…The rising number of attacks on Jews and synagogues in recent years has been well documented, but it has nothing to do with terrorism and certainly not Islamic terrorism, French authorities say.
The latest attack came in Strasbourg, France, where an Orthodox Jewish rabbi was attacked in broad daylight Friday and left hospitalized by a knife-wielding Muslim yelling “Allahu Akbar!”
The incident was immediately scrubbed by French police as “not terrorism related” in what has become a pattern across Europe, Canada and the United States.
Instead of calling it terrorism, the authorities initially refer to the assailant as mentally ill or “suffering from psychiatric issues,” as the Daily Mirror reported on the latest incident, which took place just outside the rabbi’s home about 500 yards from the main synagogue in the city’s Jewish quarter.
As recently as Aug. 11, a woman ran over two police officers in Montreal with her car while yelling “Allah!” and she was also deemed mentally ill by Canadian authorities, CIJ News reported. (Read more from “Another ‘Mentally Ill’ Muslim Excused for Stabbing Spree” HERE)
Jesus has been looming over the Rio games. And we don’t just mean the iconic Christ the Redeemer statue towering over the city. His presence has been felt in expressions of Christian faith by many of the athletes competing in the Olympics, though you’d be hard-pressed to find it breaking through the mainstream media coverage of the games.
In most instances, reporters would rather try catching a javelin with their bare hands then catch themselves quoting athletes expressing their joy in the Lord. Video highlights seem to cut away from the medal-winner just as they get to praising Jesus. Even Simone Biles saying Tuesday night she wanted to see Christ the Redeemer seemed to throw NBC’s Bob Costas for a loop. He offered a startled and odd “oh,” and an awkward, rapid change of subject.
By contrast, it’s amusing to watch the mainstream media fawn over Muslim fencer Ibtijah Muhammad, who was wildly heralded for being the first American Olympian to wear a hijab while competing. On Saturday, when America medaled in the women’s team sabre event, the AP story opened, “Ibtihaj Muhammad came to the Olympics determined to show the world that Muslim-American women can excel in sports. Muhammed will return home to New Jersey with proof she was right.”
Did anyone really need proof? Do her teammates — who remain unnamed in the article — have the right to feel like chopped liver?
Muslim Fencer Scores Media Victory Over Christian and Jewish Gymnasts
The media fixated on Muhammad’s Muslim faith the second she stepped onto the fencing strip for the individual sabre competition. Newsbusters’ Katie Yoder did some calculating. As of last Friday, American television networks dedicated 13 minutes, 25 seconds to Muhammad simply because she was the first American Olympian to wear a hijab.
By contrast, says Yoder, “When the U.S. women’s gymnastics landed a gold medal Tuesday evening, the broadcast networks spent 22 minutes, 35 seconds celebrating the win and interviewing the girls. Only 0.6 percent of the coverage mentioned the girls’ faith, even though several of them clearly expressed that God was their inspiration for competing.”
Now, as a former fencer, watching any fencer get national attention is worth a crisp salute. But Muhammad getting 100 times more attention for being a Muslim than the “Final Five” got for their faith should earn the media a major point deduction.
Still, the Light has found a way to shine. Here are just a few examples:
Faith of “The Final Five” on Display
Monday morning, as she prepared to compete on the balance beam, 16-year-old Laurie Hernandez tweeted out Isaiah 40:31:
I don’t know how anybody could walk — let alone flip, flop and fly — on a 4″-wide elevated piece of wood without feeling at least a little faint. But Hernandez did “soar on wings like eagles,” and earned a silver medal. In the ensuing hoopla, she found time to praise Hillsong United’s “Touch the Sky.”
Hillsong Young & Free is just one of the Christian artists on the Olympic training playlist teammate Gabby Douglas shared with Billboard magazine right before the Games. Unfortunately, Gabby Douglas has had an Olympic experience filled with more lament than celebration. Cruel attacks on her looks, her demeanor, even her patriotism devastated the regal 2012 Olympic darling. She told the media Tuesday the comments were “really hurtful,” and as ESPN reported, she then walked down a hallway, “stood in a corner, facing a wall, and had a good, long cry.” Very few people approached her. Hopefully, one of the songs on her Billboard list came to her heart: “You’ll Never Be Alone.”
By Wednesday, it appears Gabby was itching to soar again.
American runner Abbey D’Agostino knows the presence of God in the midst of pain. Her inspirational example of the Olympic spirit has made headlines across the globe. Abbey was competing in a 5,000-meter qualifier Tuesday when she got tangled with New Zealand’s Nikki Hamblin. Both women crashed to the ground. Abbey scrambled to her feet to continue racing, but stopped cold when she saw Nikki was still crumpled on the track. Abbey reached for her competitor, helped her up and urged the New Zealander to keep running.
Both completed the race. However, Abbey was carted off the track in a wheelchair. Somehow, maybe you can say miraculously, she had finished the final 2,000 meters despite suffering a torn ACL and strained MCL in her right knee. (For you metric-phobes, that’s 1.25 miles.)
Despite the stop, despite the injury, Abbey has no regrets. And you have to hear why. “Although my actions were instinctual at that moment, the only way I can and have rationalized it is that God prepared my heart to respond that way,” said the 24-year-old Christian. “This whole time here, he’s made clear to me that my experience in Rio was going to be about more than my race performance — and as soon as Nikki got up I knew that was it.”
According to the race results, Abbey D’Agostino finished in 29th place. Yet even Michael Phelps is no greater a champion.
“We Just Let His Presence Come Upon Us”
American women’s hurdlers are leaving Rio with the bling. Brianna Rollins, Nia Ali and Kristi Castlin earned gold, silver and bronze in the 100-meter hurdles; the first time a single nation has swept the medals since 1972. And to Him they gave the glory.
“I just kept God first and just continued to let Him guide me through the rounds,” Rollins said, “We formed a prayer circle this morning and we just let His presence come out here and continue to glorify him and do the best that we can and that’s what we did.”
“We Are Winners Because of This World”
Finally, we started out by saying the mainstream media appears to be downplaying the importance of Christian faith to many of the athletes. So we do have to credit NBC where credit’s due, as in their story “Divers Johnson and Boudia rely on faith to put minds at ease,” about Olympic silver medalists Steele Johnson and David Boudia.
But we close with an inspirational moment that NBC didn’t quite get. Go to NBCOlympics.com and you’ll find a video titled “Fiji rugby players sing after winning gold.” The full caption accompanying the video reads, “The Figi men’s rugby team sang in celebration after winning the gold medal.” Oh, NBC, it was much more. They sang alright. They sang like David sang.
This was the first Olympic gold medal Fiji has won in that nation’s entire history, and the Fiji rugby 7 were singing about the King. It’s a gospel hymn called “E Da SA Qaqa.” Translation: “We Are Winners Because Of This World.”
The lyrics:
“We have overcome,
We have overcome.
By the blood of the lamb in the Word of the Lord
We have overcome.”
(For more from the author of “Jesus in Rio: Christian Olympians Share Their Faith During Games” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/10410363584_11afab9bcc_b.jpg6531024Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-08-19 23:44:272016-08-19 23:44:27Jesus in Rio: Christian Olympians Share Their Faith During Games
The trickle of disturbing leaks about the Obama administration’s flawed and risky Iran policy continues to grow. The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that “New details of the $400 million U.S. payment to Iran earlier this year depict a tightly scripted exchange specifically timed to the release of several American prisoners held in Iran.”
Although President Barack Obama’s White House persistently has denied that the cash transfer amounted to a ransom payment, a State Department spokesman admitted Thursday that the U.S. government delayed making the payment “to retain maximum leverage” over Iran.
This concession confirms widespread suspicions that the negotiations over the release of four Americans were at least tacitly, if not directly, linked to negotiations over the return of frozen Iranian money that had been paid to the United States before Iran’s 1979 revolution for military weapons.
When the administration announced in January that the hostages had been released, it also announced that it had agreed to pay Tehran $1.7 billion to settle a longstanding claim at the U.S.-Iran claims tribunal, which was set up under the 1981 Algiers Accords that resolved the first Iran hostage crisis. But the White House insisted that the payment was made as part of the agreement that resolved the 1979-1981 Iran hostage crisis, not the latest hostage deal.
The January hostage deal involved the release of four innocent Americans held on trumped-up charges in exchange for seven Iranians justifiably imprisoned or charged with sanctions violations and the dropping of criminal charges against another 14 Iranians arrested outside the United States for various offenses.
Such criminals-for-hostages swaps reward hostage taking and the deal was criticized for that reason when the hostages were released on Jan. 17, the day after the “Implementation Day” of the Iran nuclear agreement.
But subsequent revelations have put the prisoner exchange in an even worse light.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Aug. 3 that $400 million worth of cash was transferred to Iran on the same day the hostages were released, at the request of the Iranian officials involved in the hostage negotiations who “said they wanted the cash to show that they had gained something tangible.”
Senior Justice Department officials had objected to sending the cash at the same time as the hostage release, but their objections were overruled by the State Department.
Clearly, Iranian officials consider the cash payment to be a hostage ransom. The commander of the Basij, a volunteer force affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, gloated in January that the United States had bought the freedom of the American prisoners with the payment.
The Tehran regime has arrested at least six more foreign visitors since the payment was made in January, including Reza Shahini, a dual Iranian-American citizen, and Nizar Zakka, a Lebanese national with U.S. permanent residency.
Siamak Namazi, an Iranian-American businessman based in Dubai, was arrested in October while visiting a friend in Tehran.
Even more disturbing is the case of Robert Levinson, a retired FBI agent who disappeared in Iran in 2007. Levinson went missing after interviewing David Belfield, an American convert to Islam who fled to Iran after he assassinated an exiled Iranian opposition leader, Ali Akbar Tabatabai, in 1980 in Bethesda, Maryland.
Clearly, Tehran has concluded that crime does pay.
The Obama administration’s hostage deal is a dangerous precedent that puts more Americans at risk of being targeted by Iran and its terrorist surrogates to extract ransom payments in the future.
This is part of the hazardous legacy that Obama will leave for the next president. (For more from the author of “Obama’s Cash Deal Encourages Iran to Take More Hostages” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/barack-obama-1174489_960_720-1.jpg638960Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-08-19 22:11:152016-08-19 22:11:15Obama’s Cash Deal Encourages Iran to Take More Hostages
For over two decades, the radical Islamic cleric Anjem Choudary has been preaching hate to British Muslims and encouraging acts of extremism. He also was made several contentious appearances on Fox News’ Hannity program.
Now a London jury has found Choudary guilty of supporting the terrorist group ISIS.
The maximum prison term he faces under the United Kingdom’s Terrorism Act is 10 years. Sentencing is scheduled for Sept. 6.
The 49-year-old Choudary had made a series of YouTube videos in which he actively promoted ISIS and encouraged Muslims to join the cause.
In 2014, he pledged allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Choudary and his associate, Mohammad Mizanur Rahman, were found guilty of motivating others to support the terrorist group between June 29, 2014, and March 6, 2015, in violation of Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000.
Many people connected to Choudary were later convicted of terror offenses, including Michael Adebowale, who killed British soldier Lee Rigby in 2013.
Dean Haydon, who heads the London Metropolitan Police Service’s counterterrorism unit, considers the conviction a significant victory.
“These men have stayed just within the law for many years, but there is no one within the counterterrorism world that has any doubts of the influence that they have had, the hate they have spread and the people that they have encouraged to join terrorist organizations,” Haydon said.
“Over and over again we have seen people on trial for the most serious offenses who have attended lectures or speeches given by these men,” he continued. “The oath of allegiance was a turning point for the police — at last we had the evidence that they had stepped over the line and we could prove they supported ISIS.”
The radical cleric has been on record saying: ‘We initiate the jihad against the kuffar [disbelievers] to make the name of Allah in the highest. He never considered defending yourself part of jihad. He said you need to send in the army. … It is about time we resumed conquering for the sake of Allah.”
Choudary also encouraged his followers to tell their children that Islam would eventually conquer the world.
“Next time when your child is at school and the teacher asks, ‘What is your ambition?’ they should say, ‘To dominate the whole world by Islam, including Britain, that is my ambition,’” he said. (For more from the author of “Radical Muslim Cleric Found Guilty of Supporting ISIS” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/kkkll.jpg7681024Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-08-17 00:32:392016-08-17 00:32:39Radical Muslim Cleric Found Guilty of Supporting ISIS
By Philip Obaji Jr. The so-called Islamic State has different strategies in different parts of the world, but in Africa and in Europe, certainly, its core objective is becoming clear: to kill Christians. Its long-term goal: to provoke a new Crusade, reviving the holy wars of many hundreds of years ago in the belief that this time around Islam will win.
In practical terms, this focus on a single pervasive, easily targeted enemy is useful to a “caliphate” under pressure that is trying to keep its troops in line.
The way ISIS has handled its Nigerian disciples in the terror organization called Boko Haram, best known for kidnapping girls and using women and children as suicide bombers, is a perfect case in point.
Earlier this month, a man named Abu Musab al-Barnawi announced that he had taken over the infamous Boko Haram organization. And his first message as Boko Haram’s leader was as clear as it was concise—on his watch, the group’s main focus will be killing Christians.
According to an interview published this month by the self-proclaimed Islamic State group (ISIS), al-Barnawi threatened to bomb churches and kill Christians, but will no longer attack places used by Muslims. (Read more from “ISIS Orders Its Franchises to Kill Christians” HERE)
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Nigeria Chibok Girls: Boko Haram Video Shows Captives
By BBC. The Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram has released a video showing some of the schoolgirls they abducted from the northern town of Chibok.
Some 50 girls are shown with a gunman who demands the release of fighters in return for the girls, and says some girls died in air strikes.
The government says it is in touch with the militants behind the video.
A journalist who had contact with Boko Haram has been declared a wanted man by the Nigerian army.
The group is said to be holding more than 200 of the 276 final-year girls it seized from a school in April 2014. (Read more from “Nigeria Chibok Girls: Boko Haram Video Shows Captives” HERE)
Russia is building large numbers of underground nuclear command bunkers in the latest sign Moscow is moving ahead with a major strategic forces modernization program.
U.S. intelligence officials said construction has been underway for several years on “dozens” of underground bunkers in Moscow and around the country.
Disclosure of the underground command bunkers comes as Army Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, commander of U.S. European Command, warned recently that Russia has adopted a nuclear use doctrine he called “alarming” . . .
“Russian doctrine states that tactical nuclear weapons may be used in a conventional response scenario,” Scaparrotti said on July 27. “This is alarming and it underscores why our country’s nuclear forces and NATO’s continues to be a vital component of our deterrence.”
Mark Schneider, a former Pentagon nuclear policy official, said Russia’s new national security strategy, which was made public in December, discusses increasing civil defenses against nuclear attack, an indication Moscow is preparing for nuclear war. (Read more from “Russia Building New Underground Command Posts” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/photolenta_big_photo.jpeg500651Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-08-15 21:02:132016-08-15 22:34:23Russia Preparing For Nuclear War, Building Many New Underground Command Posts
Russia’s malignant influence on American foreign policy is finally becoming a relevant issue in the 2016 presidential election, and that is definitely a positive development. Based upon their actions and associations, neither candidate has shown a sufficient understanding of — or worse, they have ignored — the nature of the Russian regime and its threat to America’s national interest. These deficiencies ought to be of grave concern to the American people.
As the Government Accountability Institute lays out in a recent report, Hillary Clinton’s dealings with Russia while serving as secretary of State appear to represent the worst kind of cronyism: sacrificing America’s national interest for her own and Russia’s benefit. As the Executive Summary of the report explains:
A major technology transfer component of the Russian reset overseen by Hillary Clinton substantially enhanced the Russian military’s technological capabilities, according to both the FBI and the U.S. Army.
Russian government officials and American corporations participated in the technology transfer project overseen by Hillary Clinton’s State Department that funnelled (sic) tens of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation.
The report also notes that Hillary’s presidential campaign chairman, Tony Podesta, had dubious ties with the Russian regime:
A Putin-connected Russian government fund transferred $35 million to a small company with Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta on its executive board, which included senior Russian officials.
John Podesta failed to reveal, as required by law on his federal financial disclosures, his membership on the board of this offshore company.
Podesta also headed up a think tank which wrote favorably about the Russian reset while apparently receiving millions from Kremlin-linked Russian oligarchs via an offshore LLC.
Building upon Peter Schweizer’s work in his book, “Clinton Cash,” The New York Times revealed another alleged quid pro quo detrimental to America’s national interest — but again, benefitting Hillary and Russia — with the infamous Uranium One deal.
Recall that the Russians took control of Uranium One and thus one-fifth of all U.S. uranium production capacity through three separate transactions between 2009 and 2013. Given the strategic importance of uranium, authorizing Russian control required the approval of various government agencies, including Hillary’s State Department.
Meanwhile, the Clinton Foundation received contributions totaling more than $100 million from Uranium One’s chairman and several of its shareholders in addition to those with ties to Uranium One or UrAsia, which had originally acquired Uranium One’s valuable Kazakh mine assets. Secretary Clinton also received $500,000 for a speech she gave at Renaissance Capital — a Kremlin-linked investment bank, which had recommended purchasing Uranium One stock soon after the Russians announced their intent to acquire a majority stake in the company.
Just how far back does the Clinton-Kremlin connection go? It’s worth investigating.
Concerning Donald Trump, even if we were gracious and excused his praise of Vladimir Putin as mere rhetoric (intended as a dig at Barack Obama and by extension Hillary), or just “Trump being Trump,” his substantive actions and associations are more troubling.
Even though the Trump campaign contributed little to the 2016 Republican Party platform changes, despite protestations to the contrary it did intervene regarding language about American support for Ukraine against Russian aggression. Trump officials reportedly watered down a portion of the platform calling for GOP support of “providing lethal defensive weapons” to the Ukrainians in the face of Russian intervention, replacing the phrase with the softer provision, “appropriate assistance.”
Previously, Trump wavered on whether the U.S. would fulfill its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) obligations to defend Baltic nations against Russian aggression, giving a standoffish response to The New York Times that amounted to the following: I would not tell Vladimir Putin what we would do in the event of Russian intervention in the Baltics, but we cannot ignore the fact that irrespective of our own treaty obligations, NATO members must fulfill their obligations in terms of funding NATO.
Again, we could charitably chalk this up to mere rhetoric, consistent with Trump’s narrative on globalism and deal-making. By Trump’s logic, NATO is just another international deal in which America has gotten ripped off by freeloader nations, and Trump will be the only negotiator that drives a hard enough bargain to fix the deal — including threats to not fulfill its terms.
Leaving aside the not-so-small issue of honoring treaties, the central problem here is that NATO’s purpose is, in large part, to counter Russia. And Trump’s advisors have significant ties to that nation, casting a pall over everything Trump says and does relating to it.
Trump campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, has done substantial work for Viktor Yanukovych — former president of Ukraine and backed by Putin. That Yanukovych pulled Ukraine closer into Putin’s orbit is well-documented. Manafort has also partaken in business dealings with oligarchs loyal to Putin.
Trump’s advisor on Russia, Carter Page, is a big investor in Gazprom, an energy company and one of the crown jewels of Putin’s kleptocracy. Page has railed against U.S. foreign policy towards Russia with all manner of calumnies — notably at times while in Russia — and called for the easing of sanctions against Russia that affected Gazprom and other companies.
Trump’s personal and professional ties to Russia, though worthy of scrutiny, raise fewer red flags than those of Hillary.
What does Russia itself actually want out of the 2016 presidential election?
On its face, it would appear that Russia seeks to damage Hillary, while promoting Trump. (For more from the author of “Hillary’s Secret Ties to Putin Will Undermine American Interests” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/xSFnfwbH0URbgMzgbuO3GrXQovXAtrZp.jpg580940Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-08-15 01:45:252016-08-15 01:45:25Hillary’s Secret Ties to Putin Will Undermine American Interests
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s latest accusations against Ukraine and military mobilizations on the Crimean-Ukrainian border is causing alarm among Western analysts.
“Preparations for conventional conflict between Russia and Ukraine are accelerating and the likelihood of open war is increasing rapidly,” The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) noted Thursday. The think tank’s stark warning comes after Russia’s state security service accused Ukraine of sponsoring terrorism plots inside occupied Crimea that killed two Russian soldiers in separate incidents.
Putin escalated the accusation, saying ominously, “We obviously will not let such things slide by,” according to the New York Times. Ukraine’s government has denied any incursion into Crimea and dismissed Putin’s claims, but the country did put its troops on the highest state of readiness.
“Putin may be seeking to trigger a political crisis in Kyiv designed to topple Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko,” ISW further speculated. “The situation for now, however, is moving clearly in the direction of open conflict between Ukrainian and Russian forces in Donbas or elsewhere in Ukraine.”
Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, taking advantage of civil unrest in Ukraine. Russia also sponsors an active separatist movement in eastern Ukraine, and has deployed its own troops under false uniforms to fight the Ukrainian military. Russia is under international sanction by the U.S. and EU for its behavior in Ukraine. (Read more from “Putin May Be on the Verge of Launching ‘Open War’ on Ukraine, Experts Warn” HERE)
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The U.S. State Department released its annual report Wednesday on religious freedom worldwide, which covered almost every nation in the world and many non-state groups, but excluded the United States, reported Yahoo! News. The report covers developments in 2015.
The International Religious Freedom Report for 2015 includes a long “global overview” of the report as well as individual reports on every other country. The country reports cover the country’s religious demography, its government’s respect for religious freedom, and what it calls “societal respect” for religious freedom, and the American government’s policy in respect to religious freedom in that country. The report also includes several appendices with the texts of international and American statements on religious freedom.
Top Persecutors
Among the top persecutors of religious people were, unsurprisingly, ISIS and Boko Haram, which “continued to rank amongst the most egregious abusers of religious freedom in the world.” Earlier this year, Secretary of State John Kerry stated that these groups and others were committing genocide of Yazidis, Christians and Shiite Muslims. He added that the Islamic State’s “entire worldview is based on eliminating those who do not subscribe to its perverse ideology.”
In releasing the report, Deputy Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said “Daesh [ISIS] kills Yezidis because they are Yezidi, Christians because they are Christian, Shia Muslim because they are Shia. … They’ve not only killed, they’ve sought to erase the memory of those they’ve killed, destroying centuries-old religious cultural sites.”
ISIS, according to the report, pursued a “brutal strategy” that included “barbarous acts, including killings, torture, enslavement and trafficking, rape and other sexual abuse against religious and ethnic minorities and Sunnis in areas under its control.” In areas it doesn’t control, the group sent suicide bombers and car bombs to kill “continued suicide bombings and vehicle-borne improvised explosive device attacks against Shia Muslims.”
The terrorist group also exploits its own version of the blasphemy laws common in Islamic countries. One speaker at the press conference told the story of seven-year-old Muaz Hassan. He was playing soccer with friends in ISIS-controlled Syria. “During the game, he said a bad word out of his frustration. He was detained by Daesh for blasphemy or cursing God. In a matter of days, he was marched out into a public square and murdered by a firing squad in front of a crowd of hundreds, including his parents.”
ISIS and Boko Haram were not the only countries singled out in the Overview. The report calls out Syria, Angola, Azerbaijan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, North Korea, Eritrea, Brunei, Burma, Viet Nam, the Central African Republic, Hungary, Bahrain, Ukraine, and Russia. Most are either Islamic or Communist or ex-Communist countries. Only one, Hungary, is a Western nation and it is flagged for its government contributing to a statue of a WWII anti-Semite, which the government then rescinded.
Few Positive Developments, But Effective Blasphemy Laws
In a much shorter section of the Overview, the State Department lists some “positive developments,” though these were almost all one act of small groups, in comparison with the large, organized, often state-led assaults on religious freedom around the world.
Religious freedom is “gradually expanding” in Vietnam, while in Kenya and the Central African Republic groups of Christians and Muslims worked together. A second Catholic church was built in the United Arab Emirates and the government gave permission for the building of the first Hindu temple. A court in Canada prevented the government from requiring that “persons must remove religiously based clothing that covered their faces while reciting their citizenship oath,” an indirect way of saying that it can’t require Muslim women from wearing the niqab.
In his remarks at the release of the report, the Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom said that his office had been given “significant” increases in funding. The department was able to increase its monitoring of individual countries and spend more time in those where “here our religious freedom advocacy can make a constructive difference,” said David N. Saperstein.
Only 24 percent of the world’s nations have “serious restrictions on religious freedom,” he said, but these countries contain 74 percent of the world’s people. This year, he told the press conference, he wanted to highlight “the chilling, sometimes deadly effect of blasphemy and apostasy laws” that governments use to persecute religious minorities. Such laws, he said, quoting a U.N. official, “do not contribute to a climate of religious openness, tolerance, non-discrimination and respect. To the contrary, they often fuel stereotyping, stigmatization, discrimination and incitement to violence.” (For more from the author of “State Department Report on Religious Freedom: Much Persecution, Few Positive Trends” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/David_Saperstein_World_Economic_Forum_2013.jpg31404552Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-08-13 00:05:532016-08-13 00:05:53State Department Report on Religious Freedom: Much Persecution, Few Positive Trends
A recent Sky News investigation reveals Russia is hiring hundreds of private military contractors to fight on the ground in Syria, catching the government in a lie that it only assists Syria from the air.
Russia has repeatedly stressed its military operations are low cost, highly limited and focused on helping the Assad regime defeat jihadist groups. Sky New’s investigation reveals hundreds of Russian private military contractors are fighting side by side with the Syrian regime. Russia’s use of private military contractors is only the latest lie about its campaign inside Syria.
Independent analyses of Russian airstrikes in Syria reveal they almost exclusively focus on groups that threaten territory valuable to the Syrian regime. Russia also broke several internationally brokered ceasefires in March 2016.
Russia is likely hiding the extent of its intervention in Syria to not inflame domestic tensions. Direct Russian military intervention in the Middle East harkens many Russians back to the Soviet Union’s military intervention in Afghanistan. Thousands of Russians were killed in Afghanistan, and many Russians blame the Afghan war for the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Russia has a history of guising the scope its intervention with “unofficially” affiliated troops in active war zones. In Ukraine, Russia deployed thousands of non-uniformed Russian fighters to fight against the Ukrainian military. These fighters became infamously known as “little green men” and have been demonstrably linked back to the Kremlin. (Read more from “Russia Caught Red Handed With Hundreds of Ground Mercenaries in Syria” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/6Yzp2IFSgB3zTsa73qLnFRHuNABPFkps-1.jpeg580940Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-08-12 03:33:082016-08-12 03:33:08Russia Caught Red Handed With Hundreds of Ground Mercenaries in Syria
