The attacks on Christians in Iraq by the Islamic State terror army, formerly known as ISIS, amount to “genocide” in pursuit of a “Muslim-only” nation, and President Obama needs to stop the “exterminations,” contend two representatives of Christians in the troubled nation.
WND reported Tuesday atrocities by ISIS include beheading of children, crucifixion, execution and mass burials, sometimes of live victims.
Nahren Anweya of the Assyrian Church of the East told Hannity the beheadings are one tactic in an ISIS effort to kill all non-Muslim.
“They are at full force with this genocide, and I believe the president is very well aware of it,” she said. “I don’t believe he understands the urgency of this genocide.”
She said reports of the atrocities are true.
“Basically they will cut off a child’s head with a small knife … slowly,” she said.
Such moves are intended to intimidate, she said.
Mark Arabo, a spokesman for the Chaldean Americans, said Iraq now is experiencing a “full blown massacre.”
“These are the most horrific atrocities that the world has ever seen,” he said. “We owe it to humanity to act.”
“Iraqi Christians have faced kidnappings, threats and even death for being followers of Jesus. And they have little faith in their government to provide security as we see in the tragedies unfolding the last month.”
WND reported Tuesday the 5-year-old son of a founder of Baghdad’s Anglican church was cut in half in an ISIS attack.
The report cited an emotional Canon Andrew White, chaplain of St George’s Anglican Church in Baghdad.
“I’m almost in tears because I’ve just had somebody in my room whose little child was cut in half,” he said. “I baptized his child in my church in Baghdad. This little boy, they named him after me – he was called Andrew.”
The report said it happened in the Christian village of Qaraqosh after Kurdish forces left and Islamic State fighters arrived.
A Catholic.org report quoted Arabo, a Chaldean-American businessman, confirming the beheading of children by ISIS fighters, who then “put their heads on a stick and have them in the park.”
“The world hasn’t seen this kind of atrocity in generations,” he told CNN.
The report, which included horrific images, said the terrorists “who have invaded Mosul and other ancient Christian communities in Syria and Iraq have made music videos of themselves murdering civilians and captured soldiers.”
“They are literally enjoying the act of killing and the fear and suffering experienced by others. This sadism may be the purest manifestation of evil witnessed since the Rape of Nanking during WWII.”
Jeff King, president of International Christian Concern, which has staff members traveling in Iraq, has evaluated many of the reports and finds them “completely consistent with who these guys are.”
“They’re absolute barbarians. We’re at a loss of words to describe who these guys are.”
Guinea has declared a “health emergency” as the number of people killed by the Ebola virus in the West African nation reached 377. More flights to West African countries have been cancelled as the region waits for the arrival of experimental drugs.
Guinean President Alpha Conde has announced a series of measures aimed to limit the spread of the disease including travel restrictions, strict controls at border points and a complete ban on moving bodies“from one town to another until the end of the epidemic.”
All suspected victims will also be forced to go to hospital until they are clear of infection.
South Africa has also repordedly declared its first suspected case of Ebola. A spokesman for the South African Province of DA Gauteng, Jack Bloom, said Thursday that there is a suspected case of the deadly virus at the Rahima Moosa Hospital.
“The patient is from Guinea and is presently being kept in isolation. If it is a confirmed Ebola case then the patient will be transferred to the Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Hospital which has been designated to treat Ebola with all due safeguards,” he said, as quoted by the Citizen, a South African tabloid.
In the worst epidemic since the disease was first discovered in 1976, the death toll has now reached 1,069 with 56 people dying in two days and a total of 2,000 infected, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
The soldiers, based at Fort Hood, Texas, are replacing about 600 paratroopers from the Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade, which is based in Vicenza, Italy. The “Sky Soldiers” have been conducting exercises with Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia since April as part of ongoing Operation Atlantic Resolve.
“These land training exercises … help foster interoperability through small unit and leader training,” Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren said.
In addition to ground forces, the U.S. has also sent F-16 combat aircraft to Poland and participated in NATO air policing missions over the Baltics.
The exercises came at the request of host nations that fear a resurgent Russia, which annexed the Crimea region of Ukraine earlier this year and continues to support a pro-Russia separatist movement in eastern Ukraine.
For months, the Russian military has massed forces along the border with Ukraine and provided advanced weaponry and other assistance to the rebels. In recent days, Moscow has announced its intention to send a convoy of trucks into Ukraine to deliver what it says is humanitarian aid to separatist-held areas under pressure from Ukrainian government forces.
Ukrainian and Western officials are concerned that the alleged humanitarian mission might be a ruse to enable Russia to provide more military help to the separatists.
On Tuesday, Warren warned that Russian aid convoys could be a “Trojan horse.”
A column of armoured vehicles and military trucks crossed the border from Russia into Ukraine on Thursday night, in the first confirmed sighting of such an incident by Western journalists.
A separate, larger convoy of around 270 Russian trucks, which Moscow claims is carrying aid, rumbled to a halt just short of the border on Thursday night, while in east Ukraine, shells hit the centre of rebel-held Donetsk for the first time.
The Telegraph witnessed a column of vehicles including both armoured personal carriers and soft-skinned lorries crossing into Ukraine at an obscure border crossing near the Russian town of Donetsk shortly before 10pm local time.
The Ukrainian and Western governments have long accused Russia of filtering arms and men across the border to fuel the separatist insurgency in Ukraine's Donetsk and Luhansk regions, but such an incident has never before been witnessed by Western journalists.
The convoy, which included at least 23 vehicles, appeared to be waiting until sunset near a refugee camp just outside Donetsk, before moving towards the crossing without turning off headlights or making any other attempt to conceal itself.
While it was not immediately clear whether all of that convoy crossed the border, The Telegraph did see a substantial number of vehicles pass through check point manned by gunmen after shadowing the convoy down narrow country lanes near the frontier.
While the force did not seem to be a substantial invasion force, it confirms that military supplies are moving across the border. While the APCs carried no visible markings the fuel tankers and soft-skinned trucks in the convoy bore black Russian military number plates.
After leaving Voronezh, the 270-vehicle convoy barrelled south towards Rostov-on-Don – a major city that could serve as another staging point.
But halfway the vast column of white-painted lorries and support vehicles took a westward turn towards the border town of Donetsk – not to be confused with the Ukrainian city of the same name – where Ukrainian forces have lost control of the border and rebels rule the land.
In a choking cloud of dust, the white-painted lorries crawled off the road and lumbered into place in serried lines on the parched field.
The apparently less-than-happy relationship between the Israeli government and the American administration is once again dominating local headlines, after the Wall Street Journalrevealed Thursday that the White House had suspended a shipment of Hellfire missiles to its closest ally in the Middle East.
How bad is it this time? The personal relationship between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama is known to be frosty, so does the “particularly combative phone call” the two leaders had Wednesday, according to the paper, really signify a new crisis?
Does the “additional care” Washington is taking now before delivering weapons to Israel, as State Department spokesperson Marie Harf described it Thursday, herald a new nadir in ties? This kind of “additional care” is paid to arms deliveries “in any crisis,” Harf claimed, adding that it’s “by no means unusual and, again, does not indicate any change in policy.”
Former deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon, who served as Israel’s ambassador in Washington from 2002 until 2006, said Netanyahu should bite the bullet, meet Obama “at the earliest possible time,” and try to repair whatever damage was done over the last few weeks.
“No, it’s not a major crisis yet, but it’s a signal that we might be on the verge of a larger crisis,” Ayalon said. “This is why it is important to straighten out the relationship. We don’t want it to get out of hand.”
Other observers, though, are firmly in the “Be afraid” camp, and consider the Wall Street Journal’s report to reflect more than just a quarrel that can be settled with a visit to Washington and a few nice words.
“It’s a major crisis. Suspending the supply of weapons to Israel during a war is an unusual occurrence,” said Eytan Gilboa, an expert on US-Israeli relations at Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. “It’s a very serious rupture in the mutual relations between the two countries.”
While it has happened before that the US denied Israel, for a few days, the arms it requested, the current conflict is of an entirely different quality, Gilboa posited. It reveals the levels of mistrust and perhaps personal animosity that exist between Netanyahu and Obama. And in this respect, the current US administration acts differently than all its predecessors, Gilboa said. “The personal factor has taken over. That should not be the case. Interests should dictate relations, and not personal whims.”
Netanyahu’s appointment of Ron Dermer as ambassador to Washington may have exacerbated the bad blood that already existed between him and Obama, Gilboa suggested. Dermer, who is known to sympathize with the Republican Party and is believed to have encouraged Netanyahu to support Mitt Romney before the 2012 elections, “could be part of the problem,” according to Gilboa. “I think it was a mistake to select him.”
The administration undeniably has several grievances with Jerusalem: the way it conducted the US-brokered peace talks with the Palestinian Authority, its harsh public criticism of Washington’s Iran course, anonymous leaked attacks on John Kerry and other senior American officials, Israel’s indignation over efforts to have Turkey and Qatar mediate a ceasefire with Hamas rather than Egypt during the Gaza military campaign, and so on and so forth.
According to Gilboa, however, none of that should justify the extraordinary step of withholding the Hellfire missiles in the midst of an Israeli war on Gaza’s terrorist government.
“Anger is not a strategy. You’d expect a superpower to overcome anger and frustration. But it seems that this is not the case,” Gilboa opined. “Nobody in Israel would have expected that to happen,” he said, referring to the suspended arms shipment. “There are certain things you don’t do. And Obama crossed the red line.”
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1 comment:
Hello all!!!! I have been "away" doing some "contract work". I see the old moderation button on, guess some things never change.
Isis are an evil group of persons consuming someone eles's breathing air. You would not believe what is going on with that bunch of tyrants. They are taking entire communities (women and children)hundreds at a time. Enough is enough. How much longer will God put up with this world?
I have not been able to keep up with alot of the current events. I take it that Iran is still producing uranium? Glad to be home for a bit........sigh of relief!!!
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