RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20368/christians-persecuted-worldwide

Overall, the global persecution of Christians remains higher than ever, with 365 million believers suffering “high levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith.”

Christians suffer “extreme levels of persecution” in the top 13 of the 50 nations. They are: 1) North Korea, 2) Somalia, 3) Libya, 4) Eritrea, 5) Yemen, 6) Nigeria, 7) Pakistan, 8) Sudan, 9) Iran, 10) Afghanistan, 11) India, 12) Syria, 13) and Saudi Arabia.

In the worst of the Muslim nations, Christianity has been so stamped out over the years that there are no indigenous Christians to persecute, only converts—apostates, who, according to most interpretations of Islamic law, deserve death.

The wildly popular late Sunni cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi noted on television that if not for the apostasy law [proposing death], Islam would have died out long ago.

Afghanistan: “When the Taliban came to power, they did so with pledges to recognize more freedoms than in the past. But that hasn’t happened—if an Afghan’s Christian faith is discovered, it can be a death sentence, or they can be detained and tortured into giving information about fellow believers.” — World Watch List 2024, opendoors.org

In 2023, around the world, 4,998 Christians — on average, 13 a day — were “killed for faith related reasons.” Another 4,125 Christians were illegally detained or arrested, and 14,766 churches and other Christian institutions were attacked.

Overall, the global persecution of Christians remains higher than ever, with 365 million believers suffering “high levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-u-n-s-long-history-of-failure/

No one should be shocked or surprised by the news that some United Nations Relief Works Agency staff directly participated in the heinous savagery of Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7.

According to Israeli intelligence, AJC reports, “six UNRWA workers were part of the wave of terrorists who breached the Gaza-Israel border and massacred civilians inside of Israel. Additionally, two helped to kidnap Israelis, two others were tracked to sites where hundreds of Israeli civilians were shot and killed. Others coordinated logistics for the assault, including procuring weapons.” Seven were identified as primary school teachers, and one is a Hamas commander.

By the way, U.S. taxpayers finance a third of the UNRWA’s budget, including paying for schools where terrorist sympathizers indoctrinate half a million students with murderous hatred for Jews. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres implied that those staffers were just a few bad apples, but Israeli intelligence estimates that 10% of UNRWA’s 12,000 employees have links to Hamas or Islamic Jihad.

Again, no surprise there. Ever since its birth, the UN has been rife with corruption, politicization, and failure. Until we start making this “cockpit in the tower of Babel” ––as Churchill in 1946 presciently warned that the most important institution of the “new world order” might become–– accountable to U.S. taxpayers, our national interests and security will remain hostages to those of other nations, many of whom are sworn enemies of the free world.

That failure should have been predictable from the start, given the sorry record of its precursor, the League of Nations, which included future aggressors like Germany, Japan, and Italy as signatories. The UN repeated the same incoherence that compromised the League. The Versailles settlement had enshrined the sovereign, self-governing nation as the universal political order, but at the same time created a supranational institution that required member states to cede some of their sovereignty, and be bound by its rules and resolutions, which reflected Western political principles and goods like political freedom and human rights.

Given the complex, cultural diversity of the world’s nations and governments, there could be no “harmony of interests” that could satisfy every nation and honor its particular culture and political ideology. National self-interest and cultural goods like religion would trump the UN’s collective interests, usually by exploiting for illiberal and tyrannical ends the lofty Western rhetoric of “national liberation,” “national self-determination,” and “human rights.”

Moreover, like the League, no credible force was created to enforce the UN’s decrees that often collide with a nation’s interests or territorial ambitions. The UN quickly became a paper tiger, its offices and resolutions hostage to such interests, especially those of the great powers that comprise the permanent, veto-bearing, nuclear-armed members of the Security Council.  Parochial political ambitions––including those of autocratic, totalitarian, and gangster states–– and economic interests replaced the UN’s lofty principles.