RUTHFULLY YOURS

The horrific slaying took place in western Nineveh in Iraq

ISIS terror thugs have forced a 12-year-old girl to execute five women including a doctor who refused to treat their wounded fighters.

The horrific slaying took place in western Nineveh in Iraq yesterday.

One of the victims was alleged to have been a doctor who refused to treat terrorists wounded by anti-ISIS coalition airstrikes.

It is though to be the first incident of its kind in Iraq where a young girl has been forced by ISIS to execute civilians in public.

The open letter from the World Council of Churches (WCC) should have first quoted the three points from my article, then answered them one by one. Such a letter, however, was impossible, because all three points are simply and obviously correct. Instead, the WCC wrote a letter that completely ignored Tveit’s mistakes and falsely claimed that he was using only UN sources, apparently trusting that nobody would read my article.

If the WCC is truly thirsty for Palestinian water justice, why has it not rushed to the defense of Najat Abu Bakr?

Suppose, however, that the WCC wants to start a dialogue based on truth rather than “narratives.” Then there is a way for it to do so.

Two recent Gatestone Institute articles were addressed to the current campaign of the World Council of Churches (WCC) called “Seven Weeks of Water 2016.” In response, the WCC has issued an open letter to Gatestone. This author is responsible only for what his article stated. Conversely, we can examine the WCC’s response exclusively as referring to that article.

The article concerned the “sermon” preached by the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC), Olav Fykse Tveit, when he launched the campaign in a Jerusalem church. The sermon can be downloaded from the WCC’s website.

From this viewpoint, the WCC’s open letter contains a plainly false statement. It says: “The information and statistics we employ in the campaign are derived from United Nations sources. None are from the Palestinian Water Authority.”

Read the sermon from beginning to end and back, and you will find only one reference to a United Nations source: that the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends 100 liters of water per day per person (a target that is missed in many parts of the world). Regarding Palestinian water, Tveit’s “information and statistics” are drawn, as the sermon explicitly says, from the “advocacy group of Palestine, EWASH” (that is, from the Palestinian website “Thirsting for justice”). So, contrary to what the open letter states, Tveit’s sermon, which constituted the opening statement of the campaign and sets the tone for whatever follows, is based on a source openly engaged in pro-Palestinian agitation.

The Tapanila gang-rape shocked the quiet Helsinki suburb, and all of Finland. Many wondered why these second-generation Somalis, citizens of Finland, would carry out such a savage attack.

The rapists were eventually brought to trial. One was sentenced to a year and four months imprisonment, two were given one-year prison sentences and two others were acquitted. Penalties were softened due to the age of the rapists.

“1,010 rapes were reported to the police in 2014, according to the Official Statistics of Finland. The number of suspected immigrants in these cases is about three times higher than of the suspected natives in relation to the population.” – Finland Today.

Hate speech is problematic: there is no clear definition, a lapse that leads to confusion and debates. Finns believe that freedom of speech should be absolute. Unsuccessful attempts to deregulate blasphemy as a religious crime took place between the 1910s until the 1990s.

Finland — an open country that prides itself on respecting different ways of life, cultures and religions — is being greatly tested by the wave of Middle Eastern asylum seekers.

Finland is a homogenous country that has roughly 5.5 million inhabitants, about 4% of which are foreign[1]. Twenty years ago, thousands of Somalis immigrated to Finland. In the last decade or so, more international students came to study, and more foreigners came to live and work.

Finnish universities and the academia are of a high level, and most Finns speak some English. But it is not easy for foreigners to find jobs. The barrier is the language: Finnish, like Hungarian, is a part of the Finno-Ugric languages, and difficult to learn.

As a US battle group heads to area, the next war in Asia may be much closer than we care to imagine. With China’s claim to a few barren shoals and tiny islands representing the flint, the iron resolve of neighbouring nations to resist being reduced to vassal states may well see the region set ablaze.
The South China Sea is a key militarily strategic and economic waterway for the nations bordering it. The area’s economic importance is clear: roughly one-third of the world’s shipping sails through its waters and huge oil and gas reserves are believed to be found beneath its seabed. As there are few resources on the various sets of islands dotting its surface, many not much more than tidal shoals, and because there is almost no fresh water on any of them, they have remained uninhabited, except for seasonal visits by fishermen or, more recently, sporadic occupation by military forces.

For all nations, except China, the South China Sea has long been regarded as a local ‘lake’ available to all for fishing, transit and, more recently, for the possible economic exploitation of the gas and oil deposits that have been detected. Although they have not been accurately quantified, about 7.7Bn barrels of recoverable oil has been identified with a potential for 28Bn barrels in total. This treasure trove is augmented by 266 trillion cubic feet of Natural Gas reserves. In 2014, China began to drill for oil in waters near the Paracel Islands that are disputed with Vietnam. This immense potential wealth has greatly raised the stakes for all claimants to the archipelagos and the surrounding seas.

As China has grown in economic and military power, the South China Sea has become both Beijing’s front line for naval defence and a limitation to its global projection of its power, as the island states to its east limit its access to the open waters of the Pacific Ocean. To be recognized as a world naval power the Chinese Navy (PLAN) must control both the South China Sea and the egress from it. This is the real basis for the aggressive Chinese claim to almost the whole of the sea, in some parts nearly to the shorelines of the littoral nations. Gaining control of these blue-water exits is also one reason for the Chinese government’s recent, more accommodating political relationship with Taiwan. This improved relationship has seen the unhindered transit of Chinese warships through the northern Taiwan Straits exit into the Pacific Ocean.