Jewish news briefs: April 21, 2015

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Former Egyptian president Morsi gets 20 years in prison

(JNS.org) Mohamed Morsi, who was ousted as Egypt’s president in July 2013, was sentenced to 20 years in prison by an Egyptian court on Tuesday.

A leading figure in the Muslim Brotherhood—a political party that is now a state-designated terrorist organization in Egypt—Morsi was convicted on charges of inciting a show of force and violence, arresting protesters, and physically abusing protesters outside of his presidential palace in December 2012, Al-Ahram reported.

Several other Muslim Brotherhood leaders, including ex-presidential aides Mohamed El-Beltagy and Essam El-Erian, also received 20-year sentences, while senior Brotherhood figures Ali Gamal Saber and Abdel-Hakim Abdel-Rahman received 10-year sentences. All of the defendants were acquitted, however, on charges of premeditated murder and possessing ammunition.

Morsi was ousted in a popular military coup by then-defense minister Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, who is now Egypt’s president. El-Sisi has led a widespread crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, arresting many of its top leaders. The Brotherhood is the parent group of the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas.

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Israeli leaders Netanyahu and Rivlin refuse meetings with Jimmy Carter

(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Reuven Rivlin declined requests for meetings with former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, who is scheduled to visit Israel and the disputed Palestinian territories in early May, Israel’s Channel 10 reported Monday.

The decision reportedly followed a recommendation by the Israeli Foreign Ministry that Carter, a harsh critic of Israel’s policies, be declared persona non grata in the Jewish state. The ministry recommended that no government official, on any level, meet with Carter. A foreign ministry official told the i24 news website that Israel’s National Security Council backed the foreign ministry’s recommendation.

Carter has repeatedly spoken out against Israeli policies concerning the Palestinian Authority, particularly in his 2006 book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” and took an ardent anti-Israel stance during last summer’s war in Gaza. He stated that there was “no justification in the world for what Israel is doing” during Operation Protective Edge and urged President Barack Obama to remove Hamas from the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist organizations.

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Jerusalem car ramming confirmed as terrorist attack

(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) “I wanted to murder Jews,” 37-year-old Arab man Khaled Koutineh, who drove his car into a bus stop in Jerusalem’s French Hill junction last week, reportedly told Shin Bet security agency investigators, confirming their suspicions.

The Shin Bet had suspected that the incident, which killed Shalom Yohai Sherki, 26, and seriously injured Shira Klein, 20, was a terrorist attack, but also pursued leads suggesting an accident. According to Israel’s Channel 2, Koutineh, who holds an Israeli ID card, told investigators that he was driving around Jerusalem in his car “looking to murder Jews” over what he called his “miserable life,” saying he and several of his relatives had been detained at a security checkpoint in eastern Jerusalem.

During questioning, Koutineh reportedly said he decided Sherki and Klein were Jews “by the way they were dressed.” He further confessed that he initially sought to use a pre-existing mental condition to claim he was insane and shirk responsibility for the attack.

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U.S. aircraft carrier heads to Yemen to intercept rebel-bound Iranian arms

(JNS.org) A U.S. aircraft carrier is heading to Yemen as part of an effort to intercept Iranian arms shipments to that country’s Shi’a Muslim Houthi rebels.

The U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt carrier and its escort ship—the U.S.S. Normandy, a guided-missile carrier—left the Persian Gulf to join other American ships near the Yemenite coast to enforce a blockade, Fox News reported.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest would not comment on the naval movement, but expressed concern about Iran’s support of the Houthis.

“That support will only contribute to greater violence in that country,” Earnest said. “These are exactly the kind of destabilizing activities that we have in mind when we raise concerns about Iran’s destabilizing activities in the Middle East.”

At the same time, America and other world powers are continuing negotiations with Iran to reach a final nuclear deal by a June 30 deadline. Israel and leading Arab states have criticized the negotiations for not addressing Iran’s role in destabilizing the Middle East and supporting terrorism.

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Islamic State executes more Christians in Libya

(JNS.org) The Islamic State terror group on Sunday released a video showing its execution of about 30 Ethiopian Christians in Libya.

The Christians were murdered in two groups. One group appears to have been executed on a beach along the Mediterranean Sea, while the other was slain in the desert in Libya. The Ethiopian government declared three days of mourning while it mulls a response.

Many Ethiopians and other Africans regularly go to Libya seeking to either be smuggled into Europe or find work. But Libya has proven to be a dangerous place for Christians of late, with Islamic State seeking to impose a fundamentalist Islamic government in the absence of a fully functioning Libyan central government, similar to the situations in Syria and Iraq.

In February, Islamic State terrorists murdered 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians in a similar manner to the Ethiopian victims. The execution prompted Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi to launch airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Libya.

Coptic Solidarity, a U.S.-based Christian human rights group, condemned the “monstrous murders” in Libya and urged the international community to “urgently protect Christians and other minorities in the region.”

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Khamenei: U.S. invented myth of Iranian nuclear weapons

(JNS.org) Just weeks after Iran and world powers (including the U.S.) reached a framework nuclear agreement, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that America is responsible for creating the “myth” of Iran’s nuclear weapons in order to portray the country as a threat.

“They created the myth of nuclear weapons so they could say the Islamic Republic is a source of threat,” Khamenei said in a televised address to Iranian military commanders, Reuters reported.

“No, the source of threat is America itself, with its unrestrained, destabilizing interventions. The other side is methodically and shamelessly threatening us militarily. … Even if they did not make these overt threats, we would have to be prepared,” he added.

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Hungarian Holocaust survivors thank U.S. troops who saved them

(JNS.org) A group of 20 Hungarian Holocaust survivors on Sunday thanked American troops who helped rescue them from a train that was taking them from one Nazi concentration camp to another.

“We thank the heroic American soldiers for being able to live meaningful, useful lives—we are grateful for being able to grow old,” Julia Kadar, who was 6 years old during the transport and organized Sunday’s commemorative meeting in Budapest, said in a Skype conversation with Lt. Frank Towers, the liaison officer of the 30th Infantry Division that liberated the train near the German village of Farsleben, the Associated Press reported.

On April 13, 1945, American troops rescued 2,500 Jewish prisoners, including 560 children, who were being transported from the Bergen-Belsen death camp to the Theresienstadt camp. Towers said in his conversation with Kadar that the survivors “had nothing and they have risen up from the ashes and have become doctors and lawyers, engineers, all high-level professional people.”

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Articles from JNS.org appear on San Diego Jewish World through the generosity of Dr. Bob and Mao Shillman

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