Displaying posts categorized under

WORLD NEWS

The “Great Pleasure in Destroying Christians”: The Persecution of Christians, September 2019 by Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15166/destroying-christians

“These regulations [from 2006] stipulate that all places of non-Muslim worship must be licenced. However, the government has yet to issue any licence for a church buildings [sic] under this ordinance, ignoring applications from churches to regularise their status in accordance with the ordinance.” — International Christian Response, September 25, 2019, Algeria.

Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board sought to deport a refugee family — a mother and three children — that had fled their native country of Nigeria after they were attacked and threatened with death for leaving Islam and converting to Christianity…. “They face a ‘fatwa’ (a pronouncement of death) against them for converting to Christianity from Islam. They believe they face certain death if they are returned to Nigeria. They are quite fearful.” … Supporters of the family said the government was not taking the time to establish the family’s humanitarian status or perform a proper risk assessment. “They’re trying to boot [them] out of the country before then.” The family’s current status is unclear.

The Slaughter of Christians

Nigeria: On September 22, the jihadi group, Boko Haram, released a video depicting the execution of two Christian aid workers. Lawrence Duna Dacighir and Godfrey Ali Shikagham, both members of the Church of Christ in Nations, appeared on their knees, in front of three armed men, who proceeded to shoot them. Both Christians had gone to Maiduguri — near where they were captured — to help build shelters for people displaced by Islamic extremist violence. In the same video, and “speaking in the Hausa language, the middle one of the three terrorists says … that they have vowed to kill every Christian they capture…” Responding to the executions, Pastor Pofi, a cousin of the two executed Christians, said:

“Lawrence and Godfrey left Abuja for Maiduguri in search of opportunities to utilize their skills for the betterment of humanity and paid with their lives. We will never get their corpses to bury. The community will have to make do with a makeshift memorial to these young lives cut short so horrifically.”

Separately, a Christian pastor and the wife of another pastor were killed in two different raids by Muslim Fulani herdsmen. “After they had killed her [Esther Ishaku Katung], they were still demanding the ransom without telling her family that they had killed her,” a local Christian said. “It was only after the ransom was paid that it was found by her family that she had been killed by her abductors.” Her mutilated body was found dumped in the bushes.

Old Tricks and the Iraqi Genie by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15168/iraqi-genie

They claim since force cannot impose democracy, it was wrong for the US to invade Iraq and dislodge Saddam Hussein. They ignore the fact that though force cannot impose democracy, impediments to democracy can, and have been, removed by force.

Iraqi officials wonder how so many Iraqis, including many statistically-classed illiterates, manage to send and receive text messages on their smartphones. Those officials do not realize that even the poorest peasant is now able to pick up the rudiments of the alphabet and a vocabulary of a few hundred words to express his anger and passions and to coordinate action with those who share his concerns.

Tehran is wrong in toying with the idea of ending the uprising with a bloodbath as in Syria. Washington is wrong to think that yet another election with the same rules and same cast of characters would do the trick. The Najaf mullahs are wrong to believe that Iraqis will obey their fatwas as they did a generation ago. Tribal chiefs are mistaken in thinking the big “Sheikh” could secure a big cheque in exchange for calming down his kith-and-kin.

But, the fact remains that old tricks will not push that genie back into the bottle.

Although it is too early to speculate about the outcome for the Iraqi uprising, one fact is clear: What we witness is the result of a multiple misunderstandings, by participants in the current drama and those who watch from the sidelines.

There are, first, those who see Iraq as a secular version of the “original sin”. To them, toppling Saddam Hussein was the starting point of a journey that could only lead to hell.

They claim since force cannot impose democracy, it was wrong for the US to invade Iraq and dislodge Saddam Hussein. They ignore that though force cannot impose democracy, impediments to democracy can, and have been, removed by force.

Jeremy Corbyn Poses a Potent Threat to Western Security by Con Coughlin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15164/jeremy-corbyn-poses-a-potent-threat-to-western

By far the most likely casualty of a Corbyn government would be the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network, where there is a strong likelihood that other member states of the alliance will be deeply reluctant to share highly sensitive material with a British prime minister who has spent his entire political career openly associating with regimes and groups that are utterly hostile to the West and its allies.

At the heart of his hard Left approach to foreign policy lies a deep hatred for the US and its role in safeguarding the interests of the Western democracies.

Thus Mr Corbyn’s instinct is to be more sympathetic to the views of Russia, Iran, North Korea and the Assad regime in Syria than Britain’s long-standing allies in Washington and Europe.

With the British general election now well underway, Britain’s allies need to give serious consideration about how they would deal with Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour party’s hard left candidate, in the event of him becoming prime minister.

The prospect of Mr Corbyn entering Downing Street is of particular concern for the US given the current level of close cooperation that currently exists between Washington and London, especially regarding national security issues.

As one highly influential American security source told me earlier this week, “A Corbyn government would not just be a disaster for Britain. It would be a disaster for the US and other Western allies who work closely with London on a whole range of global security issues.”

Hong Kong’s Week of Rage Boils Over: ‘All Day All Night We Are Gonna Fight’ Clashes between protesters and police since Monday have turned universities into battlefields and gridlocked the city By Steven Russolillo, Joyu Wang and John Lyons

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hong-kongs-week-of-rage-boils-over-all-day-all-night-we-are-gonna-fight-11573803380

Antigovernment protesters and police shocked Hong Kong with some of the ugliest incidents in nearly six months of unrest this week, leaving the city’s leaders scrambling for a way to restore order under increasing pressure from Beijing.

A 70-year-old man died Thursday night after being hit in the head with a brick during a clash a day earlier. A 15-year-old boy was in critical condition on Wednesday, according to the Hospital Authority, which declined to comment on his current status. Local media said he sustained injuries after appearing to be hit in the head by a tear-gas canister. And police shot a 21-year-old protester on Monday; later, pro-democracy demonstrators set a man who argued with them on fire.

On Thursday in Brazil, Chinese President Xi Jinping urged a tough police response to the protests.

The Chinese government will “firmly support the Hong Kong police in strictly enforcing the law and firmly support the Hong Kong judicial bodies in severely punishing the violent criminals in accordance with the law,” Mr. Xi said. He made his comments on an international stage at a summit of leaders from emerging markets.

Clashes between protesters and police this week turned universities into battlefields, rendered highways and tunnels unusable, disrupted public transit and frequently left the city’s bustling financial district under a fog of tear gas. Shops across the city closed, further crippling an economy that has already tumbled into a recession. The Hang Seng Index, the city’s stock market, dropped 4.8%, its worst week since early August.

France: An “Inverted Colonization” by Guy Millière

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15155/france-inverted-colonization

Soon after, Muslim organizations that had asked for students to have the right to wear the veil in schools also asked for a change in the school curriculum — in history, so that Muslim civilization would be presented in a more “correct” and “positive” way.

“If the way I dress disturbs you, leave my country”. — Signs at a demonstration, October 27, 2019.

“Any criticism of Islam is now blasphemy.” — Ivan Rioufol, columnist, Le Figaro, November 4, 2019.

Details lead one to see that the anti-Christian acts were mostly acts of church vandalism, the anti-Semitic acts were very often violent attacks against Jews or cemetery desecrations, and that the anti-Muslim acts were almost only anti-Muslim graffiti or the laying of slices of bacon the entrance to a mosque or in the mailbox of a Muslim organization. No Muslims were physically attacked.

“We are not in a project of assimilation.” — Yassine Belattar, former advisor to French President Emmanuel Macron, October 27, 2019.

Éric Zemmour has suggested that France is threatened not by a risk of “partition”, but by an inverted “colonization”.

On October 12, 2019, a meeting of the Regional Council of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté was held in Dijon, a quiet town in central France. A woman wearing a long black veil was in the audience, apparently accompanying a group of students. All at once, the head of the National Rally party group at the Regional Council, Julien Odoul, rose and said that the presence of a woman wearing an Islamic headscarf in a public building was incompatible with the values ​​of the French Republic:

“We are in a public building, we are in a democratic enclosure. Madame has all the time to keep her veil at home, in the street, but not here, not today. It’s the Republic, it’s secularism. It’s the law of the Republic, no ostentatious signs.”

He was neither threatening nor violent, yet his words immediately upset others in the room. A boy, apparently the son of the veiled woman, rushed crying into her arms. She then left the room slowly, accompanied by other children.

The Other Genocide of Christians: On Turks, Kurds, and Assyrians By Raymond Ibrahim

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-other-genocide-of-christians-on-turks-kurds-and-assyrians/

“Although there has never been any love lost between Turks and Kurds, once Christians were thrown into the mix, the two hitherto quarreling Muslim peoples temporarily set their longstanding differences aside: “Holy war [jihad] was proclaimed in Kurdistan and Kurdish tribes responded enthusiastically under the planned and concerted direction of the Turkish authorities,” writes Yacoub. Thus, the Kurds “were accomplices in the massacres, and participated in looting for ideological reasons (the Christians were infidels).””

One of the most refreshing aspects of Resolution 296—which acknowledges the Armenian Genocide, and which the House recently voted for overwhelmingly—is that it also recognizes those other peoples who experienced a genocide under the Ottoman Turks.  The opening sentence of Resolution 296 acknowledges “the campaign of genocide against Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriacs, Arameans, Maronites, and other Christians.”

And that last word—Christians—is key to understanding this tragic chapter of history: Christianity is what all those otherwise diverse peoples had in common, and therefore it—not nationality, ethnicity, or grievances—was the ultimate determining factor concerning who the Turks would and would not “purge.”

The genocide is often conflated with the Armenians because many more of them than other ethnicities were killed—causing them to be the face of the genocide. According to generally accepted figures, the Turks exterminated 1.5 million Armenians, 750,000 Greeks, and 300,000 Assyrians.

As for the latter peoples (the word “Assyrian” also encompasses Chaldeans, Syriacs, and Arameans) half of their population of 600,000 was slaughtered in the genocide. In other words, relative to their numbers, they lost more than any other Christian group, including the Armenians.

Year of the Sword: The Assyrian Christian Genocide (published 2016) underscores that: 1) the Assyrians were systematically massacred, and 2) the ultimate reason for their—and therefore the Armenians’ and Greeks’—genocide was their Christian identity.

The book’s author, Joseph Yacoub, an emeritus professor at the Catholic University of Lyon, offers copious contemporary documentation recounting countless atrocities against the Assyrians—massacres, rapes, death marches, sadistic eye-gouging, and the desecration and destruction of hundreds of churches.

U.S. House Acknowledges Armenian Genocide, the ‘Most Colossal Crime of All Ages’

Europe: The New Political Weapon of ‘Islamophobia’ by Alain Destexhe

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15159/islamophobia-political-weapon

The objective of using the word “Islamophobia” appears to have been to make Islam untouchable by placing any criticism of it as equivalent to racism or anti-Semitism.

The word “Islamophobia” deliberately intends to transform the critique of a religion — a fundamental right in Western societies — into a crime.

“The term ‘Islamophobia’ serves several functions….Above all, however, the term is intended to silence Muslims who question the Koran, who demand equality of the sexes, who claim the right to renounce their religion, and who want to practice their faith freely and without submitting to the dictates of the bearded and dogmatic.” – Pascal Bruckner, in his book, Un racisme ordinaire : Islamophobie et culpabilité, Grasset, 2017 [English version: An Imaginary Racism: Islamophbia and Guilt, Polity 2018]

It is not Muslims people “hate,” any more than they hate Hindus or Buddhists or Shintos. It is the violence and coercion that some adopt — what is known as jihad or holy war — that people reject.

In the attacks at the Bataclan Theater and other sites in 2015, terrorists murdered 131 persons and wounded 413. Is it irrational to remember who was calling those shots?

France is once again profoundly divided over Islam. Last Sunday, November 10, a “March against Islamophobia” was held in Paris in response to an appeal from 50 public figures. In an op-ed in the leftist newspaper Libération, the demonstrators pleaded to “stop Islamophobia and stop the growing stigmatization of Muslims, victims of discrimination and aggression”.

Two recent incidents ignited the public debate and served as a pretext for the march. On October 26, an 84-year-old man shot and injured two men while trying to set fire to the mosque of Bayonne. Earlier in October, in the Regional Assembly of Burgundy, a member of the National Rally party (RN) complained about the presence in the gallery of a woman wearing an Islamic headscarf. The French political class and media condemned both incidents almost unanimously.

Among the signatories of the op-ed are Jean-Luc Mélenchon, president of La France Insoumise (“Unsubmissive France”), the most prominent leftist political party in the French National Assembly; Benoît Hamon, the Socialist Party candidate in the last presidential election; Philippe Martinez, leader of the Communist trade-union General Confederation of Labor (CGT); Yannick Jadot, a prominent Member of European Parliament from the Green party and Edwy Plenel, editor of Mediapart, a successful online media news platform and former editor of the newspaper Le Monde.

Europe Backs Iranian Nuclear Breakout by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15149/europe-iran-nuclear-breakout

Tehran shelters members of the terrorist group Al Qaeda, and it is reportedly continuing to facilitate the group’s operations.

Now imagine if this rogue state obtains nuclear weapons, what kind of destruction could it inflict on the world?

The international community, particularly European nations, must take urgent steps to counter Iran-backed international terrorism and prevent it from becoming a nuclear state.

When the US State Department released its annual Country Reports on Terrorism on November 1, 2019, four countries — North Korea, Sudan, Iran, and Tehran’s staunch ally, Syria — were listed as state sponsors of terrorism. The annual report describes the theocratic establishment of Iran as “the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism” in 2018.

How, in 2018, did the Iranian government receive the title “the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism”? The criteria by which it is determined if a country should be listed as a state sponsor of terrorism are based on whether that state has constantly provided support for acts of terrorism.

In the region, Iran has continued to smuggle weapons and provide military, financial, intelligence and advisory assistance to proxies such as the Houthis, Hezbollah, Iraqi Shiite militias, Kata’ib Hizballah, Hamas and other designated Palestinian terrorist groups, such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC).

Tehran has spent roughly one billion dollars per year to arm and train these militant groups, which serve Iran’s interests. This sum has contributed to a greater capability for Houthi rocket launches at civilian targets in Saudi Arabia, the deployment of thousands of Hezbollah foot-soldiers in Syria, and the regular bombardment of southern Israel with Hamas rockets bankrolled by Iran.

Muslim Brotherhood Subversion vs. Jihadist Rage The connection between ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the Muslim Brotherhood. Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/muslim-brotherhood-subversion-vs-jihadist-rage-raymond-ibrahim/

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

What do Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri—that is, the late leader of ISIS, and the late and current leaders of al-Qaeda—have in common? That they’re among the world’s most notorious Islamic terrorists?  Yes, but there’s something else, something more subtle, that binds them: they all began their careers as members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest and most widespread political Islamic organization in the world.

In a 2014 video interview, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi—a spiritual leader of the Brotherhood whose Al Jazeera program on shari‘a is watched by tens of millions of Muslims—asserted that “this youth [al-Baghdadi] was from the start among the top ranks of the Brotherhood, but he was inclined to [positions of] leadership and so forth…  Then, after he spent years in prison [for Brotherhood activities] he came out and joined with them [the nascent Islamic State],” eventually becoming first “caliph.” (I first discussed this Qaradawi video soon after it appeared in 2014; predictably, YouTube has since taken it down, though Arabic websites still have it.)

In response, Egyptian Minister of Religious Endowments (awqaf), Dr. Muhammad Mukhtar Gom‘a had said that “Qaradawi’s confession [concerning al-Baghdadi] confirms that the Brotherhood is the spiritual father to every extremist group.”

China’s Holocaust of Children By Kyle Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/chinas-holocaust-of-children/

The ‘one-child policy’ involved slaughtering hundreds of millions of babies.

Using the aggressively bland term “one-child policy” is a bit like saying that 1942 Germany had restrictions on Jews. You may never have thought much about how a huge nation enforces a limit of one baby per family, but the horrifying details of China’s Holocaust of children emerge in a powerful documentary told by a woman whose family was one of the countless millions who suffered.

A girl born in 1985 in Jiangxi Province was named Nanfu, or man-pillar. The Wang family, like nearly all others in rural China, desperately wanted a boy, and when one didn’t arrive, her parents gave her the planned boy’s name anyway. After she was born, village authorities threatened to sterilize her mother, who wanted to try again for a boy, but instead struck a compromise. Some rural families were allowed a second child if the parents spaced the children apart by five years. While the mother was in labor, Nanfu Wang says in her documentary One Child Nation (streaming on Amazon Prime Video), her grandmother put a basket in the room and announced, “If it’s another girl, we’ll put her in the basket and leave her in the street.” Nanfu’s brother arrived instead.

It was no idle threat. As Wang discovers, this sort of thing happened all the time. And when you left your baby girl (it was nearly always a girl) in a market, or by the side of the road, here’s what happened: Nothing. No takers. Girls had no value whatsoever. When Wang’s uncle had a daughter, her mother recalls, he wanted to try again for the son. So the family climbed over mountains in the dark to take the infant to a market, where they left her on a meat counter with the equivalent of $20 in her clothes. The family would go back to check on her progress, of which there was none. Soon the baby was covered with mosquito bites. “For two days and two nights she was there,” recalls Wang’s mother. “She eventually died. Then we buried her.” Oh.

Chinese officials would use a variety of pressures to prevent women from giving birth. Sometimes sterilization would be presented simply as an option; you were free to refuse, but then the authorities would burn your house down or steal your pig. Other times women underwent sterilization by force, or suffered as their eight- and nine-month-old fetuses were aborted. A single “family planning” official recalls carrying out an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 sterilizations and abortions, sometimes inducing delivery and then killing the newborn. “I’d do over 20 [sterilizations and abortions] a day,” she recalls now. “Sterilization takes ten minutes.” In many cases the women had been abducted: “Tied up and dragged to us like pigs,” recalls another woman who served as a “family-planning official,” who says, “I initially thought forcing abortions was an atrocity.” But a Party official persuaded her that the more challenging a job was, the more willing she should be to take it on.” “Sometimes pregnant women ran away. We had to chase after them.” One woman “took off all her clothes and ran away naked.” But the “population war” had to be fought: “Our country prevented 338 million births,” notes a propaganda video. The word “prevent” is doing a lot of work there.