Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced Monday that any Australian who left to fight with jihad groups in the Middle East may as well stay there.

“My unambiguous message to all Australians who fight with terrorist groups is that you will be arrested, prosecuted and jailed for a very long time,” Abbott told the Australian parliament in a statement on national security.

Numerous Australian immigrants have left the island nation to fight with Islamist radicals abroad; some have then returned to start trouble at home.

Australia has recently announced tough counter terror measures to target the home-grown terrorists, as did Canada as well, which is revoking citizenship from anyone who travels overseas to fight alongside ISIS or any other terrorist group.

Search warrants unsealed in Quebec allege that the Haredi Lev Tahor sect trafficked in human cargo and committed other abuses.

The documents also reveal that Interpol and Israel helped build the criminal case against the group before its 250 members fled to Guatemala in March with leader Rabbi Shlomo Helbrans.

The list of charges in the warrant issued in January include detailed allegations by former Lev Tahor member, including Helbrans’ own brother Nathan, of physical force, use of psychotropic drugs, forced marriage of juveniles and sexual assault, according to Canadian reports.

Helbrans founded Lev Tahor in Israel in the late 1980s and ran it both there and in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he was convicted of kidnapping, and then for a decade near Montreal.

Canada granted him asylum in 2003 based on his claimed fear of being persecuted if sent back to Israel.

In November, the group fled Quebec for the adjacent province of Ontario, and four months later for Guatemala in the wake of the ongoing investigation by youth protection officials and other authorities.

This month, Lev Tahor left the village of San Juan la Laguna for the Guatemala City capita amid reports of rising tensions with local Catholics.

The remaining 30 Lev Tahor members who had remained in Canada also reportedly left Ontario for Guatemala this month to reunite with the rest of the sect.

Members of the controversial Haredi sect Lev Tahor left a Guatemalan village after religiously tainted disputes with its Roman Catholic Mayan residents.

Over 200 members of the community began leaving Thursday after local leaders said they would cut services to Lev Tahor members.

The move is one of many recent disruptions for the group, which has been targeted with child abuse allegations in Canada.

Lev Tahor had maintained a small presence in San Juan La Laguna, a village about 90 miles west of Guatemala City, for about six years, but it expanded considerably in March after a contingent arrived complaining of persecution by Canadian authorities.

Tensions appear to have flared after the newcomers arrived, and leaders of the village told news agencies that the group sought to impose its practices on the indigenous peoples.

Miguel Vasquez Cholotio, a member of the elders’ council, told Reuters the sect members refused to greet or have physical contact with anyone outside their community.

“We felt intimidated by them in the streets. We thought they wanted to change our religion and customs,” he said. Vasquez Cholotio told AFP that the villagers “need to conserve and preserve our culture.”

Uriel Goldman, a spokesman for Lev Tahor, told Reuters that the group had friendly relations with the locals, and was the victim of charges by a minority among the village’s leaders. He said the group would seek another site in Guatemala to settle.

The Haredi Lev Tahor cult is leaving its community from Canada to Guatemala, where other families of the group fled earlier this year.

Approximately six families still are in Chatham, Ontario, where the cult was based after having escaped last year from Quebec, where it faced various criminal charges of child abuse and child custody disputes with welfare officials.

Several children and adults fled Ontario last March, and some of them reached Guatemala while others were returned to Canada by immigration authorities.

Five or six families still remain in Ontario, the London Free Press reported Friday. Most of the 200 cult members who left Quebec are in Guatemala, and a few have moved to the United States and Israel.

“This story is going to end not with a bang, but with a very loud fizzle,” Lev Tahor’ lawyer Guidy Mamann told the newspaper.

“I don’t think anybody is planning on staying.”

Mamann said that there are not enough men remaining to hold a minyan for daily prayers. “The yeshiva more or less closed down. They have only six guys left,” he added.

North Americans are ignoring the largely skewed news coverage they are being fed by mass media abroad and continuing to ‘come home to Israel’ regardless of the grim news headlines around the conflict with Gaza.

One of the special Nefesh B’Nefesh aliyah flights from New York that takes place each summer arrived bright and early Tuesday, bringing 338 new “olim” to Ben Gurion International Airport on the wings of Israel’s national carrier, El Al Airlines.

The 38 new Israeli families included 107 children and 108 young men and women who are soon to become soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces.

The new immigrants, who came from the United States and Canada were welcomed by top government officials at a special ceremony held under tight security inside the airport.

Far from the flying missiles and mortar shells, Canadian Israeli philanthropist David Azrieli has passed away at the age of 92.

Best known in the Jewish State for the landmark three geometric-looking towers in Tel Aviv that bear his name, Azrieli died in Montreal at his country home.

A man with a lifelong love affair with the Zionist State, Azrieli was a member of the Forbes’ billionaires’ list, with a net worth of $2.9 billion.

But he spent millions on tzedaka – charity – and his family donated $100 million in various funds over the past 23 years alone. The Azrieli family has pledged to match that in the coming five years.

Born in 1922 in Poland, Azrieli was 17 when he fled the Nazis, moving east to join the Polish “Anders” Army in Bukhara. Together with his new host “family” he moved into Iran and then to Baghdad, where two Hagana agents – Moshe Dayan and Enzo Sereni — persuaded him to switch allegiance and move to Palestine.

Azrieli fought in Israel’s War of Independence with the Seventh Brigade, later going on to attend the Technion and then years later the University of Montreal when he moved to Canada in 1954.

He married his wife Stephanie Lefcort there, and the two had four children together; Rafael, Sharon, Naomi and Danna. It was there in Canada that Azrieli also started Canpro, a real estate firm. But 20 years later he was back in Israel to build a new mall in Ramat Gan, following that with more malls throughout the country.

Owner of more than a dozen shopping malls in Israel, the Azrieli Group also owns 20 percent of the Leumi Card firm, as well as 4.8 percent in in Bank Leumi Le-Israel Ltd. The group also owns the Sonol, Supergas and GES energy and environmental firms.

Last Thursday, his daughter Danna Azrieli succeeded him as chairman of the Group.

Journalists around the world are expressing outrage in the wake of an Egyptian court’s decision to sentence three Al Jazeera journalists to prison for seven years.

The three were taken from their hotel room in Cairo in December 2013 and charged with conspiring with the Muslim Brotherhood to tarnish Egypt’s international reputation. Australian ex-BBC reporter Peter Greste, Canadian-Egyptian ex-CNN journalist Mohamed Fahmy, and local Egyptian producer Baher Mohamed were among 20 accused in connection with the charges.

Al Jazeera has denied the accusations and journalists around the world have condemned Egypt for conducting what is seen as a direct campaign by Egypt’s new president to snuff out freedom of speech.

In the United States, the issue was also perceived as a diplomatic slap to the White House, which condemned the sentence. Secretary of State John Kerry phoned Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shukri to express his government’s “serious displeasure” over the matter.

The court decision had come just one day after Kerry’s unannounced visit to Cairo in which he announced that Washington had unfrozen billions of dollars in military aid to Egypt. He also vowed during his visit that the U.S. would deliver 10 Apache attack helicopters for use in the fight against terrorists in the Sinai Peninsula.

Newly-elected President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi refused to “interfere in the judicial verdict,” setting off an international firestorm.

“Egypt should review its unacceptable sentences against Egyptian and international journalists, and show commitment to freedom of the press,” said British Foreign Secretary William Hague, Al Jazeera reported.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott added that his government would work to get the imprisoned journalists out of the country “quickly.”

Leaders from various other international groups said that they, too, would work to free the journalists.