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Hundreds of thousands of protesters block Ayalon Highway, light fires, smash police blockade near Prime Minister’s residence in Jerusalem; Netanyahu expected to announce pause in judicial overhaul legislation.

By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets throughout Israel late Sunday evening and in the early hours of Sunday morning, on the heels of an announcement by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he had fired Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

Gallant had warned that refusals by IDF reservists opposed to the judicial overhaul are endangering the army’s operational readiness and urged for a pause to the reform legislation due to the phenomenon.

Former Israeli Air Force head Eitan Ben-Eliahu told Hebrew language media that by firing Gallant, Netanyahu “has declared civil war.” His words appeared to resonate with hundreds of thousands of protesters opposed to the reform.

At around 10 p.m., tens of thousands of demonstrators began marching in Tel Aviv towards Ayalon Highway and in Jerusalem, towards the Prime Minister’s residence on Azza Street.

Protest in Tel Aviv – Israel has moved to an intense stage of protests after Netanyahu’s sacking of the defense minister. pic.twitter.com/z6P45VlmV4

— Ashok Swain (@ashoswai) March 26, 2023

The crowds quickly swelled, with Hebrew language media reporting spontaneous demonstrations in cities, towns, and junctions around the Jewish State, with the total number of protesters estimated at around 500,000.

The IDF issued an operational readiness alert several hours into the night, fearing that terror groups and enemy states could leverage the widespread chaos throughout the country to attack Israel.

Footage from Tel Aviv showed thick black smoke billowing from numerous fires set by demonstrators on Ayalon Highway, one of the country’s most important north-south freeways, as they completely blocked the thoroughfare for about 9 hours.

In social media videos from the scene, no police appear to be present at all. Eventually, they cleared the protesters at around 5 a.m. by using water cannons and horse-mounted officers.

Israeli MK @naamalazimi among protesters hit by police water cannon tonight during Tel Aviv highway protest dispersal @haaretzcom pic.twitter.com/bLED4CZwtJ

— Noa Landau נעה לנדאו (@noa_landau) March 27, 2023

At least three police officers were wounded in violent clashes with demonstrators.

Protesters in Jerusalem burst through a police blockade near Netanyahu’s home, sparking a major security incident which saw Shin Bet head Ronen Bar personally visit the residence to ensure it was safe for the premier and his family.

ההפגנה מתחת לבית רה”מ בירושלים: המוחים פרצו מחסום נוסף | עדכונים שוטפים >>> https://t.co/1eh1MdcvES@AkivaWeisz pic.twitter.com/QP4se1P9vD

— כאן חדשות (@kann_news) March 26, 2023

All of Israel’s universities were closed on Monday. The head of Israel’s largest labor union, the Histadrut, is expected to declare a massive strike.

President Isaac Herzog formally called for a pause to the legislation on Monday morning, along with several members of the Likud party, all of the opposition party heads, and reportedly a lawyer representing Netanyahu.

After the chaotic night of protests, Netanyahu expected to announce pause in judicial overhaul legislation sometime on Monday morning.

But Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu of the Religious Zionism party warned that pausing the overhaul set a negative precedent for the future.

“It’s giving in to political coercion,” he told Army Radio on Monday morning. “I think stopping the legislation is a really problematic thing.”

The post Mass protests roil Israel overnight – ‘Bibi declared civil war’ appeared first on World Israel News.

Michael Horne, a 53-year-old man from Kokomo, Indiana, is under arrest for allegedly facilitating the heinous act of child sex trafficking.

Reports of the boy’s whereabouts reached the Tell City Police Department, which notified local law enforcement about the missing teen.

Upon arriving at the address provided by the tip, authorities found the juvenile near a bathroom door, “lethargic” with hickeys covering his neck.

When officials questioned Horne about harboring the boy in his home, he confessed to sleeping in the living room while allowing the teen to sleep in his bed. Horne abruptly requested a lawyer when asked whether his DNA would test positive on the child’s body.

Sources say electronic devices found during the property search bore evidence of child sexual abuse.

The Kokomo neighborhood community was shocked to learn of the situation. Horne has been charged with the ‘promotion of child sex trafficking’. Additionally, there is speculation more charges will be brought to the Howard County Prosecutor’s Office.

Child sex trafficking is the crime of modern-day slavery involving illegally exploiting children for sexual gain. It is an issue that ravages millions of teens across the globe, with seriously damaging effects on the victims.

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33-year-old Jonathan Majors was arrested for allegedly attacking a 30-year-old woman in Manhattan’s Chelsea area in New York.

The altercation was reported to 911 at 11:14 am. Saturday in an apartment near West 22nd Street and 8th Avenue was said to have caused minor injuries to the woman’s head and neck. Afterward, she was taken to a nearby hospital and is in stable condition.

Majors was apprehended without incident and is now charged with strangulation, assault, and harassment in what police describe as a domestic dispute.

He has recently become more well-known due to his roles in Lovecraft County, Creed, and Kang, a Marvel villain in movies and TV.

A representative of Majors has declared that he has done nothing wrong and looks forward to clearing his name.

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Previously on Providence, I asked whether Russian President Vladimir Putin was correct to smear the West as morally degenerate (or, as he preferred, “Satanic”) as part of his ongoing ideological war against the Occident. Putin’s argument was that contact with Western soil inevitably corrodes the sacred Slavic soul, hence transforming his war of conquest in Ukraine into a morally just battle for the moral salvation of the Ukrainian people. 

One way to examine why Putin’s argument is so convincing in Russia, where belief in Orthodox Christianity remains strong, is through the lens of the attention-seeking Ukrainian-born extreme feminist group Femen, best-known today for a series of sick anti-religious stunts like invading French and German Catholic churches in a state of semi-undress before performing obscene mock-abortions of the infant Christ before the altar. 

Such literally un-Orthodox tactics – billed dubiously as acts of daring female rebellion – are deliberately calculated to offend Christians of all denominations. This makes it simple for Putin’s propagandists to portray such antinomian agitators as literal agents of the Devil, proving that extended contact with the wanton ways of the West really can corrupt previously innocent Ukrainian souls. 

Wicked Witches of the West

Femen was founded in Ukraine in 2008. Their all-female forces (they consider themselves a guerrilla band of terroristic ‘sextremists’) initially expressed valid concerns about poor native women being forced into the flourishing post-Soviet sex industry, besides quite correctly foreseeing the danger Vladimir Putin’s ever-more militaristic regime posed towards the freedom of their country. 

The specific patriarchs the man-eaters of Femen initially rebelled against were the literal patriarchs (as their national archbishops are known) of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Russian Orthodoxy has long been lavishly funded by the Kremlin and in return has lent its blessing to the State. Its leader, Patriarch Kirill, has explicitly endorsed Putin’s rule and wars alike, even saying dying fighting ‘Satanists’ in Ukraine “washes away all sins” for any Christian soldiers lucky enough to do so. 

Femen’s current priest-baiting tricks in Western Europe are not daring at all. Clearly secularist courts repeatedly fail to pass meaningful sentences against the sextremists who disrupt religious services: in 2022, the ECHR upheld one Femen agent’s act of public urination before an altar in a Paris church as a valuable expression of her inalienable right to free speech. In today’s woke West, Femen appear untouchable.

Their original antics in Ukraine were nowhere near as risk-free. In 2017, Femen sextremist Anna Allein valiantly disrupted a Russian Orthodox procession through Kiev by draping herself half-naked across a public monument to Prince Vladimir, the esteemed original converter of the Russian world to Christianity. Deriding Patriarch Kirill’s “so-called Christian values”, Femen called the (un)holy march of his priests through the city “inadmissible at the time when our defenders are dying from Russian aggression in Donbas” in the east of the country, where pro-Russian separatists were already fighting to split the region away. “The procession of the Moscow Patriarchate through the streets of Kiev is a ‘silent march’ of the Kremlin aggressor, after which heavy armored tanks may come,” Femen presciently argued. 

Yet most did not listen. Why? Perhaps because, by increasingly mixing their reasonable complaints with childish, anti-clerical tantrums, Femen unwisely made the average person in the East automatically regard them as a bunch of student-politics show-offs – or even full-blown Satanists. 

When Putin invaded Ukraine for real in February 2022, one Femen sextremist held a “therapeutic action” at Kiev’s central railway station dressed as a female Grim Reaper. Topless and holding a bloody scythe, with her face painted like a skull and a bridal veil atop her long blond hair, she had ‘DON’T PANIC’ daubed across her torso, urging residents not to flee Russia’s incoming missiles as “[being] intimidated equals [being] killed!” (so does being hit by a missile…) All that was necessary for Putin to accomplish his goal of demonizing the West was to share photos of this macabre, seemingly-deranged individual – who looked rather like a literal demon herself. 

The Misjudgements of Paris

In 2013, several of Femen’s founders fled Ukraine for Paris after being beaten up or seemingly having illegal weapons planted in their offices as a pretext for arrest. They blamed Putin’s secret agents for punishing them after one topless sextremist had accosted Patriarch Kirill with the slogan “Kill Kirill!” in protest against the recent arrest of the Russian feminist punk-protest band Pussy Riot. 

One Femen refugee to Paris, Oksana Shachko, a one-time aspirant nun turned creator of satirical anti-religious iconographic art, hanged herself in the French capital in 2018, aged 31. In 2014, she had left Femen, disillusioned by what it had become on foreign soil. “It was not the small, revolutionary, aggressive and courageous movement we created in Ukraine … it became empty,” she said, a mere degenerate parody of its original Ukrainian self. Perhaps this was inevitable. In Ukraine, Femen had encountered enemies actually worth standing up to. In France, the best they could do was to moan self-indulgently against legally impotent Catholic priests. 

Once safely harbored within the EU, Femen’s original core of moral seriousness died. Schisms grew between them and their original cross-border inspiration, Pussy Riot. Pussy Riot’s greatest act of public political disobedience came when they famously interrupted a Moscow cathedral service with a discordant ‘punk-prayer’ against Putin in 2012 before being imprisoned, an obvious inspiration for Femen’s own later sacrileges in Western churches.

Russian Dolls and Riot Girls

Pussy Riot’s 2012 punk-prayer took place in Christ the Savior Cathedral, the church Moscow’s leaders attended to broadcast their alleged religious faith before TV cameras on religious holidays. Thus, Pussy Riot hoped to make “a political gesture to address the Putin government’s merger” with Kirill’s Church. Rather than condemning Christian doctrine, they actually disparaged the Orthodox Church for deviating from it by obeying fallen earthly powers like Putin, not true heavenly authority. Called ‘Mother of God, Chase Putin Away!’, their song had competing verses, some disrespectful when addressing Putin and Patriarch Kirill, some respectful when addressing the Virgin Mary and requesting redemption from the dictator. 

Accordingly, some argued Pussy Riot were not blasphemers at all, but Dostoyevskian figures boldly resurrecting the old Russian tradition of Orthodox Holy Fools by leading subversive ‘alternative prayers’ in defiance of corrupt human authorities. In court, Pussy Riot consistently pled no malice against actual believers, claiming to be faithful Orthodox Christians themselves. In 2018, one incarnation of the group actually played a gig at a UK Christian music festival, suggesting their beliefs were genuine, not just a clever defense tactic. 

Pussy Riot subsequently refrained from using religious iconography during future protests and explicitly distanced themselves from Femen’s later actions supposedly performed ‘in their name’, as when one topless sextremist cut down a large cross in Kiev using a chainsaw, a senseless provocation Pussy Riot said created no “feelings of solidarity” between the two sisterhoods. Pussy Riot’s public assertion that they “were believers and prayed” was even called “ridiculous” and “disappointing” by the avowedly blasphemous Femen, who thought Christianity inherently sexist. 

Femen in Paris became a hollow burlesque of what they had once been in Ukraine, where they faced actual deadly danger, and also of the more truly courageous Pussy Riot in Russia. Therefore, sadly, Putin is correct: in this specific instance, contact with the West really did blacken the souls of a band of once-noble and brave Ukrainian women. But which particular devil in human form had made them all flee Westwards in the first place? 

The post Occidental Heroes or Foreign Devils?: The Feminist War for Mother Russia’s Soul appeared first on Providence.

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