Religious Freedom Day in Portugal was celebrated yesterday, June 22, to commemorate the anniversary of the Religious Freedom Law, which was enacted in 2001. The law strictly requires both public and private entities to respect that freedom, a mandate which is rooted in the fundamental principles of the Portuguese Constitution and protected by international laws.

The Portuguese Religious Freedom Law defends freedom for all religious groups, including associative and institutional forms. It expressly ensures that religious organizations have total autonomy in their internal structure, worship, and administration. The law formally recognizes the "collective dimension" of religious freedom, allowing communities to organize as collective entities, choose and qualify their members, establish places of worship, train clergy, and spread their faith.

Religious communities operate independently of the state and are free to determine their internal organization, doctrine, principles, and the appointment of their ministers and members without government interference.

Politicians, Media groups and Police

In the US or Israel, they would all be in jail.They dared to publish hundreds of news articles in newspapers spitting on the community without even listening to them or respecting the principle of contradiction. They dared to invade the largest synagogue in the country, based on those news articles. They dared to steal the community's board meeting minutes to verify if they agreed with its form of organization. They dared to spy on the email inboxes and phones of the organization and its leaders.

They dared to gather letters from a convicted criminal spitting on the Jewish community of Porto, on the granddaughter of the founder, on the central synagogue, and even on the Kadoorie family. They dared to arrest the religious leader and seize all the wages the community had paid him for more than a decade of work.

They dared to collect letters from the condemned man stating that the granddaughter of the Portuguese Dreyfus, daughter of a Jewish mother, was not Jewish, and they did the same regarding the only Portuguese Jew whose marriage was officiated by a chief rabbi of the State of Israel.

They dared to call the community uncultured. They dared to disregard the opinions of Chabad Lubavitch, the strongest Jewish religious organization in the world. They dared to invade the Jewish museum and steal all the documents they found there. They dared to invade the museum curator's house at 7:00 AM.

They dared to put people under maximum stress, with the elderly facing health problems. They dared to frighten more than a thousand people. They dared – through the atmosphere of persecution they created – to give carte blanche to criminals who assaulted offices and private homes (including that of the former president of SIRESP) and who attempted to kill young Ilan Cohen.

All this happened in the country of the Inquisition, the same country that in 1930 – through its press – had already called Captain Barros Basto a mere pantheist.

Religious Freedom Day was celebrated as if nothing had happened. No one offered official apologies to the Jewish Community of Porto, which promises not to forget the issue. The Jewish world is characterized by its memory.

In contemporary international law, a state that severely violates religious freedom is widely considered a "rogue state". A case of this gravity – especially when combining executive, legislative, judicial, and media powers – can be considered terrorism by the Jewish state and the United States.