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ISRAEL

Utøya ‘God’s payment for opposing Israel’

The young people killed in 2011’s brutal terror attack on the island of Utøya deserved to die because their organisation was too critical of Israel, a new book by a US evangelical Christian has claimed.

Utøya 'God's payment for opposing Israel'
The book's writer Jeremy Hoff and Kjartan Mogen from Norway's Party of Christians. Photo: YouTube/Facebook
According to “22 July: The Prophecy”, the Norway’s Labour Party Youth (AUF), whose summer camp was attacked by the far-right terrorist Anders Breivik in 2011, was too supportive of Palestinians, making its members “enemies of God”. 
 
“When tragedy came, it was as a result of Norway’s fateful betrayal of Israel via the Oslo Accords. We reap what we sow,” the book’s author Jeremy Hoff, wrote in a response to a critical editorial in Norway’s Vårt Land newspaper. “It is true that I openly argue that the Utøya massacre was God’s direct judgment over Norway. Throughout the Bible, it is clear that God allows evil people and evil nations to exercise his direct judgments.”
 
Kjartan Mogen, the lead candidate for the Party of the Christians in Skien in this month’s country election, said he had met Hoff through the International Christian Zionist Centre, and supported his message. 
 
“The terrorism was the Devil’s work; the attacks occurred because of Labour and the AUF’s resistance against Israel, and God let it happen,” he told Dagbladet newspaper. “The Labour Party supports the Palestinian organisations PLO and Hamas.” 
 
Mani Hussaini, the AUF’s new leader of Norway’s Labour Party youth called Mogen’s support for the book “horrible, offensive, and disappointing”. 
 
Hoff, who works as an administrative pastor at the Shepherd of the Hills Church, published the work in Norwegian under his own imprint and has already sold several thousand copies. 
 
He draws on a prophecy he claims was made a year before the attacks and also on the strange numerical correlations which characterised the events, such as the fact that Breivik’s attack lasted precisely 77 minutes and also claimed 77 lives. 
 
On the book’s website, Gro Wenske, leader of Norway’s Committee for the Bible and Israel, calls it “fantastically good”. 
 
Jan Willem van der Hoeven, founder of the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem wrote, that “This is a book which all Christians in Norway should read.” 
 
Terje Liverød, chief executive of the Catch The Fire School Of Ministry Norway, said it contained “enormously valuable information”. 
 
The book has received considerable publicity on Norway’s evangelical channel TV Visjon.  

ISRAEL

Former Israeli soldier attacked on Berlin street

A former Israeli soldier was attacked in the German capital Berlin, police said Saturday, with one or several unknown assailants spraying him with an irritant and throwing him to the ground.

Former Israeli soldier attacked on Berlin street
Israeli soldiers on operation near the Gaza Strip. Photo: dpa | Ilia Yefimovich

The 29-year-old was wearing a top with the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) logo when the attackers started harassing him on Friday about his religion, the police added, calling it “an anti-Semitic attack”.

Officers are seeking the assailants, who fled immediately after the attack, on suspicion of a politically-motivated crime.

Saturday is the second anniversary of an attack by a far-right gunman on a synagogue in the eastern German city of Halle, who killed two in a rampage when he failed to break into the house of worship.

It was one of a string of incidents that led authorities to declare the far right and neo-Nazis Germany’s top security threat.

Also this week, a musician claimed he was turned away from a hotel in eastern city Leipzig for wearing a Star-of-David pendant.

While the allegations prompted a fierce response from a Jewish community unsettled by increasing anti-Semitic crimes, several investigations have been mounted into contradictory accounts of the incident.

In 2019, police recorded 2,032 anti-Semitic crimes, an increase of 13 percent year-on-year.

“The threat is complex and comes from different directions” from jihadists to the far right, the federal government’s commissioner for the fight against anti-Semitism Felix Klein said recently.

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