Tag Archives: Hamas

Aug 2 2015

What are Palestinians teaching their children today?

Disturbing items seen in Muslim quarter part of Jerusalem. NB; These are not pics off the internet, I took these myself.  In one case some local teenagers were playing with a toy gun and aimed it and Jewish passers by. IMG_20150712_140645189 IMG_20150712_140651710 The toy guns are made in China, but have Arabic writing and images of Muslim gunmen on them. IMG_20150712_140916521 IMG_20150714_102943912_HDRThere are no toy guns in the Jewish toy shops in Israel.   I saw this interesting picture in a toy shop, I’ll explain more later on this.

Moshiach is the Hebrew word for Messiah. You can argue that army service is mandatory for Israeli Jews (Arabs, Bedouins, Druze, Armenians and other ethnic groups in Israel can also join as well but are optional) and they are required to carry their guns when not on duty.

All Israelis I know join the army out of duty and learn many valuable skills during then, but really don’t want to go to war, but see a need to defend their nation from enemies on several directions.

Please pray for Arab children in Israel, that they would not be taught hate and violence.

NB, I was shocked to hear a Palestinian child died in a house fire a couple of days ago which was done deliberately with Hebrew graffiti (Price tag message) was left nearby.    Actual attacks on Arab families and children by extremist Jews can happen but happen extremely rarely.  I know the Israel government are determined to find and punish who was responsible for this, and the other child of the family is being treated in hospital.   Please pray this won’t mean more revenge attacks to anyone.

Aug 26 2014

Investigate terrorism from your armchair using NEWOCR.COM

fight terrorism from your armchairAbout a year ago, someone showed me a clever cloud based service called NEWOCR.COM

OCR or optical character recognition, is the art of clever software scanning a page of printed writing and convert into text.   This is a complex process to turn an image into actual blocks of text that could be edited in  a regular word processor later.

This software has been around for 20 years or more, but never accurate to be accepted in a real life work place.

The beauty with NEWOCR is it works with all kinds of languages include non Latin alphabets.   You can then feed the results into Google translator.

I think this system could be tweaked further and used for police or anti-terrorism work.

I’ve just seen this news article about a training manual recently found for members of HAMAS, the terrorist group who control the Gaza strip.

fight terrorism from your armchair2

fight terrorism from your armchair3

fight terrorism from your armchair4Open a new tab in your browser, and go to the site.   You can either A) upload a picture saved on your computer or B) use the URL of a specific image you have found on the internet.

Be aware, this will work in languages like Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Russian, Chinese etc.   I’ve even made it work with text at 45 degrees.   The text needs to ideally be large, and text with different images or patterns behind it might cause problems.  Click the blue Upload button.

fight terrorism from your armchair5

Now use the corners of the boxes show to adjust which parts of the image you want to scan.   Then click the blue OCR button

fight terrorism from your armchair6Ok Yalla!! – You can now translate your text.

Please don’t expect brilliant translation quality.   Also the NEWOCR site seems to be short of bandwidth and sometimes not always available.

I’d be curious to see how the police and anti terrorism departments could make of this.

Aug 10 2014

Evil reincarnated from the past

Haven’t felt like doing much writing, despite much going on the middle east and my new life in London.

I honestly can’t remember when the news was more depressing than this, with war between Israel and Gaza, Iraq and Syria having their own citizens murdered, victims mostly Christian.   Meanwhile naive one-sided white middle class people who don’t know much about middle east history put on kefiyah scarfs and join pro-Palestinian rallies with Muslim people in UK and Europe, and make a nuisance of themselves outside Tescos, but choose to ignore the bigger picture of the often turbulent middle east.

“Boycott Israel”  says your average liberal, leftist, vegan for Palestine, from their iPhone which contains memory chips and 3G technology developed in the only democracy in the middle east.  During the time of the Nazis, Hitler’s Germany had a similar idea to boycott the Jews of Europe.

This got me thinking about the names of today’s enemies of decent civilisation.

HAMAS the terrorism group who run the Gaza strip, their name comprises of an acronym in Arabic.   When transliterated into Hebrew, these five letters are pronounced “חמס” the word for violence.

ISIS is the group currently wiping out the Iraqi Christians at the moment, which bizarrely also a pagan god of Egypt long before Islam.

I was reading a while back also that some churches in Norway were set of fire by members of some heavy metal bands.   Most heavy metal music I have heard has a lot of lyrics about revenge, bitterness, anger, darkness and hatred towards God.   I want to Finland about 11 years ago, the Nordic countries seem to be the metal capital of the world.  Some of the more extreme metal bands contain lyrics and culture related to Norse gods like Thor.     This got me thinking this part of the dominant religious system in this region over a thousand years ago.

Its ironic how evil can be around in society for millennia only to come back with a similar legacy that the world has forgot.

Nov 19 2012

Hamas in Hebrew

A local Israeli I work with told me something interesting today:-

The word Hamas, the political movement that controls the Gaza strip, has eerily similar word in Hebrew.

I am not going to tell you, you have to find out for yourself:- 🙂

http://translate.google.com/

here is the text you need to copy and paste into:

חמס

Here is Psalms 140 in Hebrew which it also occurs in.  Click on above link or click here http://study.interlinearbible.org/psalms/140.htm (if you have a Windows XP computer you might need to add Hebrew support to read this)

Apr 5 2011

Jerusalem bus stop two weeks on:

I rode along the north part of Jaffa Street up to the bus station and saw my friend Dave along the way, actually its very easy to accidentally see anyone you might know in this city.

I think when Jesus returns here, it won’t be too hard to find him, even without a cellphone. 🙂

I visited the place where the bomb happened a few weeks ago:

Everything seems strangely normal, the man is still running the kiosk selling cigarettes, newspapers and ice cream, people are waiting for the bus, and some chap was using the phone box as well.

In fact nothing really looked any different apart from two wreaths left for the Christian woman who died, one from Israel and one from the UK.

Today, I was working home towards the bus (it was raining and I don’t like to ride my bicycle in the wet)   a short distance from work I saw a large crowd of people and some Magon David paramedics dealing with someone on the floor, they were doing resuscitation on this woman, there was a drip rigged up, and I could see a set of electric pads as well.  I prayed for this woman here that she would live, and after a while I noticed she was coughing, although the ambulance staff were still having to push her chest hard, I didn’t stick around too much longer, but will check the local news tomorrow.

You can see how fragile life can be from things happening on your street in any place, I must stress that I do feel very safe here, there isn’t a problem with alcoholism I see in Portsmouth, and there are occasional terrorist threats in the UK like the ones that happened on 7/7 on the London tube network in 2005.  Police and military are often around here in Jerusalem so security issues are spotted in almost all cases very quickly.

Jul 31 2010

Gaza’s prosperous regions

Saw this interesting article the other day.   Seems just like Portsmouth or Jerusalem that have people in poor and rich areas, not all of Gaza is hit by poverty, even if the media shows it this way.  Interesting that shopping malls and big swimming pools have recently opened when there is supposed to be a shortage of building materials.

http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001127.html

This is not to show that I don’t care about people in Gaza, its just more that their problems are less caused by Israel and more by rule from Hamas and Hezbollah who keep them in bondage, and kept the worldwide media in the dark by painting a different picture of what is happening, where other troubled places like Sudan get much less coverage in the news.

Jul 3 2010

ex-Hamas terrorist who finds Jesus stays in the US

Really pleased (some of our bible study group prayed this week)  that Mosab Hassan Yousef an ex-Hamas terrorist who turned to Jesus will be allowed to stay in the US, this is brilliant news, as it gets a chance for Arab people that have come out of the darkness of Islam to really tell the truth about what is happening in the West Bank and Gaza and example of the love of Jesus to touch both Jew and Arab.

Jun 4 2010

June Gaza Flotilla incident and being a volunteer in a unpopular place

I know Christians working in numerous troubled parts of the world all over.  Pakistan, South Africa, Chile, Ukraine and many more.  Western nations as well.   For me, being in Israel has to be one of the most difficult, not so much just in the context of my actual role and living there, but more in case of being an ambassador and explaining to people in my home country both Christians and non-Christians alike why I am volunteering there.

“Christians supporting Israel? Oh so you are Zionist are you?”  is sometimes reactions I get.   This week has been particularly difficult as I try and explain to some people what I believe why the IDF had to board the ships by ‘freedom fighters’ trying to enter Gaza.

In a usual predictable fashion, there is worldwide condemnation of Israel being an aggressor on civilians yet again.   But hold on are these people really people providing humanitarian aid and support to the Palestinians?  Look on Youtube and you can see videos released by the IDF about these people came armed, ok mostly with relatively crude weapons, kitchen knives, iron bars and such, but still able to kill.   Fine if you wish to make a legitimate statement they could of just held up banners and could arrange a third party from the UN to arbitrate sending goods and assistance from their boat to the people in Gaza, instead they were there motives are not so well intentioned.  Even more so, one of the pro-Palestinian activists (I think from the UK or Europe) brought an 18 month old child, why?  Sounds familiar like Hamas terrorists deliberately attack Israel from amongst buildings knowingly containing women and children.  To the folks from Europe, just like some anarchic animal rights protest group, it probably seems jolly exciting to join a band of mercenaries against what they have read as an oppressive authority, and join a cause.  Its now been found that the supposed Turkish freedom fighters have links to Al Queda.

As I said earlier, I am not really a political sort of person.  In the UK I have voted on all three parties at different years, sometimes though when injustice and lies come from our familiar media channels you need to speak out, and when you are a Christian supporting Israel, your views are not always very popular.  All boycotts are a stupid and pointless thing and don’t achieve anything productive.  Instead we need pray and show love to people in all places of conflict.   Israel may get financial support from the US, but for me as a volunteer, the kind donations I have been given by people this year can be counted on one hand.   I am in great need of sponsorship and through asking through various channels, finding a regular sponsor has turned up very little so far.

My role as an IT administrator in the charity in Jerusalem means I have a relatively hidden backroom job but very necessary role of keeping a charity infrastructure running.  As usual with my blog I don’t like talking about politics and arguing, so I will get back to just more biblical places I have visited and seeing people in need lifted up and encouraged by the different Christian organisations I know of here.