Sometimes the global efforts of the Islamists pay dividends for them. Sometimes they are frustrated by the authorities. Nothing happens very quickly in the battle against them. And no one can seriously claim they are being defeated; on the contrary. Here are some snapshots.

France

Reuters says one of several Islamists behind a September 19 grenade attack on a Jewish store in the Paris suburbs was shot and killed by police in the northeastern French city of Strasbourg today. Eleven other people were detained in what prosecutors called a “vast anti-terrorist operation”. The dead French man, Jérémie Louis-Sydney, 33, had served prison time for drug-dealing and had been convicted of membership in a radical Islamist movement. When police entered Sidney’s apartment around dawn, he opened fire. He was found to be equipped with a .357 Magnum revolver and reserves of ammunition.

Reuters says that in the course of the round-ups today, the police found Al-Qaeda literature, 27,000 euros in cash, and a list of Jewish organizations in Paris (the French-language reports, according to a friend of ours in Paris, used the archaic term “israélite” leading to most of the news agency reports saying the targets were Israeli, but they were actually French-Jewish) at the homes of the suspects. Among the others taken in by police is a woman described as one of Sidney’s two wives. Three of the others have criminal records for drugs, theft and violence. One of the men was arrested in the Paris region as he returned from morning prayers and was carrying a “ready to fire” 22-caliber pistol.

Australia

Melbourne’s Age newspaper has an interview today (it’s the lead story at this hour) with an Islamist preacher, Abdul Rahman Ayub, who acknowledges that he was sent to Australia in 1997 to recruit jihadists at the request of Abu Bakar Bashir, the notorious Indonesian terrorist currently serving a lengthy prison sentence. The Age calls Bashir “Indonesia’s godfather of terrorism”. Ayub co-founded the Australian wing of Jemaah Islamiah and says he personally “indoctrinated” a group of about 100 people in “the ways of violent jihad”. One of them, an Australian Moslem convert called Jack Roche (alias Paul George Holland) was later convicted in 2002 for conspiring to bomb the Israeli embassy in Canberra. In today’s interview he says he has gotten over his terrorism.

There were about 30 active “radicals” in Australia when he left there in 2002, he says, and while ”I don’t know about their recent development, whether they’re still active or not… I believe they are still there.” Ayub says he is no longer in favour of “violent jihad” and thinks Moslems “should fight only as soldiers in a war zone” whatever that means. Elsewhere in today’s Age ["J is for Jihad"], one of its foreign correspondents in Asia points out that “Indonesia’s prisons are a breeding ground for terrorists, and so are some of the Islamic boarding schools. But despite the ever-present threat of terrorism, the Indonesian state shows little interest in tackling this issue.”

UK and US

The one-eyed Sunni Islamist cleric with a hook for a hand, Abu Hamza al-Masri (sometimes known as Mustafa Kamel Mustafa), was finally extradited to the United States on Friday after his eight-year legal battle to avoid deportation ended in failure. He was jailed by the British for incitement to murder (of “non-believers”). He became famous for his hate-filled sermons in the years that he was the imam of the Islamist hot-bed, the Finsbury Park Mosque, in north London. He loved the UK, calling it ”a paradise, where you could do anything you wanted” [source], and he meant it.

British taxpayers have contributed several million dollars to the man in the form of welfare payments and government-funded legal services. The Americans have charged the preacher with hostage taking, conspiracy to establish a militant training camp in the US state of Oregon and calling for holy war in Afghanistan [source]. The British prime minister [source] marked the occasion with a brief appreciation of the man and his achievements:

I’m absolutely delighted that Abu Hamza is now out of this country. Like the rest of the public I’m sick to the back teeth of people who come here, threaten our country, who stay at vast expense to the taxpayer and we can’t get rid of them. I’m delighted on this occasion we’ve managed to send this person off to a country where he will face justice.

Visit This Ongoing War.

An Australian man who allegedly raped a Holocaust survivor two decades ago will face trial.

A three-judge panel of the New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal rejected claims last Friday by the defense for Robert Paul Webb that he could not receive a fair trial because the complainant could not be cross-examined, according to a report by the Australian Associated Press.

The victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, gave video testimony to police just months before she died last year. She was 70 at the time of the alleged attack in Sydney in 1991.

The judges allowed the prosecution to admit the video statement into evidence, AAP reported. Crown prosecutor Sally Dowling said the woman, who immigrated to Australia in her 20s, had been the victim of a “calculated attack” and it was in the public interest for Webb to stand trial.

Webb, who was 18 at the time of the alleged attack, was charged in 2011 with two counts of aggravated sexual intercourse and aggravated assault. He was charged when police discovered a semen stain on the ground in the car park where the alleged rape occurred and used it to match his DNA.

This past weekend, we blogged here about foaming-at-the-mouth proponents of jihad rampaging through the streets of Australia’s largest city, Sydney [see our blog post here].

Today, the mainstream Australian media are reporting with astonishment on the sight of elementary school children being pushed front and center by radical adults to embody the lust for Islamist jihad and to advocate the killing of unbelievers.

*An eight year-old Australian girl called Ruqaya, reading a prepared speech promoting jihad at a Hizb ut-Tahrir (“Party of Liberation” in Arabic) conference for “Islamic fundamentalists” in the western Sydney community of Bankstown this past Sunday, a day after the riot. [The video is here - she starts in Arabic, and then switches between English and Arabic.] The name of the conference: Muslims Rise. More than 600 people took part.

*A second child, probably younger than the girl, is photographed today in several Australian papers, holding a placard that reads “Behead all those that insult the prophet.” It’s unlikely he has the ability to read the sign, let alone write it.

Jared Owens writing in The Australian [here] says, without much evident conviction, that these unsettling developments amount to a challenge for moderate Australian Moslems to stand up and speak out. Speaking in customarily measured and moderate Australian tones, he uses the word ‘set-back’ in describing the general mood among Australians exposed to the events of the past four days.

Our familiarity with Australia gives us the sense that, after showing considerable tolerance and exemplary patience to their newly arrived Islamic neighbours over several decades, a sense of alarm and dismay at what these people are ready to do to their own children has begun setting in, along with a sense of dread about what they are willing to do to other people’s children

We wonder how much Australians in general know about the emerging calls to restore this thing called a caliphate. Following is a brief extract from Wikipedia’s “Caliphate” entry:

“Al-Qaeda has as one of its clearly stated goals the re-establishment of a caliphate. The late al-Qaeda leader, Osama Bin Laden, called for Muslims to “establish the righteous caliphate of our umma.” …Ayman al-Zawahiri (Bin Laden’s mentor and al-Qaeda second-in-command until 2011), once “sought to restore the caliphate…which had formally ended in 1924 following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire but which had not exercised real power since the thirteenth century.” Once the caliphate is re-established, Zawahiri believes, Egypt would become a rallying point for the rest of the Islamic world, leading the jihad against the West. “Then history would make a new turn, God willing,” Zawahiri later wrote, “in the opposite direction against the empire of the United States and the world’s Jewish government.”

In the videos of Saturday’s Sydney Islamist riots, the clearly-heard rallying cry of the men bashing the police was “Obama, Obama, we love Osama“ [check it on the RT (Russia Today) video here]. Understanding what they mean is child’s play.

A 96-year-old woman from Australia is immigrating to Israel.

Lily Hyde will leave the Sir Moses Montefiore Jewish Home in Sydney on Wednesday morning for Tel Aviv, where she will be reunited with her family. She is believed to be the oldest Australian ever to immigrate to Israel.

“It’s a dream come true,” Hyde was reported as saying Tuesday just hours before her departure. It will be comforting to have “so many of my family by my side.”

Her son Robert, 68, made aliyah with his family in 2010. Hyde, a native of Durban, South Africa, who worked as a music teacher in an orphanage in Johannesburg, has a great-grandchild she has yet to meet.

“She took ill recently and we thought of her on her own, and I made enquiries with an aged care home in Herzliya and booked her a room,” Robert Hyde told J-Wire, a local Jewish website.

The State Zionist Council of New South Wales had to fast-track Hyde’s application forms, according to the report.

“We managed to work with Israel and get all the necessary paperwork taken care of in less than 24 hours,” a Zionist council official said.

Hyde is scheduled to move into Beit Protea in Herliyza, which was opened in 1992 by the Zionist Federation of South Africa.

She is not believed to be the oldest immigrant to Israel. Two Jews from the former Soviet Union were said to have been 111 when they arrived in the 1990s.

Phillip and Dorothy Grossman were 95 and 93, respectively, when they arrived in February this year from Baltimore — the oldest married couple to make aliyah.

Australia’s 2011 census shows that Australia’s official Jewish population has risen to almost 100,000, a rise of 10 percent in five years.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics lists the Jewish population at 97,335 – 0.5 percent of Australia’s 22.5 million person population.

Jewish demographers, however, believe the number may be several thousand larger, due to potential inaccuracies caused by the optional nature of the religion question – which does not list Judaism as an option but rather lumps it into the “Other” category – as well as their belief that Holocaust survivors may be less inclined to volunteer information about their Jewishness.

Hebrew University demography scholar Professor Sergio DellaPergola listed Australia’s Jewish population as just over 107,000 in 2010, and ranked Australia as the ninth largest Jewish community in the world, behind Israel, the United States, France, Canada, the United Kingdom, Russia, Argentina, and Germany.

More than 60 percent of Australians identify as Christian and more than 20 percent said they were not a part of any religion.  Hinduism is the nation’s largest growing religion, with Islam coming in second with over 475,000 followers.

Earlier this year Israel passed a law that would strip Israelis of their citizenship if convicted of espionage or treason. Condemned for this by countries all over the world, almost all of whom have far harsher anti-treason laws than Israel, the Israeli government has yet to apply the law to anyone.

Sometimes called the “Azmi Bishara Law,” it was motivated by the fact that an Arab member of the Israeli parliament, Azmi Bishara, from one of the Arab parties, had openly engaged in espionage and treason, including passing on intelligence to the Hizbullah terrorist organization while it was firing rockets at Israeli civilians. Bishara is now in hiding and has yet to be prosecuted.

The Anti-Israel Lobby denounced this law as “racist,” just as it denounces everything Israel does as racist (including rescuing Haitian earthquake victims). The bleating from Bash-Israel NGO groups about supposed Israeli “apartheid” sound particularly absurd when one realizes that Israel is one of the few democracies that has not utilized mass internment of hostile minority populations that identify and, in some cases, collaborate with the enemy in time of war. And Israel has yet to charge any of its extreme leftists with treason, no matter how brazen their words and deeds.

Treason itself is left undefined under Israeli law, and in general it has been interpreted by legal authorities in Israel so loosely that virtually no one has ever been prosecuted for it.

On paper Israeli penal law defines treason as “acts that impair the integrity of Israel” or “impair its sovereignty,” and the granting of assistance to the enemy during time of war. Based on British law, Article 99(a) of the Israel Criminal Code states, “If a person with intent to assist an enemy in war against Israel commits an act calculated to do so, he is liable to the death penalty or to life imprisonment.”

It should go without saying that no one has ever been sentenced to either punishment for treason in Israel. Only a few people engaged in actual espionage – including nuclear spy Mordecai Vanunu and some old-time spies for the former Soviet Union – have ever even been charged with treason.

The Israeli law against treason is little more than a joke. Nearly all the Arabs who sit in the Knesset openly communicate and even collaborate with the enemies of Israel. They support their agendas and some have engaged in violence.

There are far left Israeli Jews who work against the sovereignty and integrity of their own country every day. Examples of this would include issuing calls for Israel’s destruction or declaring support for international boycotts against Israel. No one has been prosecuted for any of that.

The Israeli attorney general is quite militant when it comes to prosecuting right-wing Israeli Jews for “incitement” and “racism,” including offenders who wear politically incorrect t-shirts or affix bumper stickers on their cars that some might find in poor taste.

Bear in mind that Israel is in a permanent state of war. Even so, Israeli Arabs and Jewish leftists never go to jail for collaborating with the enemy during times of war.

It is instructive and illuminating to examine the history of what other Western democracies have done with traitors, especially during times of war.

Many countries have the death penalty for domestic traitors; some of these anti-treason laws are quite old. Several countries have been putting teeth into old anti-treason laws recently because of international terrorism.

Britain’s Treason Act, which allowed for the prosecution of British nationals supporting the enemy in time of war, went back to 1351. One famous application of the act was the trial of Roger Casement, who was accused of collaborating with Germany during World War I. There was debate during the trial over whether the act applied to treason committed outside Britain or only on British soil. The prosecution carried the day and the traitor was executed.

Fifty years ago, when I served as the director of Bnei Akiva of New York, I wondered how my relationship with Bnei Akiva would develop. Today, years later, after coming on aliyah to Israel in 1973, I find that I still cherish my Bnei Akiva past and still enjoy the friendships that were developed so many years ago. Not only are some of my grandchildren involved in Bnei Akiva, but I, too, still feel involved. This past year I was involved in the 75th reunion of Bnei Akiva’s Moshava camps of America, and a few years ago, I helped plan the 70th Anniversary of America’s Bnei Akiva in Jerusalem. I owe so much to the socialization and education that I received in Bnei Akiva, to my year of Hachshara (a Bnei Akiva program) in Israel and to the friendships I developed over the years.

I recently attended the World Bnei Akiva Convention in Jerusalem. Delegates from around the world gathered in the Jerusalem Theatre for the Grand Opening. One hundred delegates from 23 countries came to examine the accomplishments of the movement and to decide its future. They came from Europe, the U.S., Mexico, Australia and New Zealand. They toured Israel and were greeted and feted by government ministers and local Israeli leaders.

The major event of the four day convention was the grand opening at the Jerusalem Theatre where thousands came to greet the delegates and to honor the Bnei Akiva shlichim (emissaries) from around the world who attended this event. The program included delightful entertainment by the Yeshiva University “Maccabeats” who were flown in especially for this event. Two of the singers, Noach Jacobson and Nachum Joel, are former Bnei Akiva leaders.

Part of the program included greetings from Bnei Akiva Hachshara and yeshiva students from around the world who were seated in the audience. To the cheers of all of those attending, one young woman declared that she had just arrived in Israel this morning and had come to settle.

Rabbi Chaim Druckman, the director of Yeshivot Bnei Akiva, read the prayer for the State of Israel and the prayer for Israeli soldiers and prisoners.

Professor Rabbi Daniel Hershkowitz, the minister of science and technology and a former director of Bnei Akiva, gave a d’var Torah about carefully choosing emissaries. Zevulun Orlev, a former Bnei Akiva member of Shevet Alumim, reminded the audience that just as the parshah speaks of leaving Egypt, all Jews must leave the Diaspora, even if it is comfortable and rich, and come to Israel. “You must remove the Egypt from every Jew.”

The keynote speaker at the opening was President Shimon Peres, who declared, “There is no Israel without Judaism, and there is no Judaism without Israel. You have to believe and those who think otherwise are wrong!” He continued, “You are endangering our identity if you speak Hebrew without knowing the Tanach. You are endangering the future of the Jewish people if you learn Tanach without even knowing how to pray. Hebrew and Jewish tradition go together.”

Zeev Schwartz, the director of World Bnei Akiva, spoke and mentioned that Yoske Shapiro, the first Bnei Akiva director, was among the many guests and former shlichim that evening. Schwartz praised all of the emissaries and spotlighted the contribution of Arye Kroll, the former shaliach to Australia. Kroll spoke and pointed out that, “Bnei Akiva is not just a movement but it also is a way of life!”

Avraham (DuvDuv) Duvdevani, the new chairman of the executive of the World Zionist Organization, the first Orthodox delegate to hold that position, praised those early Bnei Akiva immigrants (like me, I guess) who now have great-grandchildren living in Israel. “Wherever you go today in Israel, you will find former Bnei Akiva members.”

Part of the well-organized evening included film clips of greetings from Chief Rabbi Amar, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israel Army Chief Rabbi Rafi Peres. Rabbi Peres, a former Bnei Akiva member, explained that he serves today thanks to Bnei Akiva.

An interesting film about the Hashmonaim community, which is one of the many communities that have absorbed the thousands of Bnei Akiva immigrants, was shown. Hopefully, it will soon be available on YouTube.                                              

Comments welcome at dov@gilor.com.

I have realized in the last few months that the friends and acquaintances in our lives are there for a very special reason. It is clear that we are in relationships to help each other at different times in our lives.

If you hear that your friend has a simcha, or God forbid, sad news, Hashem wants you to act on it. Make a phone call to wish someone a happy birthday or a mazal tov. Pay a shivah call, send flowers to someone who is ill, and visit an elderly person at her retirement home.

Here is my story of doing a good deed that trickled down to helping my own child to purchase luggage!

My mother-in-law wanted to volunteer her time at a retirement home, but it just never worked out. When she found out that Madame Cohen was admitted to a retirement home, she realized that Hashem had opened a door of opportunity for doing something good. You see, Madame Cohen never had children, and all her siblings had passed on. When she developed signs of Alzheimer’s and could no longer take care of herself, her niece and nephew had no choice but to place her in a nursing facility.

My mother-in-law visited her frequently. The two women conversed, laughed, listened to music, and went for walks. Madame Cohen’s family appreciated these visits, especially since they knew that most of the time, Madame Cohen did not recognize my mother-in-law.

My husband was getting ready to go to Australia for a few weeks. He needed to purchase a carry-on bag. He had his heart set on a particular suitcase that was a bit pricey. One day, before heading back to the office, he decided to walk into a luggage store and there was the suitcase he wanted. The price was still very high.

The owner of the store asked him if he needed help, and in the same breath told him that he looked very familiar. After exchanging names, the store owner said, “I believe that your mother visits my aunt in the nursing home!” My husband confirmed this, and the owner told him that he would give him the luggage for a fraction of what it cost him.

So there it is! Hashem gives us the opportunity every day to bless one another by smiling and wishing each other a great day, a good recovery, and good news.

The next time someone thanks you for doing something wonderful, thank them for giving you the opportunity to do a mitzvah. I am told that mitzvos are the only form of currency we take with us to the Next World.

Wishing you and your family a happy, healthy New Year.

May you seize the opportunities throughout the coming year to do mitzvos and kindnesses to everyone with whom you are connected. After all, that is the reason we are connected in the first place.