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Buried Alive: Persecution of Christians, August 2021by Raymond Ibrahim

tps://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17800/persecution-of-christians-august

After sexually harassing a Christian sanitation worker, a Muslim supervisor threatened to file blasphemy charges — which carry a maximum death penalty — against her unless she withdraws her complaints against him.” — Morning Star News, August 31, 2021, Pakistan.
“Most sanitation workers in Pakistan are Christian…. Christian sanitation workers are routinely called derogatory terms… and face sexual harassment, discrimination, nonpayment of salaries, irregular work contracts and extortion by senior officers….” — Morning Star News, August 31, 2021, Pakistan.
“[T]he Taliban are going door-to-door in Afghanistan, executing Christians on the spot…. Taliban militants are even pulling people off public transport and killing them on the spot if they’re Christians…. The Taliban have spies and informants everywhere.” — Religion News Service, August 17, 2021, Afghanistan.
“Women who disappear and are never recovered must live an unimaginable nightmare. The large majority of these women are never reunited with their families or friends because police response in Egypt is dismissive and corrupt. There are countless families who report that police have either been complicit in the kidnapping or… bribed into silence.” — Coptic Solidarity, 2020, Egypt.
Muslims murdered a man for leaving Islam and converting to Christianity by burying him alive. — Morning Star News, August 26, 2021, Uganda.
“What you have witnessed happening to your husband today is for the disobedience of your husband not heeding the advice given by the family that he should return to Islam, since Islam cannot tolerate infidels.” According to report, “Police have taken no action regarding the killing.” — Morning Star News, August 26, 2021, Uganda.
“Islam is now invading South Sudan. They’re saying South Sudan is a strategic place and… the gate[way] to Africa [so that] Islam can go to all of Africa.” — Local Christian, Vatican News, August 19, 2021, South Sudan.

Editor’s note: The publication of this report marks the tenth anniversary of the “Persecution of Christians” monthly series, which Gatestone began to publish a decade ago, starting with the month of August 2011. Scroll to the bottom of this report to access the previous 119 reports, covering every month between August 2011 and now.

The following are among the abuses inflicted on Christians by Muslims throughout the month of August 2021:

Iran Cements Its Advantage While Biden Sleeps Iran’s leaders recognize the pain that results from sanctions do not pose an existential threat to a regime willing to rule through hard power.By Jason Killmeyer

https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/24/iran-cements-its-advantage-while-biden-sleeps/

Six months into President Joe Biden’s term, several sanctions against Iran were lifted and new ones imposed as the administration seeks to cajole Iran back to the negotiating table over their nuclear capacity. While the messaging from Washington, and the signaling from Tehran, was mixed, one thing was clear this past July in the southwestern city of Ahvaz: people were thirsty. On July 15, after weeks of irregular access to water and periods of several hours with no water, a spontaneous protest emerged.

Desperate, angry citizens took to the streets and blocked roads as the growing service shortages plaguing Iran reached a breaking point. Dubbed the Uprising of the Thirsty, within days the protests were province-wide then soon spread around the country and into Tehran. Citizens blamed the government, and widespread corruption, for water and power shortages, and in some instances chanted “Death to the dictator.”

Some reports indicate the regime was taken aback by the speed at which the protests spread, the biggest in the capital since after the mistaken downing of a Ukrainian passenger plane in January 2020. Security forces killed protesters in cities near Ahvaz and the government throttled Internet service to limit organizers’ ability. Given the frequency of unrest in the past several years, the regime by now has a well-worn playbook, much of it dedicated to suppressing demonstrators with deadly force.

So, despite the protests’ organic and widespread nature, there will be no revolution this year. Still, an important evolution has taken place in Iran in 2021. Conventional wisdom has for years suggested that relief from Western sanctions is a drastic and urgent need for the regime. But a more careful read of their actions in 2021 suggests relief as maybe the third or fourth priority of the government.

Iraq Should Join the Abraham Accords Full relations with Israel would help atone for the infamous act of driving out our Jewish population. By Wisam Al-Hardan

https://www.wsj.com/articles/iraq-abraham-accords-israel-sunni-shiite-11632495291?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Erbil, Iraq

More than 300 of my fellow Iraqis from Baghdad, Mosul, Al-Anbar, Babel, Salahuddin and Diyala joined me Friday in this northern city, where we issued a public demand for Iraq to enter into relations with Israel and its people through the Abraham Accords.

We are an assembly of Sunnis and Shiites, featuring members of the (Sunni) Sons of Iraq Awakening movement, which I lead, in addition to intellectuals, tribal elders, and youth activists of the 2019-21 protest movement. Some of us have faced down ISIS and al Qaeda on the battlefield. Through blood and tears we have long demonstrated that we oppose all extremists, whether Sunni jihadists or Iran-backed Shiite militias. We have also demonstrated our patriotism: We sacrificed lives for the sake of a unified Iraq, aspiring to realize a federal system of government as stipulated in our nation’s constitution.

Now, in striving to rebuild our country, we commit ourselves to an awakening of peace. Our guiding light is the memory of a more honorable past: a young, modern state with a glorious ancient tradition; a country that, at its finer moments, witnessed a spirit of partnership across ethnic and sectarian lines. Iraq’s subsequent deterioration was marked by the dissipation of tolerance—a casualty of generations of tyranny and fear, imposed first by rulers, then by external actors, as a tool to divide and conquer.

The most infamous act in this tragedy was the mass exodus and dispossession of the majority of our Iraqi Jewish population, a community with 2,600 years of history, in the mid-20th century. Through their forced migration, Iraq effectively cut one of its own principal veins. Yet we draw hope from the knowledge that most Iraqi Jews managed to rebuild their lives, passing their traditions to their children and grandchildren in Israel.

UN conference highlights Houthi persecution of minority populations in Yemen David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/un-conference-highlights-houthi-persecution-of-minority-populations-in-yemen/

Sponsored by the European Organizations Union for Peace in Yemen and the Yemeni Coalition of Independent Women, it took place on the anniversary of the Houthi takeover of the country and looked specifically at the mistreatment of Jews, Baha’is and women.

 A conference spotlighting the oppression of Yemen’s minorities by the Iranian-sponsored Houthi rebels occurred Monday on the sidelines of the 48th session of the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, which takes place from Sept. 13 to Oct. 8.

The conference, sponsored by the European Organizations Union for Peace in Yemen and the Yemeni Coalition of Independent Women, took place on the anniversary of the Houthi takeover of the country (Sept. 21, 2014) and looked specifically at Houthi mistreatment of Jews, Baha’is and women.

The United Nations considers war-torn Yemen the “world’s largest humanitarian crisis” with 20.7 million people, or 66 percent of the population, requiring humanitarian assistance, according to a U.N. report released in February. Amid the war, supply shortages and natural disasters that have affected all Yemenis, minorities and women have endured double torment due to persecution by the Houthis, an armed Shi’ite movement that controls most of Yemen.

Speaking at the conference, former U.S. Deputy Envoy to Combat Antisemitism under the Trump administration, Ellie Cohanim, noted the deeply anti-Semitic, Nazi-like nature of the Houthis.

“We have to be very careful when making any comparisons with the Nazis,” she explained. “But incredibly enough, there is much video evidence which has surfaced online over the years with the Houthis mimicking the Nazis, and expressing anti-Semitic and anti-American rhetoric during their ceremonies, military recruitments and other large gatherings, including videos in which the Houthi militia performed the Nazi salute.’ ”

Israeli pipeline company embroiled in conflict over UAE oil deal David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/israeli-pipeline-company-embroiled-in-conflict-over-uae-oil-deal/

An agreement penned a year ago has encountered growing opposition from environmentalist groups and Israel’s Ministry of Environmental Protection. It was hailed as the first major partnership to come out of the Abraham Accords—a deal in which Israel would serve as an artery for Emirati crude to Western markets. The lucrative deal, reportedly worth hundreds of millions, was inked on Oct. 19, 2020, by Israel’s state-owned Europe Asia Pipeline Co. (EAPC) and MED-RED Land Bridge Ltd., a private Dubai-based company.

An Israeli “land bridge” transporting oil from Eilat on the Red Sea to Ashkelon on the Mediterranean already exists; it has been operating for more than 50 years. In fact, there are two pipelines between the cities: one for crude oil and one for distillates (gasoline, jet fuel, etc.). While the pipeline isn’t new, pumping Arab oil through it is, at least in such a publicly celebrated manner.

“Since the establishment of the state, Israel has been dealing with the Arab boycott and its consequences,” EAPC said in a statement. “These agreements are, in fact, the practical expression of improving relations between the State of Israel and the Gulf states.”

Then-United States Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who was present at the signing, called it a “significant breakthrough that was made possible thanks to the Abraham Accords,” the normalization treaty signed between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain a month earlier.

But the agreement has encountered growing opposition from environmentalist groups and Israel’s Ministry of Environmental Protection. The Eilat oil terminal is roughly 200 yards from coral beaches. While those favoring the deal focus on its geo-strategic importance, opponents say it poses an unacceptable risk to the coral reefs.

One of the earliest critics was environmentalist group Zalul, which issued a statement immediately after the October 2020 signing, calling the intention to bring more oil tankers to Eilat “a mortal danger.” Zalul then organized a coalition of 20 green groups to fight what they termed “the transformation of Eilat and Ashkelon into oil cities.”

Post-Merkel Germany’s Race for the Center Regardless of who wins, Sunday’s election will deliver a coalition that governs by consensus. By Josef Joffe

https://www.wsj.com/articles/merkel-germany-federal-parliamentary-election-race-coalition-scholz-11632426273?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Who will replace Germany’s eternal chancellor, Angela Merkel, in Sunday’s election? None of the six parties in the Bundestag will capture a majority, and so it will be on to Act II: coalition-building, which may take weeks, even months. But it hardly matters whom the Parliament finally anoints. The voters will have affirmed tepid centrism.

That isn’t the Germany of the 20th century. “Centrists” the Kaiser and Führer were not; they wanted to fuse Europe into a German fiefdom. Such types are ancient history.

Germany’s new players are essentially unknown in the U.S. Leading in the polls is the Social Democrat Olaf Scholz. Behind him trots Armin Laschet, the equally uninspiring candidate of Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democrats. He is trailed by the youngish Annalena Baerbock of the semi-left Greens and Christian Lindner of the Free Democrats. Mr. Lindner, an old-style liberal, speaks for them all: “We secure the country’s center.”

Each candidate could win a place at the cabinet table. Whatever the winner’s political coloration, the government will be gray. That is a blessing—or curse—of multiparty government. Two-party systems like America’s and Britain’s tend to polarize. Coalitions of the many gravitate toward the middle; otherwise the parties couldn’t govern together.

Turkey: NATO’s Pro-Russian, Taliban-Friendly Ally by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17763/turkey-nato-russia-taliban

Around the Taliban, and in a bizarre combination of convergence of interests and ideological kinship, a new anti-Western circle is evolving, including a willing NATO member state…. anti-Western sentiments are bringing together these regional powers, who are now courting Afghanistan’s radical rulers.

The hard lesson learned from relying on an “ally” for critical production, then needing to reshore that capability as politics change, ultimately will cost U.S. taxpayers between $500 million and $600 million in nonrecurring engineering costs, according to Ellen Lord, the previous Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s Afghan drama will spur a number of anti-Western alliances based on different anti-Western calculations. Proof? Just look at the names of the countries on Taliban’s invitation list for its birthday party.

The Taliban, since its founding in 1994, has been using the most notorious shariah-based law enforcement, including beheadings, stoning women to death, forcing burqas on women, killing girls who are students, gang-raping, locking women in their homes and various other medieval practices. Now, for the first time in NATO’s history, a member nation’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has said that the Taliban’s interpretation of Islam does not contradict Turkey’s.

A love affair with Islam, in fact, seems to be blossoming. At the end of August, the Taliban asked Turkey for technical support to run Kabul’s airport. Pro-Hamas, Islamist allies Turkey and Qatar have since been discussing with the Taliban conditions for reopening the Hamid Karzai Airport; only the security issue of technicians, private companies and security staff who will be running the airport remains a concern. On September 2, Turkey said it was evaluating proposals from the Taliban and others for the safe operation of Kabul’s airport after the radical group’s return to power in Afghanistan.

“We have held our first talks with the Taliban, which lasted three and a half hours,” Erdoğan told reporters August 27. “If necessary, we will have the opportunity to hold such talks again.”

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu also mentioned on September 6 that Turkey was in “direct talks” with the Taliban concerning the future of Afghanistan. “After all,” the minister said, “It would be wrong for Turkey to completely pull out of Afghanistan.”

The Problem With Canada By David Solway

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/09/22/the-problem-with-canada-n1480521

The results of the recent and utterly unnecessary Canadian election, called two years before the expiry of a four-year term and returning Justin Trudeau’s Liberals to the same minority government status as before, were not unexpected. Indeed, they were graven in stone—a tombstone, I’m tempted to say.

Although the slogan “the natural governing party” has been applied to the Liberals since the lengthy administrations of William Lyon Mackenzie King, there have been thirteen Conservative prime ministers since the nation’s founding, including the architect of Confederation, John A. Macdonald. Nonetheless, Canada is no longer a conservative country. The one party true to conservative precepts and practices—belief in personal responsibility, freedom of choice, low taxes, small government, freedom of expression, a balanced budget, border integrity, energy self-sufficiency, and more—the People’s Party of Canada led by the principled Max Bernier finished out of the running—a scathing judgment on an anemic and ungrateful country. 

In fact, according to Justin Trudeau, Canada has no “core identity,” and he is probably right. Given a reasonably affluent electorate having taken its freedoms and privileges for granted and growing increasingly apathetic; a vote-rich portion of the country bought off by transfer payments from Western Canada, principally Alberta, to the Eastern provinces, primarily Quebec and the Maritimes; a species of internal balkanization owing to massive immigration; and the socialist march through the institutions, Canada’s traditional coherence and national character—with the exception of irridentist Quebec that never regarded itself as part of the Confederation—have undergone a sea-change. The country I once knew is no longer recognizable.

A political, social, and cultural upheaval has established a new and historically unprecedented dispensation. With few exceptions, our leadership, provincial as well as federal, has sold its stewardship for a mess of pottage. The electorate has been suborned by bribes—that is, government largesse sourced from foreign borrowing, the minting of fiat currency, and subventions gouged from the public’s own tax payments. Citizens have succumbed to the temptation of ethnic and sectorial advantages at the cost of national unity. And over the last years, the nation could not resist the glamor of a dynastic name and the Teflon superficiality of an incumbent prime minister.

We were—and are—wrong. A shallow, corrupt, and clapter politician, Justin Trudeau is not and never was prime ministerial material. There is nothing genuine or praiseworthy about this latest Trudeau iteration, despite the puffery of a battery of stringer journalists, as evidenced, for example, in a sycophantic piece by Jonathan Kay in Canada’s leftist literary journal The Walrus, painfully titled “The Justin Trudeau I Can’t Forget.” Even the presumably wise and pensive Conrad Black made a substantial donation to the Liberal Party in 2015 and extolled Trudeau rather extravagantly—”flexible in public finance…a very alluring personality, a quick intelligence and an apparently reasonable combination of principle and openness”—before changing his solemn opinion rather dramatically.

Conspiratorial Anti-Zionism Professor David Miller and the paranoid style of politics. Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/conspiratorial-anti-zionism-richard-l-cravatts/

“Anti-Semitism,” wrote Stephen Eric Bronner, author of the engaging book A Rumor About The Jews, “is the stupid answer to a serious question: How does history operate behind our backs?” For a wide range of ideological extremists, anti-Semitism is still the stupid answer for why what goes wrong with the world does go wrong. It is a philosophical world view and interpretation of history that creates conspiracies as a way of explaining the unfolding of historical events; it is a pessimistic and frantic outlook, characterized in 1964 by historian Richard Hofstadter as “the paranoid style” of politics, which shifts responsibility from the self to sinister, omnipotent others—typically and historically the Jews.

Long the thought product of cranks and fringe groups, Hofstadter’s paranoid style of politics has lately entered the mainstream of what would be considered serious and respectable academic enterprise. Witness, for instance, the ongoing controversy engulfing Professor David Miller, professor of political sociology in the School for Policy Studies at Britain’s Bristol University, who has enraged Jewish students and other external stakeholders by his vicious attacks on Zionism, Israel, and Jewish organizations in England.

In his lectures, writing, and public statements Miller has vehemently suggested that Jewish communal organizations work in tandem, behind the scenes and in a furtive and underhanded manner, to subvert the interest of British universities and government. More than that, Miller also contends that Zionism itself, which he characterizes as a “fanatical” political ideology, has as one of its primary roles to slander Islam, that Zionism, he contends, is a chief source of Islamophobia. And the shady Jewish organizations he identifies as being part of the defense and promotion of Zionism are therefore agents of this bigotry, not to mention, as he put it, that “the Zionist movement and the Israeli government are the enemy of the left, the enemy of world peace.”

Greta’s Chumps Climate zeal decides an election in Norway. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/gretas-chumps-bruce-bawer/

The main thing you need to know about the results of last week’s Norwegian elections is that the international media and political elites were absolutely thrilled – just like when Joe Biden won. “America is back!” they cheered in the world’s corridors of power last November. Similar sentiments greeted the news that Norway’s left-wing parties had secured a majority of parliamentary seats, ousting the conservatives.

In a time when China and Russia are saber-rattling, when the COVID lockdown has decimated economies, and when the dire process of Islamization continues in Europe, the top issue in the Norwegian election was – what else? – climate change. No surprise. The nation’s state-run media corporation – a reliable fount of leftist agitprop – has been pushing the existential-threat, time-is-running-out line for years. This time around, deluged with Greta Thunberg-style campaign rhetoric, a significant number of voters listened. Why? Partly because many Norwegians are highly susceptible to save-the-world pitches: this is, after all, the “peace nation,” which derives much of its sense of identity from brokering accords and being a founding member of the UN. But also partly because of the central role of nature in Norwegian culture.

You see, you’re not a true Norwegian unless you’re devoted to friluftsliv – life out in the open air. (The word was coined by Henrik Ibsen in 1859.) Taking walks in the mountains isn’t just a popular pastime but something more like a sacred ritual. The late Arne Næss, the country’s foremost modern philosopher (and, briefly, uncle-in-law of Diana Ross) built up his whole philosophy around the zen of mountain climbing, the importance of going outside and breathing fresh air, and the proposition that the rights of plants are equal to those of human beings. This intense attachment to nature makes Norwegians very eco-conscious, and gives them a fierce sense of custodianship of the natural world – and hence makes them the perfect suckers for the climate-change hustle.

Here’s just one example of Norwegians’ determination to do good by the environment: in no other country has a higher percentage of the population bought into the electric-car scam. Since 2016, the market share of plug-in vehicles has skyrocketed from 29.1% to 74.7%. As for those Luddites who still rely on fossil fuels, you might expect them to be charged reasonable prices at the pump, given that Norway’s biggest industry is the extraction of North Sea oil and gas. (After all, Venezuelans pay less than a penny per gallon – one of the few advantages of living in that hellhole.) But nope: owing to punitive taxes, Norwegian motorists pay the world’s second highest gasoline prices. And most accept their punishment uncomplainingly, like the repentant sinners they are.