Athens police arrested an alleged Palestinian terrorist accused of being in Greece to plan a major attack in Europe. Ghaleb Taleb, who who was arrested Feb. 12, is said to be a member of the Fatah-Al-Islam terror group based in Lebanon. He holds a Lebanese passport and citizenship.
Israel and Greece agreed to set up a regional force to deal with natural disasters following a meeting between the foreign ministers of the two countries. Avigdor Lieberman arrived in Greece Wednesday on the first official visit by an Israeli foreign minister in 15 years. Greece said it would organize the regional force and has invited the Palestinian Authority and other countries in the region such as Turkey, Egypt and Jordan to join the effort. The force comes in response to the Carmel Forest fire in northern Israe last December; Greece was among the countries to assist in quelling the blaze.
A high-level priest on the morning show of the largest television station in Greece blamed world Jewry for Greece\’s financial problems. The Metropolite of Piraeus Seraphim also blamed world Jewry for other ills in the country during his appearance on Mega TV. Mixing Freemasons with Jewish bankers such as Baron Rothschild and world Zionism, the Metropolite said that there is a conspiracy to enslave Greece and Christian Orthodoxy. He also accused international Zionism of trying to destroy the family unit by promoting one-parent families and same-sex marriages.\n
Israel’s ambassador to Greece, Arye Mekel, was on the phone with a journalist earlier this month when the call came in that Israel’s Carmel region was up in flames. The Israeli prime minister needed to speak urgently with his Greek counterpart. Mekel quickly located Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou in Poland, where he was meeting with the Polish president. But a Papandreou aide told Mekel the meeting could not be interrupted. “Tell him Bibi Netanyahu wants to speak with him urgently,” Mekel pressed, using the Israeli prime minister’s nickname.
Israeli rock musician Aviv Geffen will be the opening act for U2.
Israel and Greece discussed expanding defense ties.
Israel ’s relationship with the Palestinians mirrors that in the early 20th century between the government of Greece and the large Sephardic Jewish community of Salonika (modern Thessaloniki ). Growing up as a boy whose four grandparents immigrated to the United States from Salonika between 1913 and 1916—and many of whose relatives went through the Holocaust there—I regularly heard stories of the tense relationship between Salonika’s Jews and the Greek authorities prior to World War II. Greece captured the city from the Ottoman Turks in 1912. At the time Jews heavily outnumbered Greeks and Turks in the city. Descendants of Jews expelled from Spain and other Mediterranean lands during the Spanish Inquisition, their medieval Spanish dialect (Ladino) was the language most often heard in the coffeehouses and marketplaces of the city. Though Greece immediately granted them citizenship, most Jews would have preferred the city remain part of Turkey , which had given them refuge in 1492. There was a Ladino saying I used to hear as a boy: “Turko no aharva Judió.” A Turk does not beat a Jew. The implication, of course, is that they were beating other people. But the Turks had treated the Jews well, even letting Salonika ’s busy harbor close for the Jewish Sabbath.
We wound our way through the busy streets of Athens, dodging loud protesters commemorating the 1973 Greek student uprising, until we came upon an unassuming six-story apartment building and climbed the narrow stairwell to the top floor.
As a student at Cal State Northridge more than 30 years ago, Aron Hasson wrote a paper about the Sephardic synagogues of his ancestral homeland, the Greek island of Rhodes.
Poets have been known to wax lyrical about \”the glory that was Greece.\” Yet a visitor to Greece today quickly finds that the glory\’s not only in the past tense. While those who built the shrines to Zeus and Apollo are long gone, the people who inhabit modern Greece are unquestionably alive.
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