ISIS Orders Its Franchises to Kill Christians

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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)

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Russia Preparing For Nuclear War, Building Many New Underground Command Posts

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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)

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Hillary’s Secret Ties to Putin Will Undermine American Interests

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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)

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Putin May Be on the Verge of Launching ‘Open War’ on Ukraine, Experts Warn

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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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State Department Report on Religious Freedom: Much Persecution, Few Positive Trends

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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)

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Russia Caught Red Handed With Hundreds of Ground Mercenaries in Syria

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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)

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Christians Forced to Hide Bibles Amid Migrant Muslim Death Threats

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Bundestag member Erika Steinbach and Iranian-born pastor Mahin Mousapour called for much stronger sanctions for Muslims who abuse Christians in Germany at a press conference on Monday.

Highlighting the fact Christians suffer violence, harassment, and death threats in migrant lodgings, Ms. Mousapour criticised Germany for granting Islam “too much respect”. Declaring anti-Christian hate attacks an affront to German values, politician Erika Steinbach advocated the government deport migrants who insult or attack Christians.

At the press conference Ms. Mousapour, who converted to Christianity more than 25 years ago, reported that Christians face various forms of persecution in migrant housing.

Ms Mousapour warned that Christians living in migrant housing are told they are “impure as a dog” and deserved death for rejecting Islam.

“Toys of Christian children are being destroyed, Christian asylum seekers are told not only to wash their dishes after eating but also that they must clean the entire kitchen as it would otherwise be ‘unclean’. Many Muslim asylum seekers call all Christians unclean. Church services are held in secret, bibles and crucifixes have to be hidden,” she explained. (Read more from “Christians Forced to Hide Bibles Amid Migrant Muslim Death Threats” HERE)

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Iranian President Asks His Friend Mr. Obama to ‘Fix’ a $2 Billion Court Ruling

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…Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent a letter to President Obama demanding the release of $2 billion in Iranian funds that were seized from bank accounts in New York earlier this year.

The money was taken to compensate family members of victims of the 1983 bombing of a Marine Corps barracks in Beirut and other attacks blamed on Iran under a Supreme Court ruling in April. In all, 1,300 American victims have a legal claim to the money.

Ahmadinejad — known for his anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism — is said to be considering a political comeback and may be using Obama as a pawn to improve his standing.

“It is the clear expectation of the Iranian nation that the particular case of property seizure … be quickly fixed by your excellency and that not only the Iranian nation’s rights be restored and the seized property released and returned, but also the damage caused be fully compensated for,” says the letter from Ahmadinejad, which was made public Monday . . .

The letter comes as Obama is already taking heat for sending Iran $400 million in cash last January just as it released four American detainees. (Read more from “Iranian President Asks His Friend Mr. Obama to ‘Fix’ a $2 Billion Court Ruling” HERE)

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Why Is the Mainstream Media Completely Ignoring Christian Genocide by ISIS?

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The major news networks of ABC, CBS and NBC have remained silent on the Christian genocide perpetrated by ISIS, the Media Research Center (MRC) reports.

The number of Christians driven from their homes, raped, mutilated, crucified or otherwise executed by members of the Islamic State is “staggering,” writes Matt Philbin.

Christian holy sites are being destroyed for “cultural cleansing,” entire villages in Nigeria have been slaughtered, Christian students murdered in classrooms in Kenya, and churches bombed in Pakistan and Syria.

At least 1,131 Christians are known to have been murdered by the Islamic State for religiously motivated purposes, and that’s “just the tip of the iceberg”:

ISIS has publically beheaded or burned alive Christians for refusing to renounce their faith and convert. In Syria, the group crucified dozens. ISIS broke up Christian and Yazidi families and sold young girls into sex slavery. It destroyed Christian holy sites in an attempt to erase all pre-Islamic history, and announced it will continue to wage war against “the Jews, the Christians, the pagans, and the apostates.”

A March 18, 2016 article in the Christian Science Monitor cited the evangelical Christian group Open Doors, which found that more than 7,000 “Christians were killed because of their faith last year,” and that doesn’t necessarily include the numbers from Iraq, Syria, or even North Korea, where accurate data are difficult to obtain.”

Meanwhile, the mainstream American media has ignored these acts of genocide. In a study by MRC, the media watchdog found:

Between January 2014 and June 2016, the network evening news shows referred to persecution against Christians in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia just 60 times. Despite telling of murders, forced religious conversions and mass displacement, the networks refused to add up the thousands of atrocities to what they clearly amount to: genocide. Just six of the 60 reports used the word genocide. Put another way, over two years, they mentioned the Christian genocide on just four separate days. Even when Secretary of State John Kerry officially declared in March 2016 that ISIS was engaging in genocide, CBS didn’t report it.

Comparatively, the media referred to the “genocide” in Darfur even before the George W. Bush administration officially acknowledged the Sudanese horror as such. Subsequently, the mainstream networks referred to the Darfur “genocide” 38 times in a two-year period.

When the mainstream networks have referred to the slaughter of Christians by ISIS as “genocide,” they’ve done so in a manner minimizing the global tragedies:

The six instances where the networks have used “genocide” or equivalent terms, they’ve tended to lump Christians in with Yazidis and Shia Muslims as victims, echoing the Obama administration’s reluctance to focus on the anti-Christian violence. During the two years MRC Culture analyzed, one source has recorded 226 Muslim- on-Christian attacks. At least 125 churches have been attacked. According to one Christian group, 7,000 Christians worldwide were killed because of their faith in 2015 alone. Yet even when the Obama administration has (officially and unofficially) called the Christian persecution in Iraq and Syria genocide, the networks almost never used the word.

The journalists working for mainstream news can’t plead ignorance to the situation. As the MRC states, “By their own reporting, hundreds of thousands of Christians are ‘on the run’ from their homes, mass graves have been found, and Christians have been made to ‘convert or die.’”

Connecting said dots, it can lead to only one conclusion: genocide.

The silence is deafening. (For more from the author of “Why Is the Mainstream Media Completely Ignoring Christian Genocide by ISIS?” please click HERE)

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Rio Olympics Ceremony Pushes Global Climate Change, Ignites Controversy

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The opening ceremony of the 2016 Olympic Games at Maracana Stadium in Rio de Janeiro on Friday featured a video focusing on the controversial issue of climate change.

Discussion over whether or not the Olympics were an appropriate forum for political topics like climate change or race relations has been ongoing for months, with former Olympic medalist Caitlin Jenner — who was a man known as Bruce Jenner when he won a gold medal in 1976 — telling HBO’s Bill Simmons “absolutely not” when asked that question on Wednesday.

The opening of the summer Olympics disregarded Jenner’s objections, including fireworks, musical acts, costumed performers and a climate change themed video narrated by Oscar winner Judi Dench, with maps and graphics showing climate data and demonstrating potentially harmful scenarios that climate change activists say could happen if action isn’t taken to prevent further damage to the planet.

With roughly 30 percent of the world’s rainforest and more than half the Amazon rainforests within the country, Brazil seems to be a logical place for a discussion on climate change to occur since if there are any negative effects, Brazil would be uniquely harmed by them.

The climate change portion of the opening ceremony spurred plenty of reaction on social media, with many showering praise upon the Olympics for tackling what they perceive to be such an important subject.

However, the controversial nature of the issue meant that a lot of people were not complimentary. Skeptics have said that the climate change issue has been exaggerated by alarmists and dispute the idea that it is a catastrophic problem.

Many of these people likewise took to social media to show their displeasure with the opening ceremony.

(For more from the author of “Rio Olympics Ceremony Ignites Controversy” please click HERE)

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