UAE leader recognized at Never Is Now Summit for his leadership in brokering the historic Abraham Accords and for promoting peace and dialogue in the Middle East New York, NY, March 3, 2025 … ADL (the Anti-Defamation League) today honored Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba, the United Arab Emirates’ Ambassador to the United States, with the Abraham Award at this year’s Never Is Now summit. The award recognized the Ambassador’s instrumental role in brokering the…
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August 21 marked the 53rd anniversary of the 1969 al-Aqsa Mosque arson and the ongoing disinformation campaigns scapegoating Jews and Israel for the attack. Although Israeli authorities promptly arrested, tried, and convicted the culprit, Denis Michael Rohan – a Protestant extremist from Australia who believed his actions would prompt the Second Coming of Jesus – Middle Eastern outlets have been publishing inaccurate reports of the event to this day. In a blog published last month,…
August 21 marks the 53rd anniversary of a terrible attack against an Islamic holy site, when a Protestant extremist from Australia named Denis Michael Rohan set fire to the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, destroying large parts of the site and irreplaceable artifacts.
Rohan’s crime should rightly be widely condemned and the loss commemorated even five-plus decades later. It is important to note that Rohan, who believed his actions would prompt the Second Coming of Jesus, was…
New York, NY, November 29, 2021… Members of ADL’s (the Anti-Defamation League’s) Task Force on Middle East Minorities issued a letter today calling on United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken to broaden the criteria for Priority-2 refugee admissions status to include Afghan nationals from ethnic and religious minority groups that have a well-founded fear of persecution under Taliban rule.
Vulnerable ethnic and religious groups are now in much greater peril since…
New York, NY, August 18, 2021 … ADL’s (Anti-Defamation League) Task Force on Middle East Minorities today expressed deep concern about the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban, an Islamist extremist group known for its horrific brutality against women, children, and religious and other minorities.
The Task Force issued the following statement:
We have no doubt that Taliban rule will prove to be devastating for Afghanistan’s minority communities.
We call…
New York, NY, March 23, 2020 ... ADL (the Anti-Defamation League) released the following statement today concerning the Coronavirus bill currently circulating in the House of Commons that would allow local authorities to cremate a body against the wishes of the deceased.
ADL supports the efforts of Jewish and Muslim communities to assure that religious rights and sensitivities are accommodated within government public health measures, in particular with regard to cremation, when…
by: Rabbi David Sandmel January 21, 2020 Update: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Oberammergau Passion Play has been postponed until 2022.
In 1634, the residents of the picturesque village of Oberammergau in the Bavarian Alps made a vow to perform a passion play every ten years as a sign of their gratitude to God for having been spared from a deadly plague. Today the Oberammergau Passion Play is performed every ten years, in years ending in zero, and will also be performed in 2034 …
New York, NY, December 14 ... ADL's Task Force on Middle East Minorities condemns the recent arrest of over 100 Christians in Iran. The timing of the arrests follows a pattern of harassment that Iran has used in the past toward its religious minorities, intimidating them just weeks before their religious holidays, in this example just weeks before Christmas.
According to reports, the arrests targeted Christian converts of Muslim backgrounds. This wave of arrests is seen as part of a…
New York, NY, December 14 … ADL’s Task Force on Middle East Minorities welcomes Congress’s passage of the Iraq and Syria Genocide Relief and Accountability Act (H.R. 390) and President Trump signing this important bill into law. The Act, which passed both chambers of Congress with wide bipartisan support, ensures that U.S. humanitarian assistance in Syria and Iraq goes to ethnic and religious minority individuals and communities that are in greatest need,…
New York, NY, November 8, 2018 … ADL today announced the launch of a new task force focused on promoting the protection of minority communities in the Middle East.
The ADL Task Force on Middle East Minorities will educate, advocate and elevate the issues challenging these important and all-too-often overlooked communities across the region, including religious, ethnic, sexual and gender minorities, and other groups who face governmental and societal repression and discrimination…
Vatican City, February 9, 2017 … A delegation of top leaders from the Anti-Defamation League met on Thursday with Pope Francis at the Vatican, where they voiced support for the pontiff’s ongoing efforts to denounce anti-Semitism and praised his advocacy on behalf of refugees, as well as his efforts to encourage greater understanding among Christians, Muslims and Jews.
“We know you understand and share our concern about the resurgence of anti-Semitism, especially in…
by: Jonathan A. Greenblatt | October 27, 2015 PBS - Religion & Ethics Newsweekly The promulgation, on October 28, 1965, of Nostra Aetate, the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on the Church’s Relations with Non-Christian Religions, may be the most important moment is post-Holocaust Jewish-Christian relations and interfaith relations writ large.
In its fourth chapter, Nostra Aetate effectively overturned centuries of what the noted French Jewish historian…
by: By Abraham H. Foxman | April 18, 2013 The Huffington Post One of the first things Argentinian native Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio did after being elected pope on March 13 was to send a message of friendship to Rome's chief rabbi, Riccardo Di Segni -- and, by extension, the Jewish people.
"I sincerely hope to be able to contribute to the progress that relations between Jews and Catholics have enjoyed since the Second Vatican Council," wrote Cardinal Bergoglio, who took the name Pope Francis…
January 02, 2013 Q. What is the basis for ADL's concerns about Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ"?A. We first learned about Mr. Gibson's plans to make a film based on the final hours of Jesus' life in a New York Times Magazine article that appeared in February 2003. An early version of the script was shared with us. In August 2003, an ADL representative saw a rough cut in Houston. On January 21, we saw a version of the film at a screening in Orlando, Florida. We had hoped to see the film…
by: Abraham H. Foxman | July 11, 2007 Jewish Telegraphic Agency NEW YORK (JTA) – With anti-Semitism resurgent in the world, one of the encouraging elements for the Jewish people, particularly if one is to compare things today to the 1930s and 1940s, is the remarkable change in the Catholic Church's attitudes toward Jews. In the past four decades, a conceptual revolution has taken place in the church's relationship with the Jewish people. The first step came with Vatican II and its…
In 1965, the Second Vatican Council made historic changes to church policies and theology. Among them was Nostra Aetate, Latin for "In Our Time," a document that revolutionized the Catholic Church's approach to Jews and Judaism after nearly 2000 years of pain and sorrow.
Section four of Nostra Aetate repudiates the centuries-old "deicide" charge against all Jews, stresses the religious bond shared by Jews and Catholics, reaffirms the eternal covenant between God and the People of…
The central narrative of Christian theology is the passion, i.e. the trials and crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus. There are four different accounts of the passion in the gospels of Christian Scriptures, in which Jews play different roles. All these accounts culminate in the death and resurrection of Jesus as revealing God's saving power available to humanity. Good Friday and Easter celebrate respectively the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus as the high points of Christian creed and…