JUDAS: A Modern Journal

The Israel-Palestine conflict is an incredibly complex issue at the intersection of religion, politics, sociology, and economics - an ever evolving affair that is both multifaceted and extremely hard to comprehend, let alone attempt to resolve. I apologise if this month's instalment is the Frankie Robinson anthology is a little downbeat, the conflict is an incredibly serious topic that I am very passionate about. This article is not supposed to be non-partisan or non-biased - I have bias that is very obvious: I'm pro-Israel, I identify as a Zionist, I observe rabbinical and Talmudic scripture on the topic, and I am ever aware of the conflict mostly from the view of Israeli media, and Jewish news outlets. There are plenty of very compelling pro-Palestine arguments in the aether, and I'll be pushing for one of our own writers to release a contrasting piece on the topic, to balance me out. With that out of the way, let's begin.  Firstly, a Rabbinical/Talmudic argument for ...

Sitting at my desk, checking emails, waiting for a pot noodle that just won't cool down fast enough, the faint sound of Lady Gaga's Artpop  filling the air, I come across an email from the Jehovah's Witnesses. I signed up for their mailing list along with a couple others - The LDS, The Messianic Jews, and The Quakers. I just like to keep up with what the smaller denominations are doing. I think their whole sitch is really quite cute, and I love an underdog. I opened up this email from the Jehovah's Witnesses, and it had a link to an article on their website. It was really a very generic blog promotion email, that I doubt was even authored by a human, but I clicked on it anyway as the article's title hooked me, it was titled "Why Did the Holocaust Happen? Why Didn’t God Stop It?" I must admit, I was rather curious as to what spiel of apologetics the Jehovah's Witnesses were going to spin around this, and I wasn't pleasantly surprised in the slightes...

1894, Paris. Captain Alfred Dreyfus of the French Army is accused of handing top-secret military documents to members of the Imperial German military.  An investigation by the French army had found damning evidence against Dreyfus, the worst being a letter to the German military attache in Paris penned in Dreyfus' own handwriting.  But why would Dreyfus commit such a crime? He was a wealthy man from a prominent family, with no need for the alleged payoffs from the German Empire. He reportedly loved France and enjoyed serving his nation in the army. Dreyfus himself refused to confess, adamant he had done nothing wrong. Although France wasn't convinced, they believed Dreyfus was a liar. But why? Well, Dreyfus was a Jew.  Whilst Dreyfus sat in jail awaiting his trial, France's right-wing newspapers got a hold of the story and used it as a catalyst for their already popular anti-semitism. One of France's biggest talking points in the 1890s was the Jewish people; particularl...