Free Republic

July 25, 2019 Special Dispatch No.8195 Article On Muslim Brotherhood Party Website: Al-Sisi Destroying Egypt In Accordance With Jewish Bible The Freedom and Justice Party, the political branch of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB), recently posted on its website an antisemitic article by journalist Sayyed Tawakkul, formerly a commentator on the Qatari Al-Jazeera channel and currently on the MB-affiliated Mekameleen TV. In the article, titled "Whoever Thinks Al-Sisi Is Failing Should Peruse the Bible of the Jews," Tawakkul accuses Egyptian President 'Abd Al-Fattah Al-Sisi of destroying Egypt in accordance with a plan "that has been set out in the Jewish...

Many years of restoration work at the ancient St. Catherine’s Monastery, carried out under the auspices of the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, have been completed. During the project, the territory surrounding the monastery was landscaped, the roads leading to the monastery and to Mount Moses were repaired, larger parking spaces for buses were created, and an electronic security system was installed, reports Romfea. With the restoration work, the Ministry aims to increase visitors to the holy habitation, built on the site where the Prophet Moses spoke to God in the Burning Bush, at the foot of the mountain where the...

I post this scholarly paper to compliment the link on DRUDGE:Eureka! Extraordinary discovery unlocks secrets of the ancients Summary:Seventeen newly published manuscripts of the Greek New Testament (comprising a new portion of P77 as well as P100-P115) are introduced and then discussed individually, with special attention to two groups of manuscripts: seven of Matthew and four of John. The material offers important new evidence on a range of text-critical issues and three passages are discussed (Mt. 23:38; Jn. 1:34; Rev. 13:18). I. Introduction:Within the last three years seventeen previously unknown papyrus manuscripts of portions of the New Testament have been...

Although it is the world’s oldest continually operating library, dating back to the 6th century, the collection of manuscripts at St. Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mt. Sinai is no stranger to the latest technology. In 2012, they began spectral imaging on many of the manuscripts to discover the texts beneath the texts. Many of the manuscripts are palimpsests, meaning a previous text had been erased so the scribe could reuse the valuable parchments. Traces of the original texts remained, however. Now the monastery has begun a high-tech process of digitizing its 4,500 manuscripts—a process that could easily take...

The Ladder of Heavenly UnityMoses approached the divine fire of the Burning Bush with the footsteps of his mind bare, completely free from any human trains of thought, wrote Saint Maximos the Confessor. Continuing Orthodox monasticism’s oldest unbroken tradition, Sinai monks still liturgize, shoeless, over the roots of the Burning Bush. On the holy ground where Moses was commanded to remove his sandals – together with all earthly logic – monks turn diversity’s polarizing forces to unity – some of the ways St. Catherine’s Monastery of Sinai brings Byzantium’s patristic spirit into the modern era as living tradition.One need look...

Saving a treasured trove, ever so slowlyAncient manuscripts from Mt. Sinai move into the digital age with the help of a Bedouin camel driver's son. By Suzanne Muchnic, Times Staff Writer SINAI, Egypt — On a refreshingly cool morning, before the sun drenches every exposed grain of sand in this vast desert, Hemeid Sobhy sets out on foot from the Bedouin village where he lives with his parents and sisters. Neatly dressed in jeans, sport shirt and sturdy sandals, he walks 40 minutes to the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine. He passes through a narrow door in the monastery's thick...

A Syriac scholar at Philipps University in Marburg, Germany, Dr. Kessel was sitting in the library of the manuscript's owner, a wealthy collector of rare scientific material in Baltimore. At that moment, Dr. Kessel realized that just three weeks earlier, in a library at Harvard University, he had seen a single orphaned page that was too similar to these pages to be coincidence. The manuscript he held contained a hidden translation of an ancient, influential medical text by Galen of Pergamon, a Greco-Roman physician and philosopher who died in 200 A.D. It was missing pages and Dr. Kessel was suddenly...

A retired Egyptian general has accused a historic monastery of being a threat to national security, and a Salafist weekly newspaper alleged that the monastery collaborates with Israeli intelligence officials, according to the Egyptian weekly Watani and the Fides news agency. Saint Catherine’s Monastery, now Eastern Orthodox, was built by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century and is located at the foot of Mount Sinai. It stands accused of being a beachhead of Greece and the European Union on Egyptian territory. “It is weird that our monks, and there are no more than 37 of us, would be accused...

A retired army general says he has filed a court case pushing for Egypt's historic Saint Catherine's Monastery to be demolished and its Greek monks deported on the grounds that they pose a threat to national security. In May 2012, Ahmed Ragai Attiya obtained 71 administrative orders regarding the demolition of the monastery's multiple churches, monk cells, gardens and other places of interest on the grounds, which he claims were all built in 2006 and thus not historic, according to Ihab Ramzy, the monastery's lawyer. ... In the same ONTV interview, Attiya levelled a host of accusations against the monastery's...

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — Malaysia has extended for two more years the imprisonment of a terror suspect linked to al-Qaeda's attempts to produce chemical and biological weapons, saying he has more information about terrorist operations. Yazid Sufaat, a U.S.-trained biochemist and former Malaysian army captain, was arrested in late 2001 as he returned home from Afghanistan, where officials say he was working on a biological and chemical weapons program for al-Qaeda that was ended by the U.S.-led war. Since then, he has been held without trial under Malaysia's Internal Security Act on accusations of being a member of Jemaah...

St. Paul, MN (LifeNews.com) -- A Catholic women's college in Minnesota is drawing criticism for allowing a group supporting Senator John Kerry's bid for the presidency to use campus facilities for a fundraising event. According to an announcement by the event's organizers, Artists for Kerry will hold a rally at the O'Shaughnessy Auditorium at the College of St. Catherine on Thursday, October 21. St. Catherine's is run by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, and is the largest Catholic college for women in the U.S. The event is meant "to inspire and mobilize Minnesotans to Get Out the Vote...