Christians under threat in the Middle East per BBC News

Jane Corbin for the BBC reports on the persecution of Jews across the Middle East, , there's a programme about it tonight that this article accompanies - This World: Kill The Christians will be broadcast on BBC Two on Wednesday 15 April at 21:00. 

The article is interesting, including where the West's invasion of Iraq is blamed for ending the Christian safety in Iraq, but it is this passage caught my eye:

'The same story is being repeated across the Middle East, where the Arab Spring unleashed forces that turned against Christians and the authoritarian leaders who once protected them.'

Strange, I can think of one Middle East state where Christians live free to worship and live peacefully. But then why would the institutionally anti Israel BBC ever refer to Israel positively?

Escaping Death in Northern Iraq - NYTimes.com

A truly fascinating story from Iraq. Read it here http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/09/04/world/middleeast/surviving-isis-massacre-iraq-video.html

Here's an extract

Ali Hussein Kadhim, an Iraqi soldier and a Shiite, was captured with hundreds of other soldiers by Sunni militants in June and taken to the grounds of a palace complex in Tikrit where Saddam Hussein once lived.

The militants, with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, separated the men by sect. The Sunnis were allowed to repent for their service to the government. The Shiites were marked for death, and lined up in groups.

Mr. Kadhim was No. 4 in his line.

As the firing squad shot the first man, blood spurted onto Mr. Kadhim's face. He remembered seeing a video camera in the hands of another militant.

"I saw my daughter in my mind, saying, 'Father, father,' " he said.

He felt a bullet pass by his head, and fell forward into the freshly dug trench.

"I just pretended to be shot," he said.

A few moments later, Mr. Kadhim said, one of the killers walked among the bodies and saw that one man who had been shot was still breathing.

"Just let him suffer," another militant said. "He's an infidel Shia. Let him suffer. Let him bleed."

"At that point," Mr. Kadhim said, "I had a great will to live."

He waited about four hours, he said, until it was dark and there was only silence. About 200 yards away was the edge of the Tigris River.

He made it to the riverbank, where the reeds gave him some cover. There, he met an injured man named Abbas, a driver at Camp Speicher who had been shot by militants and shoved into the river.

Horrific and I remember similar stories from WW2 of people surviving similar ethnic cleansing atrocities by the Nazis by feigning death.

This is what happened in Iraq, Tikrit in fact, where Sunni Muslim Jihadists killed Shia Muslims

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=706773732727983&id=689169714488385&refsrc=http%3A%2F%2Ft.co%2FmqMPDKA4zV&_rdr

I watched that video and it struck me that it was very similar to the grainy film footage of Nazi soldiers killing Jews during World War 2. The names may change but evil stays evil. 

In a sane world this video would be all over the Western media but with an institutionally anti Israel BBC and an even worse Channel 4, nothing anti Islamist will be shown when Israel is there to be vilified.

Iraq crisis: Isis jihadists 'seize Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons stockpile' - live - Telegraph

Hold on a moment, we were told that there was no WMD in Iraq and that Bush & Blair invaded on a lie.

But this Telegraph report http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/10910868/Iraq-crisis-Obama-may-launch-air-strikes-without-Congress-amid-calls-for-Maliki-to-go-live.html seems to state the contrary.

Religious Freedom is important

The 2014 USCIRF Religious Freedom  report is out now and just as last year there seems to be some common threads that unite the worse offenders.

 Tier 1 CPC Countries
Designated by State Department & Recommended by USCIRF
Burma - Military government of a particularly nasty type
China - Single party Communist state
Eritrea - Single party state split 62.5% Christian, 36.5% Muslim
Iran - Islamic republic under Shariah Law
North Korea - One party authoritarian regime, based on Communism
Saudi Arabia - Islamic republic under Shariah Law
Sudan - Single party Islamic state
Uzbekistan - Former part of Communist Soviet Union




Tier 1 CPC Countries
Recommended by USCIRF
Egypt - Islamic state with Muslim Brotherhood problems
Iraq - Islamic state with troubled past and future
Nigeria - Troubled African country, approx 50% Muslim and 50% Christian with major Islamist problems
Pakistan - Islamic state
Syria - Islamic state with civil war in progress between different brands of Islamists
Tajikistan - Former part of Communist Soviet Union
Turkmenistan - Former part of Communist Soviet Union
Vietnam - Communist state

So of the 16 above countries:
Islamic - 7
Large part Islamic -2
Communist or ex Communist - 6
Military government - 1

Makes you think.

I await the BBC's reporting of this report, but as Israel are not listed I doubt that they will bother, 'mustn't spoil the narrative'...

How many people were killed by Saddam Hussein's regime?

How many people were killed by Saddam Hussein's regime? This is a question that it is hard to answer, there are many answers none of which are 100% accurate (how could they be?) but there are ranges that are agreed upon.

Wikipedia reports that:

According to The New York Times, "he [Saddam] murdered as many as a million of his people, many with poison gas. He tortured, maimed and imprisoned countless more. His unprovoked invasion of Iran is estimated to have left another million people dead. His seizure of Kuwait threw the Middle East into crisis. More insidious, arguably, was the psychological damage he inflicted on his own land. Hussein created a nation of informants — friends on friends, circles within circles — making an entire population complicit in his rule". Other estimates as to the number of Iraqis killed by Saddam's regime vary from roughly a quarter to half a million, including 50,000 to 182,000 Kurds and 25,000 to 280,000 killed during the repression of the 1991 rebellion.Estimates for the number of dead in the Iran-Iraq war range upwards from 300,000.

About.com  reports 'Top 5 Crimes of Saddam Hussein', which include:

...it is estimated that up to 182,000 were killed during the Anfal campaign. Many people consider the Anfal campaign an attempt at genocide. 

... As early as April 1987, the Iraqis used chemical weapons to remove Kurds from their villages in northern Iraq during the Anfal campaign. It is estimated that chemical weapons were used on approximately 40 Kurdish villages, with the largest of these attacks occurring on March 16, 1988 against the Kurdish town of Halabja.

Beginning in the morning on March 16, 1988 and continuing all night, the Iraqis rained down volley after volley of bombs filled with a deadly mixture of mustard gas and nerve agents on Halabja. Immediate effects of the chemicals included blindness, vomiting, blisters, convulsions, and asphyxiation. Approximately 5,000 women, men, and children died within days of the attacks. Long-term effects included permanent blindness, cancer, and birth defects. An estimated 10,000 lived, but live daily with the disfigurement and sicknesses from the chemical weapons.

...
At the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991, southern Shiites and northern Kurds rebelled against Hussein's regime. In retaliation, Iraq brutally suppressed the uprising, killing thousands of Shiites in southern Iraq.

As supposed punishment for supporting the Shiite rebellion in 1991, Saddam Hussein's regime killed thousands of Marsh Arabs, bulldozed their villages, and systematically ruined their way of life.

Stanford University  reports:

Along with other human rights organizations, The Documental Centre for Human Rights in Iraq has compiled documentation on over 600,000 civilian executions in Iraq. Human Rights Watch reports that in one operation alone, the Anfal, Saddam killed 100,000 Kurdish Iraqis. Another 500,000 are estimated to have died in Saddam's needless war with Iran. Coldly taken as a daily average for the 24 years of Saddam's reign, these numbers give us a horrifying picture of between 70 and 125 civilian deaths per day for every one of Saddam's 8,000-odd days in power"

The Iraq Foundation  reports:

DOING the arithmetic is an imprecise venture. The largest number of deaths attributable to Mr. Hussein's regime resulted from the war between Iraq and Iran between 1980 and 1988, which was launched by Mr. Hussein. Iraq says its own toll was 500,000, and Iran's reckoning ranges upward of 300,000. Then there are the casualties in the wake of Iraq's 1990 occupation of Kuwait. Iraq's official toll from American bombing in that war is 100,000 — surely a gross exaggeration — but nobody contests that thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians were killed in the American campaign to oust Mr. Hussein's forces from Kuwait. In addition, 1,000 Kuwaitis died during the fighting and occupation in their country.

Casualties from Iraq's gulag are harder to estimate. Accounts collected by Western human rights groups from Iraqi émigrés and defectors have suggested that the number of those who have "disappeared" into the hands of the secret police, never to be heard from again, could be 200,000. As long as Mr. Hussein remains in power, figures like these will be uncheckable, but the huge toll is palpable nonetheless.

Scaruffi has a handy table listing The worst genocides of the 20th and 21st Centuries:
Saddam Hussein appears at number 13 on the list after Mao's Communist regime in China (49-78 million), Hitler's Nazi Germany (12 million), Leopold II massacre in The Belgium Congo (8 million), Stalin's Communist regime in Russia 9& million), Japanese Emperor Tojo's World War 2 massacres (5 million), The Ottoman Empire's massacres of Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks (2 million), Pol Pot's Cambodian regime (1.7 million), Kil Il Sung's North Korean regime's purges and concentration camps (1.6 million), Menghistu's Ethiopian regime (1.5 million), The Biafran killings (1 million), Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet regime's massacres in Afghanistan (900,000) and the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s (800, 000. The figure attributed to Saddam Hussein is 600,000.


So we have, excluding those victims of  war, estimates of between 250,000 and 600,000 people killed by Saddam Hussein's regime. We have an agreed range. Well not totally agreed because @The_Mitch92 claims that only 5,000 were killed. Of course @The_Mitch92 has an agenda, he's claimed that

Correcting a liar or a fool

I have been engaged in a Twitter debate with another anti-Israel type whose grasp on reality is poor. This one goes by the handle @The_Mitch92 and has tweeted that both 9/11 and 7/7 were false flag operations, but more of that later. @The_Mitch92 sees no place for a Jewish state, except maybe in Antarctica, says that Jews have no historical connection with the land of Israel and tries to blame Israel and America for all the troubles of the world.

Here's one example of @The_Mitch92's output and my responses...

@The_Mitch92's response was not to try and justify his initial claim but to ask...

I've told him to look at Ask.com for a start but the Iraqi figures are pretty well accepted and on many sites, as is the less than 5,000 Palestinian deaths figure.

I'd like to see @The_Mitch92 accept that his initial claim was ridiculous but somehow I don't think he's man enough to admit that he was guilty of lying with his initial claim. I'd also quite like to see @The_Mitch92 try and provide figures to backup his claim but that might be tricky...

The difference between Iraq and Syria

In the case of Iraq, we invaded and found no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, although chemical weapons had been used previously by the Saddam Hussein regime.

In the case of Syria we didn't invade despite us knowing that they do have stockpiles of chemical weapons and that they probably used them.

Odd old world.

Religious Freedom

The Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), an independent advisory body created by the International Religious Freedom Act to monitor religious freedom abuses internationally, released its 2013 report, which idenitifes “governments that are the most egregious violators.”

The 15 countries are Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Uzbekistan, Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Vietnam, all of which severely restrict independent religious activity and harass individuals and groups for religious activity or beliefs. These nations are classified as Tier 1 “countries of particular concern” (CPCs) in the report.

Burma -  Military government of a particularly nasty type
China - Single party Communist state
Eritrea - Single party state split 62.5% Christian, 36.5% Muslim
Iran - Islamic republic under Shariah Law
North Korea - One party authoritarian regime, based on Communism (shh)
Saudi Arabia - Islamic republic under Shariah Law
Sudan - Single party Islamic state
Uzbekistan - Former part of Communist Soviet Union
Egypt - Islamic state, now under partial control of Muslim Brotherhood
Iraq - Islamic state with troubled past and future
Nigeria - Troubled African country, approx 50% Muslim and 50% Christian
Pakistan - Islamic state
Tajikistan - Former part of Communist Soviet Union
Turkmenistan - Former part of Communist Soviet Union
Vietnam - Communist state

So of the 15 above countries:
Islamic - 6
Large part Islamic -2
Communist or ex Communist - 6
Military government - 1

Makes you think...

Desecrating a Koran

Do you remember the anger and indeed hysteria when a non-Muslim defaces a Koran? The Islamic organisations are up in arms (figuratively of course), the liberal media are outraged, etc. How about when an Islamist hollows out a Koran in order to plant a bomb in it? Not so much anger...

From Iraq.



It's almost as though the Islamist anger over Joran desecrations are just a tool to intimidate the kufr.

Some news that will be of no interest to the BBC

Mawtani reports the interesting news that:

'Iraq completes removal of radioactive contamination from seven sites

(15/3/12) -- By Khalid al-Taie in Baghdad

For Mawtani.com

Seven demolished sites showing high levels of radiation have been successfully decontaminated in Iraq, the Iraqi Environment Ministry announced Wednesday (March 14th).

The ministry's Centre for the Prevention of Radiation supervised the removal of radioactive contamination at seven sites that the Ministry of Science and Technology had been cleaning up since 2009, said Deputy Environment Minister Kamal Hassan Latif.

The decontamination process included removing radioactive debris, designating a 25-meter radius around each contaminated area to observe radioactivity levels, and analysing the soil at each site to confirm it is free of radioactive material, he said.

The sites include facilities that were used in Iraq's nuclear programme under former President Saddam Hussein. The Ministry of Science and Technology has been demolishing and clearing these sites of radioactive contamination with help from government and international agencies. '

How does that fit the BBC narrative?

Saturday morning catchup

Once again, too many Firefox tabs resulting in carashing Firefox and much frustration.

1) Blazing Cat Fur reports that 'The Toronto District School Board has decreed that "Only White People Are Racist" ' and provides the evidence.  Political correctness decrees that white people are in the wrong and in this sort of analysis of course Jews are white people whereas Muslims are not.


2) Fox News has an >to the Mila Kunis story and it may not be good news for Marine Sgt Scott Moore...


3) The often interesting Mother Jones website has interesting piece about life in an Indian call centre. Read it and you may go more gently on the Indian helpdesk the next time you have to call one...


4) Angry Predator identifies a fine example of victimhood poker and it seems that ethnic minority sensibilities outweigh the feminist right to breastfeed.


5) Melanie Phillips thinks that 'From human rights to the EU, the tide's turning against the liberal thought police' - I hope she's right but fear she is not.


6) Der Spiegel warns of the dangers of dildos. Yes I did say dildos.


7) The BBC report with a straigh face that: 'Alastair Campbell was "somewhat of an unguided missile" during talks about intelligence before the Iraq war, a senior MI6 officer has said.' Tell us something we didn't know about that duplicitious c**t.


More later...

30 years ago today

30 years ago today Israel carried out Operation Opera. The Israeli Air Force launched a strike on the Iraqi nuclear facility at Osirak destroying the reactor and with it much of Iraq's nuclear programme. Eight F-16 multi-role fighters carried out the bombing accompanied by six F-15s escorts. The planes flew 680 miles across Jordan, Saudi Arabia and into Iraq to bomb the target. All the planes returned safely to Israel. It is claimed that the Israeli planes evaded detection by flying close together so that instead of appearing as a squadron of small fighters on radar, they appeared as a single large jet, and so not much attention was paid to them by Iraqi defences. It is supposed that Jordan and Saudi Arabia gave tacit support to the attcak.

Interestingly, one of the Israeli pilots on the Osirak mission was Ilan Ramon, who would later become Israel's first astronaut and died in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster on February 1, 2003.

Is Iraq now part of Iran?

AAWSAT report some odd news:

'The mausoleum of Hussein Ibn Ali, the third Imam of Shiism, in Karbala will soon have a new gate. It took dozens of Iranian artisans several years to make the gate that, according to experts, is a masterpiece of Persian handicraft.

At first glance, there is nothing remarkable in that news item carried by Iranian media last week.

After all, the mausoleum, like other Shiite places of pilgrimage in Iraq, was built by Iranians and maintained by their donations for centuries.

What is remarkable is that the Iran's state-owned media have chosen to present the report in the section devoted to "domestic news." The official news agency, IRNA, carried the item in its section of "news from the provinces."

Karbala, however, is located in Iraq, a country that, although a neighbor of Iran, has been an independent state for almost 90 years.

It is clear that many within Iran's ruling elite have difficulty acknowledging that fact. To them, concepts like national sovereignty have little meaning.

Official mullahs, such as Ahmad Khatami, a preacher at the Friday prayers at Tehran University, pretend to have never heard the word "Iraq." To them, Iraq is either "Bayn al-Nahrayn" (Mesopotamia) or "Atabat al-Aliyat" (The Holy shrines). Apparently, even the war that lasted eight years and left a million dead has not convinced them that Iraq is a sovereign state.'

The Iran Iraq war killed millions of people. The Iraniansare now trying to takeover Iraq from within, this will not end well...

The left do not care?

The case for invading Libya compared with Iraq? The portryal of that type of Obama supporter is very accurate.


Thanks to Theo Spark for the spot.

why doesn't Colonel Gaddafi have nuclear weapons?

We have the invasion of Iraq to thank, so claims Donald Rumsfeld.

Things to worry about - Middle East and North Africa related

Two news stories to worry about overnight.

1) Defensetech asks the question that I have been wondering about for a few days now - Will Gadhafi Resort to Terrorism to Fight Back?'
DefenseTech puts it this way:

'We all know Gadhafi is no stranger from using such tactics from bombing several European airports and a Berlin nightclub to blowing up Pan Am flight 103 over Scotland, the colonel has long used terror as a way of hitting Western governments for perceived slights against his regime.

With his forces being pounded into oblivion by a number of foreign miltaries, who knows what Gadhafi will do. Yes, he gave up his nuclear weapons program years ago. However, Libya is still reported to have tons of chemical weapons stockpiled. Keep in mind, that the colonel has said that his weapons depots are open to loyalists. We don’t know what type of weapons, money or combination of both he’s giving to potential terrorists. U.S. officials are already worried about this, as they should be.

DT has already discussed the potential for the weapons looted by rebels to make their way to conflicts around the world. This situation could be made far worse if Gadhafi deliberately arms bad organizers in one last spite-ridden effort to hurt the West.'

DefenseTech are right but also remember that this is also the man who supplied arms to the IRA in order to enable them to kill and maim as many Britons as possible. He has no scruples and he has the contacts to once more spread his lethal legacy around the world. I have no doubt that if he felt he had no way out then any WMD stocks he has would be supplied to whichever terrorists want to make use of them and as usual London will be one of the first targets. Whilst you wince at the possible prospect don't forget that this 'mad dog' regime is one that until very recently had the Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and LSE seal of approval - I still await their apologies, I suspect in vain.


2) Pajamas Media as usual provide more analysis than the main Stream Media as they report this:

'Several grand ayatollahs in Iran have issued a fatwa for Muslims to come to the aid of their Shiite brothers in Bahrain, who they claim are suffering horrific crimes from their government in collaboration with the Saudi armed forces. They further emphasized that the people of Bahrain have every right to demand freedom and their fair share from the state.

Shia-News, a site associated with Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi (a hard-line Shiite Twelver and an influential figure in the suppression of Iranians during their uprising to protest the fraudulent presidential election of 2009), is registering volunteers to participate in suicide bombings against Saudi interests around the world. Hundreds have already registered. Reports from inside Iran indicate that an alert has gone out to the Revolutionary Guards Quds forces throughout the world to prepare for attacks on Saudi establishments.

...

The ayatollahs who cry foul over the Saudi action in Bahrain have not spoken one word against their own Islamic regime, which is guilty of the rape, torture, and the murder of thousands of Iranian boys and girls for their uprising and demand for freedom and democracy. Human rights groups have reported that Iran, in just one month, executed more than one hundred people. The slaughter continues on a daily basis: the Iranian Supreme Court recently stepped up the executions by “expediting” death sentences.

The proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia is just beginning — expect to see many more such conflicts in the Middle East which will expand onto the world stage.'

Shiite against Sunni, anyone who remembers the horrors of the 1980's Iran Iraq war
with its half a million or so dead, knows what that might entail.



2011 is looking like becoming a very very dangerous year in the Middle East and beyond as the tensions long suppressed explode both metaphorically and literally.

Some questions that the Chilcot Inquiry will not address properly, if at all

'Why did Mr Scarlett put himself at the service of Mr Campbell? Why did Mr Goldsmith not resign? Why did the Cabinet allow itself to be sidelined? Why did Parliament in general, and the Tory Opposition in particular, so easily accept Mr Blair’s word?'

Read more in a rather good article in The Mail by Stephen Glover. The piece is entitled 'So it WAS all based on a lie. But don’t hold your breath waiting for Blair to be held to account over Iraq' and made me rather angry at the way Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell got away with so many wrongs and are now rich and/or lauded despite their histories.

News on Sky but not yet reported by BBC, but then is it really news?

Sky News report that:

'Two former Cabinet Secretaries have disputed Tony Blair's claim on Friday that the Cabinet knew military action against Iraq was likely a year before the invasion.

The former Prime Minister told the Iraq Inquiry on Friday that his cabinet were aware from early 2002 that they had endorsed a policy that would probably lead to an attack on Iraq.

But Lord Wilson, who was Cabinet Secretary from 1998 until 2002, and Lord Turnbull who was his successor, have both told the Inquiry that this was not the case.
Lord Wilson claimed that Mr Blair told his cabinet in a meeting in April 2002 that "nothing was imminent".

Echoing evidence given by other Downing Street officials, Lord Wilson described a lack of official cabinet meetings in those crucial 15 months before the invasion in March 2003.

...

Numerous witnesses have claimed that under Mr Blair's leadership, the Cabinet was not routinely consulted on key decisions and commitments that were being made regarding Iraq.

Lord Wilson told the Inquiry: "I don't think anyone would have gone away thinking they had authorised a course of action that would lead to military action."

His successor, Lord Turnbull, claimed that Mr Blair continually put off Cabinet discussions about the possibility of attacking Iraq in the months before the March 2003 invasion.

"The prime minister basically said, 'well, they [his ministers] knew the score'. That isn't borne out by what actually happened."

Lord Turnbull added: "None of those really key papers [options papers about Iraq and the threat posed] were presented to the cabinet which is why I don't accept the former Prime Minister's claim that they knew the score."

On Friday, when asked whether or not he had ensured his cabinet were fully informed, Tony Blair said: "I don't think there was any doubt about that at all.
"If you went back, unless people were not listening to the news or reading the newspapers, which is not my experience of the Cabinet Ministers, it was the issue the entire time."

Will Tony BliarBlair be asked to return to the Chilcot Inquiry yet again or is there really very little point? As I have said many times in the past - 'The chances of Tony Blair answering a question totally truthfully look slim and unless he is under oath and wired to a lie-detector I don't think that I will believe his 'evidence' anyway.'

How long without a government?

Le record du monde is keeping track how long Belgium has been without a government... 225 days and counting; catching up with Iraq!