Once again, the National Security Agency has been caught illegally collecting the phone data of Americans. This news comes just months after a similar incident forced them to (supposedly) purge hundreds of millions of records captured without FISA authorization.
According to RT, the government spy agency unlawfully gathered a “larger than expected” volume of call and text records from one United States telecom provider under the metadata-collection program known as Section 215. According to a documentobtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as part of its ongoing lawsuit against the agency, the heavily redacted file does not reveal which company was affected, or how many of its “call detail records” were illegally collected between October 3 and 12, 2018.
“These documents further confirm that this surveillance program is beyond redemption and a privacy and civil liberties disaster,” ACLU National Security Project staff attorney Patrick Toomey told the Associated Press as reported by RT.
“There is no justification for leaving this surveillance power in the NSA’s hands.” The NSA, unsurprisingly, in its own internal documents assessed the blunder’s “impact on national security or international relations” to be “none.”
Critics of the program, formerly known as StellarWind, have pointed to its acknowledged failure to stop a single terror event. Terrorism was the agency’s official rationale for eavesdropping on 3 billion phone calls every day. That’s just one of many reasons the entire agency, not just its programs, should be scrapped.
The agency “will assess the scope of the civil liberties and privacy impact of this incident upon completion of the investigation,” the report promises, though an “initial assessment is that the impact was limited given the quick identification, purge processes, and lack of reporting.” Journalist Ben Swann is not letting the NSA off the hook. “If there is no accountability for those who continue to break the law – because that’s what they’re doing – then why would they ever stop doing that?” Swann pondered.
“Why is there no penalty? Why is there no consequence for doing this? This is illegal behavior – if it is illegal, what is the accountability for those who are collecting it?” journalist Ben Swann asked, referring to both the telecoms providing excess information and the government agency that has made at least three such “mistakes” in the last year. “The NSA never outs themselves and admits ‘We made a mistake’ – it only comes to light when the ACLU or some group sues,” Swann told RT.
The NSA has stated they wouldn’t mind dropping Section 215, however, president Trump has suggested he’d like it to continue indefinitely.Former NSA chief William Binney confirmed that the agency is only letting it go of the controversial program Section 215 because they have something much more sinister going on.
“There is no oversight of the upstream program,” Binney told RT, referring to an NSA program that collects not only phone records but emails, “chatter,” and “everything on the fiber optic network.” Upstream is “the major program that’s copying the collection of bulk data on everybody, not just in the United States but on the planet.”
In the bookPlace to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State, author Glen Greenwald reveals fresh information on the NSA’s unprecedented abuse of power with never-before-seen documents entrusted to him by Snowden himself. It’s become absolutely horrifying; the amount of spying the U.S. government does on its own “free” people.
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When I’m having a bad day, I trawl the internet for videos of happy cyborgs. My favorites are clips of hearing-impaired people getting their cochlear implants turned on for the first time. The videos follow a soothingly predictable pattern. Mumbly background chatter and shaky cam—the cinematography is rarely good—then a pregnant pause, wide eyes, and finally that peculiar kind of sobbing that human beings do when we are overwhelmed. The pattern is the same whether it’s a babe in arms or a full-grown man.
If you catch the right algorithmic wave on YouTube or the right hashtag on Instagram, you can surf for hours in this genre: videos of Parkinson’s patients as their tremors are calmed by a new therapy, paraplegics walking with the help of adaptive prosthetics, infants getting their first pair of coke-bottle glasses, and more.
Adorable kittens and soppy love stories do little to warm my cold, dead heart. But show me a part-robot baby flipping out because he heard his mom say “hello” for the first time, and it’s onion city.
I’m not deaf or hard of hearing, but I am aware that cochlear implants are not without controversy in that community. As with almost everything you see on the internet, behind the scenes there is invisible labor, difficult setbacks, and the occasional disaster. Hardly anyone posts those on their YouTube channel.
Still, entire religions were once built around the spectacle of someone banishing a severe disability with the wave of a hand. Today any certified R.N. in the right audiologist’s office can be a secular saint. When my own worthless eyeballs were corrected with lasers, making me a blind(ish) woman given the gift of sight, I didn’t fall to my knees and worship the ophthalmologist. I just got out my credit card. We live in an age of reliable, scalable, profitable miracles.
People are ungrateful wretches, of course. Once anyone can reliably perform a miracle, it immediately ceases to seem miraculous. Babies generated without sex—actual virgin births—are humdrum. We carry nearly all of human knowledge in our pockets. Within a decade, burgers made without meat will be commonplace (page 10). And the memory of a time when HIV was a death sentence will soon fade to almost nothing (page 30).
As a species, we’re brilliant at focusing on the negative. There are some very useful evolutionary implications of this trait, but an unfortunate side effect is that we always feel like the sky is falling, even when it’s 70 degrees and sunny.
But historically speaking, it’s a beautiful day.
In 1820, nearly 84 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty (roughly less than $1.90 per day per person). In 1981, according to the World Bank, that number was still 42 percent. Today, it’s hovering around 8 percent.
Also in 1820, 90 percent of the world’s population was illiterate. Today that number is inverted: 90 percent can read.
Since 1990, an additional 2.6 billion people have secured access to clean water.
And in 1990, zero percent of the world’s population had access to the World Wide Web. By 2020, more than half will.
In other words, the people around us are healthy and long-lived. They have words to read and videos to watch. The water is clear and blue. Food is plentiful and delicious. And the soundtrack—whether it’s piped in through the latest medical technology or just an ordinary pair of earbuds—is gorgeous.
All of these heartening facts and figures (and much of my hope for humanity) are drawn from an upcoming book, Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know, by Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey and the Cato Institute’s Marian L. Tupy (page 12).
These are mere material gains, the determined pessimist might say. True enough. We are the children of Steven Pinker’s “long peace” and the grandchildren of Deirdre Nansen McCloskey’s “great enrichment.” We are safe and wealthy beyond the imagining of our ancestors, the beneficiaries of an astonishingly lengthy stretch of success for liberal institutions, international trade, and the free exchange of ideas.
These institutions are not automatically self-sustaining. But they are self-reinforcing. People aren’t perfectible, and they are prone to both personal and political error. Everything could always go pear-shaped.
But so far, billions of healthier, wealthier, better-educated, and better-connected people have also proven themselves better able to understand and defend the values of the free society.
Politics, of course, is crap. But politics has consistently been crap throughout the last couple of centuries, and yet here we are in the greatest period of global peace, enrichment, and innovation in human history. Truth be told, even the crappiness of politics is way down over the last 200 years. The modes of amplifying the shouting have gotten better, so the whole enterprise is noisier. But it’s far less fatal than it used to be. Not every downward trend line is an inflection point.
“Put not your trust in princes,” the psalmist warns us, “nor in the son of man in whom there is no help. His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish.” The first bit couldn’t be more true. But the rest is absolute rubbish.
Human beings are doing remarkably well lately, especially for such fragile, mortal creatures. As with the cochlear implants, a lot of messiness, horror, and hopelessness are hidden from view. It’s wrong to dismiss or ignore suffering just because it’s not part of a broader trend. But it is also wrong to despair.
The combined efforts of the sons of man have wrought astonishing changes. And their thoughts do not perish when they die but live on through their inventions and institutions. The dead of the last two centuries have bettered the world not just for themselves but for those of us who came after them. Their legacy is a world rife with boring, ordinary miracles.
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A video showing Danish schoolchildren being trained how to perform a Muslim prayer and chant “Allahu Akbar” has stoked controversy.
The clip shows a boy of African descent in Muslim clothing demonstrating the Islamic prayer to a group of mainly ethnically Danish children.
He is then interrupted by a teacher who instructs the kids to say “Allahu Akbar,” after which the entire class kneels in prayer.
The prayer took place at Thyregod School in Velje municipality in southern Jutland in November 2018, reports Sputnik.
The clip was filmed by a Sudanese mother of one of the children. She was explicitly told not to upload the video to the Internet but did so anyway.
After the video was leaked, numerous people called for schools officials to resign, claiming that children were being ‘indoctrinated’ into Islam.
According to headmaster Gert Hougaard, he has “never experienced anything like this”.
The Danish People’s Party’s Martin Henriksen demanded an explanation from the school and whether parental permission had been obtained, but was merely told that this was a routine part of the curriculum.
He also asked school management if they intended to teach pupils Islam’s “dark sides and widespread fundamentalism,” in addition to its “massive religious and social control.”
Numerous similar videos showing children in European countries being taught how to adopt Muslim practices have previously emerged.
Strangely enough though, there appear to be very few videos of Muslim kids being taught how to worship Christ in Christian churches.
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In Illinois, Lakewood Forest Preserves District President Angelo Kyle attempted to cancel this year’s 27th annual Civil War re-enactment, which is scheduled for July. He rescinded the cancellation after other Lake County commissioners complained, and the organizer noted that they already have a contract. But Kyle says he doesn’t want to host the event in the future. It is the largest event hosted by the park, drawing about 3,000 people each year, a fact that seems to grate on Kyle. “Why isn’t (the largest event) pertaining to the mission of the forest preserve—preserving our natural resources and environmental quality of Lake County?” he said.
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After a record-breaking heat wave turns parts of Europe into an inferno, cooler air is finally on the way, as European leaders have renewed discussions on combating the impacts of climate change on their economies, reported Reuters.
The south of France, more specifically Gallargues-le-Montueux, recorded 114.6°F on Saturday, more than four degrees above all-time highs
Severe heat warnings were lifted over France on Sunday, after nearly a week of sizzling tempatures. Italy, Spain, and other Central European nations experienced days of unbearable heat, as well.
Tempatures started to decline on Sunday for France and Spain, but Germany still printed above 100°F before cooling down on Monday.
Wildfires broke out across Spain during the heat wave were stabilized on Saturday. Firefighters struggled for days to control a blaze in the central provinces of Toledo and Madrid that had burned eight sq miles since Friday.
Wildfires force residents to evacuate in Cadalso de los Vidrios as the flames coming from a previous wildfire in Toledo crosses to Spain’s Madrid region pic.twitter.com/KiZmubVd8I
Jerome Despey owns a vineyard in France’s southwestern Herault region, he tweeted images of dried grapes, and said his crop experienced “widespread damage.”
“Some vines seem to have been hit with a blowtorch,” Despey said, while Catherine Bernard likened it to the effects of a hairdryer.
Échaudage le vignoble héraultais est impacté par la canicule surtout les Carignan une pensée pour ceux qui vont être encore en difficulté pic.twitter.com/RydRynI23c
“I’ve been a winegrower for 30 years. I have never seen a vine burnt by a sudden onset of heat like yesterday,” Despey added.
The cause of the heat wave appears to be the weakening of the high-level jet stream has caused weather systems to stall out in Central Europe. Reuters notes that Europe’s hottest summers in the last 500 years have occurred during the past 100 years.
The World Meteorological Organization said that the heat wave was “absolutely consistent” with more volatile weather linked to the result of greenhouse gas emissions.
According to the Guardian, Météo-France meteorologist Etienne Kapikian, said “this is historic. It’s the first time temperature in excess of 114°F has ever been recorded in France.”
France is the seventh European country in the union to ever record 114 F tempatures, along with Bulgaria, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Greece, and North Macedonia, Meteo France said.
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In Illinois, Lakewood Forest Preserves District President Angelo Kyle attempted to cancel this year’s 27th annual Civil War re-enactment, which is scheduled for July. He rescinded the cancellation after other Lake County commissioners complained, and the organizer noted that they already have a contract. But Kyle says he doesn’t want to host the event in the future. It is the largest event hosted by the park, drawing about 3,000 people each year, a fact that seems to grate on Kyle. “Why isn’t (the largest event) pertaining to the mission of the forest preserve—preserving our natural resources and environmental quality of Lake County?” he said.
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This new report from the United Nations documents Statista’s headline, and it proves that America’s regime-change operations have actually created around half of the world’s refugees. It proves that America’s penchant for invading and trying to overthrow the governments that its billionaires want to replace (“regime-change”) has been by far the biggest of all single causes of refugees worldwide, vastly higher than any other government. Regardless of how bad those other governments might possibly be, the US regime is far worse – at least as being the cause, the creator, of the world’s refugee problems.
Consider the countries that the US regime has recently regime-changed or attempted to:
The US regime invaded Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003, Syria in 2012-2019, and has been applying, in order to overthrow the Government of Venezuela, strangulating economic sanctions. All of those four target-countries (Syria, Venezuela, Iraq, and Afghanistan) lead the list of nations that are bleeding the most refugees. The US regime’s “regime-change” operations abroad are therefore certainly the leading cause of the world’s refugee-crisis.
That’s the big news in the new UN report, though it is news that the report itself ignores.
The biggest of these crises in 2018 were Syria and Venezuela, which were the US regime’s most recent regime-change operations. But Afghanistan and Iraq are also among the top bleeders of refugees — even now, over 15 years after the US regime had invaded them.
Mr De Zayas, a former secretary of the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) and an expert in international law, spoke to The Independent following the presentation of his Venezuela report to the HRC in September. He said that since its presentation the report has been ignored by the UN and has not sparked the public debate he believes it deserves. “Sanctions kill,” he told The Independent, adding that they fall most heavily on the poorest people in society, demonstrably cause death through food and medicine shortages, lead to violations of human rights and are aimed at coercing economic change.
In order for the US regime to blame Venezuela’s Government 100% for Venezuela’s problems including the economic shortages that result from the US regime’s sanctions, the US regime stages attempts to send aid to the Venezuelan people, and this aid is, of course, blocked by Venezuela’s Government, because it is just the aggressor’s PR stunt — the US regime’s effort to take over the country in a ‘kind’ way. (After all, Hitler claimed to love the “Volk,” even as he served the interests of Germany’s armaments-firms and the billionaires who controlled them.) However, if the aggressor had honestly wanted to help Venezuelans, it wouldn’t be applying such strangulating economic sanctions, which include penalties against countries that trade with Venezuela — an economic blockade against Venezuela.
Here are highlights in the new report from the UN:
The report says that in 2018, there were “13.6 million newly displaced” persons.
“Altogether, more than two thirds (67 per cent) of all refugees worldwide came from just five countries:”
Syria 6.7M
Afghanistan 2.7M
Sudan 2.3M
Myanmar 1.1M
Somalia 0.9M
“The main countries of asylum for refugees were:”
Turkey 3.7M
Pakistan 1.4M
Uganda 1.2M
Sudan 1.1M
Germany 1.1M
However, this chaotic UN report also states that:
At the end of 2018, Syrians continued to be the largest forcibly displaced population, with 13.0 million people living in displacement. … Colombians were the second largest group, with 8.0 million forcibly displaced, most of them (98 per cent) inside their country at the end of 2018.
Presumably, the reason why Colombia does’t show on the list of “newly displaced” is that most of its “8.0 million forcibly displaced” occurred during the civil war there, which peaked in 2009.
“Figure 17 | Major recipient countries of new asylum applications | 2017-2018” shows that pending asylum-applications are the highest in US, second-highest is in Peru (mainly from Venezuela resulting from America’s economic sanctions against Venezuela), third-highest is in Germany (mainly from Arabic lands that America invaded), fourth-highest is in France (mainly from Arabic lands that America invaded), and fifth-highest is in Turkey (mainly from Arabic lands that America invaded).
In other words: four of those five countries are lands where America’s strangulating economic sanctions, and invasions, by America’s own troops and by its proxy-forces such as Al Qaeda and other ‘rebels’, drove millions of people out. Though the confusing report doesn’t note it, most of that “highest in US” asylum-applications come from the US regime’s banana republics — Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador — where the US trained death squads etc. created (or at least encouraged) the problems, at least a decade or more ago. Consequently, even in some nations where the US regime didn’t create refugees by means of invasions, it created many by coups and other means.
“Figure 18 | Major source countries of new asylum-seekers | 2017-2018” shows that in 2018, the highest number of new asylum-applicants were from Venezuela, second-highest were from Afghanistan, third-highest were from Syria, and fourth-highest were from Iraq. All of those are lands that suffer from the US regime’s past and current aggressions. (Of course, everybody expects Iran to be the next.)
Venezuelan refugees and asylum-seekers grew in number during 2018. The broader movement of Venezuelans through the region and beyond, increasingly took on the characteristics of a refugee situation, with some 3.4 million living outside Venezuela by the end of 2018, as more than 3 million Venezuelans left their homes, travelling mainly elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean. “This is the biggest exodus in the region’s recent history, and one of the biggest displacement crises in the world.” It could turn out to be even worse than Colombia’s was. The report notes:
“When my nine-month-old daughter died because of the lack of medicines, doctors or treatment, I decided to take my family out of Venezuela before another one of my children died. Diseases were getting stronger than us. I told myself, either we leave or we die.” – Eulirio Baes, a 33-year-old indigenous Warao from Delta Amacuro in Venezuela. He abandoned the Warao’s ancestral lands and took his entire family to Brazil after three relatives died.
Lebanon continued to host the largest number of refugees relative to its national population. 1 in 6 people there was a refugee. Jordan (1 in 14) and Turkey (1 in 22) ranked second and third, respectively. Of course, those lands receive mainly Syrian refugees.
At the end of 2018, Syrians continued to be the largest forcibly displaced population, with 13.0 million people living in displacement, including 6,654,000 refugees, 6,184,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) and 140,000 asylum-seekers. Colombians were the second largest group, with 8.0 million forcibly displaced, most of them (98 per cent) still living inside their country at the end of 2018. The top two foreign recipients of refugees from Colombia were Spain and Ecuador. As previously noted, Colombia’s refugees were generated by the lengthy civil war there, which peaked in 2009. The following visual, which is the most comprehensible part of this chaotic (and in places uninterpretable) UN report, doesn’t show Colombia, because these were the refugee-flows only for the year of 2018:
That visual is around half of the interpretable content in the entire 28-page UN report. It’s a visual way of showing that the US regime’s regime-change operations produce around half of the entire world’s refugee-problem. The only US Presidential candidate who even so much as just mentions America’s “regime-change wars” (and she is strongly against them) is Tulsi Gabbard, and she currently scores the support of fewer than 1% of America’s Democrats in that Party’s Presidential primary polls. So, at least America’s Democrats are overwhelmingly unconcerned about their country’s causing around half of the entire world’s refugee crisis. And there is no indication that America’s Republican voters are more concerned about it than the Democratic voters are. Americans, evidently, don’t care about this matter. At least, not yet.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3093DHB Tyler Durden
Next month, the world’s first floating nuclear power unit (FPU) dubbed ‘Academik Lomonosov’ will be towed via the Northern Sea Route to its final destination in the Far East, after almost two decades in construction.
Russia’s first floating nuclear power plant has two KLT-40S reactor units that collectively generate 70 MW of energy.
A year ago we noted video of the beginning of the ships’ voyage (from St.Petersburg to Murmansk)
A floating nuclear power plant made by Russia headed out for its first sea voyage on Saturday. The floating plant, the academic lomonosov will provide power for a port town and for oil rigs. pic.twitter.com/Eo0uBjVfht
The vessel is now expected to be towed “along the Northern Sea Route to the work site, unloaded at the mooring berth, and connected to the coastal infrastructure in Pevek,” added the press release.
Pevek is a small Arctic port town and the governmental center of Chaunsky District in Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, Russia, located on Chaunskaya Bay.
Once the floating nuclear power plant is moored and connected to the coastal infrastructure in Pevek, the nuclear reactors aboard will be used to power 100,000 homes in the region, a desalination plant, and critical energy infrastructure assets. Rosatom said the floating power plant “will replace the Bilibino nuclear power plant and Chaunskaya TPP that are technologically outdated,” and become the most northerly nuclear facility in the world.
However, the floating nuclear power plant has been extensively criticized by antipollutionist — Greenpeace has called it a “floating Chernobyl.”
“Nuclear reactors bobbing around the Arctic Ocean will pose a shockingly obvious threat to a fragile environment, which is already under enormous pressure from climate change,” Greenpeace nuclear expert Jan Haverkamp said in a statement.
“The floating nuclear power plants will typically be put to use near coastlines and shallow water … contrary to claims regarding safety, the flat-bottomed hull and the floating nuclear power plant’s lack of self-propulsion makes it particularly vulnerable to tsunamis and cyclones.”
Meanwhile, Rosatom states the vessel meets all requirements from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and “does not pose any threat to the environment.”
“The FNPP is designed with the great margin of safety that exceeds all possible threats and makes nuclear reactors invincible for tsunamis and other natural disasters. In addition, the nuclear processes at the floating power unit meet all requirements of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and do not pose any threat to the environment.”
Why would Russia want a floating power plant in the Arctic?
Speaking to reporters in 2017 after a conference with Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that Russia’s proposal to jointly explore the Northern Sea Route was “a great idea,” and that “China welcomes this idea and supports efforts with partners in the region to develop a ‘Silk Road on ice’.”
The Answer: To provide the needed energy to build infrastructure for the ‘Ice Silk Road.’
As CNN concludes, the last Russian nuclear project of a comparable scale was completed in 2007, when the “50 Years of Victory” nuclear-powered icebreaker finally sailed after sitting in the docks since 1989. Now, after more than 20 years of arguments, changes of contractors and economic crises, Russian engineers can finally take pride in launching the world’s only nuclear floating rig.
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“Christianity originated in the Middle East. Thus, the displacement or evacuation of Christians from the Middle East is very dangerous for the safety of the region… also in the Mediterranean Sea region. Europe is affected by this.” — Egyptian Coptic Pope Tawadros II, in Germany, where he was inaugurating a new Coptic church for his exiled community. Deutsche Welle, May 14, 2019.
Regrettably, the tragedy of these Christian massacres is directly proportional to the neglect with which they are reported in the West.
“‘Islamophobia’ looms large; talk of ‘Christophobia’ is almost nonexistent”. — Ross Douthat, “Are Christians Privileged or Persecuted?”, The New York Times, April 23, 2019.
Algeria — the country of origin of some of the Christian fathers such as Augustine of Hippo — has become a country… where officially there are “no native Christians”. How many other countries will meet the same fate? And will the West ever come to the help of their Christian brethren?
Persecution of Christians in the Middle East is now close to “genocide“, a UK-commissioned report just revealed. The same threat has also become critical for Christian communities in Africa.
Some say it began in Algeria in the 1990s, when 19 monks, bishops, nuns and other Catholics were killed during the civil war. Since then, in Nigeria, Christian faithful have been massacred in their churches; in Kenya, Christians have been killed in universities; in Libya, Christians have been beheaded on beaches; in Yemen, nuns have been assassinated and in Egypt, massive anti-Christian violence is prompting an exodus. It is the new African archipelago of persecution.
Distressingly, these Christians have been finding themselves in the blind spot of the West: they are “too Christian” to get the Left’s attention, but too far away for the Right. Africa’s Christians are orphans. They have no “allies”, John O’Sullivan writes.
Christian families recently fled the city of Diffa, in Niger, after Boko Haram delivered the message: “You have three days to go or you will be killed!”. “There is no Christian anymore in this town”, someone reported to the non-governmental organization, the Barnabas Fund. The town, Arbinda, is in Burkina Faso. Numbers are telling: 82 pastors, 1,145 Christians and 151 households have fled from violence in the Muslim-majority nation. Just in the last few weeks, several of the Christian faithful and clergy have been murdered. Jihadists killed six Christians in a Catholic church in the town of Dablo. A pastor was murdered in an attack in Silgadji, Catholic parades have been targeted.
Pictured: The gate of a school in Diffa. (Image source: Roland Hunziker/Wikimedia Commons)
Jihadists apparently want to “cleanse” these areas of Christians — and they are succeeding. “There is an atmosphere of panic in the town,” the mayor of Dablo, Ousmane Zongo, said. “People are holed up in their homes, nothing is going on. The shops and stores are closed. It’s practically a ghost town”.
In Nigeria, attacks on Christians never stop. The country has become a “war zone for Christians“.
“The attacks on Christians are growing more flagrant and more aggressive,” Father John Bakeni from the Maiduguri Diocese, northern Nigeria, said. “We consider each day we live in safety a blessing because we do not know what will happen the next day”.
“We Christians are at risk of extinction and an attempt is being made to Islamize the whole country because controlling Nigeria means expelling Christians from all of West Africa”, said Father Joseph Fidelis Bature, a Catholic priest in the Nigerian diocese of Maiduguri, in the Italian monthly Tempi.
Unfortunately, we Westerners have a short memory. Al Qaeda’s first attacks took place in Africa: the bombings against US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Africa matters for the West. That is why we should take this monstrous new anti-Christian persecution more seriously. “Christianity originated in the Middle East”, the Egyptian Coptic Pope Tawadros II said in Germany, where he was inaugurating a new Coptic church in May for his exiled community. “Thus, the displacement or evacuation of Christians from the Middle East is very dangerous for the safety of the region, not only in the Middle East but also in the Mediterranean Sea region. Europe is affected by this, and the Arab countries as well”. The West should take much more seriously these appeals from the Eastern Christian leaders.
With a secularized Europe and a Middle East close to becoming emptied of Christians, those jihadists who are obsessed with eradicating Christianity understand that their current ideological battlefield is in Africa. “By 2025, 50 percent of the (world’s) Christian population will be in Africa and Latin America”, wrote the scholar Philip Jenkins. The share of the world’s Christians in sub-Saharan Africa is expected grow from 24% in 2010 to 38% by 2050. That is why jihadists there are pursuing a horrific project of religious cleansing.
“Christianity has literally ‘gone south’, exploding demographically in the developing world and augmenting ongoing sociopolitical turmoil in places such as West Africa”, the Pew Forum reports. Radical Islam wants to stop this demographic movement, which Professor Philip Jenkins called “the largest religious change of any kind that has ever occurred”.
According to another report, in one century the number of Muslims living in sub-Saharan Africa has increased more than 20-fold, rising from 11 million in 1900 to 234 million in 2010. At the same time, the number of Christians has grown 70-fold, rising from 7 million to 470 million. Sub-Saharan Africa now is home to 21% of all the Christians in the world and 15% of the world’s Muslims. “Islamic extremism has two global centers of gravity, one in the Arab Middle East, but the other is in sub-Saharan Africa”, researcher Ron Boyd-MacMillan noted in a report for Open Doors.
Every year, Open Doors lists the world’s 50 worst persecutors of Christians. The list include 14 African countries, called home to “extreme” or “very high” levels of persecution: Algeria, the Central African Republic, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, and Tunisia. Mali, for instance, went from no listing to seventh place in just two years. In Kenya last year, Islamists forced passengers of a bus to present their identification cards. Then they separated Muslims and killed the two Christians.
Regrettably, the tragedy of these massacres of Christians is directly proportional to the neglect with which they are reported in the West. “One of the basic facts of contemporary religious history is that Christians around the world are persecuted on an extraordinary scale”, Ross Douthat recently wrote in The New York Times.
“Yet as an era-defining reality rather than an episodic phenomenon this reality is barely visible in the Western media, and rarely called by name and addressed head-on by Western governments and humanitarian institutions. (‘Islamophobia’ looms large; talk of ‘Christophobia’ is almost nonexistent.)”
Jihadists know a secret: persecution works.Algeria — the country of origin of some of the Christian fathers such as Augustine of Hippo — has become a country that is 99.9% Muslim and where officially there are “no native Christians“. How many other countries will meet the same fate? And will the West ever come to the help of their Christian brethren?
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However, now that they are in control, they are fighting bitterly amongst one-another. They are on two sides.
Concerning foreign policies, and domestic policies, Republican Party billionaires hate especially Iran, and especially all progressivism.
By contrast, concerning foreign policies, and domestic policies, Democratic Party billionaires hate especially Russia, and accept some progressivism.
(They need to do the latter so that they can be considered to be liberals and thus tolerated or even admired by Democratic Party voters. That’s necessary for them because, for example, Democratic Party voters would be just as turned off toward a politician who is financed by and fronts for the conservative Koch brothers, as Republican Party voters would be turned off toward a politician who is financed by and fronts for the liberal George Soros — and everybody knows that billionaires fund the major politicians; it’s not a totally hidden fact. Soros and other liberal billionaires can claim to be ‘public spirited’, which is necessary for them in order to be able to appeal to liberals; but the Koch brothers and other avowedly conservative billionaires have no need to make that pretense in order to appeal to conservatives.)
Actually, all billionaires are conservatives, because they need to be that, in order to call a country like America “democratic” instead of “dictatorial,” and they need that myth of American ‘democracy’ in order to prevent a revolution, which would strip them of their power.
(No American billionaire calls America a “dictatorship,” even though it is and each of them knows it, since they collectively are the dictators here, and since they don’t become involved in politics, at all, unless they want to remain in control over it. The richer a person is, the more conservative the person tends to be, and billionaires are the richest people of all, so all of them are actually conservatives. Even billionaire liberals are conservative, because otherwise the individual would be fomenting revolution, and none of them is doing any such thing — what would they be revolting against, if not themselves? They can pretend to be progressive, but only pretend. Furthermore, every study shows that the richer a person is, the more involved in politics the person tends to be. Poor people are the least involved in politics, and this is one of the reasons why the U.S. is a dictatorship. It’s a dictatorship by the richest, and throughout thousands of years that has been called an “aristocracy,” as opposed to a “democracy.”)
Barack Obama was, from the very first moment when he became President, aiming to overthrow and replace Syria’s Government, and the reason for that was never made clear, but some people thought it was because Syria is allied with Iran, and some of them thought that it was instead because Syria is allied with Russia. When the Democrat Obama negotiated and signed the multinational pact in which Iran guaranteed that it would produce no nuclear bombs and the U.S. and its allies would end their sanctions against Iran, the reality became clear that Obama didn’t actually hate Iran (which the Republican Trump clearly does). Obama was invading Syria because it’s allied with Russia, not because it’s allied with Iran. His successor, the Republican Donald Trump, is just as anti-Iran as Obama was anti-Russia. Whereas the Republican Party especially hate Iran, the Democratic Party especially hate Russia. And that’s because their billionaires do — the Democratic ones hate Russia the most, and the Republican ones hate Iran the most. That’s the biggest single difference between the two Parties.
The main personal difference between Obama and Trump (other than that Obama was intelligent and Trump isn’t) is that Obama was a much more skilled liar than Trump is. For example, he was able to string Vladimir Putin along until 2012 to hope that Obama’s ‘reset with Russia’ wasn’t merely a ploy. On 26 March 2012, Obama informed Dmitry Medvedev to tell Putin that “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved, but it’s important for him [the incoming President Putin] to give me space. This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.”
Obama won Ukraine as being an enemy of Russia; it’s as if Putin had wrangled a coup in Mexico and suddenly Mexicans turned rabidly hostile toward the U.S. But it was a Democrat who did this, not a Republican. And the Republican Trump is just as hostile to Iran as Obama was to Russia. These aren’t foreign governments that are interfering in America’s foreign policies; maybe Israel is doing that, and maybe Saudi Arabia is, and maybe UAE is, but certainly America’s 585 billionaires are. And they are allied with those three Middle Eastern countries. When America imposes sanctions against a country in order to wreck the target-nation’s economy, that target-nation is officially an ‘enemy’, and that’s because it is allied with or at least friendly toward either Russia, or Iran, or both. America’s 585 billionaires control America’s foreign policies, but disagree on whether America’s top enemy is (if the billionaire is a Republican) Iran, or (if the billionaire is a Democrat) Russia.
For example: If the next President is Biden, then conquering Russia will be the main foreign-policy goal, but if the next President is Trump, then conquering Iran will be.
