Coronavirus, Meningitis Tell Us Without Borders We Die

By Enza Ferreri


This article was published on Italy Travel Ideas


While all the attention is on Coronavirus, there is another illness that has been on the increase in Italy: meningitis, a disease of generally infectious origin.

Meningitis Risk from African Migration to Italy

Italian doctor Alessandro Meluzzi, while speaking on the topic of coronavirus, also said:

I want to remind everyone present of something that nobody remembers: the very strong growth of meningitis in Italy, especially in Tuscany, is related to the fact that the type C meningococcus [meningococcal type C bacterium], which almost did not exist in Italy, comes from the meningococcus belt. That is the Sahel, from which 90% of African migration to Italy originates.

He concluded by saying: “Let's try to tell that to the President of the Tuscany region. What I mean is that boundaries, like cell membranes, serve to survive.

"It is not a question of racism, this is not the problem, but that of stopping viruses and bacteria, otherwise we are delirious.

"Without borders we die. As cells need membranes and the immune system needs antibodies, borders are necessary for survival."

Meningitis Belt, in Africa

Like Other Parts of the Natural World, We Are Not Interchangeable

Doctor Meluzzi is right.

The idea of a globalised, borderless world is a dystopian view, totally unrealistic and, if tried to put into practice - as many forces are trying at the moment, against people's will - it will lead to chaos and highly destructive consequences.

There is a reason why the various peoples, nations, ethnic groups have spontaneously formed and united themselves into separate societies.

Smaller polities are always easier to manage. This is why larger states are divided into federal states, then counties, provinces, regions and so on.

This is the way men naturally organise themselves, it is an organic process, not one dictated from above like the "one world" idea.

Nature doesn't exist just outside of us. It exists inside of us too.

We worry not to break the balance of non-human nature, what is generally known as the environment or the ecosystem.

But then, paradoxically or at least unreasonably, our culture's dominant ideology (although not shared by most people) holds that human beings are flexible and pliable to a fantastic point, for example holds that a person's sex can be chosen or changed.

Similarly, this powerful ideology maintains that the naturally-developed, organic human societies that have grown out of family and blood ties, together with a shared history, culture and, more importantly, religion, are not necessary and can be replaced by a global society with a world government.

In this view, humans are seen as pawns in a game of draughts or chess, which, being all the same, can move or be moved from one part of the world to another without any serious consequence.

A hypothesis that we are now experimenting on ourselves with disastrous effects.

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SOURCE
Meluzzi: I confini servono a sopravvivere
PHOTO CREDIT
Streets of Italy Deserted

Italy: How a Coronavirus Crisis Became a Disaster

By Enza Ferreri

This article was published on Italy Travel Ideas


Italy early in the coronavirus crisis was the first country in the world for number of Covid-19 cases, with its number of confirmed infections increasing very rapidly day by day, and the whole country was placed under lockdown, as is well known. It is important to understand what happened to provoke this exceptional crisis.

In a previous article we saw that, for fear of labels of racism, by not having quarantined all people coming from China, a measure recommended by the World Health Organisation and followed by many nations, the Centre-Left Italian government has opened the door to the epidemic.

Then we saw that the uncontrolled immigration that for a long time has particularly hit and shaken Italy among the countries of Europe, in addition to bringing security and crime risks posed by undocumented migrants' free circulation, has now turned into another possible dynamite waiting to explode: due to China-Africa close trade ties and the vast presence of Chinese in the continent, Africa can become an incubation venue and transmission channel for coronavirus, which means that lots of African immigrants to Italy may be carrying Coronavirus.

The migrants arriving in Italian ports may have the coronavirus without their knowledge - and without ours. And still without their knowledge they could contribute to spread it throughout Europe.

The consequences, in that case, would be potentially lethal given the absence of sanitary bulwarks in almost all African states.

The infection might spread to Europe through Africa perhaps via Italy.

African Countries at Risk

The director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was very clear when he said that the "biggest concern", in addition to the epidemic itself, is that the virus may reach "countries with weaker health systems" least able to contain it, and the whole of Africa undoubtedly falls into that category.

Although, when news of the epidemic from China first started spreading, there were no confirmed cases of Coronavirus in Africa, there are now, and escalating fairly quickly.

Doctor Giovanni Rezza, specialised in hygiene and in infectious diseases, senior scientist at the Istituto Superiore di Sanita' (ISS) in Rome, and Director of the Department of Infectious, Parasitic and Immune-mediated Diseases, has confirmed that Africa could represent a problem: it is a very populous continent, he said, and has fragile and weak points in the health chain:

African states do not have the same network as European laboratories. And the various types of fever that people can get could be confused with other infections and not be recognised as Coronavirus. This is why international organisations should be on the alert.

Africa, except for a few specialised centres, does not even have the means to recognize this new virus.

Health authorities and researchers fear that the Coronavirus could circulate undetected in Africa, where less advanced health systems could quickly be overwhelmed by a local outbreak.

It's therefore necessary to close the Italian ports to migration.

PHOTO CREDIT
La Gazzetta di Reggio

Coronavirus Exposes Open Ports to Africa Danger

By Enza Ferreri

This article was published in Italy Travel Ideas and is our second post on the subject, here's the first on Coronavirus and Italy.

Italian physician and psychiatrist Alessandro Meluzzi rightly described as paradoxical Italy's current policy of "closed schools and open ports", letting in migrants at such a time of emergency for Coronavirus (whose official name, which initially and temporarily was 2019-nCoV, has from early February become Sars-CoV-2, also adopted by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), while the disease it causes is called COVID-19).

If we don't close our borders others close theirs, Dr Meluzzi added.

This happened, in fact, and China itself was among the countries isolating Italy.

Dr Meluzzi was making correct predictions as early as 31 January, when he said in an interview:

"My feeling is that the Italian situation is already totally out of control".

He added that he considered with great concern the hypothesis of the spread of Coronavirus on the African continent:

"When the virus arrives in Africa, where countries do not have adequate health coverage to deal with the epidemic, this could spread in a potentially catastrophic way".

He referred to the great number of Chinese workers and companies in Africa, "which create a large flow of trade with China, especially with the industrial area from which the epidemic originated", concluding: "I dare not imagine what could happen in Africa."

From China to Europe via Africa

The African "bomb" became a later alarm about Coronavirus and its further spread in the world.

There are two factors that greatly elevate the potential risk of contagion: one is the thriving trade relations between China and Africa, the other is the uncontrolled immigration that from Africa regularly arrives in European countries overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, particularly Italy.

Let's be frank: when we say "uncontrolled", it is very literal. We know nothing of many, indeed probably the great majority, of people landing on our shores from smugglers' boats and NGO ships, since they have no documents or false documents. In a very high number of cases we don't even know their name, let alone their past history, criminal record and health status. The newspaper Il Giornale wrote:

Italy hosts immigrants at its own expense without having the slightest idea who they are. To know their stories, we rely on the stories given by them in front of the various commissions.

For their personal identities, we are satisfied with having them put their name and surname in writing the moment they disembark...

In Italy, in fact, thousands of people arrive who can carry with them cell phones but never a shred of an identification document.

Hardly Any of the Arrivals Are Refugees

There have been cases of fake refugees who disclosed to the media that they paid thousands of euros to obtain ways to claim asylum status.

For a long time Italy has been literally overwhelmed by would-be asylum seekers and migrants. A Nigerian interpreter and "cultural mediator", calling himself Uchenna, has explained how it works:

To judge asylum seekers there should be 4 people for each commission [called 'territorial commission'], who include representatives for the UNHCR (UN Refugee Agency), Italian police and local authorities. Now, there are only 1 or 2 left to follow the interview because there are several organisational problems... so many requests arrive that if they were all present at each interview, it would never end. The system is practically collapsing.

This means that in some cases the waiting times for obtaining the opinion of the commission can be extremely long. Meanwhile, Italy hosts many immigrants at its own expense, who will then never obtain refugee status. And they are a very high number. Says Uchenna: "The majority of those who are arriving on the Italian coast from Nigeria certainly do not run away from dangers: they are looking for money and success to be able to return home one day and strut the wealth achieved".

He explained that to do this, therefore, many times they invent stories of suffering and persecutions that they have never undergone: "I often hear the same identical story told by different immigrants".

Asked why everyone coming to Italy on the migrants' boats is undocumented, the interpreter answered: "Those who land in Italy say they never had a document or lost it in Libya. In Nigeria, falsifying documents and changing identity several times is normal. They do the same during recognition in Lampedusa".

But in Italy, he says, the 'poor thing' rule applies, explaining: "In the commissions we hear them say of every tale: 'Oh, what a poor man'. Yet these people often only tell lies."

Migrants, particularly those who seek asylum under false pretence, are also known for cutting, abrading and burning their fingertips to prevent identification.

Anna Bono, former University of Turin researcher in Africa's History and Institutions, who has long lived in Africa and has worked with the Italian Foreign Ministry, sums up the situation:

We now know with certainty that 95% of the foreigners who land in Italy are not refugees: they are not people exhausted from extreme poverty, they are not people who have escaped death threats, torture, deprivation of human rights.

They come from southern Nigeria, Senegal, Ivory Coast ... they are illegal immigrants. In 2016, 181,045 arrived, 123,482 of whom applied for asylum. The territorial commissions examined 90,473 requests, accepting 4,940 of them, namely 5.4% of the applications examined, 3.9% of those submitted and 2.7% of the total landings.

Prof Bono says that the vast majority of asylum seekers do not get asylum because they are not persecuted at home, nor are they fleeing wars.

However, not all applicants rejected over the years have left Italy. Many of both fake asylum seekers and illegal immigrants remained in Italy, escaping the control of the authorities and often disappearing. With the "residence permit for humanitarian reasons" many have been allowed to live in Italy in hiding, doing illegal jobs or illegal activities.

Therefore it's not surprising to know that 1 in 3 inmates in Italian prisons is foreign. This gives some indication of a serious problem of security in the country, a danger that has been in existence for a long time.

Yet again, it should come as no surprise that people with no official identity, no ties with the larger community that hosts them, generally no family (they are mostly young men of military age) and few opportunities for legal jobs should be enormously overrepresented in crime statistics.

Incidentally, this statistic is similar in other European countries. In Germany, for example, as reported by Free West Media: "In a sample of the 3930 prison population of Berlin 31 March 2018, 51 percent had no German citizenship. Of the individuals in pre-trial detention facilities, 75 percent had foreign nationality, the Berliner Morgenpost reported."

The epidemic of the new virus simply adds to this grave risk, and, paradoxically, it seems almost to offer an opportunity to examine it.

It's terrible, though: it shouldn't have been necessary to face a dangerous epidemic to be allowed to more openly discuss it.

We must also mention a well-known illegal trafficking of identity documents among immigrants across various European countries, including Italy, Germany, Greece, involving even people who have been recognised as refugees.

This Migration Phenomenon Is Not Good for African Countries Either

As we've described in this previous article “Young People, Don’t Emigrate” Say African Bishops, Italy, with 1 in 3 youths unemployed, has nothing to offer to migrants. African Cardinals and Bishops themselves have repeatedly and constantly exhorted their flocks to stay at home and help their countries.

Those who emigrate are usually the best equipped and qualified to help their own economies. They are richer, otherwise they wouldn't be able to pay the expensive people smugglers, younger, stronger, more skilled, with more initiative than the rest of their population that they leave behind.

And no-one in his right mind can seriously think that Africa's poverty problems - which have nevertheless diminished over the last few decades - can be solved by transferring the 1.2 billion Africans (rapidly increasing as we are counting) to the continent of Europe, the world's smallest.

And why don't we ever hear the same people who, for self-declared humanitarian reasons, worry so much about illegal immigrants equally condemn the most atrocious persecution of Christians all over the world? Why don't they beat their chest, similarly, for those Italians who commit suicide because their business failed and they can't support their families? While Italy is paying to host and keep thousands and thousands of fake refugees and illegal immigrants, what about the Italians who also need help?

The series of articles on Italy and Coronavirus continues.

SOURCES
Stop Censura
Researchgate: Fingerprint Alteration
Il Giornale: Gli immigrati raccontano bugie
Dei profughi non sappiamo nulla
La NuovaBQ: Io, falsa rifugiata
Un detenuto su tre e' straniero
Free West Media
Traffico di identita'

PHOTO CREDIT
Il Primato Nazionale

Racist Black Looters in South Africa

Black rioting and looting are not caused by any conflicts between US cops and black criminals, although these can be used as a pretext. Events in South Africa show that it is in fact a far more widespread, global phenomenon.

And in this case blacks form the country's majority, targeting a powerless minority: so, who's racist and xenophobic now?

For a week, at the end of January, a mob in South Africa lynched Ethiopians, Somalis and immigrants of other nationalities living in Nelson Mandela's country, and raided and looted their stores.

At least 4 people were killed and over 160 were arrested in Soweto, during a wave of anti-immigrant protests and violence.

The Daily Mail reported:

The 19-year-old mother of an infant who died after being trampled by a mob during the looting said she was accidentally caught in the street chaos. Some witnesses, however, said the mother was herself pillaging when she was knocked down with her baby strapped to her chest...

In a separate incident, a truck carrying livestock overturned on a highway in the Johannesburg area last week, and people carrying knives and buckets descended on the injured cattle and slaughtered nearly three-dozen for their meat, according to Eyewitness News, a South African media outlet. The driver alleged that people on a bridge threw objects at his vehicle, causing it to crash.

These are savages, who don't care about human and non-human lives alike.

That the violence began in Soweto - the same district of Johannesburg that became the symbol of anti-apartheid protests - is particularly ironic.

The recent unrest, one of the worst in Soweto since the apartheid era, started on 19 January when a Somali national allegedly shot and killed a 14-year-boy who was among a group of people attempting to break into his shop.

That was the signal which started the crowd's rioting and targeting of immigrant-owned shops, in a repetition of what happened in the country during the episodes of xenophobic violence in 2008 that killed more than 60 people. Anti-immigrant attacks seem to occur periodically in South Africa.

The media, as usual, try to exculpate the criminals with references to "the frustration of the poor":

Such episodes reflect the predicament of South Africa, a regional hub with gleaming infrastructure projects where many people nevertheless feel marginalized by high unemployment, a lack of opportunity and a gap between rich and poor that is starkly visible in leafy, spacious suburbs, on the one hand, and the shacks and so-called "matchbox" homes of the townships where blacks were confined under apartheid.

Soweto came under the world's gaze in 1976 when it erupted in student-led protests. Parts of it are relatively affluent today, as malls, gyms and new homes attest. But poverty is still widespread.

But it's evident that these attempts to find excuses are due to the mob's skin colour, and to a lack of will to admit that black proneness to violence is not the fault of whites, with their "evil racism" and apartheid, after all.

Witness Phindile Shabangu said that the mother of Nqobile Majozi, the baby boy killed by the crowd, "was caught in a stampede after emerging from the shop with eggs and drinks, and that the mother didn't even notice her baby's dire state while she was trying to pick up fallen items."

Video footage showed rioters looting shops sometimes in view of police, and one clip showed an officer apparently participating in the free-for-all.

The Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa, a group representing immigrants, urged the government to approve hate crimes legislation that it said would curb a culture of "impunity."

Didn't they say that, with the end of apartheid, racism would be eradicated from South Africa?

Libyan Soldiers Bring Mayhem to Cambridgeshire

Great and greatly funny article by my friend, the brilliant author Alexander Boot. Below is part of it.

An update. Now 300 soldiers are guarding out 240 Libyan cadets. Cameron insists we won't grant them asylum.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

But God forbid our leaders utter a single word suggesting they realise that the West and Islam are irreconcilable – that even in its present debauched state our civilisation simply can’t accommodate Islam as a dynamic force within our borders.

Yet our electorate has been corrupted to such an extent that, for any ‘statesman’ to be politically successful, he has to be politically correct. Hence the respect, both preached and practised, for any religion or civilisation, provided it isn’t Christian.

Hence also the criminal stupidity of our leaders who destroyed the demonstrably un-Western but still workable power balance in the Middle East to plunge the region into a blood-filled abyss of violence and unrest.

Now that the violence looks as if it’s about to spill over way beyond Iraq, Syria and Libya, our governments are reviewing their options.

One of them is yet another direct military intervention, and we all know how hugely successful this has proved so far.

Another is to intervene by proxy, using Iran (what with the Nato member Turkey refusing to play) to do the fighting for us. Ancient Rome had that kind of arrangement with the Vandals, remember how that turned out?

We may suffer the same way, since the inevitable price for Iran’s involvement will be the opportunity to acquire nuclear weapons, and you aren’t getting three guesses to figure out how they’ll be used.

The third option is related to the second: arming and training those local groups we perceive as our friends. ‘Perceive’ is the operative word: there are no groups in the Islamic world that are genuinely friendly to the West.

Some, however, are ready to fake amiability for tactical reasons, something we accept as the real thing. Both sides are perfectly aware of the ad hoc nature of any such alliance, invariably underpinned as it always is by background hostility.

They pretend to be our friends, we pretend to believe them. However, the two sides still diverge in one important area. They have a long-term strategy, we can’t think beyond the next election.

That’s why we refuse to recall that every time we trained and armed Muslim soldiers in the past they eventually turned their weapons against us. Who do you think armed the Taliban? Al-Qaeda? Saddam? Gaddafi? Isis?

Training thousands of Libyan soldiers at our Cambridgeshire base is a sign that we’re as ever prepared to equip our future enemies while pretending they’re our present friends.

We simply refuse to admit that our quarrel isn’t with this or that Islamic faction but with Islam as such. Well, if we still haven’t realised that there’s a clash of civilisations under way, we ought to be thankful to the Libyan soldiers for clarifying the point.

Since arriving in June they’ve succeeded in turning their corner of sleepy Cambridgeshire into a scaled-down version of Tripoli’s outskirts.

The Libyans went on an alcohol-fuelled rampage and there I was, thinking Muslims were supposed to be teetotal. A few of them spent £1,000 on booze in a single visit to a supermarket, an amount that buys a lot of mayhem.

Two of the soldiers have now been charged with raping a man, who presumably was wearing a provocative business suit. Not to discriminate, three others are being held on remand for several counts of sexual assault against women.

These peccadilloes were augmented by attendant charges of theft and threatening behaviour towards a police officer, which is legalese for head-butting. (Since no one has suggested that ‘Glasgow kiss’ be renamed ‘Tripoli kiss’, I’m hereby putting this initiative forth as my own.)

Anyway, this is where our MoD officials unveiled their comedy routine, and I thank them for making my morning so much more upbeat for it.

In a nutshell, the training programme, originally supposed to last until the end of the month, is being terminated effective immediately, and no future training will be done in Britain, what with the UK’s surfeit of tasty men and women roaming the countryside freely.

Instead of describing this simple development in this kind of language or, as would be my preference, more colloquially, the MoD spokesman delivered his first knee-slapping line:

“We have agreed with the Libyan government that it is best for all involved to bring forward the training completion date”. (“We can’t have too many raping and thieving Muzzie soldiers about…”)
Encouraged by the outburst of laughter, he continued in the same vein: “There have been disciplinary issues.”

I suppose homosexual rape, sexual assault on women, theft and head-butting a cop could be described that way for comic effect, but, playing it straight, I’d have settled for ‘crimes’ instead.

And then came the kicker, having punters rolling in the aisles: “As part of our support for the Libyan government, we will review how best to train Libyan security forces – including whether training further tranches of recruits in the UK is the best way forward.” (“…and neither do we want them to darken our doorstep ever again.”)

To add a few delicious touches to the stand-up gig, several Libyan soldiers, presumably not the defendants, have requested political asylum in Britain. And their government has so far failed to pay for the programme, while not offering much hope it’ll do so in the future.

Oh well, we’ve made our bed of nails, so we must lie in it – and it’s no laughing matter.

Ebola and Immigration, a Deadly Combination



The Ebola virus epidemic reminds us that global travel and international communications are not always a good thing.

Furthermore, since epidemics of this kind often originate in the same Third World countries that routinely send us thousands of people - call this phenomenon "immigration" or more appropriately "invasion" -, the infectious diseases emigrate to richer nations with their carriers.

Last year, for example, a report by the UK's All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Tuberculosis, Drug-resistant tuberculosis: old disease—new threat, said:

The majority of UK cases are likely as a result from the reactivation of latent TB infection in people who were born in high incidence areas outside the UK.

While cases of tuberculosis, especially drug-resistant, are increasing in the world and - according to The Lancet - "the worldwide number of new cases (more than 9 million) is higher than at any other time in history" largely thanks to the spread of HIV, in developed countries like the UK immigration is the first culprit of the rise in incidence.

The above-mentioned study by the All-Party Parliamentary Group reported that TB rates increased in only three of the 21 countries under investigation: the United Kingdom, Norway and Sweden. In all of them, about three quarters of cases were foreign-born. The UK had the third highest number of foreign nationals overall, but the highest number from a country with a very high TB incidence.

In the USA, last month Fox News disclosed that tuberculosis had spread and become a dangerous issue at both its southern border and the refugee centres housing thousands of illegal immigrants:

Dr. Marc Siegel, a professor of medicine at New York University's Langone Medical Center and a Fox News A Team medical contributor, said tuberculosis appears to be spreading through several counties in southern Texas. He told me that some counties are reporting twice the usual average number of cases.

"Some of the tuberculosis that comes from Central America is drug resistant," he told me. "It's not easier to spread but it is harder to treat. I'm concerned about that."

And while TB is not that easy to spread, he warned that all those children living in close quarters could be a ticking time bomb.

"It is a disease that needs to be carefully monitored and screened for -- something that is not possible under the current circumstances," Siegel said.

An earlier article had given a similar warning.

In the video above this article, a map of the United States showing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quarantine stations is compared with another map of the country showing the places to which the illegal immigrants have been sent. They are almost completely identical.

It's not conclusive evidence, of course, but it provides a good working hypothesis to research on.

Now, the Ebola virus is spreading in West Africa. Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone are among the most afflicted countries of what the World Health Organisation has called the worst outbreak of Ebola virus in history, with 932 deaths so far.

To put that into context, in the biggest previous outbreak of the disease 224 died out of 425 cases, and all previous outbreaks resulted in just 2,300 deaths. This epidemic, increasing since January, concerns the deadliest form of the Ebola virus, Zaire ebolavirus.

This means that one third of all the fatalities caused by Ebola since it was recognised as a disease 40 years ago have taken place in the current outbreak. And the number is increasing.

Some nations try to confine the population, but the countries in that region, as nearly all African states, have porous borders with large uncontrolled tracts - which explains why Boko Haram terrorists can cross the border with Cameroon, where they have created several bases, and return home for new attacks. After Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the first case of death due to Ebola was identified in Nigeria, a country located 2,000 km from the epicentre of the epidemic.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Ebola virus disease causes high fever, diarrhea, bleeding, vomiting, chills, muscle aches, headache, joint pain, damage to the nervous system and other symptoms. The disease is transmitted through contact with the bodily fluid of an infected person directly or indirectly - e.g. by touching needles which have come into contact with infected bodily fluid.

The CDC has moved its operations to Level 1, with increased deployment of staff and resources. This is the first time the agency has invoked its highest level alert since 2009, then over a lethal influenza epidemic.

Christian doctors and missionaries treating Ebola patients for Christian charities - not many atheist charities involved in such task, as Dawkins' "rationality" doesn't seem to work in these cases - have died. But then we know that many of today's medical facilities were originally founded by Christians who acted out of a humanitarian impulse inspired by Jesus Christ.

In the UK, according to a union leader, border, customs and immigration staff feel unprepared to deal with people coming to the country with possible cases of the Ebola virus.

If you think that the USA is off the hook due to the provenance of its immigrants from Mexico and Central America, think again:

What’s more alarming, however, are reports confirmed by the National Border Patrol Council, or NBPC, and United Nations that some of the detainees apprehended attempting to enter the U.S. illegally are from Africa – where the Ebola outbreak is thriving...

In 2012, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime released a report confirming, “Central Americans are not the only ones being smuggled through Mexico to the United States. Irregular migrants from the Horn of Africa (Eritrea, Somalia, and Ethiopia), as well as South Asia (Bangladesh, Nepal, India), China, and other African and Asian states are being smuggled through Central America.”

“Border Patrol agents in our sector have in the past apprehended aliens from Iraq, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Israel and from many other nations,” Spratte continued. “People think this is just about Mexico and Central America, but it isn’t. People from all over the world are trying to sneak into the United States.

What is happening in Africa due to the Ebola is terrible. But what is there to gain from importing the virus to our countries?

Slavery, Colonialism and Christianity

My analysis of my reader Tony's attacks on Christianity, after Support for Christianity Should Not Alienate People and How Christian Charity Developed Western Ethics, Hospitals, Schools, continues. On the subject of slavery he writes:

The Bible actually condones slavery Enza. I can send you verse after verse from the Old Testament where God tells his people how to treat slaves, how they should be sold etc. Never once does the OT teach that slavery is wrong. In the New Testament neither Jesus nor Paul call for slavery to be abolished. On the contrary they provide teaching on how to treat slaves. The Bible was used as justification for slavery in the early colonies of America. Furthermore slavery was spread around the world as Christian Western powers built their Empires. One Pope, Nicholas V, actually issued a papal bull in 1452 authorising slavery of captured Muslims.

Here we find again the problem that I briefly mentioned in a previous article: Tony's failure to recognise the break between the Old Testament and the New Testament.

The Christian part of the Bible is the New Testament.

Although we can talk of a Judaeo-Christian tradition, we cannot talk of a Judaeo-Christian religion. These are two separate and different religions.

St Paul compared the condition of the world (including the Old Testament) before the advent of the religion of Jesus to a child-like, immature state.

Christ said: “The law and the prophets were until John [the Baptist]: from that time the gospel of the kingdom of God is preached” (Luke 16:16).

In addition, just about everything that Tony says about slavery comes to nothing for one simple reason: you cannot discuss a historical subject abstracting it from a historical context.

When we talk about slavery, we may forget that we are looking with modern eyes at an institution that has been part of human history in virtually all cultures.

No culture on the globe has ever questioned the morality of slavery, no culture has ever effectively abolished it. Only in relatively recent times this has been done - and it was Christians who did it.

If Tony, and all of us, reject slavery it is because we were born in the Christian West, regardless of whether we consider ourselves Christian individually or not. Or, as the great Oriana Fallaci, who was among the first to alert the West to the dangers of Islam after 9/11 and who called herself a "Christian atheist", said: "We are all Christian".

Very early the Church baptised slaves and treated them as human beings equal to all others in dignity. They were allowed to marry, be ordained, and some became saints.

St. Isidore of Seville (born about 560 AD) said: "God has made no difference between the soul of the slave and that of the freedman."

His teaching has its roots in St. Paul's First Epistle to Timothy (1 Timothy 1:10), which condemns slave traders and places them among the sinful and lawbreakers, and Epistle to Philemon. In the latter, Paul writes that he is returning fugitive slave Onesimus to his master Philemon, but he urges Philemon to regard Onesimus as a beloved brother.

Historian Rodney Stark writes in The Victory of Reason:

Slavery ended in medieval Europe only because the church extended its sacraments to all slaves and then managed to impose a ban on the enslavement of Christians (and of Jews). Within the context of medieval Europe, that prohibition was effectively a rule of universal abolition. [Emphasis added]

This was during the "Dark Ages".

Later, when the Spanish Conquistadores were enslaving South American Indians and importing African black slaves, their main adversary was the Catholic bishop and missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas, "Protector of the Indians", who devoted 50 years of his life actively fighting slavery and the abuse of native populations.

His efforts led to a greater focus on the ethics of colonialism and to many improvements in the legal status of indigenous peoples, including a 1542 Spanish law prohibiting the enslavement of Indians. Las Casas is considered as one of the first advocates for universal human rights.

In 1537 Pope Paul III issued the papal bull Sublimus Dei against the enslavement of the indigenous peoples of the continent of America, who were non-Christian. A papal bull is a document of rare importance and significance, formal and profoundly authoritative. Sublimus Dei shows in an exceptionally meaningful way the Christian approach to slavery as early as in the Renaissance:

We define and declare by these Our letters, or by any translation thereof signed by any notary public and sealed with the seal of any ecclesiastical dignitary, to which the same credit shall be given as to the originals, that, notwithstanding whatever may have been or may be said to the contrary, the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ.

Yes, slavery persisted, and sometimes received ecclesiastical permission. Yes, supporters of slavery before the American Civil War used the Bible as justification for it. But abolitionists could easily point out that slavery was against the whole Christian message of love for your brother and neighbour like for yourself and equality of all men before God.

If we are too attached to and fixated on the letter of the Scriptures, we risk losing the most important part, their spirit, the whole picture, namely the message that Jesus conveyed with all His entire life, His words and His actions.

He was not a slave owner, like Muhammad 600 years after Him.

So, anti-slavery views were present in Christian thought and practice since the 6th century AD.

Modern abolitionism, the anti-slavery movement, started in Britain in 1787 with the foundation of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The people behind it were Christians, including William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, who wrote:

We cannot suppose therefore that God has made an order of beings, with such mental qualities and powers, for the sole purpose of being used as beasts, or instruments of labour.

The strong, prolonged opposition to slavery that followed - a unique example in the whole history of mankind - was a formidable effort, with nothing to gain and everything to lose economically by ending this enormously profitable business. Only an exceptional moral force could have achieved it: and that force was the profound Christian conviction of the abolitionist leaders that slavery was wrong.

There were ecclesiastical figures supporting slavery, as there were in every other category of people. But, with rare exceptions, only devout, committed Christians - priests, monks, Christian laymen - opposed slavery. Atheist, secular, non-Christian opposition was unheard of for generations.

If we used the same yardstick employed by anti-Christians, we should say: what have atheists done to condemn or resist slavery when it was difficult to do so, when it was not yet politically correct and orthodox to be abolitionist?

American abolition crusader William Lloyd Garrison declared:

Abolitionism, what is it? Liberty. What is liberty? Abolitionism. What are they both? Politically, one is the Declaration of Independence; religiously, the other is the Golden Rule of our Savior. [Emphasis added]

When Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and then slavery in 1834, it had to fight against African tribal leaders who wanted to continue their profitable trade in African slaves. These chieftains were also virulently hostile to Christian missionaries because of their opposition to slavery, and not due to their desire to convert.

The current, politically correct orthodoxy about slavery that Tony espouses demonstrates for the umpteenth time how the enemies of Christianity and the enemies of the West use - not coincidentally - similar, false arguments to attack both, showing once again how the fate of the West is intrinsecally tied to that of Christianity.

Not only were black Africans and Arab Muslims deeply involved in slave trafficking - and in Islam slavery is still practised today -, but whites were also enslaved by Muslims in great  numbers. But, while we never cease to hear about the nasty, racist whites making slaves, we never start hearing about other ethnic and religious groups doing the same, including to whites.

In the same way as Christianity is wrongly and unjustly castigated for slavery - when only Christians abolished it permanently -, so the West is uniquely berated for it. If you hear or read "liberal" thinkers, commentators and all the vast numbers of people that they managed to brainwash, you must be forvigen for thinking that slavery, as well as colonialism, are wicked Western, white, European, Christian inventions. All other populations of the earth are just the innocent victims, and they never harmed a hair on anybody's head.

What has been used to whip white Westerners has been used to whip Christians.

Look at what Westerners and Christians have in common and see if it can be a coincidence: they are both disproportionately attacked for two phenomena - slavery and harmful colonialism - that have existed throughout history and geographical locations, and they are both those who in fact saw the immorality of them and put an end to them.

Rather than going through the long history of how Western colonialism is not what it has been portrayed, of how it was often economically disadvantageous for the European powers involved but on many occasions motivated by the desire to help underdeveloped populations - aim that was often achieved -, I'll point you below to well-researched posts on the subject.

The Islamic world never abolished slavery, and still practises it today.

And remember that it was the European imperial powers which put an end to both the frequent raids and piracy by Muslims that for centuries tormented the Southern European coasts, and to the payment of the extortionate jizya tax demanded from the subjugated Christians living in Muslim lands.

The latter was for those unfortunate brothers and sisters a short-lived respite until multiculturalism, producing Islamophilia on one hand and anti-Christianity on the other, strengthened the Muslim world.

To be continued.

Further reading on slavery, European colonialism and Islam:

http://islamversuseurope.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/north-african-predation-upon-europeans.html

http://islamversuseurope.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/did-europe-grow-rich-from-slavery-and.html

http://islamversuseurope.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/shocking-display-of-dhimmitude-in.html

http://islamversuseurope.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/slavery-around-world-today.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrxmdjaK7Cs


Photo by Elliott Brown (Creative Commons CC BY 2.0).

South Africa: Kill the Whites!

We don't know enough of what's going on in South Africa. The media don't inform us because what happens there is exactly the opposite of what they want us to believe and Hollywood films portray: blacks are nice and victims, whites are horrible and perpetrators (even criminal statistics in the West, where black-on-white violence is much more frequent than white-on-black violence, can easily disprove that).

Songs and chants of "Kill the whites" by vast crowds in their native languages need to be translated, as they have been in these videos, before we can grasp the situation.

And here below are the effects.

Nelson Mandela, incredibly lionized when he was in fact responsible for commissioning terrorist acts at the time of the apartheid, is among those chanting these appallingly racist words.

As The Truth about South Africa says:

When did he [Mandela] become the messiah? It really irritates me. How many people are just bowing down to the man because the world's media is making him out to be the Savior of all people?

Truth is, the WHITES in South Africa voted to abolish Apartheid. The old terrorist was IN JAIL. HE didn't end Apartheid. In fact, he did very little to end it. He was chosen as a figurehead by the media, big business and the Nats.

But go on, have your hero. We all need a messiah.

Only a couple of months ago Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu said that South African society is now more violent than it was under apartheid.

These people are communist and don't know the meaning of the word "peace", let alone "tolerance".

In addition to the genocidal violence against whites, the latter have to face particularly bad economic hardship due to "reverse discrimination": reverse it as much as you like, it is still discrimination.

White poverty in South Africa has doubled since 1994.

Tanzania: Muslim Bomb Outside Catholic Church Kills 3 and Injures over 60

In Tanzania, as in many other African countries, Muslims discriminate against, persecute and attack Christians, with the complicity of the authorities.

For years officials have been colluding with Muslims to stop churches from being built and to erect mosques, Christians have been arrested for "illegal preaching", churches have been destroyed and torched, Christian university students have been prohibited from worshipping, Christian leaders have been jailed, Muslims have seized Christian burial sites, and especially in the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar, where Muslims represent 97 per cent of the inhabitants, Christians live in fear of being killed.

A young man who converted to Christianity fled the island to escape death threats from his Muslim family, after the beating he had received from them left him with head, hand and torso injuries, a serious mouth wound and substantial loss of blood; another Christian who accidentally burned pages of the Quran chose jail by entering a guilty plea rather than face certain death from a violent mob.

The apparent paradox is that most Tanzanians are Christian. Christians are 60 per cent of the population and Muslims are 36 per cent. But Muslims do not need to be a majority. The supremacism and aggression that are part of Islamic doctrine ensure that even a minority of Muslims can terrorize non-Muslim majorities.

After all, the dhimmis (the subjected people) that inhabited the lands of the Middle East and North Africa conquerered by Islamic hordes after the death of Muhammad were often still majorities in their countries.

The most recent horror occurred last Sunday, a bomb explosion outside a new Catholic church, considered "one of worst ‘terrorist’ incidents in years" in which 3 people were killed and more than 60 injured:

Last Sunday’s blast outside St Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Arusha, a town popular with tourists visiting the Serengeti national park and Mount Kilimanjaro, was just the latest example.

The newly built church, in the Olasti district on the outskirts of Arusha, was celebrating its first ever mass at the time of the attack, which left three dead and more than 60 injured...

In Zanzibar, which is 97 per cent Muslim, arsonists burned the Evangelical Church of Siloam on February 19, two days after gunmen killed a Catholic priest, Father Evaristus Mushi, in the Motni area of the island.

Earlier that month, an Assemblies of God minister, Pastor Mathayo Kachili, was hacked to death in the Geita region of Lake Victoria..

Christian Solidarity Worldwide reports that church leaders began to receive text messages from a group calling itself ‘Muslim Renewal’ which claimed responsibility for these murders, adding the killers were ‘trained in Somalia’ and which promised ‘disaster’ during the Easter season.

Number of Tuberculosis Cases Rises in the UK Due to Immigration

"The increase in the rate of TB in the UK, which contrasts with most other European countries, may, at least in part, be due to the fact that a high proportion of UK cases occur in the foreign-born, coupled with a comparatively large number of foreign nationals from countries with a very high incidence of TB."

Who wrote that? One of the far-right "nazi grouplets", as the Marxist site Searchlight would call them? A racist, a xenophobe?

No, it is the conclusion of a scientific study published in the world's most authoritative database of peer-reviewed medical research, the US National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health.

The study in question is called "The impact of immigration on tuberculosis rates in the United Kingdom compared with other European countries", and these are its results:

TB notification rates increased in only three of the 21 countries [under investigation]: the United Kingdom, Norway and Sweden. In all three countries, approximately three quarters of cases were foreign-born. The UK had the third highest number of foreign nationals overall, but the highest number from a country with a TB incidence > or =250 cases/100000 (219000, 13%). European countries with declining TB rates had varying patterns of migration, but did not generally receive migrants from very high-incidence countries and/or had a smaller proportion of their total TB cases in their migrant population.

This was published in May 2009, but the trend, far from stopping or decreasing, has continued.

Another highly prestigious, historical medical publication, The Lancet, in 2010 printed a paper entitled "The white plague returns to London—with a vengeance" calling London "the tuberculosis capital of Europe", a claim repeated last week in another paper in the same major medical journal, titled "The ongoing problem of tuberculosis in the UK":

London has the highest overall rate of tuberculosis of any capital city in western Europe. Rates of multidrug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis have doubled in the UK over the past decade, and, although most developed countries have achieved sustained reductions in the number of cases, rates in the UK continue to rise.

The paper is a comment on a new report from the UK's All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Tuberculosis, Drug-resistant tuberculosis: old disease—new threat, published 15 April. Among other things, the report says:

TB is the leading killer of people living with HIV/AIDS, accounting for one in four AIDS related deaths...

In the UK, TB is a particular problem among people born abroad and hard to reach groups... [In the UK] The majority of the 81 new cases in 2011 (95%) were born in South Asia, Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, with an additional six of these being the most extreme form of the disease (XDR).

There are almost 9,000 new cases of this deadly disease each year in the UK.

Tuberculosis, especially drug-resistant, cases are on the rise in the world, and "the worldwide number of new cases (more than 9 million) is higher than at any other time in history" largely thanks to the spread of HIV: "Due to the devastating effect of HIV on susceptibility to tuberculosis".

This explains why, for example, South Africa has both the world's highest burden of HIV and the third highest burden of TB. Another country which has among the highest rates in the world of both TB and HIV and has a high rate of TB/HIV co-infection is Nigeria.

The resurgence of tuberculosis, which was once one of the world’s biggest killers, has led the World Health Organisation to declare it a global health emergency in 1993.

Two of the great idol totems of our time, unrestricted mass immigration from Third World countries to Europe and normalization of homosexuality, untouchable dogmas of progressivism and liberal rectitude, are thus taking us back to the 19th century.

Sign the Petition to Nominate Ugandan Pastor Umar Mulinde for the Nobel Peace Prize

Uganda's Pastor Umar Mulinde had the incredible courage to convert from Islam to Christianity, and even to become a Christian minister, well knowing the mortal risk he was taking.

Islam prescribes the death penalty for apostates, those who leave Islam.

This is how Islam has conquered peoples and maintained its position: through the sword, waging war against infidels and beheading apostates.

If there were no death penalty for apostasy, there would be no Islam. This is what cleric and prominent leader of the (now the West's ally) Muslim Brotherhood Yusuf al-Qaradawi says, on video: "If they left apostasy (rida) alone, there wouldn’t have been any Islam. Islam would have been finished right after the death of the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him)".

Muslims in Uganda, who represent only 13 percent of the population, are agitating for Shariah law to be established in Uganda. Mulinde and his supporters worry that such an action will result in the oppression of women and non-Muslims in Uganda, just as it has in Nigeria.

In his campaign to prevent the introduction of Sharia into Uganda, Pastor Umar helped organize a petition that received more than 36,000 signatures. Mulinde is also a potent supporter of Israel. He filled a stadium with 5,000 supporters of Israel a few years back.

These actions did not go unnoticed by the Islamists in Uganda. On Dec. 24, 2011, a group of radical Muslims threw acid on his face and back in an attempt to kill him. The attack left him alive, but horribly disfigured. Upon learning that he survived the attack, his attackers and their supporters sent letters to his church stating that they wish the attack had resulted in his death.

The acid attack was not the first attempt on Mulinde’s life that he’s miraculously survived. He’s been shot at and poisoned...

The ideology that motivated the acid attack he endured on Christmas Eve in 2011 is the same used to justify suicide attacks against Israel during the Second Intifada and the rocket attacks that took place over the past few days. Christians in Uganda are starting to wake up to the fact that many in the West have failed to understand the threat presented by Islamic imperialism.

“What the West is denying they will realize when it has come upon them,” he said.

If somebody deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, it is Pastor Umar Mulinde. Giving it to Barack Hussein Obama has made a mockery of this honour; let us re-establish its true value.

As over 700 people so far, including me, have done, please sign the petition to Nominate Umar Mulinde for the Nobel Peace Prize here.

Sign the Petition to the UN for the Recognition of a World Day against Christianophobia

Christians are today by far the most persecuted religious group. The number of Christians killed each year for their faith is so high that it calculates to one Christian martyr's life being taken every five minutes.

This must be stopped. The UN would let down its mission if it did not do what is in its power to stop this abominable form of discrimination and this genocide.

The 2nd of March 2011 is the day when Muslim extremists in Pakistan assassinated Shahbaz Bhatti, the Roman Catholic man who was Pakistan's first Minister for Minorities Affairs.

They killed him for his work to abolish the country's blasphemy law which has been used to persecute Christians and other faith minorities.

March 2nd has now been proposed as the Annual World Day against Christianophobia, with a petition to the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon for the recognition of a World Day against “Christianophobia”.

At this moment 2272 have already signed it, including me.

You can sign it here:

Let’s promote March 2nd as the Annual World Day against Christianophobia!

This is the petition:

Dear Secretary General!

Present-day persecution of Christians attracted world attention after the cold-blooded killing of 58 worshippers by radical Islamist gunmen inside Our Lady of Salvation Syriac Catholic Cathedral in Baghdad (Iraq), in October 2010, and the bombing during a New Year’s Eve service of the coptic al-Qiddissin Church, in Alexandria (Egypt), leaving 23 people dead and another 97 injured.

Perhaps even more worrying was the March 2nd murder of Mr. Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s Federal Minister of Minorities in broad daylight in Islamabad, since he was martyred precisely for his opposition to the «blasphemy laws» which are used as a legal instrument to persecute non-Muslims.

Direct killing, however, is not the only form of “christianophobia.” Current persecution of Christians also includes vandalism against churches and discrimination and harassment of individuals, particularly in the West, under the form of unjust representation in the media, unfair treatment by employers, disrespect for the right to conscientious objection, disregard for the right of parents to be the primary educators of their children, etc…

This reality makes the recognition of a World Day Against Christianophobia urgent – to draw the attention of public opinion, social movements, policy makers and the media to this crucial issue and to provide a unique annual opportunity for Christians to defend their rights in society.

A World Day against Christianophobia is the natural next step after recent positive attitudes adopted by the European Parliament, such as its resolutions expressing deep concern over the attacks against Christian communities in Iraq (Nov 25th, 2010), and its condemnation of attacks against Christians in Egypt, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Iran and Iraq, as well as the forcible interruption by the Turkish authorities of the Christmas Mass in northern Cyprus (Jan 20th, 2011).

However, words – even if they are pronounced from the floor of a Parliament – are not enough ! No concrete results will come from them if the persecution against Christians is not recognised as the first worldwide emergency with regard to religious discrimination and violence.

Sign the petition here!

London Protest: Christians Persecuted in Pakistan Demand Equality

Saturday 2nd March I attended in London the protest against discrimination and persecution of Pakistani Christians.

Organized by the British Pakistani Christian Association, it included the presentation of a petition both to London's Pakistani Embassy and to the British Prime Minister's residence in 10 Downing Street. Several religious figures and human rights campaigners were speakers at the demonstration.

A Peace Rally and Memorial Concert in Trafalgar Square followed, in memory of Shahbaz Bhatti, the Roman Catholic man who was Pakistan's first Minister for Minorities Affairs from 2008 until Muslim extremists assassinated him in 2011 for his work to abolish the country's blasphemy law which has been used to persecute faith minorities. He was the only Christian in the government.

Minister Bhatti had received repeated death threats for his consistent defence of the rights of Pakistan's religious minorities and for his fight for the abolition of Pakistan’s shameful blasphemy laws, which mandate the death sentence for anyone thought to have spoken ill of Muhammad or to have in any way offended Muslim sensitivities: the standard of accepted evidence is very low, and intent or lack of it is not a consideration in passing the sentence.

Two months before the assassination of Bhatti, another man campaigning for the same cause, Provincial Governor Salman Taseer, had been killed by his own bodyguard, who for his crime was welcomed as a hero by many Pakistani Muslims.

Saturday's event, like a similar one in 2012, commemorated the anniversary of Shahbaz Bhatti's assassination on 2 March 2011 outside his home in Islamabad.

Constantly Pakistani Christians are killed for their faith, or other atrocities are committed against them, like the rape of a Christian 2-year-old girl because her father refused to convert to Islam.

The situation of Christians in Pakistan is dire. Recently a Christian 19-year-old boy, Mard-e-Khuda, living in the Bahawalpur district, was barbarically killed on the false accusation of having an affair with a Muslim girl.

"20 million Christians in Pakistan are treated as second class citizens and denied justice in Pakistan by Islamic governments which never feel ashamed to release Muslim criminals and terrorists" said Dr. Nazir S Bhatti, who has been been campaigning for equal rights for Christian people in Pakistan since 1985 and is President of the Pakistan Christian Congress (PCC). He had to flee Pakistan for his safety and now lives in the USA.

While in his country Nazir Bhatti was arrested many times. The government of Pakistan registered 21 false cases of treason and blasphemy against him on February 13 1998, for leading a protest against the burning of the Christian village Shanti Nagar in Punjab by radical Muslims.

The reality of Christian victimization and persecution in this Muslim-majority country is so horrific that I suggested that the international community, particularly the British Commonwealth of which it is part, should give Pakistan the South African treatment and treat it like a pariah until it repeals its blasphemy laws and protects its religious minorities.

As usual, last Christmas was a dark Christmas for Pakistani Christians, and, amid growing fear of persecution and rampant economic and social discrimination in Pakistan, the year 2012 was one of the worst years for them.

Raymond Ibrahim, in his monthly report of Muslim Persecution of Christians throughout the world for December, writes about Pakistan:

Birgitta Almby, a 70-year-old Bible school teacher from Sweden, was shot by two men in front of her home; she died soon after. She had served in Pakistan for 38 years. Police said they could not find the assassins and could not unearth a motive, although Christians close to her have no doubt "Islamic extremists" murdered the elderly woman: "Who else would want to murder someone as apolitical and harmless as Almby, who had dedicated her life to serving humanity?" That service may have included sharing the Gospel with Muslims, an act strictly forbidden in Islam.

Other recent Muslim atrocities against Christians are listed on Jihad Watch.

The list of horrors could continue, but I'm sure that those who do not want to look away and pretend it does not happen have now got the message.

On a positive note, March 2nd has now been proposed as the Annual World Day against Christianophobia, with a petition to the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon for the recognition of a World Day against “Christianophobia”.

I would have probably preferred "against the persecution of Christians" to another "phobia", but it is true that the latter includes other forms of attack against Christianity, like the ones coming from the Western "progressives" as well as from communist regimes or the 1,400-year-old cult of Islam.

Every 5 Minutes a Christian is Killed for His Faith

Every 5 minutes a Christian is killed for his or her religion somewhere in the world.

Yet, leftists, dhimmi media and assorted "intellectuals" say that the main problem is "Islamophobia".

From Zenit, Sociologist: Every 5 Minutes a Christian Is Martyred. Speaks of Emergency in Religious Discrimination:

ROME, JUNE 3, 2011 (Zenit.org).- A sociologist representing a European security organization says that the number of Christians killed each year for their faith is so high that it calculates to one martyr's life being taken every five minutes.

Massimo Introvigne of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) reported this data at a conference on Christian-Jewish-Muslim interfaith dialogue, which concluded today in Hungary. The conference was sponsored by the Hungarian presidency of the Council of the European Union, and included a variety of high-level representatives from the three monotheistic religions, as well as political and social leaders.

Introvigne reported that Christians killed every year for their faith number 105,000, and that number includes only those put to death simply because they are Christians. It does not count the victims of civil or international wars.

"If these numbers are not cried out to the world, if this slaughter is not stopped, if it is not acknowledged that the persecution of Christians is the first worldwide emergency in the matter of violence and religious discrimination, the dialogue between religions will only produce beautiful conferences but no concrete results," he stated.

Egyptian diplomat Aly Mahmoud said that in his country laws have been passed that will protect Christian minorities, for example, prosecuting those who give speeches that incite hatred and banning hostile crowds outside churches.

"However, the danger is that many Christian communities in the Middle East will die from emigration, because all Christians, feeling threatened, will flee," he said.

The diplomat suggested Europe prepare for "a new wave of emigration, this time from Christians fleeing the persecutions."

For his part, Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, chairman for the Russian Orthodox patriarchate's Department of External Church Relations, reminded that "at least 1 million" Christian victims of persecutions are children.

What Is Happening Today 4-12-2012

News in pills. The latest events worth knowing

That Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, is newly pregnant and in hospital with a rare and acute morning sickness you already know, but it's just a starter.

The Pope has his new personal Twitter account, @pontifex (Latin word for "pontiff"), in 8 languages, starting tweeting in just over a week. The description: "Welcome to the official Twitter page of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI. Vatican City · news.va". No tweet yet in his account, but already over 300,000 followers in the first 24 hours, which are at this moment approaching 400,000, and still counting.

Today thousands of Egyptians marched on the presidential palace in Cairo to protest the assumption by Islamist president Morsi of almost unrestricted powers for himself as well as a draft constitution, hurriedly adopted by his allies, that will establish Egypt as a Sharia state, burying any vestige of democracy. Is this "the Death of the ‘Arab Spring’", as Robert Spencer describes it, nearly 2 years after it started?

Obama held a reception party for Led Zeppelin, David Letterman and Dustin Hoffman while discussions to avoid the fiscal cliff continue. Many commentators observed that he could have waited until the fiscal cliff talks were done and a deal had been reached. This is not the first time that Obama puts being a celebrity and hanging out with celebrities (or playing golf) ahead of doing his job. If America goes over the fiscal cliff, millions of Americans will suffer. But the president doesn’t seem to care.

In Sudan, Christians living in the Nuba Mountains continue to be the target of bombers as the government continues to fight a rebel group in the region. Will the world speak up to protect the Christians in the Nuba Mountains? Don't hold your breath.

A mortar slammed into a school in the Damascus suburbs today, killing 29 students and a teacher, according to Syria's state media. Obama and other world leaders warn Syria against using chemical weapons. Nato has now given the go ahead for Patriot surface-to-air missiles to be deployed along Turkey's border with Syria.

In the meantime, in another "Arab Spring" country, Yemen, an Amnesty International report released today details ‘horrific’ abuses. It documents that in its 16-month rule between February 2011 and June 2012, during which it took over parts of southern Yemen, Al Qaida beheaded an alleged sorcerer, crucified a man accused of spying and amputated a man’s hand for stealing, in a “human rights catastrophe”. The report also accuses Yemen’s government of abuses.

In the US, Iraqi refugee were arrested for bombing Arizona Social Security office with IED. The mainstream media are silent about it.

Still in America, Speaker John A. Boehner initiated yesterday a small purge of rebellious (mostly conservative) Republicans from prominent economy committees, sending a harsh message before the approaching vote on a fiscal cliff deal.

Christians in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh continue to face persecution at the hands of Hindu radicals. Police remain complicit to the violence perpetrated against Christians.

The highest US military court, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, yesterday ousted the judge in the Fort Hood shooting case for “bias”. It ruled that Col. Gregory Gross didn't appear impartial while presiding over the case of Maj. Nidal Hasan, who faces the death penalty if convicted in the 2009 shootings on the Texas Army post that killed 13 people and wounded more than two dozen others. The "bias" consisted in the judge's order to have the suspect's beard forcibly shaved before his court-martial, which the court threw out.

In the US, a newly-released colour photo showing George Zimmerman with bloody injuries, allegedly taken on the night of his altercation with Trayvon Martin which ended up with Zimmerman shooting the 17-year-old dead, could prove that the killing was an act of self-defense and that "media coverage of the story was an exercise in manufactured race-baiting".

In Mali, Jihad gang boss Oumar Ould Hamaha declares war on all music everywhere. He says: "We are in a struggle [Jihad] against all the musicians of the world".

Christians Are the World's Most Persecuted Religious Group

Did you know any of the events described here, all of which happened only in the last few days and are representative of what goes on all the time all over Asia and Africa?

While the media ran a carpet coverage of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and pointed the finger at the purported Israeli "aggressor", all of this news, a sample of which is below - and is only the tip of the iceberg -, received scarcely any attention.

Christians are now, and have been for some time despite the world's, including the historically Christian West's, silence, the most persecuted religious group in the world.

In "modern, moderate" Indonesia (everything is relative), Muslims threaten churches in West Sumatra:

A mob numbering in the hundreds and grouped under the banner of the Islamic Organizations Communication Forum (FKOI) descended on two churches on Tuesday: Stasi Mahakarya and GPSI (Gereja Pentakosta Sion Indonesia).

Those in the crowd threatened to use force to stop the congregations from building additional structures in their compounds, nailing wooden boards outside the churches.

In Nigeria, Muslims erupt in new violence against Christians over supposed blasphemy, four Christians are killed:

A rumour that a Christian man blasphemed against Islam has sparked a riot in the northern Nigeria town of Bichi, police have said.

Residents said four people were killed and shops were looted.

The riot came on the day the incoming head of the Anglican Church, the Rt Rev Justin Welby, launched an initiative to promote religious tolerance in Nigeria.

Religious clashes [a BBC euphemism for Muslims killing Christians] have claimed thousands of lives in Nigeria since military rule ended in 1999.

The militant Islamist group, Boko Haram, has also been waging an insurgency since 2009 to impose strict Sharia across Nigeria, which is roughly divided between a mainly Muslim north and a Christian and animist south.

Church bombings have become normal for Christians in Nigeria.

In Vietnam, pastors imprisoned for refusing to give up their ministry are tortured and subjected to forced labour. One pastor's daughter watched as police tied her father to the back of a motorcycle and dragged him away.

In Somalia, a Christian convert from Islam is beheaded:

Islamic militants from al-Shabaab beheaded a Christian in the Somalian city of Barawa Friday, accusing him of both being a spy and forsaking Islam.

A crowd watched as Farhan Haji Mose's body was split in two and then dumped near the beach, according to Morning Star News.

Mose's family didn't immediately recover his body for fear that the Islamists would kill them as well.

Mose, who had a small cosmetics shop in Barawa, often traveled to Kenya on business where he converted to Christianity in 2010.

With a population of 545,000, Barawa is now under control of al-Shabaab militants fighting the government; the militants have already killed dozens of Christian converts from Islam since launching a campaign to rid the African nation of Christianity while seeking to impose a strict version of shar'ia over all of Somalia.

Al-Shabaab was one of several Somalian groups that arose from the power vacuum created after Ethiopian forces toppled the Islamic Courts Union back in 2006.

In Uzbekistan, a refugee pastor is facing up to 15 years in prison for having held a religious meeting.

In Tanzania, Muslims torch and destroy dozens of churches and demand heads of all church pastors, while violence against Christians in East Africa escalates. There were no arrests.

In Sudan, dictator Omar al-Bashir is launching new attacks and airstrikes against the mostly Christian Nuba people:

Although the casualty figures vary depending on the source, Nuba Reports that since June 2011, 350,000 people have become refugees. Nuba Reports also says 88 bombs were dropped in September and October.

Relief Web says that since mid-October, 18 people have been killed in shelling in Kadugli town in the South Kordofan state.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that the 80-bed Mother of Mercy Hospital in Nuba was housing over 500 wounded.

“These days they are reporting intensified fighting, with both sides initiating offensives. This is what one would expect this time of year as we get into the dry season. The Nuba Report is well-placed to report on civilian casualties on the SPLA-N side,” Eibner said.

Eibner adds that terrorism and military strikes are one of al-Bashir’s preferred methods of dealing with non-Muslim Sudanese populations.

...

“Al-Bashir is no stranger to genocide. Consider the events in Darfur. Once South Sudan split off from Sudan, the north decided that it had to establish its Islamic identity. This has been reflected in the government’s actions and statements,” Stark said.

“Al-Bashir said that Sudan would become a purely Islamic state now that the south has split off. This statement was very worrisome for many Christian that continued to live in the North,” Start said.

Since al-Bashir’s announcement, the move to a fully Islamic state has only gained momentum.

“Since that statement, the Sudanese government has ratcheted up its implementation of Shariah law, even on non-Muslims,” Stark said.

Stark said, “Women found not wearing a veil/hijab are arrested for violating Shariah, whether they are Muslim or not. Also, Christian schools and institutions are being either closed down by the government or destroyed by Muslim mobs. Sometimes it is a combination of the two!” Stark said.

...

“With the borders being closed, many Christians that would likely flee south are now stuck in the north. Many sold their property in anticipation of moving south, but got stuck because of the border closing. Now they live in refugee-like camps on the outskirts or Khartoum,” Stark said.

...

Stark points to the Barnabas Aid airlift that has transported some of Sudan’s Christians south.

“There are some organizations airlifting some of the neediest Christians to the South, but there are so many refugees that it is going to be a long time until they are all safe. My contacts estimate there are around 500,000 Christians stuck in Sudan right now around Khartoum alone,” Stark said.

The major issue for Christians in Sudan is al-Bashir’s increasingly strident Islamic tone. Eibner says the gradual implementation of Shariah is part of al-Bashir’s effort to fulfill a promise to jihadists.

“Shortly after the independence of South Sudan and the deterioration of relations between Khartoum and Juba, Bashir pledged to place Sudan more solidly on an Islamic basis and making more space for Shariah in the a new constitution,” Eibner said.

“He clearly seeks stability for his regime by enhancing its Islamist credentials. He is expected to convene shortly an Islamist congress. This makes politically conscious Christians and other non-Muslim in Sudan nervous,” Eibner said. “But I am not aware of a new direct threat against the Christian minority.”

Eibner adds that Shariah has always been a part of Khartoum’s plan.

“Shariah has long been a part of the constitution of Sudan. I am not aware that it is being implemented in a much more comprehensive and rigorous fashion these days,” Eibner said, adding, “But a desperate regime in Khartoum will not shrink from turning the screws against Christians if it believes it will help its survival.”

Islam, Racism and Slavery. Blacks in Morocco: "I Get Called a Slave"

Islam is a supremacist doctrine that affirms not only Muslim superiority over non-Muslims, but also Arab superiority over other ethnic groups and races. Both Islam's holy texts - the Quran and the Hadith, namely Muhammad's official biography - and scholars are testament to that.

Muhammad himself bought, sold and kept African slaves.

Historically, Muslims' slave trade of black Africans has been by far the world's greatest numerically and the most long-lasting, spanning over 1400 years (watch the above video, "The Arab Muslim Slave Trade Of Africans, The Untold Story").

Arab Muslims initiated slavery of ethnic Africans and breathed new life into slavery and the slave trade.

All over the world, only Christianity brought an end to slavery of all races. The Roman Empire abolished slavery after converting to Christianity, and Christians banned slavery in 19th century America.

But slavery still exists in Muslim countries of the Middle East and north-central Africa. Watch the video "Muslim Slavery Still Exists" below:

Islamic racism against black people is well documented in its theological foundations as it is in today's practices. Here is a recent report from Morocco.

Being black in Morocco: 'I get called a slave':

The latest cover of Maroc Hebdo magazine—seen as racist by some, defended by others—has launched a national debate on the struggles faced by sub-Saharan Africans living in Morocco.

“The Black Peril.” That's the controversial headline that the Moroccan weekly ran on its cover last week to tease to an article about the rise in the number of immigrants from sub-Saharan African, many of whom come to Morocco in the hopes of making it to Europe. Many are turned back and end up staying in Morocco, where they live in poverty. Some end up taking part in illegal activities to make a living. According to Morocco’s Interior ministry, there are about 10,000 illegal immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa living in the country. Human rights organisations estimate this number higher as closer to 15,000.

Moroccan authorities are taking an increasingly strict approach to immigration from sub-Saharan Africa. Immigrants without residency permits are quickly expelled. The European Union’s ambassador to Morocco, Eneko Landaburu, recently called the treatment of these immigrants “problematic”, a sentiment echoed by the Moroccan Human Rights Organisation. Meanwhile, the Moroccan labour minister, Abdelouahed Souhail, accused sub-Saharan African immigrants of being in part responsible for the country’s employment crisis.

The International Organisation for Migration recently launched a campaign to raise 620,000 euros to help send some 1,000 illegal migrants from sub-Saharan Africa home.


"Young Moroccans have physically assaulted me on several occasions, for no reason"

Joseph (not his real name) is from Guinea. He lives in Casablanca, where he studies computing at a local university. He is a legal resident.

I came here to study computing thanks to a grant from my country. I’ve been here for four years, and for four years I’ve been a victim of racism. It happens all the time, everywhere.

The most awful incident took place at the airport. I was with my aunt, who was heading back to Guinea and had a lot of luggage. Other passengers from sub-Saharan countries, seeing her struggle to carry it, came to help her get it onto the plane, but an airline employee stopped them, saying she had to deal with it on her own because she was black. I replied in Arabic, and he replied by hitting me in the head. I told him I was going to file a complaint, and he said, sarcastically: “That’s right, go complain to the king!” I never did file a complaint.

Often, when I’m just walking down the street, people will call me a “dirty black man” or call me a slave. Young Moroccans have physically assaulted me on several occasions, for no reason, and passers-by who saw this didn’t lift a finger to help me. All my friends are black and they have all had similar experiences. Even the girls get insulted in the street. To avoid getting hurt, I now try to ignore the insults. But if someone starts to hit me, what can I do? I have to defend myself...

In two years, I’ll be done with my studies, and I certainly don’t intend to stay in Morocco to look for work. Even if someone were to offer me a job here, I would rather go home to Guinea.