Thatcher Death Parties Expose Left's Immorality and Totalitarianism

Among all the media coverage of Margaret Thatcher's recent death, what has impressed me most are the scenes of communists, trade unionists, "occupyers", miners and assorted leftists "celebrating" collectively in the street (like in the video above) or privately at home with a bottle of sparkling wine or a cigar.

Where did you see analogous scenes? Among Muslims, of course, after 9/11 or some genocidal attack on Israel or other similar niceties.

You never see Christians celebrating the death of anyone, or real conservatives doing that. All these are decent people.

Display of happiness for someone's decease, just because that person has diverging opinions or is a political opponent, even in case of profound disagreement, is a sign of moral depravity and totalitarian way of thinking at the same time.

People on the Left have created the myth of their inhabiting the moral high ground, for which there is no evidence whatsoever.

Left-wing parties are, for instance, the ones most responsible for voter fraud, in the USA, in Britain and in many other countries.

In the UK, the Labour party government subjected its country to an experiment in demographic engineering by allowing mass, unrestricted immigration for political and electioneering purposes while lying to the people about its real motives.

Leftist parties in government display a highly unethical lack of concern for the enormous injustice of leaving a huge public debt, that they almost single-handedly created, to future generations who will be born indebted.

Historically, socio-communists have in modern times been the political forces that used most violence and killed the highest number of innocent people.

Even today, here are some statistics to ponder on. These are official statistics of the US National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) for the year 2011:

“According to NCTC, of the 12,533 terrorism-related deaths worldwide, 8,886 were perpetrated by “Sunni extremists,” 1,926 by “secular/political/anarchist” groups, 1,519 by “unknown” factions, 170 by a category described as “other”, and 77 by “Neo-Nazi/Fascist/White Supremacist” groups.”

Indeed, "the end justifies the means" could be the motto of the political Left.

And what is its end? Many people mistakenly think that socio-communists are moved by compassion for the poorest. That is hard to justify on the basis of empirical evidence, since, whether in socialist or in capitalist economies, Marxists and their allies, far from combating poverty, have always managed to create poverty.

They are not moved by compassion for the poorest (this is their spin), but envy for the richest.

Envy, being one of the basest human emotions, is also one of the commonest, which explains the great attraction that leftist ideologies have always exercised over the masses.

Christianity genuinely embraces compassion for the poorest, not socio-communism. The idea that there is something in common between them derives from the misconceived view of the charitable nature of socio-communism. Not coincidentally socio-communists have considered Christians as their enemies and massacred them in their millions.

One of the British people interviewed on the TV about their feelings about Thatcher's death was a miner's wife living in an English community affected by the former Prime Minister's decision to close down unproductive and economically unsustainable coal mines that were bleeding Britain's resources.

This woman, even while jubilating for the demise of the Baroness, was nonetheless full of bitterness and resentment. She kept repeating that Thatcher did not think of "us", and what about "us", and similar self-centred utterances.

This is one of the "me people", who would rather sacrifice a whole country's economy, as they also do with their never-ending entitlement requests that have created an ever-expanding, ruinous welfare state, than take responsibility for sorting out their lives.

One final consideration: why does hardly anybody call this display of lethal sentiments "hate", since wishing somebody dead and celebrating his/her death is the very essence of it, whereas simply disagreeing with the current orthodoxy, for example, which is the context to which "hate" is most frequently applied, is not? Because that term, like a table at a restaurant, is reserved for the politically incorrect only, and nobody else can usurp it.

A Critical Assessment of LGBT Claims

For a long time I, like many other people, thought that the campaign to stop discrimination against and even persecution of homosexuals was a worthy battle in need to be fought.

And indeed it was. But now it has become something else, something completely different, that goes well beyond the demand for recognition of fundamental rights and equality.

Many people still think of homosexuals as victims because they have been in the past, but things have changed now, and we should wake up to the new historical reality that homosexual activists now victimize those who disagree with them, using the ideological power and influence that they have acquired through the previous times of their "victim" status.

The issue of same-sex marriage, the pressure put on the Boy Scouts of America to allow homosexuals as scout masters and leaders, and the scandal of the Catholic Church's so-called "paedophile" abuse, which was in fact homosexual abuse, have made it timely, and indeed imperative and unavoidable, to confront the nature of homosexuality and whether it is just another lifestyle, innocuous to the people practicing it, harmless to children, without consequences for society, "normal" and non-pathological both physically and psychologically.

We have to take a better look at what homosexuality is, what transgender and transvestitism are, what their goals and intentions are, because now it is no longer to do with homosexuals wishing to be left alone - "Live and let live" -, but their demands, if met, are going to affect the rest of society in ways that most people are not aware of.

Let me start with a recent news item, Colorado parents of transgender 1st-grader file complaint over restroom ban, regarding the parents of a 6-year-old who have filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Division because Eagleside Elementary School in Fountain banned the first-grader, who was born a boy, from using the girls' toilets.

The mother of this "transgender" child says in the video accompanying the article that they started noticing that, when the boy was about 18 months old, as soon as "she" could express "herself", she was really expressing that she was a girl.

"Transgender" is the "T" in the LGBT movement, so they are part of the great rainbow umbrella. Transgender or, to give it its medical name, Gender identity disorder, was until a few months ago on the official psychiatric diagnostic manual but the American Psychiatric Association announced last December approved changes in its official guide to classifying mental illnesses.

This follows the same pattern of the controversial and far from unanimous decision by the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its diagnostic list of mental disorders in 1973, so we can expect to see more of parents like those in Colorado declaring that their boy is in fact a girl; we can expect the medical profession, media and politicians to call this normal, and everybody else who does not want to be named "transphobic" to obediently follow suit and see this as the new normal, as has been done for homosexuality.

Now, if this Colorado incident were the case of one of those cults or religious sects that sometimes appear in the American news for not having let their children go out in the outside world, or have a blood transfusion or similar, it would have been denounced all over the media as serious child abuse and the child would have been taken away from the parents and put into care.

But both journalists and social services don't care about all child abuse, only politically incorrect one. They are perfectly happy with homophile (or transphile) child abuse, being as it is on the right side of the politically correct track.

This story should also make us reflect on the various ramifications and far-reaching consequences of the requests of the LGBT movement, which not coincidentally has decided to unify its different strands.

I want to better explain this by way of an analogy.

Various deaf associations and deaf people's rights groups have a negative attitude towards cochlear implants that help hearing, because treatment implies that there is something wrong.

The National Association of the Deaf (NAD) in the US has issued this position statement:

Many within the medical profession continue to view deafness essentially as a disability and an abnormality and believe that deaf and hard of hearing individuals need to be “fixed” by cochlear implants. This pathological view must be challenged and corrected by greater exposure to and interaction with well-adjusted and successful deaf and hard of hearing individuals.

The media often describe deafness in a negative light, portraying deaf and hard of hearing children and adults as handicapped and second-class citizens in need of being “fixed” with cochlear implants.

The Telegraph has this story:

Sara Kendall, profoundly deaf from birth, lives with her deaf mother and deaf boyfriend in Nottingham, and feels she has nothing to gain from an implant.

“I was offered cochlear implants when I was younger but my parents refused and I’m very happy with that because I’ve seen some cochlear users admit that they feel they don’t belong.”

What many hearing people might not realise is the strong community that exists in the silent world. In fact, it’s more than a community. Deaf people (with a capital D) see themselves more as an ethnic minority, with their own (sign) language, schools and proud history.

The National Association of the Deaf was created by deaf people to advocate for deaf rights in 1880. The Deaf don’t see deafness as a disability but a cultural identity (motto: different but not deficient). It’s a world so warm and welcoming, many wouldn’t want to become hearing, even given the choice.

The controversy over cochlear implants within the deaf community has sometimes led to strong stances:

However, there has been a notable resistance in the deaf community towards the technology of the cochlear implant (CI). The deaf community is split between those who feel that it is a medical miracle and those who feel it is a form of ethnic “genocide.”

Deaf people not wishing to acknowledge that deafness is a pathological condition, inferior to hearing capability, whereas they consider them both to be of equal value, offers an evident analogy with the normalization of homosexuality and the claims of its being just another lifestyle.

It is understandable that someone with a disorder or disability, physical or psychological, may wish to deny it. In fact, it is part of human nature, denying our weaknesses gives us a false sense of defending our pride and self-image.

But the reality is that it is when people recognize what is wrong with them that they can make progress. That is why, for example, Alcoholics Anonymous requires its members to admit that they are alcoholic.

If a deaf or homosexual person wishes to remain so, it is rightly his/her choice. And whatever these persons think of their condition is also their choice.

But should the rest of society oblige, go along with and encourage this self-deception?

One way to scientifically test the prevailing theory that homosexual behaviour is normal, natural and healthy is the following.

In science, theoretical hypotheses are controlled by logically deducing from them a proposition describing an observable event, i.e. by making a prediction, and then seeing if the event occurs as predicted, which confirms the hypothesis, or not, which refutes it.

In the 1980s, in the early days of AIDS when the major groups at risk were male homosexuals, drug addicts sharing needles and hemophiliacs being given blood transfusions, the prediction was made that AIDS would spread among heterosexuals as it had among "gays".

This 1988 New York Times article well captures the spirit of the time:

Scientists have not determined whether AIDS virus carriers from other groups, such as intravenous drug users or heterosexuals, will develop AIDS at the same pace. But a recent study of hemophiliacs infected with the AIDS virus found a similar rate of disease, Dr. Moss said. ''There's no reason to think it will be any better for other groups,'' he said.

''There's no reason to think it will be any better for other groups''. Indeed, there was reason to think that, if medical researchers had embraced the correct hypothesis of the pathological nature of homosexual behaviour, considering only the latter and putting aside for a moment homosexual inclination.

The HIV/AIDS epidemic among heterosexuals that never was, logically derived from and predicted on the basis of the "benign, normal, healthy" nature of homosexual behaviour, is in itself an empirical falsification of that hypothesis.

Even today, male homosexuals are at very high risk of contracting the AIDS virus.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published in 2010 a study conducted in 21 American cities, showing that one in five MSM (men who have sex with men) had HIV.

We are not here talking about minor differences in the incidence of this deadly disease between homosexuals and heterosexuals, but of two completely different scales.

A coincidence, you say? No, the way HIV, the AIDS virus, spreads has a lot to do with homosexual behaviour.

Before looking into the evidence of brain, genes or hormones we need to recognise that the male body is not designed to be penetrated during sexual intercourse. The lining of the anus is much thinner than the vagina and tears very easily. The lining of the anus, compared to the lining of the vagina, is also designed for nutrients to pass through it - where a healthy vagina will stop sperm entering any part of the body except the reproductive system the anus will allow semen (and any disease it carries) into the blood stream. Also the anal sphincter muscle is designed to expel not accept objects which can lead to problems in later life...

So biologically the male and female bodies are compatible with each other not bodies of the same gender.

There are two ways HIV can be transmitted: blood to blood (as in non-sexual contagion like among intravenous drug users and in blood transfusions) and semen/cervical secretions to blood. During a normal (pardon this unfashionable term) heterosexual intercourse there is normally (again, damn!) no spilling of blood because the vagina (there is no other way to put it) is the "natural place" for sexual intercourse, whereas this is not true of the anus and anal intercourse, during which there is more tearing and bleeding.

Anal sex is the most unhealthy form of sex, not just, as it tragically is, for AIDS but also for other sexually transmitted diseases.

This is from the website of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), a federal government agency:

The Surgeon General (C. Everett Koop, Surgeon General 1982-1989) has said, "Condoms provide some protection, but anal intercouse is simply too dangerous to practice".

Condoms may be more likely to break during anal intercourse than during other types of sex because of the greater amount of friction and other stresses involved.

Even if the condom doesn't break, anal intercourse is very risky because it can cause tissue in the rectum to tear and bleed. These tears allow disease germs to pass more easily from one partner to the other.

Psychiatric conditions are also associated with homosexuality.

I will explore this area in more detail in future posts, lest this article become a book, but here I will briefly mention some of the issues.

Recent studies show homosexuals have a substantially greater risk of suffering from psychiatric problems than do heterosexuals. We see higher rates of suicide, depression, bulimia, antisocial personality disorder, and substance abuse.

Pope Urban II and the First Crusade

Since there is so much misunderstanding about the Crusades, as well as the history of the relationship between Europe and Islam in general, I have decided to write historical articles for my website on Italy, Italy Travels Guide.

Italy, being right in the middle of the Mediterranean, has a long history of relations with the Islamic world.

The widespread misunderstanding mentioned above was obviously not born out of chance, but is the result of clever manipulation of public opinion. Propaganda and apology of Islam disguised as history have managed to corrupt what many people think they know about these subjects; myths have been spread as Islamophiles have tried to rewrite history in their own image.

So, these truths and facts from past ages need to be told.

My first article is on Pope Urban II, who launched the First Crusade:

Urban II, the 159th Pope of the Catholic Church, was one of the great Popes in history, and was beatified in 1881 by Pope Leo XIII.

The most famous son of Châtillon-sur-Marne, in Champagne, France, he was Pope from 1088 until his death in 1099.

We have to thank Pope Blessed Urban II for many things, including the internal reforms he made and his declarations against simony, the Medieval practice of selling church offices; but especially we have to be grateful to him for having saved Europe from subjugation to Islamic forces.

Since the time of Islam's prophet Muhammad and after his death, Muslim armies had kept conquering lands, starting from the Arabian Peninsula and then spreading to the whole Middle East and North Africa, offering the local populations, largely Christians and Jews, the triple "choice" of a) converting to Islam, b) accepting their inferior status, to be fully humiliated (become "dhimmi") and to pay a special non-Muslim tax ("Jizya") that many could not afford, or 3) being killed, as the Koran orders:

Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued. (Qur'an (9:29))

"Historical facts say that Islam, including Muhammad, launched their own Crusades against Christianity long before the European Crusades".

Muslim forces were poised to conquer Europe as well. In 732 in France, moving north, Muslim armies "led by Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi proceeded to sack Aquitaine. Charles Martel mobilized his army to meet the threat. The victory at Tours marked the end of the Muslim invasions in northwestern Europe and preserved Christianity in the region."

Adolf Hitler, who was an admirer of Islam, said: "Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers -already, you see, the world had already fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing Christianity! -then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism [Islam], that cult which glorifies the heroism and which opens up the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing so" (Adolf Hitler's Monologe im Führerhauptquartier (Monologue with Headquarters of the Führer). Hamburg: Albrecht Knaus, 1980).

In addition, Muslim invasions and atrocities against Christians were increasing in the decades before the First Crusade was declared in 1095.

This is half of the article, read the rest.

Journalist Dr Udo Ulfkotte: Expelling Muslims Will Help Europe Fight its Financial Crisis

Enlightening and heart-warming video interview with prominent German journalist Dr Udo Ulfkotte, (not surprisingly) former editor of one of Germany's main dailies, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (thanks to Benedict Broere for the hat tip).

In it he says that he does not think that Islam will prevail in Europe because Europeans will fight it back, but it will be bloody.

Asked if there could be a socio-economic problem behind Muslim radicalism, he reiterates the ideologically intransigent nature of Islam and answers that we in Europe have thrown so much money at Islam that this could simply not be the case.

Muslim immigrants in Germany up until 2007, Dr Ulfkotte explains, "have taken 1 billion euros more out of our social welfare system than they have paid into our system". To give a better idea of the magnitude of this figure and put it into perspective, he adds that the total debt of the German government is 1.7 billion euros. Expelling Muslims, therefore, will help Europe fight its financial crisis.

Another subject touched in the interview is the mainstream media which, largely dominated by post-'68 ideologues, have not published criticisms of the current situation out of political correctness.

Regarding his personal involvement and security problems, Ulfkotte explains that twice he had to leave his home because he had received two death threats and still has them, and he had to live under anonymity and under police protection. But he is not the only one, he says, there are many in Europe under threat of being killed by Muslims.

Asked if he is a Christian, the journalist answers that he was born into a Christian family but rejected his Christian roots when he was young. At first he was an atheist and then converted to Islam while he was in Afghanistan and the Middle East covering events there for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

That is why, he adds, he can speak from knowing Islam so well, from within.

He is now a born-again Christian, having embraced the faith out of conviction this time, and not tradition.

The final question is about the future of Europe. Ulfkotte responds that he believes the financial crisis will not go away and history teaches that, when you have economic hardships combined with ethnic tensions and a widespread disregard for the law of the country, the outcome is likely to be civil war.

His story touches me because it reminds me of mine (except the conversion to Islam bit), with his abandonment of Christianity and then return to it when he discovers that it is the best the world has to offer.

His conflictual endgame scenario may seem gloomy, even terrifying, and I hope that it will not come to that. The point is: is Islamization a better one?

We will not need a civil war if we can start addressing the problem freely and without censorship now, before it is too late, and consider different solutions which have so far been prevented even from being mentioned, let alone discussed, by the oppression and thought policing of political correctness.

Indonesian Town Government Destroys Church amid Muslim Cheers

In Indonesia, Muslims protest the construction of a church.

The Batak Protestant Church, in the Bekasi subdistrict of Jakarta on the Indonesian Island of Java, "had been meeting in a residential house every Sunday for the past 13 years. When the congregation swelled to about 600 members, Pastor Adven Leonard Nababan applied early this year for a building permit. The church obtained signatures of 60 non-Christian neighbors, as required by law."

See if we can have a law requiring 60 non-Muslim neighbours' signatures to allow a mosque to be built in Western, Christian countries. Good luck with that!

Certainly the church had met all the permit rules, however, well knowing that local governments in Indonesia can be slow to approve them, Pastor Nababan in January 2013 "ordered construction to proceed — a not uncommon practice among churches in a country where applications often languish".

But the local authority said that the church lacked the permit and "dispatched a backhoe to the Batak Protestant Church on March 21 to knock down church walls that had been under construction".

Cheers went up from the Muslim crowd as a backhoe tore down the barely finished walls of the church.

"The pile of rubble that remained was only the latest setback to Christians trying to retain a toehold in the world’s most populous Muslim country."

We Are so Used to Assaults on Christianity that We No Longer Even Recognize Them

After posting my article Islamic Republic of Great Britain under President Charles Windsor?, I've received comments here and especially on my Facebook Save the West page that show two related phenomena:

1) most people still do not understand that Christianity is the only way the West can remain itself, civilized, Islam-free and ethical

2) the reason the Western general public opinion has not been capable of recognizing or adequately countering the Islamic threat is that it has been so accustomed to the Left's propaganda, an important part of which is its anti-clericalism, anti-Christianity and assault on Christian moral values, that it has lost the ability to see even the biggest elephant in the room; in other words, erosion of and attacks on Christianity have become so normal and commonplace that they are not even noticed and recognized as such, which has led to the spread of the misconception that a religion equals another, and this in turn has made it more difficult to recognize Islam for what it is, even in the face of the most obvious and widespread direct experience through our eyes and ears.

After all, if so many people (including me until not long ago) can believe that Oscar Wilde was an innocent victim of homophobia whereas in fact he was a dirty homosexual paedophile of the worst sort, a wealthy man abusing and exploiting young working class rent-boys for sex, and that, far from being a victim of Victorian prejudice, even today he would be found guilty and be rotting in a prison cell, the high incidence of this belief in itself shows how big the collective disconnect with reality has become in the Western mind.

People have been subjected to such a brainwashing of Orwellian proportions and diabolicalness that of course, when Islam was ready and coming here to invade and submit, it found the gates of the West wide open. Nobody, or very few, were capable of seeing the obvious any more.

Now, going back to the comments to my post. I do not blame anybody, as I said it is extremely easy to be deceived by 40-50 years of uninterrupted, continuous, profound leftist indoctrination.

The comments are mainly of two types: a) they minimize the impact that even a Muslim or Islam-sympathizer Prince Charles could have, either because his reign will be short-lived or he will not have any say in how the country is run or because at least he is honest, and b) they defend the atheists' presumed entitlement to "get a say in who is to sit on the throne".

The very fact that Britain could have an Islamophile monarch is per se a sign of the enormous influence that this pseudo-religion has already attained, let alone if that dreadful scenario becomes reality.

This case also makes it even more evident than it has already been how Islam is incompatible with and a direct threat to Christianity, when you have a monarch who is supposed to have the official titles of both the "Supreme Governor" of the Church of England and the "Defensor Fidei", defensor of "the" faith - as there is only one faith that can be recognized as the foundation of any Western society, and that is Christianity - who has Islamic propensions and does not really want to defend the special role of the Christian faith.

The question about "atheist rights", which we hear more and more of, increasingly reminds me of the often-trumpeted "Muslim rights".

In advanced, Western democracies, both individuals and minorities should be protected, hence the classical theory of human rights, not to be confused with the current, leftist theory of human rights, which is something completely different, indeed opposite, and only underpins the spread and power of the state and of the welfare system, bringing Western countries to economic ruin.

The classical theory of human rights derives from the Christian doctrine of natural rights. And incidentally, this is only one of the many things that Christianity has "done for us". The problem is the widespread lack of historical knowledge of how almost everything that distinguishes the West, with its incredible civilization, from the rest is indissolubly and inherently linked to Christianity.

In the West I also include Christian populations the world over.

But the decision in a democracy is clearly taken by the majority, and most people in Britain want a Christian monarch with a Christian role: "73% said she should continue as supreme governor of the Church of England and keep the Defender of the Faith title ".

The problem is that, if we lose or dilute our Christian roots, we become nothing, the West cannot even be defined without them.

Europe geographically is just an appendix of the Eurasian continent. What distinguishes Europe is its culture, and its culture has two roots: the classical world of ancient Rome and Greece and the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Without them Europe, and by extension the West, would have just remained as civilized as the Third World is now.

The West would not have existed without Christianity and will not survive without it.

One of the reasons why Islam has made so many inroads into Western society so easily is because the people in the West do not believe in anything any more, and therefore think that there is nothing to defend, nothing worth protecting.

People who attack Christian values, which are what the West is built on and without which the West does not exist (think of the current difficulties in trying to define “Britishness” in the UK and “Europe” in the EU, difficulties that derive from the attempt to exclude Christianity from these definitions), open the door to Islamization, whether they realize it or not.

As for atheists, it is possible to be atheist and Christian, as Oriana Fallaci declared herself to be and I was until I realized that atheism is impossible to support rationally and scientifically (the alternative to the existence of God, that everything happened by chance, having such a low probability as to be mathematically impossible); so now I am agnostic and Christian. You can believe in Christian ethics and values and recognize that we owe all our civilization, including science, to Christianity, while having doubts about or without believing in God.

Burma Gravely Violates Christians' Human Rights

Buddhists are not so peaceful as the Western stereotype portrays them.

In Burma, ethnic Chin Christian children and youth are coerced to convert to Buddhism.

Burma troops kill and rape Christian civilians, burn churches and homes and destroy crosses.

"Discrimination on grounds of religion and ethnicity is both deep-rooted and institutionalized" within the army, an official said.

Human rights organizations have linked Burmese troops to rights abuses and are calling on the international community to urge Burma to protect its minorities.

From BosNewsLife:

NAYPYIDAW, BURMA (BosNewsLife)-- Rights groups urged the world Friday, March 22, to pressure Burma to end a crackdown on ethnic and religious minorities after government troops reportedly killed and raped dozens of mainly Christian civilians while burning hundreds of churches and homes.

In a statement obtained by BosNewsLife, Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) and the Chin Human Rights Organization (CHRO) said the "international community" should "push ethnic and religious minority rights higher up the reforms agenda for Burma."

In one of the most reasons incidents, CHRO said a 13 year-old girl was sexually assaulted by a Burma Army soldier in the Paletwa area of southern Chin State. "A ceasefire agreement between the Chin National Front and the government has been in place since January last year, but Chin State remains heavily militarized with more than 54 Burma Army camps," the group said.

Elsewhere, in predominantly Christian Kachin state, government troops killed at least nine civilians and wounded more than a dozen others in mortar attacks from September 2012 to February, explained the the Kachin Women’s Association of Thailand (KWAT).

Though President Thein Sein announced a unilateral ceasefire in the region, "the Burma Army offensive in Kachin State has continued," said the Kachin Baptist Convention (KBC), representing devoted Kachin Christians.

ONGOING WAR

The ongoing war in Kachin State resulted in the destruction of over 200 villages, with 66 churches reportedly damaged and over 100,000 people internally displaced, according to KBC investigators.

CSW, CHRO, Human Rights Watch, and KWAT testified this week about the violence in Burma during a hearing of the Subcommittee on Human Rights at the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium.

"We welcome the ceasefire agreement, but the international community must recognize that this is only a first step," said CHRO’s Executive Director Salai Bawi Lian Mang. "So far, there has been no discussion about troop withdrawal from Chin State. As long as there is a heavy military presence, we expect human rights abuses to continue,” the official explained at the hearing.

Speaking about Chin State, CHRO’s Program Director Salai Za Uk Ling told the Subcommittee that ethnic Chin Christian children and youth "are coerced" to convert to Buddhism at military-run ‘youth development training schools’.

"Discrimination on grounds of religion and ethnicity is both deep-rooted and institutionalized," within the army, the official said. "Current reforms in Burma should focus on dismantling the institutional structures and policies that enable continued discrimination and forced assimilation against ethnic and religious minorities.”

"CONSIDERABLE CHALLENGES"

CSW’s Senior Advocate UK/UN Matthew Jones agreed. "We see considerable challenges in Burma’s ethnic regions including in the Burmese Army’s offensives against civilians in Kachin State, the conflict and suffering of the Rohingya in Rakhine State, and continuing violations of religious freedom and other human rights [of the Chin people] in Chin State," Jones explained in remarks obtained by BosNewsLife.

"There is a need to encourage clear benchmarks and timelines for reform, and to maintain pressure on Burma to take steps to address human rights violations and engage in a meaningful nationwide peace process and political dialogue,” the official added.

The panel strongly condemned grave human rights violations in Rakhine and Kachin States, and called on the European Union (EU) to urge President Thein Sein’s government to allow immediate unrestricted humanitarian access to those areas.

Europarliamentarian László Tokés has also expressed concerns about Burma's "state policy of segregation" of Buddhist and Muslim communities in Rakhine State, and the destruction of large Christian crosses in Chin State.

It came amid reports Friday, March 21, of unrelated deadly sectarian clashes that killed at least 10 people, injured 20 others and left scores of homes destroyed.

OWNERS ARGUMENT

The riots in the town of Meikhtila, 540 kilometers (335 miles) north of Burma's capital Naypyidaw, broke out after an argument between a Buddhist couple and Muslim owners of a gold shop, witnesses said.

Relations between Buddhists and Muslims in Burma, also known as Myanmar, have simmered since last year’s sectarian violence in western Rakhine state killed 110 people and left 120,000 homeless, analysts say.

The United Nations fears such incidents could endanger democratic reforms introduced since military rule ended in 2011.

In separate meetings with government and other officials in Washington this week, a CHRO and CSW delegation also spoke about "the problem of ethno-religious based discrimination in Burma. Since 1999, the US has designated Burma a 'country of particular concern’ for what it views as the country's poor record on freedom of religion or belief.

Next week a CHRO delegation was to meet with legislators, government officials, and staff at Canada’s newly-established Office of Religious Freedom, to discuss the tensions in Burma, the rights activists said.