SYDNEY, Australia – Anti-Semitic incidents in Australia rose 21 percent in the last year and are the second highest on record, according to an annual report.
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry’s annual “Report on Anti-Semitism in Australia” – tabled at Sunday’s annual general meeting in Melbourne – revealed 657 reports of racist violence against Jewish Australians and Jewish community buildings between Oct. 1, 2012 and Sept. 30, 2013.
Serious physical attacks were at the lowest since 2005, however, with fewer than 20.
“In general, it can be said that Australians neither particularly like nor dislike Jews,” wrote the authors, Julie Nathan, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry’s research officer, and Jeremy Jones, director of international and community affairs at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council.
“Although stereotypes of Jews remain part of the culture in Australia, these are not as deeply ingrained or hateful as in European and Middle Eastern cultures,” according to the authors. “Anti-Semitism remains at the fringes of Australian politics and society, and though there are exceptions, anti-Semitism is not generally part of the mainstream discourse.”
The 202-page report does not include the recent brutal assault of five religious Jews walking home from Shabbat dinner in Bondi last month, described as the worst anti-Semitic incident of its kind since records began in 1989.
Here’s a sickening display of Jewishness in the New South Wales parliament. (Showing us all who’s boss.) FromJ-Wire:
Chanukah got off to an early start when Rabbi Pinchus Feldman lit all eight candles at a special ceremony in the NSW Parliament.
A fully lit Menorah by Rabbi Pinchus FeldmanPremier Barry O’Farrell
The event, co-hosted by the Sydney Yeshiva and the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, was attended by many NSW State politicians as well as Federal members Michael Danby and Josh Frydenberg together with NSW Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells.
During his speech preceding the lighting of the candles the Yeshiva’s Rabbi Feldman recited a special prayer for the victims of the Philippine typhoon as well as victims of other disasters around the globe.
Speakers included Premier Barry O’Farrell, Leader of the Opposition John Robertson, President of the NSW Legislative Council Don Harwin, Speaker of the NSW Legislative Assembly Shelley Hancock and President of the NSWJBD Yair Miller.
In his address, Premier Barry O’Farrell reaffirmed Don Harwin’s statement that the NSW Parliament was the oldest in Australia and effectively where modern-day Australia began. He said that Chanukah not only represented a story of multiculturalism but also one of multi-faith. He added: “The story of the Jewish people is a story of survival. Your values, the values of Judaism, underpin Western society.”
Rabbi Pinchis Feldman, Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells and Premier Barry O’Farrell
He told a WWII story from Holland which he described as “a Chanukah miracle”. He said: “A young woman who had survived too many pograms decided to flee and to change her name and pretend she was Christian in order to survive the war.The good news is that she did. The bad news is that she left her home by train with a package packed for her by her sister on the eve of Chanukah with all the usual Chanukah treats including latkes. As she was sitting in the train with part of her luggage a Gestapo officer walked into the carriage and she suddenly realised that within her luggage was something that would disclose her religion…something that could have ultimately have lead to her death. As she worried about this a young girl who was eating an apple, spat the apple out and as luck would have it, like a miracle of Chanukah, the Gestapo officer slipped on the apple and knocked himself out and was carried out of the carriage.”
There just had to be a Holohoax miracle involved somewhere along the line! Hahaha!!
“Your values, the values of Judaism, underpin Western society.” – There you go. Straight from the Premier’s mouth! The modern “West” most certainly is a Jewified culture, that’s for sure.
Israel’s new Ambassador-designate to Australia Shmuel Ben-Shmuel presented Vladimir Meskenas with the award recognising his parents Josifas and Agripina as Righteous Among the Nations.
ISRAEL’S new Ambassador to Australia Shmuel Ben-Shmuel paid tribute to two Lithuanians who have just been declared Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem at a service marking the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht in Sydney on Sunday night.
Addressing the 650-strong crowd at the Great Synagogue in his first communal address since arriving in the country, Ben-Shmuel said that Josifas and Agripina Meskenas – whose son and grandchildren live in NSW – showed great bravery when the Jewish people were in their greatest hour of need.
“They risked their lives by providing asylum for a young Jewish girl escaping Nazi forces in Lithuania,” Ben-Shmuel said.
“The Talmud tells us that whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saves the entire world,” Ben-Shmuel said.
“The late Josifas and Agripina are a shining example to everyone here tonight and for all of humanity.”
Professor Robert Lanza claims the theory of biocentrism teaches death as we know it is an illusion. He believes our consciousness creates the universe, and not the other way round, and once we accept that space and time are ‘tools of our minds’, death can’t exist in ‘any real sense’ either.
Most scientists would probably say that the concept of an afterlife is either nonsense, or at the very least unprovable.
Yet one expert claims he has evidence to confirm an existence beyond the grave – and it lies in quantum physics.
Professor Robert Lanza claims the theory of biocentrism teaches that death as we know it is an illusion created by our consciousness.
‘We think life is just the activity of carbon and an admixture of molecules – we live a while and then rot into the ground,’ said the scientist on his website.
Professor Robert Lanza’s, pictured, theory is explained in his book Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe.
Lanza, from Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina, continued that as humans we believe in death because ‘we’ve been taught we die’, or more specifically, our consciousness associates life with bodies and we know that bodies die.
His theory of biocentrism, however, explains that death may not be as terminal as we think it is.
Biocentrism is classed as the theory of everything and comes from the Greek for ‘life centre’.
It is the believe that life and biology are central to reality and that life creates the universe, not the other way round.
This suggests a person’s consciousness determines the shape and size of objects in the universe.
Lanza uses the example of the way we perceive the world around us. A person sees a blue sky, and is told that the colour they are seeing is blue, but the cells in a person’s brain could be changed to make the sky look green or red.
‘Bottom line: What you see could not be present without your consciousness,’ explained Lanza. ‘Our consciousness makes sense of the world.’
By looking at the universe from a biocentric’s point of view, this also means space and time don’t behave in the hard and fast ways our consciousness tell us it does. In summary, space and time are ‘simply tools of our mind.’
Once this theory about space and time being mental constructs is accepted, it means death and the idea of immortality exist in a world without spatial or linear boundaries.
Similarly, theoretical physicists believe there is infinite number of universes with different variations of people, and situations, taking place simultaneously.
