 The first sign says it's a National Democratic Party (NDP) office. Another establishes it as a Ministry of Social Solidarity local unit. A third sign claims it belongs to "El Wayli Kindergarten." But really, the building is a synagogue, a Jewish house of worship. Curious pictures of this Cairo temple were first posted by Egyptian blogger Mostafa Hussein last year.
The photos, which showed a sign of the ruling NDP in front of the building's main door and a handful of employees working inside, generated a buzz in the Egyptian online social networks like Twitter and Facebook. The building, in the eastern Cairo neighborhood of Hadayeq el-Qubba, turned out the bygone synagogue that has been revived for different functions at different times. It consecutively became a public kindergarten, a local headquarters for the NDP, and a local administrative center for the Ministry of Social Solidarity. Signs remain from each of the three functions, suggesting a rather schizophrenic identity. People living in the area recall the building being a synagogue until the 1960s, but aren't entirely sure what has become of it since. "Our building used to be filled with Jews. But they all left. This synagogue used to function long time ago, but I don’t recall when it stopped. Now it has become related to the government," says Saleh Mahdy, a 72-year-old retired accountant who lives in the building adjacent to the synagogue. Equally visually confusing is the presence of a small mosque which has almost cordoned the synagogue with its freshly painted green fence. A men's prayer room stands to the right of the synagogue's main body and a women's prayer room is on the left. According to Mahdy, the mosque is only a handful of years old. “It looks ridiculous. I totally disagree with its presence there,” he says. At night, the synagogue looks like nothing but a distant relic of the past with its huge dark gates and walls with Hebrew inscriptions, run-down stairs, and ancient wooden chairs covered with cobweb. An old woman was seated on the stairs of the synagogue. When asked about it, she said she knew nothing. "My husband used to work as an office boy in the kindergarten. When he died, the [Ministry of] Social Solidarity people gave me a room to stay here," she said, pointing to a small wooden structure behind the synagogue. She had extended a laundry rope from the synagogue’s wall to her small house where she hung her clothes. During the day, the synagogue is the working space for about 30 employees who say they work for the Ministry of Social Solidarity. But inside lies a grandiose structure that features a central cupola, Hebrew inscriptions, spiral stairs, huge marble columns and tiles, and ancient wooden gates and chairs. The original stained glass panes, in the shape of the star of David and other geometrical formations, are mostly intact. In the eastern side of the interior architecture--pointing towards Jerusalem--sits the holy ark, otherwise known as the hechal, a curtained niche where the Torah scrolls were kept. The niche is now covered by a makeshift curtain, but the scrolls are long gone. Instead, a bunch of old government folders are scattered behind the curtain. Above the niche, an old Fatah poster of President Gamal Abdel Nasser fails to hide the faded but legible golden Hebrew letters, spelling "Gateway to the Righteous." Above those still are a pair of tablets, on which are inscribed the ten commandments. The "Eternal Light" that hangs above the niche, a common feature in all synagogues, has long been turned out. In stark contrast to the historical feeling of the synagogue are wooden partitions that divide the space into quasi-offices. Employees sit behind grey metal desks reminiscent of a 1960s and 1970s office style. When Al-Masry Al-Youm paid the office a surprise visit, the employees were having their usual breakfast of fuul and taamiya. "We’ve been here for the past 20 years. They keep telling us it’s a temporary location," said a female employee. "Didn’t they occupy Al-Aqsa mosque? We’re occupying them here," said another. Many complained that the synagogue is not the perfect working environment because it’s too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer. "It’s so old that I feel there are ghosts hidden somewhere in the walls," said another woman. Despite the seeming lack of local knowledge about the 400-square-meter synagogue, it does have a long history. It was built by an Egyptian Jewish family that resided in the neighborhood. “This temple was built by the Adda family,” says Carmen Weinstein, president of the Egyptian Jewish Community Council (JCC). "The Adda's were a Jewish Egyptian family of industrialists and bankers, who contributed to the growth of the Egyptian economy in the 1940s. I wish the state would preserve this temple, which is unique in this part of the city." For Jewish communities in Egypt before 1952 it was customary to erect neighborhood synagogues. "In each neighborhood, the local Jewish collectivity built a synagogue," says Weinstein, who also points out that while 29 synagogues once existed in Cairo, only 13 remain. When contacted for more information about the building, Cairo Governorate officials expressed surprise with respect to the building's unusual status, and gratitude that Al-Masry Al-Youm reporters brought the matter to their attention.
According to one governorate employee who wanted to remain anonymous, the building is recognized in the district's files, but has no licenses or ownership documents. Read more at almasryalyoum 
 The mainstream media continue to decry the Swiss referendum on minarets. To date, The New York Times has published one editorial and five additional articles on the subject, including one today. Perhaps The Paper of Record views the 30% of the electorate who actually voted in Switzerland as traitors to their own multicultural, anti-racist, politically correct belief system. The problem is that the Islamic world today does not share this hallowed belief system. Actually, it never did. Rather, it has destroyed or built over synagogues, churches, and temples, and denied that such infidel places of worship ever existed. Note the fevered Palestinian attempts to claim the Temple Mount, where once the ancient Jewish Temple stood, as really “Islamic.” The Islamic world does not allow new synagogues or churches to be built.
Further: Muslim fundamentalists currently persecute, torture, and murder those Christians who dare remain in the Middle East, and they kidnap, forcibly convert, and “marry” their very young daughters. It is time to demand—or at least to expect–reciprocity. Otherwise, we are really being racist in having one (higher) standard for Westerners and another (much lower) standard for the barbarians. Granted: The West is not as barbaric and intolerant as the Islamic world; we do not willingly wish to become intolerant. Yet, tolerating the intolerant is unwise, or as the Jewish sages tell us: Being kind to the cruel results in cruelty to the kind. Thus, if there can be no churches or synagogues built in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc.—then why should the Swiss or the Europeans allow new, blockbuster size mosques, and sound-splitting loudspeakers emanating from minarets? According to Imam Kurdi, writing in the Arab News, “And let’s not be hypocrites. If you held a referendum in a Muslim country asking whether the construction of new church steeples should be permitted, you are also likely to get an overwhelming no. So let us not brand this a Swiss phenomenon and let us also remember that it is not the majority of the Swiss population that supported the ban but the majority of those who voted, which if you do the maths comes to 30 percent of the population.” (Thanks to Esther for bringing this to my attention.) Let me be clear. I am one of those westerners who has “dreamed East.” And, as a Jew, I have an undeniably dangerous but familial kinship with Arabs and Muslims. I find the Muslim call to prayer beautiful—but only if I refuse to understand that, as an infidel, an American citizen and patriot, a Jew, a woman, and a Zionist, that my place inside that mosque is that of a sub-human, fair-game target for hatred or worse. Jews in exile from Arab and Muslim countries have launched a beautiful, haunted literature, one in which they manifest nostalgia for the places which endangered them and forced them to flee. Often, the danger is minimized, the customs romanticized. I am thinking of Andre Aciman, Roya Hakakian, and Lucette Lagnado. I am in favor of interfaith gatherings. Peaceful voices are sweet to my ears and yet: telling the truth is far sweeter than lying. The truth is: Mosque and minaret building in Europe probably represent a refusal to integrate; a refusal to separate mosque and state. Perhaps it also signifies an intention to one day vote in Shari’a law as the law of the European land. According to my colleague, Henrik R. Clausen, at Europe News: “Minarets are built to ’stamp a site with Islamic character’, not for their religious signifiance. Actually, no building should in principle have any religious significance, for only Allah is to be worshipped, not stones, buildings and holy water. The reality, of course, is somewhat different. The core purpose of a minaret remains to mark the ownership, that this land is Islamic.” Clausen points out that many Islamic minarets started out as church watchtowers. Thus, the minaret (and what it symbolizes) is cause for concern. Phyllis Chesler
 KABUL: Zebulon Simentov lives, eats and prays alone — the last known Jew in a country dominated by conservative Muslim culture. In the late 19th century, Afghanistan's Jews numbered about 40,000, many of them Persian Jews who had fled forced conversion in neighboring Iran. Beginning with an exodus to Israel after it became a state in 1948, the community has been in decline. Now Simentov is the caretaker and sole member of Afghanistan's only working synagogue. The last eight or nine Jewish families left after the 1979 Soviet invasion, he said. Simentov's wife and children moved to Israel years ago, but he stayed even through the Taliban regime. He was born in the western Afghan city of Herat in 1959 and says Afghanistan is home.
But having survived numerous beatings under the Taliban, he now only wears his yarmulke, or skullcap, in private. Portly, fond of whiskey and aged about 50, Simentov lives alone in the dilapidated two-story synagogue building and gets by on donations from Jews abroad and sympathetic local Muslims. Until 2005, Simentov shared the house with one other Jew, but the two feuded and lobbed allegations at each other of having let a sacred Torah scroll go missing and of having spread rumors that resulted in Taliban beatings. When his 80-year-old housemate died, Simentov said he was happy to be rid of him. Though Simentov has a Muslim friend who visits a few times a week, he spends most of his days in the company of his pet partridge, reading a Hebrew prayer book and watching Afghan TV in a small room whose pink walls are adorned with an Afghan flag and the picture of an orthodox rabbi. Source: AP H/T: Infidels Are Cool
 Danish politician Nader Khader says that "If anybody in the world should apologize to the rest of the world, it's Saudi Arabia.
They should apologize for oppressing their women.
They should apologize that women can only inherit half the portion of a brother.
They should apologize that women can't get a driver's license.
They should apologize that you can't build churches in synagogues in the country."
Khader adds that Saudi Arabia should also apologize for women having to wear a burka.
The Telegraph recently made headlines with a survey that suggested that a fifth of the European Union will be Muslim by 2050. This is if anything an understatement of the situation, since once you subtract Eastern European states and focus in on Western European countries such as England, France and Italy... or Sweden, Islam will comprise a sizable enough minority to be considered a state within a state. And even the most pessimistic statistics will grow gloomier if 75 million Turks inside the presently Islamist Turkey will become part of the European Union.
 Meanwhile always eager to get ahead, Russia estimates that Islam will become its predominant religion by 2050.
The Russians, both under the USSR and in the Putin era, have done everything they can to try and raise the birth rate, but remains at half that of Uzbekistan, or even war torn Chechnya.
With the Russian population set to fall by almost 50 million, to 100 million in 2050, the Muslim birth rate will have made up the surplus.
Having tried all the usual financial family incentives and even made an effort at luring back its former Jewish emigrants, Russia is now counting on its state run network of mosques, which can only preach Jihad at America, England and any non-Russian infidels, to maintain control. It is an absurd strategy, but no more so than Europe's own.
While Europe may not boast a population that is by turns dying of alcohol poisoning or trying to escape abroad-- Europe is dying the slow death of socialism instead.
High taxes, late marriages and the accompanying low birth rates have hit Europe hard. And attempts to compensate for gaps in the workforce during economic upswings with immigration, has imported the barbarians through the gate, past customs and into every major European city.
The old European is likely to live comfortably, to go abroad on vacations and have plenty of time for hobbies and entertainments. And to be child free, or perhaps one or two indifferently pampered children, if they can find the time.
The new European is likely to be named Mohammed, to have twice as many children, if not twice as many wives, and to spend less time entertaining himself at operas and on vacations, and more time building a future for his family.
The old European is likely to have a limited interest in church or synagogue. His children may even hold an open hostility toward organized religion. The churches and synagogues will pursue his grandchildren with all sorts of gimmicks in the hopes of getting them to show up, but even if they do, there will be very little there to hold them.
The new European will have a steady mosque. Outside the mosque he will listen to Islamic lectures on his media player or cell phone. Family ties will create strong religious bonds through the next generation, and there will always be a brother with a shiny knife for any daughter who stays off the path.
The end result is not very hard to project at all. Europe's left of center parties have embraced Muslims as a voting public, speeding their legalization, and what can only be euphemistically described as integration. But it is not so much Muslims being integrated into Europe, as Europe becoming integrated into the Islamic Ummah.
 Islamic hard-liners in Indonesia are calling for the closure of the country's only synagogue as a protest to Israel's offensive in the Gaza Strip. Protesters enraged by Israel's three-week-long operation in Gaza marched to the synagogue's gates chanting, "Go to hell, Israel!" The only Jewish religious site in the world's most populous Muslim state - which has no rabbi and only a few followers - then closed its doors. "If Israel refuses to stop its attacks and oppression of the Palestinian people, we don't need to defend [the synagogue's] presence here," said Buchori, who led about 100 hard-liners to the synagogue, where they burned an Israeli flag. The woman who has run the synagogue since the 1970s went underground after the Jan. 7 incident, in which Buchori also threatened to drive any remaining Jews out of town. The vast majority of Indonesia's Muslims practice a moderate form of the faith and do not advocate violence against Israelis, but they support the creation of a Palestinian state. Jakarta hosts a Palestinian embassy but has no political links with Israel. Read more ...Source: APH/T: Weasel Zippers
 Sun Nov 9, 2008 12:25pm EST
By Peter Graff
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - One of the last eight Jews in Baghdad, a portly retired accountant, erupts in a bellyful of laughter when asked why he never married.
"I was a playboy. Don't write that!" he jokes, grinning. "How old do you think I am? Wrong. I'm 65! Don't write that! Write that I am 55!"
His government ID proves his age, and on the back it says, unmistakably: "Religion: Jewish."
He has made contact with a reporter, not because he wants to tell the story of his persecuted community, but because he wants to complain about the landlord who is raising his rent.
"Because we are Jewish he knows we can do nothing. He isn't afraid because he knows we have no tribe here. Don't use my name."
Once one of the largest Jewish communities in the Middle East, Baghdad Jews have now nearly vanished while the country has been consumed by sectarian war.
Speaking in fluent English, the ex-accountant launches into a description of the Baghdad of his youth, one of the Muslim world's most cosmopolitan cities.
He recites the names of legendary social clubs where Jews, Christians and Muslims mingled in better days, with music and whisky and parties that ran through the night.
"So many people -- Muslim people -- say if the Jewish people come back it will be nicer," he says.
His family have left. Some are in London, some in the United States. His father was offered a chance to move to Canada, but turned it down because he wanted to die and be buried in Iraq.
The ex-accountant himself stayed, but if he can sell his father's house -- now a ruin bombed out in the Iran war in the 1980s -- he will finally leave.
"I want to sell the house and go. I like Iraq, but I am fed up. We had very nice times in Iraq, but now we don't like it."
Iraq's Jewish community dates from biblical times. According to Charles Tripp's History of Iraq, the country was home to 117,000 Jews in 1947.
Under Ottoman rule, well into the first half of the 20th century, Jews made up about a fifth of the population of the capital. Some of the villas in neighborhoods along the Tigris still have six-pointed stars of David in their stucco.
How many Jews are there now?
"We know them all," says the ex-accountant, counting.
There's the ex-accountant himself, plus the nephew with whom he shares a rented house in Baghdad's central Karrada district. There's the man who lives near them, the man who leads the community, the very old woman, the male doctor and the female dentist. And the man whose brother was a goldsmith.
The goldsmith married the dentist a few years ago. A few months later, he was abducted by gunmen.
"They came to his house and took him. He disappeared. They left his car, they left his mobile. They just took him."
So that leaves eight. Eight Jews left.
The synagogue in central Baghdad has been boarded up since 2003. The ex-accountant occasionally runs into some of the other Jews on the street, but confesses he isn't much for religion.
"We don't know how to pray," he says. "Hebrew books we have everywhere in the synagogue, but we don't know how to read it. Some words I know. The important one is Adonai. Adonai is God. We believe in God."
In the old days, Jews were an integral part of Iraqi life. A relative of the ex-accountant was finance minister decades ago. But beginning in the late 1940s, successive Arab governments accused Baghdad's Jews of supporting Zionism.
Some were jailed, others were barred from government posts, and thousands upon thousands left for Israel or the West.
By the time of Saddam Hussein's fall, the ex-accountant estimates there were only a few dozen Jews left. Western organizations came and evacuated most of the rest.
"A woman called Rachel, she came here took some of them to the Jewish community in London, I think," he said.
In 2003, he went to the Green Zone to meet a cousin who was born in the United States and had come to Iraq to work for the U.S.-run administration. The American woman was shocked when her mother put them in touch.
"She said: incredible! You are still here? She did not know she had a cousin in Iraq," he said.
Apart from his quarrel with his landlord, the ex-accountant says he has had few problems with the neighbors, most of whom don't know he is Jewish, some of whom don't care.
"Somebody says 'You are Christian', I don't say anything. Somebody says 'You are Muslim', I don't say anything. I think most people think we are Christian because they don't know there are still Jews in Iraq."
(Editing by Matthew Jones)
Source: Reuters
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Copyright Muslims Against Sharia 2008. All rights reserved.
E-mail: info AT ReformIslam.org
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The first sign says it's a National Democratic Party (NDP) office. Another establishes it as a Ministry of Social Solidarity local unit. A third sign claims it belongs to "El Wayli Kindergarten." But really, the building is a synagogue, a Jewish house of worship.
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