RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13497/china-sovereign-state

The trend of Chinese ruler Xi Jinping’s recent comments warns us that his China does not want to live within the current Westphalian system of nation states or even to adjust it. From every indication, Xi is thinking of overthrowing it altogether.

Beijing now thinks it can, with impunity, injure Americans. In the first week of May, the Pentagon said that China, from its base in Djibouti, lasered a C-130 military cargo plane, causing eye injuries to two American pilots.

The laser attack in the Horn of Africa, far from any Chinese boundaries, highlights Beijing’s unstated position that the U.S. military has no right to operate anywhere and that China is free to do whatever it wants anyplace it chooses. And let us understand the severity of the Chinese act: an attempt to blind pilots is akin to an attempt to bring down their planes, and an attempt to bring down planes is an assertion China has the right to kill.

“I hear prominent Americans, disappointed that China has not become a democracy, claiming that China poses a threat to the American way of life,” Jimmy Carter wrote on the last day of 2018 in a Washington Post op-ed. That claim, Carter tells us, is a “dangerous notion.”

There is nothing more dangerous than a notion from the 39th president, even on China. China, despite what he said, threatens not only America’s way of life but also the existence of the American republic. Chinese ruler Xi Jinping has, in recent years, been making the extraordinary case that the U.S. is not a sovereign state.

The breathtaking position puts China’s aggressive actions into a far more ominous context.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/syrian-christians-plead-for-no-fly-zone-to-protect-only-hope-for-our-long-term-survival/

A coalition of Syrian Christian political and military groups issued an appeal today to Christians around the world to back their call for a quickly established no-fly zone over northeast Syria to protect the region’s religious minorities from Turkish invasion.

The plea was signed by the Syriac Military Council, the Syriac National Council of Syria, European Syriac Union, American Syriac Union, and Syriac Union Party of Syria, and comes on the heels of the SMC — the Christian unit within the multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian Syrian Democratic Forces that has cleared regional territory of ISIS — warning that Christians in Syria are “at risk of extinction” at the hands of Turks after U.S. withdrawal.

The Chaldean-Syriac-Assyrian Christian coalition of groups represented in today’s request said they “urgently need protection from Turkey’s threats to invade and ‘cleanse’ our territory from Christianity, religious freedom, and democracy.”

“U.S. President Donald Trump’s sudden decision to withdraw U.S. troops leaves us powerless and open to be destroyed by either Turkey or other regimes scrambling to see our demise in the vacuum this will create,” they said. “Turkey is threatening us daily in the local media to invade and kill us. They are calling us ‘infidels.’ When Turkey was allowed to enter Afrin by the West, Turkey committed war crimes and ethnic cleansing against the religious minorities. All the Christians had to flee the area as Turkey’s jihadi troops conducted door to door searches to hunt the Christians down to kill them and destroyed all of Afrin’s churches. They had to flee with nothing, and take refuge in the area that Turkey is now threatening to invade: north and east Syria.”

The Christian coalition added that “when President Trump gave Turkey’s Recep Erdogan the permission to replace the U.S. forces this means Turkey will crush the multi-religious democracy that is happening in north and east Syria.”

“It alone is an island of religious freedom, decentralized and representative government, and is the only hope for our long-term survival as Middle Eastern Christians.”

The SDF alliance of Kurdish, Arab, Assyrian/Syriac Christians, and other ethnic minorities was founded in October 2015 and is about 70,000 strong. Equality is a core value of the SDF: the successful battle to rout ISIS from their declared capital, Raqqa, was commanded by Rojda Felat, a Kurdish woman, and the SDF spokesman, Kino Gabriel, is a Christian with the Syriac Military Council.

The Syriac Christian alliance stressed that they “know what it means to live under the Ottoman Empire’s Caliphate,” with a “collective memory of the Ottoman’s ‘special treatment’ of Christians” including laws that made them second-class citizens, the jizya “extortion taxes,” oppression, “persecution, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.” CONTINUE AT SITE

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

The great communicator with the deep sense of history at his very best, paying tribute in Brazil to Christian evangelicals, and reiterating Israel’s close friendship with Christianity in a world where so many Christians are imperilled.

“My wife Sara and I are delighted to be with you in Brazil.

We have no better friends in the world than the Evangelical community, and the Evangelical community has no better friend in the world than the State of Israel.

If you are a Christian in the Middle East, there’s only one place where you are safe. There’s only one place where the Christian community is growing, thriving, prospering. That’s in the State of Israel. Because everywhere else, if you’re a Christian, you have to be very careful, or you have to leave. Not in Israel. You are pour brothers and our sisters and we protect the rights of Christians as we protect the rights of all religions.

But this isn’t only a matter of justice, and it’s not only a matter of value. It’s a matter of the deepest sympathy in recognizing our common traditions, our common heritage.Israel and Jerusalem are one. And Jerusalem, from the time of King David, 300 years before King Hezekiah, was the capital of our people, has remained the capital of our people, and will remain the united, eternal capital of the Jewish people for all time. You don’t need this reminder because you know our history, and you know our common roots.

Our histories are intertwined, our faith is intertwined, our values are intertwined. And so every time that we dig with a shovel in our land, we find ancient synagogues or ancient churches. And sometimes we don’t even have to dig.

And when you come to Israel today, you see a country that welcomes you as brothers and sisters. You see a country that values religious freedom. You see a country that is pride of our past and carries our values to the future. You see a country where the ideal was that every person is born in the Image of God. This is the original idea of equality, in the ancient world, thousands of years ago.

These are the values that produced our modern civilization. And they’re anchored in the faiths that we hold dear. These are also the faiths, the values that create the future. Israel is seizing the future. We now have an opportunity in Brazil to seize it together. President Bolsonaro says, ‘We are brothers,’ he says. We are brothers, and we are going to seize the future together.

You know that President Bolsonaro’s first name in Hebrew is Yair, which is also the name of our son. But Yair means something in Hebrew: He who brings light. And I think that we have now an opportunity together to bring a lot of light to the people of Brazil and the people of Israel. This is an alliance of brothers.

So I want to invite all of you next year in Jerusalem. I want to invite all of you to come to Israel, next year, it’s only two days away. We shall welcome you with all the love and warmth that we reserve for family. You are part of our family and we are part of yours.

I look forward to seeing you in Jerusalem, my brothers and my sisters.”