Nigerian Christians warn of religious war following Christmas day bombings

Northern Nigerian Christians said on Tuesday they feared that a spate of Christmas Day bombings by Islamist militants that killed over two dozen people could lead to a religious war in Africa’s most populous country.

The warning was made in a statement by the northern branch of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), an umbrella organization comprising various denominations including Catholics, Protestant and Pentecostal churches.

But a powerful Muslim traditional ruler, the Sultan of Sokoto Muhammadu Sa’ad Abubakar said after meeting the Nigerian president in Abuja on Tuesday that it was not a conflict between Muslims and Christians or between Islam and Christianity.

The Boko Haram Islamist sect, which aims to impose sharia Islamic law across Nigeria, claimed responsibility for the blasts, the second Christmas in a row it has caused carnage at Christian churches.

Saidu Dogo, secretary general for the CAN in Nigeria’s 19 northern provinces called on Muslim leaders to control their faithful, saying Christians will be forced to defend themselves against further attacks.

“We fear that the situation may degenerate to a religious war and Nigeria may not be able to survive one. Once again, ’enough is enough!’,” Mr. Dogo said.

The attacks risk reviving tit-for-tat sectarian violence between the mostly Muslim north and the largely Christian south, which has claimed thousands of lives in the past decade.

Mr. Dogo said the CAN was calling on all Christians to continue respecting the law but to defend themselves when needed.

“We shall henceforth in the midst of these provocations and wanton destruction of innocent lives and property be compelled to make our own efforts and arrangements to protect the lives of innocent Christians and peace-loving citizens of this country,” Mr. Dogo said.

The most deadly attack killed at least 27 people in the St Theresa Catholic church in Madalla, a town on the edge of the capital Abuja, and devastated surrounding buildings and cars as faithful poured out of the church after Christmas mass.

“What is going on is a conflict between evil people and good people,” Sultan Abubakar said after the meeting at the presidential residence. “The good people are more than the evil ones. So the good people must come together to defeat the evil ones and that is the message.”

“We want to assure our brother Christians and Christian leaders to stand on the part of truth according to our religion and continue to work for the greatness of this country,” the Sultan said.

Security forces also blamed Boko Haram for two explosions in the north targeting their facilities. Officials have confirmed 32 people died in the wave of attacks across Nigeria, though local media have put the number higher.

But the church bombs are more worrying because they raise fears that Boko Haram is trying to ignite a sectarian civil war in the nearly 160 million nation split evenly between Christians and Muslims, who for the most part co-exist in peace.

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan has come under pressure to do more to fight the growing security threat which risks derailing economic gains in the OPEC member and Africa’s top oil-producing nation.

Nigeria’s main opposition leader Muhammadu Buhari, a northerner and former military ruler who lost a presidential election in April to Mr. Jonathan, accused the government of incompetence on Monday, saying government was slow to respond and had shown indifference to the bombings.

The CAN said in the statement that it was concerned that the perpetrators and their sponsors “are well-known to government and no serious or decisive actions have been taken to stem their nefarious activities”.

The Globe and Mail

If Abraham Were to Come This Year, Temple Mount Would be Closed

“If Jesus were to come this year, Bethlehem would be closed', theLondon Guardian reported this week. And what if Abraham were to visit?

The Guardian article painted a bleak picture of an “Apartheid wall” and military checkpoints that supposedly have stagnated the city of Bethlehem, located immediately south of Jerusalem. This idea was also used by anti-Israel NGO's (see NGO Monitor's "The NGO's that Stole Christmas" posted on Arutz Shevafor details.)

The writer, Phoebe Greenwood, also details the nearby Jewish communities that are “strangling” the city and quotes a Catholic priest bemoaning the exodus of Christians from the ancient city. He neglected to mention that the reason is mistreatment by the Muslim PA.

Many businesses in the communities employ neighboring Arabs, who are able to travel freely while Jews are not allowed into Bethlehem and other “Apartheid” areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority.

Foreign media headlined the alleged problems of Bethlehem – until Christmas Eve, when suddenly there were reports of nearly 100,000 visitors who apparently were able to pass the “Apartheid wall.”

All of the reports from foreign news services, such as the Associated Press, routinely traced Christians’ problems to Israel. “Like the rest of the West Bank, the town fell on hard times after the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation broke out in late 2000,” according to AP.

Justus Reid Weiner, an international human rights lawyer who teaches at Hebrew University, in an interview by Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld posted on Arutz Sheva recently, says that Christians lost their majority status in Bethlehem soon after Yasser Arafat assumed control of the Palestinian Authority.

Weiner added that "under these regimes, the resident Christian Arabs have been victims of frequent human rights abuses including intimidation, beatings, land theft, firebombing of churches and other Christian institutions, denial of employment, economic boycott, torture, kidnapping, forced marriage, sexual harassment, and extortion".

“And Muslims who have converted to Christianity are the ones in the greatest danger".

In the previous years under Jewish control, the economy in Bethelhem, as in all of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, flourished after being suffocated under Jordanian rule, until the Intifada under Arafat. Under Jordanian occupation between 1948 and 1967, all holy sites were barred to both Christians and Jews, except for visiting dignitaries, until Israel opened up the sites after the Six-Day War in 1967.

Neither the Guardian nor foreign news services noted what would happen to the Biblical Abraham if he were to return today for a visit to the Temple Mount, where he sacrificed a ram after G-d told him not to sacrifice his only son, Yitzchak (Isaac).

After the Six-Day War, Israel recognized Muslim claims to the Temple Mount, Judaism’s most sacred site, but Muslim authorities have used their de facto control to haul out tons of earth containing artifacts dating from the First and Second Jewish Temple, whose existence has been increasingly denied by the Palestinian Authority in specific and the Arab world in general.

Jews are barred from praying on the Temple Mount and are not even allowed to carry any holy articles with them. With Muslim observers supervising visits, police have frequently arrested or removed Jews for various violations, such as singing or reciting a prayer even in a whisper.

The Palestinian Authority has been insistent in claiming that the Temple Mount, as well as all of the Old City, is sovereign PA territory and will be the seat of a country it wants to establish. PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has stated that in a Palestinian Authority country, no Jews would be allowed, which would preclude a visit by Abraham to the place that is the foundation of the belief in one God.


Arutz Sheva

Iran threatens to cut off oil exports if sanctions imposed over nuclear activity

TEHRAN — Iran threatened on Tuesday to stop the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz if foreign sanctions were imposed on its crude exports over its nuclear ambitions, a move that could trigger military conflict with economies dependent on Gulf oil.

Western tensions with Iran have increased since a November 8 report by the UN nuclear watchdog saying Tehran appears to have worked on designing an atomic bomb and may still be pursuing research to that end. Iran strongly denies this and says it is developing nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

Iran has defiantly expanded nuclear activity despite four rounds of UN sanctions meted out since 2006 over its refusal to suspend sensitive uranium enrichment and open up to UN nuclear inspectors and investigators.

Many diplomats and analysts believe only sanctions targeting Iran’s lifeblood oil sector might be painful enough to make it change course, but Russia and China — big trade partners of Tehran — have blocked such a move at the United Nations.

Iran’s warning on Tuesday came three weeks after EU foreign ministers decided to tighten sanctions over the UN watchdog report and laid out plans for a possible embargo of oil from the world’s No. 5 crude exporter.

“If they [the West] impose sanctions on Iran’s oil exports, then even one drop of oil cannot flow from the Strait of Hormuz,” the official Iranian news agency IRNA quoted Iran’s First Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi as saying.

The U.S. State Department said it saw “an element of bluster” in the threat but underscored that the United States would support the free flow of oil.

“It’s another attempt to distract attention away from the real issue, which is their continued non-compliance with their international nuclear obligations,” spokesman Mark Toner said.

Rahimi’s remarks coincided with a 10-day Iranian naval exercise in the Strait and nearby waters, a show of military force that began on Saturday.

“Our enemies will give up on their plots against Iran only if we give them a firm and strong lesson,” Rahimi said.

National Post

Happy new GIABO

Russia test fires long-range missile with new warhead

Russia on Tuesday successfully test fired its long range ballistic missile RS-18 from its Baiknonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with a new warhead aimed at overcoming Western air defence systems, news agencies said.

The RS-18, a warhorse missile known to the West as Stilet (Stileto) that the Russian defence ministry has given a new lease of life, successfully hit its target on the Kamchatka Pensinsula on the Pacific, the reports quoted the defence ministry as saying.

The RIA Novosti news agency said that the RS-18 missile was now carrying a new warhead aimed at overcoming missile defence systems at a time of growing tensions over plans for a US missile shield in Europe.

Space War

Russian election and protests.....

Now Under Obama, an emerging global apparatus for drone killing

The Obama administration’s counterterrorism accomplishments are most apparent in what it has been able to dismantle, including CIA prisons and entire tiers of al-Qaeda’s leadership. But what the administration has assembled, hidden from public view, may be equally consequential.

In the space of three years, the administration has built an extensive apparatus for using drones to carry out targeted killings of suspected terrorists and stealth surveillance of other adversaries. The apparatus involves dozens of secret facilities, including two operational hubs on the East Coast, virtual Air Force­ ­cockpits in the Southwest and clandestine bases in at least six countries on two continents.

Other commanders in chief have presided over wars with far higher casualty counts. But no president has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance the nation’s security goals.

The rapid expansion of the drone program has blurred long-standing boundaries between the CIA and the military. Lethal operations are increasingly assembled a la carte, piecing together personnel and equipment in ways that allow the White House to toggle between separate legal authorities that govern the use of lethal force.

In Yemen, for instance, the CIA and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command pursue the same adversary with nearly identical aircraft. But they alternate taking the lead on strikes to exploit their separate authorities, and they maintain separate kill lists that overlap but don’t match. CIA and military strikes this fall killed three U.S. citizens, two of whom were suspected al-Qaeda operatives.

The convergence of military and intelligence resources has created blind spots in congressional oversight. Intelligence committees are briefed on CIA operations, and JSOC reports to armed services panels. As a result, no committee has a complete, unobstructed view.

With a year to go in President Obama’s first term, his administration can point to undeniable results: Osama bin Laden is dead, the core al-Qaeda network is near defeat, and members of its regional affiliates scan the sky for metallic glints.

Those results, delivered with unprecedented precision from aircraft that put no American pilots at risk, may help explain why the drone campaign has never attracted as much scrutiny as the detention or interrogation programs of the George W. Bush era. Although human rights advocates and others are increasingly critical of the drone program, the level of public debate remains muted.

Senior Democrats barely blink at the idea that a president from their party has assembled such a highly efficient machine for the targeted killing of suspected terrorists. It is a measure of the extent to which the drone campaign has become an awkward open secret in Washington that even those inclined to express misgivings can only allude to a program that, officially, they are not allowed to discuss.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, described the program with a mixture of awe and concern. Its expansion under Obama was almost inevitable, she said, because of the technology’s growing sophistication. But the pace of its development, she said, makes it hard to predict how it might come to be used.
The Washington Post