Welcome back to the News Round Up! We’ve been hearing a lot about balloons from Gaza, but balloons for Gaza? That explanation and some more interesting stories and opinions from Israel and outside of Israel are coming up. Including a former jihadist that asks forgiveness of Jews. Intrigued?
The beautiful seashore above is of Tel Aviv and is taken from leonardo-hotels.com.
Remember that each title below is also a link back to the original article where we took the summaries from. Click the links to read the full story. All credit belongs to the authors and publishers of the articles and is collected here for your ease of reading.
As the Hamas terror group threatened to launch 5,000 flaming kites and balloons at Israel on Friday, Israeli children at the Gaza border countered with an airborne message of peace.
At Kibbutz Nir Am, which has suffered a number of fires sparked by burning kites flown from Gaza, children and residents launched balloons carrying candy towards the Palestinian enclave, Hadashot TV news reported. They also have planned to re-plant the groves that were destroyed by the fires started by the Gaza fire bombs in a message of “they burn and we plant.” Thousands of acres of farmland, forests and nature reserves in the regions around the Gaza Strip have been burned, according to Israeli officials.
But the Israeli children chose to send a message of peace and candy to the innocent Gaza children who are caught in this turmoil. We hope that this message of peace is received! 
An unidentified supporter of the ‘Hofstad’ terror group arrives at a trial for the group’s members in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Friday, March 10, 2006. The group includes Mohammed Bouyeri, the convicted murderer of filmmaker Theo van Gogh. (AP Photo/ Fred Ernst)
Jews were never far from the mind of Jason Walters when he was still a key member of the Netherlands’ deadliest network of jihadist terrorists, the Hofstad terror group. Now Walters is 33 and a recent university graduate. He says he became de-radicalized in prison, where he served eight years before his release in 2013.
“As a salafi jihadist, anti-Semitism is wrapped up in your entire worldview,” he said.
Which is why Walters chose to speak out for the first time to Esther Voet, the editor-in-chief of Holland’s NIW Jewish weekly, in an unusual interview that also featured an apology to Dutch Jews and other victims, and his advocacy of Israel’s right to exist within secure borders.
Walters is one of two individuals with ties to that network who are giving others hope in the fight against radical Islam by reaching out to Jewish audiences and warning other Muslims against radicalization.
Soumaya Sahla, a Muslim woman who spent nine months in jail in connection with the Hofstad Group, broke her silence last year. Sahla, 34, had traveled with the CIDI pro-Israel lobby group to Jerusalem for a seminar on the Holocaust.
“When a Jewish man can’t wear a kippah on the street” but Muslims can wear traditional garb, “then something’s wrong,” she said last year during a Hanukkah party in Utrecht.
The Temple Mount-Flash 90
In an underhanded trick, the Muslim Waqf carted out large mounds of dirt that contained sacred and archaeologically valuable artifacts from the times of the Jewish Temples.
They used the closure of the Temple Mount to Jews during the last week of Ramadan as their opportunity to get rid of the mounds of dirt that had been in their way.
The dirt was originally dug up in 1999, when the Waqf carried out large scale illegal construction on the Mount, to create a new mosque in the section of the Mount known as Solomon’s Stables. At that time, 400 truckloads of archaeologically valuable dirt were evacuated and dumped into city landfills and the Kidron stream.
Eventually, the Israeli authorities intervened and the dirt that had not yet been dumped was saved. Since then, the Waqf has been planning to get rid of the mounds of dirt, which were hindering its plans for carrying out more construction and development on the east side of the Mount. They had their chance and they took it, and threw away ancient history to make new terraces.
The tiny, 1cm across, amulet.
A tiny piece of pottery was discovered in the ancient City of David archeological dig recently and it very rare! It has an Arabic inscription from the Abbasid period (9th-10th centuries CE) on it and is believed to be a personal blessing. It was discovered last week in archaeological excavations by the Israel Antiquities Authority and Tel Aviv University in the Givati parking lot in Jerusalem’s City of David.
The text on the tiny amulet was translated as: “Karim will trust in Allah” “Master of the worlds is Allah”. It is not known if Karim is the name of the person it belonged to, but it is direct testimony to daily life in Jerusalem during the early Islamic period and was found between plaster floors and in the same area as kitchen utensils and the like.
Sebastian Kurz visits the Western Wall, June 10, 2018. (photo credit: AVI HAYUN)
Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz gave a speech this past Sunday that owned up to Austria’s dual roles in the Holocaust. They were both victims and in some cases, perpetrators.
It is the second time an Austrian Chancellor has made this statement, but what makes this one different is that Kurz says that Austria must take country responsibility not only to its Jews but also to the country of the Jews.
Austria may not be a powerhouse economically or militarily but the expression of support was much appreciated. Even so, he was questioned by the Jerusalem Post as to why his party sits in a coalition government with the Freedom Party, a right-wing party started by former Nazis in 1956? His answers were straightforward and clear, the entire government is in agreement with the statements he made, including the Freedom Party. The rest of the hard-hitting questions and his answers are worth a read. Click the link in the title to be taken to the full article.
Thanks for reading and please leave us a comment about your opinions regarding the balloons for Gaza piece. Do you think it will help? hurt? We’d like to hear your thoughts! Happy weekend!
