Category Archives: Politics

“The strategy will include three areas: media, diplomatic, and political.

Those in North America are particularly targeted, since that is where physical elimination approaches present more risk to the Rwandan government, “ sources within the Rwandan Defense Forces who participated in the Rwandan national security meeting led by General Paul Kagame late last week, told Inyangenews Network.

Ya’alon Responds to Kerry: ‘We Know Exactly What We Are Doing’

Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon responded to US Secretary of State John Kerry’s accusations that Israel is responsible for stalled peace talks, charging that Kerry’s plans for Israel would endanger its security and were impracticable.

Yazidi Girls Sold as Sex Slaves while Women March against Trump by Uzay Bulut

  • Some Yazidi girls were “sold” for a few packs of cigarettes.”Some of those women and girls have had to watch 7-, 8-, and 9-year-old children bleed to death before their eyes, after being raped by ISIS militia multiple times a day. ISIS militias have burned many Yezidi girls alive for refusing to convert… Why? Because we are not Muslims…” — Mirza Ismail, chairman of the Yezidi Human Rights Organization-International.

  • “This is genocide against women.” — Zeynep Kaya Cavus, leading Alevi activist.
  • Sadly, many of the organizers and participants of the “Women’s March” in Washington chose to ignore women being tortured and exterminated by Islamic terrorists, and in other parts of the world, not being able to to receive an education or even leave the house without the permission of a male.
  • If only these women felt as motivated to protest about the enslavement, rape and torture of Yazidi women and children, as about the cost of tampons.

Yazidi Girl Exposes ISIS Rape Hellhole by Raymond Ibrahim

  • Yazidi girls were “sold” in exchange for a few packs of cigarettes.”They would come and take any girl against her will; if she refused, they would kill her on the spot.” — all quotes below from “Birvan,” on “Shabaab [Youth] Talk,” hosted by Ja’far Abdul, March 22, 2016.”Anyone who walked by our room and liked us would just say ‘Let’s go.'””There were 48 ISIS members in that house, and we were two girls — two Yazidi girls.””What hospital?! They beat me even more!”

  • “I didn’t care if I got caught. Escape or death were both better than remaining there.”

A new televised interview, conducted in Arabic with a Yazidi girl who endured sexual captivity at the hands of the Islamic State, was published on March 22, 2016. It appeared on “Shabaab [Youth] Talk,” hosted by Ja’far Abdul.

The teenage girl, who went by the pseudonym of Birvan, was enslaved when she was 15 and endured months of captivity before she managed to escape. She is now 17. Based on the 40-minute interview, her story is as follows:

Yazidis were escaping from their war-torn village near Tel Affar, Iraq, when they were intercepted on the road by four ISIS operatives. The men swore that if the Yazidis would cooperate and answer some questions, no harm would befall them and they would be allowed to return home in peace. Asked how many Yazidis there were, Birvan says she recalls only 95 men and their families — “many, many women and children.”

Before long, 17 more ISIS vehicles “full of men” appeared. The men became aggressive, ordered the Yazidis around, separated the men from the women and marched the men away — including Birvan’s father, brothers, and uncles. The women and children were taken to different buildings and kept under lock and key.

ISIS fighters said they were merely moving the men to a different location. However, soon after they disappeared, Birvan heard innumerable gunshots: “The sound of those shots will never leave me,” she said. She later came across her father’s corpse; she never saw her brothers or uncles again and is convinced they were all slaughtered.

The women were then transferred to different locations, and stayed a few days in each. Birvan was able to stay close to her mother. ISIS members would regularly intimidate the women, fire their guns in the air, and shout “Allah Akbar” (Allah is the greatest”). “All of us,” Birvan said, “would huddle together and grab hold of each other in terror.”

ISIS members, according to Birvan, would tell the women that if they “try to escape we will kill you, or slaughter you. … My mother always held me tight, terrified that after they took her entire family — husband, children, and brothers — they would take me as well.”

That day arrived. Birvan said she and her mother held each other tightly and cried as ISIS forced them apart and took her mother, and all middle-aged and older women, to a different location:

The hardest moment for me that I remember is having my hand clasped to my mom’s hand and then having them forcefully broken apart. This was the hardest thing — not just for me but for all the girls and children. … They killed any woman who resisted going, they would open fire on her.

Next, all boys older than six were taken to a military camp, presumably to be converted to Islam and trained as ISIS fighters.

Then Birvan’s group — girls and women from the ages of 9 to 22 — were taken to another holding place in Mosul:

I remember a man who looked at least 40 years old coming and taking a ten-year-old girl. When she resisted him, he beat her severely, using stones, and would have opened fire on her if she had not gone with him. Everything against her will.

There Birvan found another 5,000 Yazidi girls enslaved. “They would come and take any girl against her will; if she refused, they would kill her on the spot.

“They used to come and buy the girls without a price, I mean, they used to tell us Yazidi girls, you are sabiya [spoils of war, sex slaves], you are kuffar [infidels], you are to be sold without a price,” meaning they had no base value and explains why Yazidi girls were “sold” in exchange for a few packs of cigarettes.

“Anyone who walked by our room and liked us would just say ‘Let’s go.'”

When her turn came and a man said “come,” “I refused and resisted, and he beat me savagely.” He purchased her, forced her to his home, which had formerly belonged to Yazidis, where, to live, she gratified him

When asked about him, she said, “He was truly foul, truly, I mean, if you saw him, there’s no difference between him and a beast. Actually animals have more mercy in their hearts than these [ISIS].”

When Ja’far Abdul asked for more details of her everyday experiences, Birvan visibly appeared uncomfortable. She kept pausing, simply repeating the word “rape.” At one point she said “there were 48 ISIS members in that house, and we were two girls — two Yazidi girls” — as if to say “use your imagination.”

She told how they had once taken her friend to an adjacent room: “you could not begin to comprehend what was happening there!” She heard her friend screaming out her name and saying “Please help me, save me!”

The only recurrent thought she had was “What wrong did these children — or I — commit to deserve all this? … I lost my father and brothers, and then even my mother was taken from me. … We were just children. Any girl over 9 years old, they took her — raped her.”

Birvan said she tried to commit suicide four times. Once she took 150 pills she found in the house; what pills she never knew. She suffered toxic poisoning but did not die. Abdul asked if anyone had taken her to a hospital. She said: “What hospital?! They beat me even more!”

She also tried to drink gasoline and slice her wrists. “Life was a nightmare,” she said.

She said the Yazidi women were forced to wear burqas when they were traveling outside, and mostly to hide who they were. They also compelled the girls to dress scantily. “Everything,” she said, “was easy for them.”

When asked if there was a daily routine, she said “Every day I died 100 times over. Not just once. Every hour I died, every hour. … From the beating, from the misery, from the torture.”

Birvan eventually managed to escape — “only because my determination was such that I didn’t care if I got caught. Escape or death were both better than remaining there.”

Other Yazidi and non-Muslim women living under ISIS have not been able to escape; they are hoping we will rescue them.

Raymond Ibrahim is the author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (published by Regnery in cooperation with the Gatestone Institute, April 2013).

World Council of Churches Demonizes Israel – Again Does the German Protestant Church Know What It Is Doing? by Thomas Smith

  • Usually, in regular Lenten services, solemn memories of divine mercy on the sinners of the world take center stage for Christians. But not in this liturgy. Center stage was instead given to committing a sin of evil speech: launching a lie about an Israeli-made water shortage suffered by Palestinians. The lie is a sin in which all the member churches of the WCC are invited to participate.

  • Those leaders of Protestant churches, turned into political propagandists, used the pulpit of Jerusalem unjustly to call upon the Protestant faithful worldwide to listen to Palestinian water libels against the State of Israel.
  • This liturgy abused the biblical readings as a means of invigorating the equally false Kairos Palestine message, that Israel takes the Land of Palestine and has no right to be where it is.
  • A close look shows no scientific analysis, neither of water distribution nor of water politics for the territories of Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA).
  • The Palestinians certainly are experiencing a water crisis; the question is to what extent are they themselves are responsible for it, and to what extent are their own leaders responsible for keeping them as victims for effective international “marketing.”

On February 10 (Ash Wednesday in the Western Christian calendar), the Palestinian Lutheran Bishop, Munib Younan, on behalf of the World Council of Churches (WCC), launched the Lenten Campaign of the Ecumenical Water Network. Entitled “Seven Weeks for Water,” it was presented at the (German) Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in the Old City of Jerusalem.

Younan — a “yes-signatory/no-signatory” of the infamous document published by Kairos Palestine in 2009 — was flanked by other well-known supporters of Palestinian agitation against Israel:

  • Dr. Antje Jackelen, the Archbishop of Sweden, (another “yes-advocate/no-advocate” of the document)
  • Rev. Dr. Olaf Fykse Tveit, the General Secretary of the WCC (he heads the body that generated Kairos Palestine and continues to be its main sponsor)
  • Mrs. Hind Khoury, the current Secretary General of Kairos Palestine; also a Palestinian economist from Bethlehem and PLO delegate general to France 2006-10)
  • Mr. Dinesh Suna, the Coordinator of the Ecumenical Water Network

The Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in Jerusalem, Israel. (Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

It was an impressive group of seasoned activists for Palestine who gathered for a ten-page prefabricated liturgy during an hour-long church service. The few people in the pews were to be sensitized about an alleged injustice to the Palestinian people: the supposed deprivation of rightful quantities of water by supposedly evil Israelis. In order to bring some action into this otherwise flow of distorted information, each participant got a cross of ash on his forehead — possibly one of the few remnants of the Christian custom of Lent.

In regular Lenten services, for seven weeks until Easter, solemn memories of divine mercy on the sinners of the world take center stage for Christians. But not in this liturgy. Center stage was instead given solemnly to committing a sin of evil speech: launching a lie about an Israeli-made water shortage suffered by Palestinians, a sin that all present were invited to commit daily for the next seven weeks; a sin in which all the member churches of the WCC are invited to participate.

Those leaders of the Protestant churches, turned into political propagandists without even any hindrance, used the pulpit of Jerusalem unjustly to call upon the Protestant faithful worldwide to listen to Palestinian water libels against the State of Israel. This liturgy abused the biblical readings as a means of invigorating the equally false Kairos Palestine message, that Israel takes the Land of Palestine and has no right to be where it is.

The WCC acolytes who gathered at the Redeemer Church are now set up to spread this propaganda through a confusing network of seemingly distinct organizations, all of which turn out — on closer inspection — to be WCC subsidiaries.

Two organizations were highlighted: first, the Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace (PJP), launched in 2013 at the 10th WCC Assembly in South Korea. The PJP in Jerusalem was accompanied by three strategic support groups: the “Theological Study Group,” the “Reference Group,” and the “International Research Group.” Second, the Ecumenical Water Network (EWN), launched in 2008 as a network of churches and Christian organizations, to keep watch on water access. Although PJP and EWN seem to be two different entities, the WCC’s press center advertised its Seven Weeks for Water campaign as a

“pilgrimage of water justice in the Middle East, with specific reference to Palestine. The Biblico-theological reflections and resources for the seven weeks will be based on the water crisis in Middle East region and take into consideration issues of justice and peace.”

That is, the work of PJP and EWN is closely interlinked. Both groups, in fact, are committed to the Palestinian cause and can be best understood as parts of the WCC-sponsored network that implements the Kairos Palestine agenda.

A close look at the EWN website shows no scientific analysis, neither of water distribution nor of water politics for the territories of Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA). The EWN material also shows no reference to any of the existing water distribution analyses in Israel (e.g.: here and here). Neither is the well-documented mismanagement of water by the Palestinian Authority mentioned, nor is Israel’s just and generous over-the-quota water support for the PA areas.

The aim of the water campaign clearly appears to spring from an unjust and unsubstantiated discrimination against the State of Israel, as propagated in the Kairos Palestine statement. The intent of launching the Seven Weeks for Water campaign was unashamedly addressed by Tveit in his sermon,

“As the WCC’s Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace is focused on issues of the Middle East, particularly in this year, we hope your stories and struggle for justice and peace will become the stories and struggle for the churches around the world. May this Lenten season help us to reflect on these issues more deeply. May the Seven Weeks for Water during this Lent help us to highlight the water crisis in Palestine and other places in the world in desperate need for more clean water.”

Such Palestinian narratives had been collected, a short time before the services at the Redeemer Church, under the watchful eyes of Bishop Younan, when the “International Research Group” met in Bethlehem. Dinesh Suna wrote on his Facebook page:

“The IRG meeting of the WCC’s Pilgrimage of justice and Peace started today at Bethlehem. To set the tone of the discussion we went to listen to stories of struggle to end occupation of Palestine by Israel. It was quite a touching moment for us to hear these stories…”

Did these people ever meet with Israelis, as well? Did the “International Research Group” ever research the countless academic water analyses, which are freely available on-line? There is no reference that either activity ever took place.

Instead, we are informed, the WCC’s PJP is organizing “two strategically important groups” in “the Holy Land” between February 9-17. One is PJP’s “Theological Study Group” at the Roman Catholic St. Anne’s Church in Jerusalem on February 9-11, “in order to deepen the theology for accompanying PJP.”

The other is PJP’s “Reference Group” in Bethlehem, February 12-17, presumably for parading more “eyewitnesses of the water crisis.” The Palestinians certainly are experiencing a water crisis; the question is, or should be, for their sake, to what extent are they themselves are responsible for it, and to what extent are their own leaders responsible for keeping them as victims to have them appear more wretched for effective international “marketing.”

Tveit and his WCC staff accompany both groups. The point of this money-intensive travel of those well-salaried clergy-cum-politicians is not to solve any misery. Rather, it is, as Tveit sermonized: “we hope your stories and struggle for justice and peace will become the stories and struggle for the churches around the world.”

In short, the WCC invites the Christian world to join in an assault upon the State of Israel. This is the actual underlying message of Kairos Palestine and PJP’s Seven Weeks for Water campaign.

Predictably, WCC’s PJP projects will find any number of young, enthusiastic, uninformed and naive Christian followers to deceive. And the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in Jerusalem is just a perfect location for launching more and more of such initiatives. How curious.

Also curious is that the German Protestant Church, owner of the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in Jerusalem, and committed to reconciliation with Israel, seems to tolerate WCC approaches against Israel, under the local auspices of the Palestinian Bishop. Is Bishop Younan just a willing fig leaf for German Protestant Church agitation against Israel? Or does the German Protestant Church not know what is going on in its own church in Jerusalem?

Thomas Smith is a scholar based in the Middle East.