role in educating young Muslims to be loyal Russian citizens.
It further demonstrates that the world should look to Russia to see a successful healthy interaction with Muslims rather than the “tolerant” west, as described in the RT report:
Among other things, the Russian Muslim organizations stage the annual International Muslim Forum, which brings together Muslim leaders from Europe and elsewhere.
“They hear us; they see how we develop; how good the relations of the Russian Muslims with the country’s authorities are and how we are being supported by our president,” Russian Grand Mufti Ravil Gainutdin said.
According to Gainutdin, Russian Muslims are “a sort of a ‘soft power’ in promoting our model of development of civil society… I recently accepted the US ambassador, then his counterpart from Spain.
“We’re not politicians and diplomats, but we have our own people’s diplomacy – we talk to them, turning them to our side.”
Putin’s words and actions have touched the hearts of Russia’s Muslims in a real way. Just listen to how the Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov supports Putin:
“These are not just words, Vladimir Putin has constantly proven that he is fulfilling his promises.
“While the United States and their allies are bringing wars and destruction to the Muslim world, Russia is consistently defending the interests of the Islamic nations and peoples,” the Chechen leader wrote.
In his message, Kadyrov also drew attention to a more recent statement by the Russian president.
Last Wednesday, Putin met with representatives of Muslim clergy in the city of Kazan, and said that Russian authorities would support Islamic education through major state universities and other means.
Kadyrov supported Putin’s stance on the issue:
“In Chechnya alone there are two Islamic universities, six Hafiz schools [dedicated schools for studying and memorizing the Quran] and dozens of Madrasas. For this, we are sincerely grateful to Vladimir Vladimirovich.
“But all rights are tied to responsibilities, and I am convinced that Muslims must actively counter the destructive and anti-Islamic movements such as Wahhabism.
“Conciliatory positions never lead to anything good, and we will always adhere to our position that we must never allow Wahhabism to rear its head in any of the Russian regions,” the Chechen leader wrote.
Putin faced the issues head-on, standing firm to his beliefs, but offering a genuine partnership with Russia’s Muslims.
As a result of his patronage and support, they have proven loyal to Russia, and many are fighting in the Russian armed forces against Islamic terrorists in Syria and abroad.
In conclusion, Putin’s policy on Islam, and the success of the Russian model as opposed to western one can be revealed in the microcosm of Chechnya compared to countries in which the west intervened.
The picture above is Grozny, the Chechen capital during the war, not a building was left standing.
Indeed, Russia razed it to the ground. The difference…
— Russia Rebuilt Grozny
Grozny has been rebuilt into a beautiful, modern city, thanks to cooperation between Russians and Chechens.
Russia assumed full responsibility for Chechnya.
Russia didn’t simply bomb it into the stone age and say “Okay, here’s your new democracy. Enjoy! Oh, and do sell us your oil and or natural reserves! No hard feelings for the war…right?”
To do that would simply create a breeding center for terrorism within Russia.
Russia rebuilt the city, taking an active role in the construction of not only infrastructure, by civil society.
When Chechens see beautiful squares, clean roads, and tall blue skyscrapers, they know who to thank.
The situation in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, etc is…well…
We may as well add Ukraine to the list. Russia didn’t invade Ukraine, but Ukrainian nationalists should maybe…just maybe wish she did…if the pattern continues, Ukraine would be rebuilt by now.
The reality speaks for itself.
The West only knows how to destroy, be destroyed (mostly by itself), whereas Russia knows how to educate and built real cities and communities for the national unity of the Motherland.
http://russiafeed.com/putins-support-of-moderate-muslim-education-reveals-difference-between-russia-and-the-west/
Paul Craig Roberts: In the Western World Lies Have Displaced Truth
In the Western World Lies Have Displaced Truth
Paul Craig Roberts
Last year I was awarded Marquiss Who’s Who In America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. This did not prevent a hidden organization, PropOrNot, from attempting to brand me and my website along with 200 others “Putin stooges or agents” for our refusal to lie for the corrupt, anti-American, anti-constitutional, anti-democratic, warmonger police state interests that rule the Western World.
The only honest, factual media that exists in the Western World today are the names on the PropOrNot list of “Putin agents.”
The purpose of ProOrNot is to convince Americans that freedom of speech must be halted by destroying fact-based Internet media, such as this website and 200 others that provide factual information at odds with Big Brother’s universal brainwashing as delivered by CNN, NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the rest of the utterly corrupt presstitute media, a collection of scum devoid of all integrity and all respect for truth.
A conspiracy of US government agencies, tax-exempt think tanks funded by the ruling interests, and media acting in behalf of a war and police state agenda work to shape perceived reality as it is described in George Orwell’s book, 1984, and in the film, The Matrix.
Controlled perception-based reality is only a Facebook “like” away from killing one person or one million or elevating a liar or the warmonger responsible for the killing to hero status or to the control of the CIA or FBI or the US presidency.
Here on OpEdNews is an article by George Eliason that reports on who exactly PropOrNot is and who is underwriting the disinformation that is PropOrNot.
https://www.opednews.com/populum/printer_friendly.php?content=a&id=219560
Eliason’s article is long and documented. It demonstrates the organized conspiracy against truth that exists in the Western World. Nothing stated in the Western presstitute media and no statement by any Western government or subservient vassal state can be trusted to comply with the facts.
Truth is the enemy of the state, and the state is eliminating the truth.
Peoples in the United States, Europe, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the various vassal states, such as Japan, all live day in, day out, an orchestrated lie that serves interests directly opposed to the interests of the peoples.
Governments that do not rest on truth rest on tyranny.
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/01/28/western-world-lies-displaced-truth/
Hit piece against Charles Bausman and Russia Insider in Israel Haretz today
You have to suscribe to the site if you want to get the full article
Thank you, O LORD, that Hildebeast Clinton won’t be giving this year’s State of the Union Address tomorrow.
Amen.
It would have been worse under her assumption of war powers as the first womanoid feminist war president, but things aren’t improving right now either since Trump delegated all authority for military foreign policy to the Pentagon.
In fact, the world of the US of Israel’s sphere of belligerent operations in foreign countries is only ever-expanding.
One year ago today, an innocent girl, 8-year old American-Yemeni citizen, Nawar al-Awlaki (Nora) was murdered in Yemen by a US Seal Team during a botched operation under Commander-in-Chief Trump’s command.
Nora joined her innocent 16-year old American brother killed by a CIA drone strike 6 years ago.
80% of Yemenis are in desperate need of humanitarian aid, thanks to the US-backed Saudi Arab-Hadi alliance’s war on the Houthi resistance in the Yemen civil war.
Here’s a look at the war’s staggering toll in numbers:
— More than 10,000 people killed, 50,000 wounded and 2 million displaced due to the war, according to the U.N.
— More than 50,000 children are believed to have died in Yemen in 2017, according to Save the Children.
— More than 22 million people, including 11 million children, are in need of humanitarian assistance, according to U.N. officials and the International Committee of the Red Cross
— More than 8 million people are totally dependent on food assistance and considered a “step away from famine”, according to the U.N.
— An estimated 17.8 million Yemenis are considered “food insecure,” meaning they do not know where their next meal will come from, according to the U.N.
— More than 400,000 children are suffering from acute malnutrition, according to the World Food Program
— Some 15.7 million Yemenis lack access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation services, according to the ICRC
— Some 16.4 million Yemenis lack access to adequate health care, according to the U.N.
— Another 24.3 million lack access to public electricity, according to the ICRC
— Yemen, a country of 27 million people, imports about 90 percent of its staple food and nearly all of its fuel and medicine, according to the U.N.
— Since the start of the war, Human Rights Watch has documented 87 apparently unlawful attacks by the Saudi-led coalition, some of which may amount to war crimes, killing nearly 1,000 civilians and hitting homes, markets, hospitals, schools, and mosques.
— The price of petrol, diesel and cooking gas increased in December by more than 200 percent from its pre-war cost, according to the World Food Program.
— There were more than 1 million suspected cholera cases reported last year and more than 2,230 associated deaths, according to the World Health Organization
— As of late December, there were 381 suspected diphtheria cases in Yemen and 38 associated deaths, nearly all of them children under 15, according to the World Health Organization.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2018/01/22/yemen-worlds-worst-humanitarian-crisis-in-numbers.html
“The reality speaks for itself. The West only knows how to destroy, and how to destroy itself…”
Be awake.
5 days ago, Lasha Darkmoon’s website was deleted.
https://www.darkmoon.me
Yesterday, Yukon Jack’s website was deleted.
https://problemwithchristians.wordpress.com/
Today, the Daily Stormer was deleted from the internet
https://dailystormer.red
At this point, the Jews want to completely erase people from the internet.
Websites are getting deleted. They own the registrar.
They are doing this gradually, one website at a time, so people are not aware what is happening.
Who will be next?
We are literally about 10-20 websites away deleting all the important information on the JQ.
Dear RJN family,
Here’s the Haaretz subscription hit piece that Desert mentions (TY Desert!):
Opinion: Fash the Nation, Russia Style: How pro-Kremlin Trolls Use Hardcore anti-Semitism to Ally With America’s Far Right
Pro-Putin website Russia Insider’s sudden conversion to full-on neo-Nazi anti-Jewish hatred quietly aids Moscow’s covert influence campaign in the U.S.
Anton Shekhovtsov Jan 29, 2018 8:33 PM
On the 15th of January, the previously little known website, Russia Insider, published a 5000-word long manifesto authored by the website’s editor Charles Bausman, in which he demanded the world in general, and Russia in particular, “Drop the Jew taboo,” stating that it was high time to start assertively addressing the “pernicious influence” of the “Jewish elites.”
The manifesto alleged “Jewish pressure groups” were in no small degree responsible for various sins, ranging from current sex scandals to most of the deadly turmoil in the world over the last 30 years. And, since Russia Insider’s contents mostly concern Russia, Bausman claimed that “the unreasonable hostility towards Putin’s Russia [was] very much a Jewish phenomenon.”
He also invited potential authors to submit (unpaid) articles dealing with the “Jewish problem” and even introduced a new category on the website, ‘The Jewish Question’, echoing the Nazi, and contemporary neo-Nazi, language of genocide: the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”
The manifesto was a surprise for two reasons.
The first reason is technical: Charles Bausman has never authored lengthy pieces such as this, therefore – with his “It’s Time to Drop the Jew Taboo” – he really put in a lot of effort. Russia Insider itself is hardly known for its original journalism, as most of its contents is copy-pasted or translated from other websites. The overwhelming majority of Bausman’s own contributions to the website are usually blog-like entries rather than proper op-eds. This means that the manifesto was quite important for Bausman.
The second reason is that Bausman’s piece was a radical departure from the previous articles published by the website.
Not that Russia Insider, which was launched in September 2014, did not publish anti-Semitic texts before – it did, and they were retroactively added to the new category “The Jewish Question” – but none of the pieces demonstrated such straightforward and “unreformed” anti-Semitism.
It is no secret that modern anti-Semites – if they are not blatantly neo-Nazis – prefer to use terms like “New World Order,” “international finance” or “global elites” to attack the Jews, but Bausman’s manifesto rejected these euphemisms directly and was written in blunt tones about the “Jewish problem.”
Doubtlessly, by publishing his anti-Semitic manifesto, Bausman has presented a challenge to his own operation. According to the website, the means of its sustenance come from crowdfunding, and Bausman has been actively campaigning since 2014 to raise funds for The Russian Insider. (The website itself claims that it has been donated around US $ 300,000 since 2014.)
And Bausman himself admitted that, since the website depended on reader contributions, the anti-Semitic publication might repel the audience and “curtail donations from some.”
Moreover, RT, which used to quote Bausman and invite him to their shows, and which was one of the main sources of Russia Insider’s copy-pasting technique, has now distanced itself from him by saying that it “categorically and unequivocally [condemned] the disgusting hate speech promoted by the recent Russia Insider article.”
Why, then, did Bausman start his crusade against the “Jewish elites”? A possible explanation is that Bausman is a very recent convert to flagrant anti-Semitism.
As he himself writes, when he started the website, he “knew relatively little about Jewish influence,” but “after three years of immersing [himself] in political analysis and media criticism,” he had his eureka moment.
An important observation supports this explanation. Russia Insider was originally launched to attack Ukraine after its former pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych was ousted and fled to Russia, by accusing the new Ukrainian authorities of fascism and anti-Semitism. Therefore the website at that time did not profess anti-Semitism, quite the opposite: it portrayed the Jews as allegedly potential victims of the new Ukrainian government, which Russia Insider opposed, following the Kremlin’s line.
If this explanation is correct, then Bausman’s anti-Semitic manifesto is a result of a process of radicalization that may have two main sources.
The first is the rise of the American far right inspired by the growing growth of the popularity of Donald Trump. The second is how anti-Semitism is becoming mainstream in particular circles around the Russian Orthodox Church.
It was the rise of the American far right, which manifested itself largely through the growing online visibility of the resources such as Breitbart News, Alt Right, Fash the Nation, The Daily Stormer and some others, that greatly reinforced the anti-Semitic element of the right-wing “alternative media” and made it more pronounced.
The analysis of the contents of Russia Insider, which admits its affiliation with “alternative media,” shows that it gradually transformed from a pro-Kremlin and Ukraine-bashing website to a pro-Kremlin far-right resource not unlike the U.S.-based Alt Right or Fash the Nation. This transformation was specifically gradual: it did not happen overnight.
Bausman’s proximity to the ultra-nationalist Russian Orthodox circles should also be taken into account.
Bausman, who was born in Germany and studied in the U.S., has been living in Moscow on and off since the 1990s, and it was in Russia where Bausman converted to the Orthodox faith. Around 2014, he made contact with Aleksey Komov, the official Russian representative of the international “pro-family” association, the World Congress of Families, and the head of the international department of Patriarch’s Commission on the Family Issues created by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Komov is also closely related to the Russian Orthodox ultranationalist oligarch Konstantin Malofeev who, in September 2014, co-chaired a meeting of the World Congress of Families in Moscow. The meeting was crowned by an exclusive gala-dinner, and Komov and Malofeev invited Bausman to join it.
In October that year, as leaked communications showed, Bausman turned to Malofeev via his contact with Komov and asked for funding for Russia Insider. Malofeev’s press service would later claim that he never sponsored Russia Insider.
In several instances, Bausman’s manifesto echoes narratives widely shared in ultranationalist Russian Orthodox circles.
For example, Komov believes that “Communism was imposed on Russia by the international professional forces of evil” who were helped by the Jewish Bolshevik Leon Trotsky and the bankers from the Wall Street. In his manifesto, Bausman writes there are grounds to believe that the Russian Revolution was “a Jewish coup d’etat, financed by wealthy bankers in New York and London,” and notes that “much of the Bolshevik leadership was Jewish” and singles out Trotsky as an example.
When Bausman attended the gala-dinner in September 2014, he might have become acquainted with Father Tikhon (Georgiy Shevkunov), who was also invited to the dinner by Malofeev.
Just a few months ago, in November 2017, Tikhon moderated a Russian Orthodox conference that discussed the murder of the Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his family. According to Tikhon, the Tsar was a victim of the “ritual murder” carried out by the Bolsheviks – a poorly-disguised Russian version of the anti-Semitic “blood libel.”
Bausman does not reproduce this particular narrative in his manifesto, but argues that after the revolution, the Bolsheviks tortured Orthodox priests and subjected them to ritual murder.
Bausman’s anti-Semitic inspirations do not necessarily come directly from either Komov or Tikhon: again, these ideas are common for a wider ultra-nationalist Orthodox milieu. But it is viable to suggest that much of Bausman’s relatively newly discovered anti-Semitism originates exactly in these circles.
Another important question about Bausman’s manifesto is who the targeted audience of The Russia Insider’s decided anti-Semitic turn is. The statistics provided by Alexa show that most of the website’s audience is based in the U.S. Considering that the website is primarily a pro-Kremlin resource, it seems that Bausman’s goal is to use anti-Semitism to reinforce the already existing pro-Kremlin sentiments within the American far right.
Bausman’s move is already getting traction among the targeted audience ranging from neo-Nazi Richard Spencer to right-wing libertarian Lew Rockwell. Russia Insider may have lost some of its more moderate readership, but it appears not only to be winning the extremists’ hearts and minds, but also contributing to the strengthening of their anti-Semitism.
At the same time, Bausman’s manifesto will unlikely find any public support outside the American and Russian far-right circles. The Russian media loyal to the Kremlin, as well as official Moscow, which poses as an anti-fascist state in the international arena, will distance themselves from Russia Insider.
However, while hardly sanctioned by the Kremlin, Bausman’s move is still useful for Moscow’s covert influence in the U.S. The more extreme the growing American far-right scene is, the more it contributes to the already troubling polarization of the American society.
That, they might be hoping, will turn it more inward-looking, and less engaged in the international fight against authoritarianism and kleptocracy.
(Subscription wall): https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-pro-putin-trolls-court-u-s-alt-right-with-hardcore-anti-semitism-1.5770080
~~~*~~~
What a clown. Mr Very Important Ukrainian-Atlantacist Anti-fascist Big Shot and Euromaidan Ideologue Anton Shekhovtsov is Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (Austria) – Research Associate at the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation (Ukraine) – and General Editor of the “Explorations of the Far Right” series at ibidem-Verlag (Germany).
His most recent book is “Russia and the Western Far Right: Tango Noir” (Routledge, 2018).
For being such a liberal “Antifa” fellow with a certain shared Ukrainian nationalist’s visceral dislike of Russians, who paints virtually every conservative and nationalist part of the spectrum with the same paintbrusch as “fascists,” he sure takes it easy on the murderous neo-Banderites of Euromaiden and ultra-nationalists coup overthrowing the duly elected Yanukovych government and their subsequent war against the Donbass people.
His hatred of the Orthodox Church, especially the ROC – Moscow Patriarchate, unless its the nationalist, uncanonical, schismatic Ukrainian ‘Orthodox’ Church of Kiev, is also very apparent in his Haaretz opinion piece.
I can’t confirm that he’s a Jew. He’s definitely a Ukrainian, and perhaps even a Ukrainian-Israeli or something.
http://euromaidanpress.com/2017/10/15/the-black-hundreds-of-1917-have-returned-to-russia-euromaidan-press/
Shekhovtsov the fascist-hunter was hounding Russian Orthodoxy, Russia Insider and Charles Bausman back in 2015:
Ukrainian Policy: Is Russia Insider sponsored by a Russian oligarch with the ties to the European far right?
http://ukrainianpolicy.com/author/antonshekhovtsov/
Dear David,
You wrote: I pointedly ask Russians, “Why are you indifferent to Lenin and the Revolution when he and his cronies murdered tens of thousands, if not millions, of Orthodox Christians?”
Here is what I want to share: Russians might gain a better comprehension of their own history if they read the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (the rest of the world, too, I might add)…”
Answer: There are entire associations in Russia devoted to Aleskander Solzhenitsyn, his books, political thought and writings, and have been since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
All of his books are published in Russian, up to and including his banned in the US “Two Hundred Years Together,” his essay on the comprehensive history of Jews in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and modern Russia between the years 1795 and 1995.
Russians are not uniform in their opinions and political partisanship, which ranges from left to right.
The Russian Federation is twice the size of the US with about half the population, which are grouped into 150-160 different ethnic groups, still living largely on ancestral and historial territories. 74% of the population is urban, 26% rural.
Russia’s population density is 8.4 people per square kilometre (22 per square mile), making it one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world.
The population is most dense in the European part of the country, with milder climate, centering on Moscow and Saint Petersburg. 74% of the population is urban, making Russia a highly urbanized country.
Like here in America, at least 50% of the Russian people simply remain uninvolved in politics or any national debates.
Moreover, more than a “generation gap” like we have here in largely bi-partisan America, which is still politically continuous without great disruption of government into different forms, the Russian people today are largely stratified by age into very different, but overlapping “generational cohort” types:
Oldest: Soviet Era who when the USSR collapsed, most Russians had lived their entire lives in a quintessentially authoritarian culture; many are still alive today from the Great Patriotic War.
Putin was born 7 years after the end of WWII in Leningrad (now St Petersburg), and grew up in the aftermath and reconstuction of the city after the 900-day seige and bombardment by the German blockade.
Transitional/Westernizer pro-Democrats/capitalists of the Clintonian 1990s and the Harvard Jew Boy “shock doctrine” corrupt privatization schemes which resulted in the rape and looting of Russia, wide-spread impoverishment, unemployment, and misery, and quite possibly according to their demographers, the deaths of 7 million from starvation and various health problems, because the the medical system all but collapsed.
This Clintonian era saw the rise of the Oligarchs, their clans, extremely brutal “tax reforms,” the kick-starting of private commercial banking, and organized crime on a national and international scale which in fact acted as the defacto Shadow Government which kept the machinery of government and politics more or less oiled and from falling apart.
If the average Russian had to pay 110% of their small business gross income to the government according to insane tax regulations, it was cheaper under the Oligarch “shadow government” to pay them “taxes” of 30% of business income.
Then we get into the Putin era, and his New Russia Orthodox revival, national economic, banking, cultural, and strategic vision, organized crime fighting, and multi-lateral reforms which not only have had to deal with the cosmetics of a Western capitalist veneer over a corrupt organized crime veneer, but also over a corrupt Soviet veneer which overlay an endemic institutional corruption stemming back to the Bolshevik Revolution which overthrew or never completed any partial reforms started in the very late imperial era.
In the 90s, the Orthodox Church began to find itself coming back into national life on the waves of Christian revival which began emerging as movements in the 1970s and 1980s, especially towards the end when the USSR finally collapsed. Orthodoxy began to grow, then Putin became president, and his vision for New Russia was the restoration of Orthodoxy as the pinnacle and foundation of Russian civilization, culture and identity.
There is, in fact, a range of opinions, positions and public debate on a variety of topics inside Russia particularly about national identity, ranging from whether to bury Lenin or not,
We Americans should mind our own business about Russia’s own ongoing national dialogs and debates because we have a lot to attend to ourselves, and don’t do it. We should probably start with our own deep rooted issues of being Pharisees, “blind guides,” “fools,” etc.
~~~*~~~
Here in America, we should be more interested in why Harvard University booed Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Commencement Address back in 1978, which has turned out to be highly prophetic and more than ever relevant today.
Harvard Magazine:
IN 1974, the Soviet Union deported dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Litt.D. ’78, author of The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in literature.
After living in Cologne, Germany; Zurich, Switzerland; and at Stanford University, he settled in Cavendish, Vermont, in 1976. Two years later, Harvard awarded the 59-year-old Solzhenitsyn an honorary doctor of letters degree and chose him as its Commencement speaker.
His address on June 8, 1978, was Solzhenitsyn’s first public statement since his arrival in the United States.
Given the suffering he had endured in the Soviet Union, many in the audience expected that the writer’s address would be a stern rebuke to Communist totalitarianism, combined with a paean to Western liberty and democracy.
The Tercentenary Theatre audience was in for a rude surprise. “The Exhausted West,” delivered in Russian with English translation under overcast skies, chastised the arrogance and smugness of Western materialist culture and exposed the adverse effects of some of those achievements that Western democracies had long prided themselves upon.
“The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals,” the author declared, for example.
“It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.”
Solzhenitsyn’s brilliant, iconoclastic speech ranks among the most thoughtful, articulate, and challenging addresses ever delivered at a Harvard Commencement.
https://harvardmagazine.com/2011/04/greatest-hits-solzhenitsyn
Solzhenitsyn’s entire priceless and precious Commencement Address was translated from Russian and published in Harvard Magazine found here in PDF:
THE EXHAUSTED WEST
The author of The Gulag Archipelago charges the Western world
with losing its courage and spiritual direction.
Highlights (this was in 1978!):
“Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror.
Life organized legalistically has shown its inability to defend Itself against the corrosion of evil.”
“Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.
“Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary.”
“Western thinking has become conservative: the world situation should stay as it is at any cost; there should be no changes. This debilitating dream of a status quo is the symptom of a society that has come to the end of its
development.”
https://harvardmagazine.com/sites/default/files/1978_Alexander_Solzhenitsyn.pdf
~~~*~~~
Orthodoxy Today: “A World Split Apart — Commencement Address Delivered At Harvard University, June 8, 1978”
Excerpt (same Solzhenitsyn speech):
We now see that the conquests proved to be short lived and precarious (and this, in turn, points to defects in the Western view of the world which led to these conquests).
Relations with the former colonial world now have switched to the opposite extreme and the Western world often exhibits an excess of obsequiousness, but it is difficult yet to estimate the size of the bill which former colonial countries will present to the West and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but of everything it owns, will be sufficient for the West to clear this account.
But the persisting blindness of superiority continues to hold the belief that all the vast regions of our planet should develop and mature to the level of contemporary Western systems, the best in theory and the most attractive in practice;
that all those other worlds are but temporarily prevented (by wicked leaders or by severe crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from pursuing Western pluralistic democracy and adopting the Western way of life.
Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in that direction. But in fact such a conception is a fruit of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, a result of mistakenly measuring them all with a Western yardstick.
The real picture of our planet’s development bears little resemblance to all this.
The anguish of a divided world gave birth to the theory of convergence between the leading Western countries and the Soviet Union.
It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these worlds are not evolving toward each other and that neither one can be transformed into the other without violence. Besides, convergence inevitably means acceptance of the other side’s defects, too. and this can hardly suit anyone.
If I were today addressing an audience in my country, in my examination of the overall pattern of the world’s rifts I would have concentrated on the calamities of the East. But since my forced exile in the West has now lasted four years and since my audience is a Western one, I think it may be of greater interest to concentrate on certain aspects of the contemporary West, such as I see them.
A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today.
The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations.
Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.
There are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.
Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice.
And the decline in courage, at times attaining what could be termed a lack of manhood, is ironically emphasized by occasional outbursts and inflexibility on the part of those same functionaries when dealing with weak governments and with countries that lack support, or with doomed currents which clearly cannot offer resistance.
But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.
Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?
…
There is yet another surprise for someone coming from the totalitarian East with its rigorously unified press: One discovers a common trend of preferences within the Western press as a whole (the spirit of the time), generally accepted patterns of judgment, and maybe common corporate interests, the sum effect being not competition but unification.
Unrestrained freedom exists for the press, but not for readership, because newspapers mostly transmit in a forceful and emphatic way those opinions which do not too openly contradict their own and that general trend.
Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges.
Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad.
There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block dangerous herd development.
In America, I have received letters from highly intelligent persons — maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but the country cannot hear him because the media will not provide him with a forum.
This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, to a blindness which is perilous in our dynamic era.
An example is the self-deluding interpretation of the state of affairs in the contemporary world that functions as a sort of petrified armor around people’s minds, to such a degree that human voices from seventeen countries of Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia cannot pierce it.
It will be broken only by the inexorable crowbar of events.
I have mentioned a few traits of Western life which surprise and shock a new arrival to this world.
The purpose and scope of this speech will not allow me to continue such a survey, in particular to look into the impact of these characteristics on important aspects of a nation’s life, such as elementary education, advanced education in the humanities, and art.
It is almost universally recognized that the West shows all the world the way to successful economic development, even though in past years it has been sharply offset by chaotic inflation.
However, many people living in the West are dissatisfied with their own society.
They despise it or accuse it of no longer being up to the level of maturity by mankind. And this causes many to sway toward socialism, which is a false and dangerous current.
I hope that no one present will suspect me of expressing my partial criticism of the Western system in order to suggest socialism as an alternative. No; with the experience of a country where socialism has been realized, I shall not speak for such an alternative.
The mathematician Igor Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has written a brilliantly argued book entitled Socialism; this is a penetrating historical analysis demonstrating that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.
Shafarevich’s book was published in France almost two years ago and so far no one has been found to refute it. It will shortly be published in English in the U.S.
But should I be asked, instead, whether I would propose the West, such as it is today, as a model to my country, I would frankly have to answer negatively.
No, I could not recommend your society as an ideal for the transformation of ours.
Through deep suffering, people in our own country have now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive.
Even those characteristics of your life which I have just enumerated are extremely saddening.
A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human personality in the West while in the East it has become firmer and stronger.
Six decades for our people and three decades for the people of Eastern Europe; during that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience.
The complex and deadly crush of life has produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting personalities than those generated by standardized Western well-being.
Therefore, if our society were to be transformed into yours, it would mean an improvement in certain aspects, but also a change for the worse on some particularly significant points.
Of course, a society cannot remain in an abyss of lawlessness, as is the case in our country. But it is also demeaning for it to stay on such a soulless and smooth plane of legalism, as is the case in yours.
After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.
All this is visible to numerous observers from all the worlds of our planet. The Western way of life is less and less likely to become the leading model.
There are telltale symptoms by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, a decline of the arts or a lack of great statesmen.
Indeed, sometimes the warnings are quite explicit and concrete. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc.
The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.
But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started.
The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive. You can feel their pressure, yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses.
What is the joy about?
Much more: http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/SolzhenitsynHarvard.php
~~~*~~~
I was 26 when Solzhenitsyn spoke at Harvard — pre-Smartphone. In fact, pre-Internet.
I’m 66 now. America’s spiritual, moral, social, and cultural condition has become far, far worse since then.
“God can only be patient for so long”!
It’s one of the most enlightening lines of this millennium.
@KathJuliane
There’s no moderate religion. The Wahhabi Al Saud hijacked the Islam and turned it pure evil.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m8FW9s8Jsg
Whooza Joo?
Studies confirm that Askenazi Jews, particularly Askenazi women, are largely European. Oy gevalt!
https://www.livescience.com/40247-ashkenazi-jews-have-european-genes.html
Englishman,
Catholics aren’t the only ones who fast. And sure you can fast in penance, as did the Ninevites at the preaching of Jonah; but you can also fast on behalf of others. Jesus confirmed it when he told the disciples, “Howbeit, this kind goeth not out but by prayer *and fasting*.”
The disciples were undoubtedly a prayerful lot. So, while prayers are good… prayers and fasting are better still.” However, one’s fasting needs to be be accompanied by dedicated prayers to be efficacious; or so it seems to me. So, I recommend it.
One needn’t fast for forty days, just give up a meal, a beer, meat, dessert or something on a scheduled basis and offer it up for someone else’s benefit.
Well, Brother Nate, looks like I’m the only one here who’s gonna be dedicating a day of prayer and fasting towards your ministry – but there it is.
KathJuliane,
I’m honored. You’re quite the scholar. 🙂
Medusa Project: ‘It’s like the Americans just copied the phonebook’
Russian officials respond to the U.S. government’s new ‘Kremlin list’
On January 29, the U.S. Treasury Department published its “Kremlin List” of senior political figures, oligarchs, and “parastatal entities” in Russia.
The “detailed report,” which was required by the 2017 “Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act,” was written in consultation with the National Intelligence director and the head of the State Department.
The list names 114 high-ranking state officials and 96 so-called oligarchs in Russia.
Treasury officials listed virtually every member of the presidential cabinet, every official in the presidential administration, the head of every state corporation, and nearly every major entrepreneur.
Meduza collects some of the first reactions from Russian officials appearing in the news and on social media.
Konstantin Kosachev
Head of the Federation Council’s Committee on Foreign Affairs
A first glance at the “American list” delivered yesterday by the Treasury Department to the Congress creates the impression (at least in the “political” appendix) that the U.S. intelligence agencies — desperate to find that promised and (most importantly) provable kompromat on Russian politicians — simply copied the Kremlin’s phonebook.
Without exception, everyone “on the list” is head of some Russian state agency.
This issue is serious and it’s not going anywhere. Political paranoia, as we know, is very difficult to treat — especially when the patient doesn’t recognize the illness and refuses treatment.
(Quote from Kosachev’s Facebook page)
Mikhail Fedotov
Head of the Presidential Council on Human Rights
(#26 on the U.S. Treasury’s list)
My name was already in “firing squad lists” in 1991 and 1993, and now I’ve landed on this list, too.
Here’s my question: what was the point of including people on this list? It’s not hard to draw up a list of the president’s advisors; you only need to glance at the administration’s website to find a list of all advisors and aides.
As I understand it, the only thing that might happen now is that American diplomats might not say hello or shake hands, when meeting me at diplomatic receptions.
But these are polite people and I don’t expect they’ll do that.
(Quote from RIA Novosti)
Sergey Sobyanin
Mayor of Moscow
(#85 on the U.S. Treasury’s list)
They carefully added the country’s entire political and economic elite to the “Kremlin report,” so it would have been strange if they hadn’t included the mayor of the capital.
The West has always disliked Russia, but even in the very worst times throughout history nobody ever dreamt up a list like this.
Such measures will unite us, not divide us, leading to results that are the opposite of what this list’s authors wanted.
(Quote from Vkontakte)
Vladimir Putin
Russian president
(Not named on the U.S. Treasury’s list)
The “Kremlin list” is an unfriendly act that complicates relations between Russia and the U.S. and damages international relations in general.
There are ordinary Russians behind everyone on this document, which means they’ve effectively listed the country’s entire population. For now, Russia will refrain from retaliatory measures.
We should tend to our own affairs, and then the realization will come that there’s no sense in drawing up lists and threatening and frightening. Russia should be guided by the old rule: “The dog barks, but the caravan rolls on.”
(Quote from Interfax)
Much more: https://meduza.io/en/feature/2018/01/30/it-s-like-the-americans-just-copied-the-phonebook
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The idiocracy of the United States of Israel is growing more pathetic by the day, and the White House hilariously reveals itself to be nothing more than a den of viperous boors.
P.S. I read Medusa.io because they are pro-Russian but are not especially pro-Kremlin.
Sometimes oppositional, even slightly irreverent, they draw from across the socio-cultural spectrum, reports oddball stuff and does some muckraking.
They always have something interesting to say about political and ordinary life in Russia beyond Jewmerica’s view of the Rodina as seen through capped binoculars.
How to win friends and influence people.
They were taking names after the UN vote too.
I guess that leaves just one nation not on the USA terrorist list — Israel.
Ironically the only two nations which are terrorists, have now declared war against the world — including themselves — because that’s what they do.
Ron Paul Liberty Report: The Real State Of The Union
President Trump will deliver his State of the Union speech tonight. No doubt there will be plenty of “good news” about his first full year in office.
But today’s Liberty Report will dig a bit deeper.
What is the real state of the union? Tune in!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3lneiaEwAY&feature=em-lss
Dr. Paul and McAdams will be doing some tweeting during the State of the Union address.
1600 Syrians attended the Sochi Congress in Russia:
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Sochi Congress Final Statement Affirms Full Commitment To Syria’s Territorial Integrity
Participants in the Syrian National Dialogue Congress of Sochi stressed full commitment to the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of Syria.
The final statement of the congress, which was approved after discussing and voting each article of it stated “we, the participants in the Syrian National Congress, representing all spectrums of the Syrian society and its political, civil and ethnic, religious and social groups, have gathered upon an invitation of the Russian Federation in Sochi to put an end to seven years of our people’s suffering through reaching a common understanding about the need to save the country from the armed confrontation, the social and economic devastation, and providing the fundamental rights and freedoms for all its citizens, foremost of which is the right of safe and free life without violence or terrorism.
“The only way to reach this goal is the political settlement to the challenges facing our country,” the statement said.
It affirmed respect and full commitment to the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of Syria.
“No part of the national territory would be abandoned.
“The Syrian people remain committed to the restoration of the Occupied Golan by all legal means in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the international law,” the statement said.
It added that Syria is fully committed to the national sovereignty of its land and that Syria should restore its full role at the international arena and in the region, including its role as part of the Arab world in accordance with the UN Charter and its objectives and principles.
The statement went on to say that only the Syrian people have the right to decide the future of their own country through democratic means and through the ballot boxes and they have the exclusive right to choose their political, economic and social system without any pressure or external intervention and in accordance with Syria’s duties and international rights on the international arena.
It affirmed that Syria is a democratic, (non-sectarian) state based on political pluralism and equal citizenship, protection of the rule of law, separation of powers, independence of the judiciary, full equality among all citizens and preserving public freedoms.
“The government is committed to national unity, social peace and comprehensive and balanced development with fair representation at the local administration level,” the statement said.
“Boosting the work of governmental and public institutions, protecting the infrastructure of private properties and society, and providing public services to all citizens in accordance with the high standards of management and gender equality,” the statement said.
“Preserving the Army and the Armed Forces that perform their duties in accordance with the constitution, including protecting the borders and the Syrian citizens from external threats, as well as combating terrorism wherever it is found,” the statement read.
The statement affirmed full rejection of all forms of terrorism, fanaticism, extremism and religious discrimination, and commitment to combating them effectively.
“All respect for the Syrian society, its national identity, its history and its rich values to which all the religions, civilizations and traditions have contributed to, including coexistence among the various spectrum of the Syrian society and preserving the national cultural heritage with all its aspects,” the statement said.
It called for combating and eradicating poverty, supporting the elderly and other vulnerable groups, including people with disabilities, orphans and war victims in addition to providing security and shelter to all refugees and displaced as well as protecting their rights in returning home voluntary.
“We, as representatives of the Syrian people, who suffered terrible endurance and were courageous enough to fight international terrorism, announce our determination to restore prosperity to the homeland and secure a decent and comfortable life for all,” the statement concluded.
SANA
https://muraselon.com/en/2018/01/sochi-congress-final-statement-affirms-full-commitment-syrias-territorial-integrity/
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Syriana Analysis (YouTube): Sochi Peace Talks Explained (very informative and insightful)
Kevork Almassian elaborates the recent statement by the Syrian National Dialogue Congress of Sochi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hNXjuMka-E
Al Arabiya (Saudi-owned media): French FM: Syria peace process should begin under UN in Geneva, not Sochi
Reuters
Tuesday, 30 January 2018
France’s foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said on Tuesday that a peace process for Syria should take place under UN auspices in Geneva and not under Russia in the Black Sea resort of Sochi where a Syrian congress began earlier in the day.
“The resolution of this crisis will happen urgently through a solution under United Nations auspices in Geneva. France has that as an immediate objective. It’s not happening in Sochi, it must happen in Geneva,” Le Drian told lawmakers.
Russia’s Lavrov: Sochi congress agrees a constitutional committee
The Russian-sponsored conference on reaching peace in Syria agreed to create constitutional committee which will work in Geneva, TASS news agency cited Russia’s Foreign Ministry Sergei Lavrov as saying on Tuesday.
The committee will include those groups that were not attending the peace conference hold in Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi, Lavrov said.
https://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2018/01/30/French-FM-Syria-peace-process-should-begin-under-UN-in-Geneva-not-Sochi.html
Americans will never “get” Putin because they don”t get real Christianity either.
With no idea of the truth of their own history or of Russia’s, and complete hypnosis by Talmudvision and it’s depravity, it is beyond their ability to understand.
It would be wonderful if the Russian Federation would have another Zemsky Sobor and elect a Tsar once again. Let Putin be a new Stolypin.
Thank you +BN for posting this wonderful interview.
@ +BN
Крута!
BEWARE The S.O.S = The Synagogue Of Satan!!!
A monarchy is the dumbest idea I have heard.
England, Thailand, Europe etc have these medieval monsters in control of untold trillions of dollars of land and wealth used for their inbreed families.