A delegation from the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta sect is currently visiting Teheran to meet with senior officials and express their support for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his calls to eliminate
Israel.

In a statement to Iran's official IRIB radio, the group called for "the disintegration of the Zionist regime" and defended the Iranian president, saying that it "is a dangerous deviation to pretend that the
Iranian president is an anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic personality."

We should not be surprised that the Netureh Karteh, who got a subsidy from the PLO, consort with Holocaust deniers. A similar anti-Zionist Jewish group in Austria made an alliance with local neo-Nazis as well. Perhaps there is something paradoxically wrong and outdated in the Halachic criteria for "who is a Jew?" On the one hand, A Falashmura Jew or a Russian with a Jewish mother or a reform convert may have their heart and soul with the Jewish people and the Jewish cause. They may have suffered persecution for their Judaism and support for Israel abroad. They may be heros of the Zionist resistance. It makes no difference. According to Jewish Orthodox Halachic law, they are not recognized as Jews unless they "convert." On the other hand, the Netura Karteh, the Satmar Hassidim and their allies in Austria and elsewhere all maintain, unmolested, the right to call themselves Jews, all the while trampling on the Jewish people, the Torah and the memory of the Holocaust martyrs, and nobody seems interested in disowning them. On the contrary, they dare to call the rest of the Jews "heretics." Isn't it time to clean house in Judaism?

Ami Isseroff