Rick Wiles discusses the modern war on Christianity and the true church with Pastor Jim and Lori Bakker. Day 2.
Tag Archives: Violence
We Are At War (Day 1)
Rick Wiles discusses the modern war on Christianity and the true church with Pastor Jim and Lori Bakker. Day 1.
Looters ransack shops on third day of South African vote violence
By Dinky Mkhize
PRETORIA (Reuters) – Looters raided shops and burned-out cars blocked roads in South Africa’s capital on Wednesday, the third day of violence triggered by the ruling party’s choice of a mayoral candidate for local polls.
Police said rioters were targeting foreigners’ shops as public anger mounted over economic hardships in the build-up to Aug. 3 elections likely to become a referendum on President Jacob Zuma’s leadership.
Residents of Pretoria’s townships started setting cars and buses alight on Monday night after the ruling African National Congress’ (ANC) named a candidate in the Tshwane municipality where the capital city is located, overruling the choice of regional branches.
Violence flared again on Tuesday night and continued in parts of the capital on Wednesday, Tshwane Metro police spokesman Console Tleane said.
“There is calm in some hot spots, (but) the navigation of the streets is difficult because of the rubble and the debris,” he told eNCA television.
Protesters were continuing to clash with police and “a disproportionate part of the looting was taking place at shops owned by foreign nationals,” he added.
Foreigners, many of them from other African countries, last suffered a wave of attacks in April last year, by crowds blaming them for taking jobs and business.
Analysts warned of more unrest in the commercial hub of Gauteng province, which includes Pretoria and Johannesburg.
“Intra-ANC, election-related, factional violence is being ignored by markets trading on external factors, but is worrying,” London-based Nomura emerging markets analyst Peter Attard Montalto said in a note.
FACTIONS
The mayoral dispute flared at the weekend after an ANC member was shot dead on Sunday as party factions met to decide on a candidate for mayor of Pretoria’s Tshwane municipality.
The ANC leadership then named senior party member and former cabinet minister Thoko Didiza as its candidate for Tshwane, overriding regional branch members and refusing to back down as the violence mounted.
The ANC said it picked the candidate as a compromise between two rival factions in Tshwane. But critics say the decision by the party, which has been in power since the end of white-minority rule in 1994, showed that it is losing its touch in areas – including Pretoria – where it was once unassailable.
Zuma survived impeachment in April after Constitutional Court ruled that he breached the constitution by ignoring an order by the anti-graft watchdog to repay some of the $16 million in state funds spent renovating his home.
“Ahead of the August elections, disgruntled ANC supporters in Gauteng will be motivated by the Pretoria riots to stage further protests to demonstrate the unpopular ANC leadership’s decisions,” Robert Besseling, head of the EXX Africa business risk intelligence group said in a note.
(Writing by James Macharia; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
In Jerusalem’s cramped Old City, Christians feel the squeeze
By Sleiman Jad
JERUSALEM, June 21 (Reuters) – – When hundreds of Jewish nationalists marched through the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City this month, waving banners and chanting songs in what has become an annual ritual, it wasn’t only Muslims watching warily. Christians were, too.
Religious tension is nothing new in a city that has been the home of three faiths for centuries. But the outlook for the Christian minority, squeezed inside the ancient walls of the Old City and caught in the midst of a months-long wave of violence involving Muslims targeting Jews, has seldom looked tougher.
While the Muslim population rises steadily, now making up 75 percent of the 38,000 residents in the city’s alleys, and the Jews increasingly make their presence felt via the annual march and their settlements beyond the Jewish Quarter, the number of Christians has not risen in 50 years, hovering around 7,000.
“If a thousand Muslims leave Jerusalem, that’s one thing,” said Jamal Khader, head of the Latin Patriarchate Seminary near Bethlehem. “But if a thousand Christians leave, you threaten the identity of Jerusalem as a city of multiple faiths.”
That concern is clear to Basil Saed, 28, the owner of a gym in the Christian Quarter. After an attempted stabbing by a Muslim in the Old City several weeks ago, Saed came face-to-face with an Israeli military policeman hunting for the suspect.
“He was trembling he was so terrified,” said Saed, a prize-winning weightlifter who wears a large gold cross around his neck. “In an instant he could have shot and killed me.”
To Saed, both Israel’s tight security and the Muslim unrest make him uneasy, and raise questions for his community.
“If we weren’t strong, we’d all be gone by now,” he said.
SQUEEZED OUT
In the narrow, cobbled streets of their quarter, Christian families have been running arts and souvenir shops for generations, earning money from the steady flow of religious and other tourists who flock to sites like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the site where Jesus is believed to have been buried.
With the surge in violence that Jerusalem and surrounding areas have experienced since last October, tourism has become more erratic. Anecdotally, locals and tour guides say visitor numbers have dropped off sharply, hurting trade.
Residents like Youseph Shbeita, 35, the third generation owner of a religious icon shop near the Holy Sepulchre, are determined to hang on, seeing no option. But they can understand why younger Christians would want to leave.
“When you’re in the minority, you have to go with the flow,” he said, expressing a sense of responsibility for trying to preserve a Christian presence in the city where Jesus preached. “We just hope for calm, always for calm.”
Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer and activist who closely follows the community, said he feared it was being squeezed out by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with its tendency to focus on the Jewish and Muslim narratives.
“Since much of the epicenter of this round of violence has been in and around the Old City, it has increased their vulnerability,” he said, pointing to the lack of political and social institutions for Christians to depend on.
“I think it’s safe to say there are more Christian Palestinians in Chicago today than there are in Jerusalem.”
Most of the Christians in Jerusalem are Palestinians. Historically, the community has played a prominent role in the opposition to Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, putting it at odds with Israel.
Inside the walls of the Old City, however, there is still a degree of mutual dependence – Muslim merchants run stores on land owned by the Christian church, and Israeli Jews stop to buy fruit or a felafel from Muslim and Christian stallkeepers.
Even so, Saed, the weightlifter, doesn’t feel confident.
“For now, the Muslims and Jews are fighting each other,” he said. “But when they stop they’ll both look at us.”
(Reporting by Jad Sleiman; Editing by Luke Baker/Mark Heinrich)
Mexico teacher protests buffet ruling party, eight killed in clashes
By Lizbeth Diaz and Natalie Schachar
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – At least eight people were killed in clashes in southern Mexico over the weekend when police and members of a teachers’ union faced off in violent confrontations, a senior state official said, piling fresh pressure on the country’s embattled ruling party.
Violence erupted on Sunday when police dislodged protesters blocking a highway in the southern state of Oaxaca, a hotbed of dissent from radical teachers’ groups opposed to education reforms pushed through by the government three years ago.
Speaking on local radio early on Monday, Jorge Ruiz, Oaxaca’s state secretary for public safety, said eight people died in two separate confrontations, raising the death toll in the clashes from a previous tally of six.
He said six people died near the town of Nochixtlan, about 50 miles (80 km) northwest of the city of Oaxaca, while two others were killed in related protests in Juchitan, in the southeast of Oaxaca state.
The violence is the latest in a series of setbacks to President Enrique Pena Nieto’s government, which has faced widespread criticism for its failures to crack down on graft and impunity, contain drug gang violence or jumpstart the economy.
It also deals a fresh blow to the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), still smarting from a drubbing in regional elections earlier this month which put it on the back foot in the run-up to the next presidential election in 2018.
The violence has tarnished the reputations of two of the party’s leading contenders for the 2018 ticket: Education Minister Aurelio Nuno and Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong, whose brief includes domestic security.
Rocio Nahle, the leftist National Regeneration Movement (Morena) party’s parliamentary coordinator, said Nuno should resign over the violence, but blamed Osorio Chong as well.
“Pena Nieto will go down in history as one of the worst presidents in terms of violating human rights,” she told Reuters.
‘INSUFFICIENT’ ACCOUNTABILITY
The violence came as Christof Heyns, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said on Monday that police accountability in Mexico was insufficient.
“Extrajudicial executions and excessive use of force by security agents persist,” Heyns said in a U.N. report.
The unrest has escalated since police arrested the leader of the local teachers’ union earlier this month. Ruben Nunez, head of one of the most combative factions of Mexico’s CNTE union, Oaxaca’s Section 22, was detained on suspicion of money laundering.
The CNTE has led efforts to resist federal education reforms, particularly its mandate to carry out teacher evaluations. Miguel Zurita, a CNTE representative in Oaxaca, said that when police arrived to dislodge Sunday’s protest near Nochixtlan, they were unwilling to enter into a dialogue.
“What we lived through yesterday was something brutal, something that has no name,” he said. “They arrived armed and they arrived shooting.”
The Mexican government, however, defended its handling of the protests.
In a statement, the National Security Commission denied federal forces had used firearms against protesters, saying images circulating online of police with rifles were faked.
Enrique Galindo, the head of Mexico’s federal police, said masked individuals who were not affiliated to the teachers’ union were behind much of the violence, lobbing Molotov cocktails and shooting at police and civilians.
(Additional reporting by Frank Jack Daniel and Stephanie Ulmer-Nebehay; editing by Simon Gardner and G Crosse)
Iraq makes arrests over reports of Sunni executed in Falluja
By Isabel Coles and Stephen Kalin
BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraq said on Monday it had made arrests as it investigates allegations that Shi’ite militiamen helping the army retake Falluja had executed dozens of Sunni Muslim men fleeing the city held by Islamic State.
Iraqi authorities “are following up on the violations and a number of arrests have been made,” government spokesman Saad al-Hadithi said after a regional governor said 49 Sunni men had been executed after surrendering to a Shi’ite faction.
Sohaib al-Rawi, governor of Anbar province where Falluja is located, said on Sunday that 643 men had gone missing between June 3 and June 5, and “all the surviving detainees were subjected to severe and collective torture by various means.”
The participation of militias in the battle of Falluja, just west of Baghdad, alongside the Iraqi army had already raised fears of sectarian killings.
Iraq’s Defense Minister Khalid al-Obeidi said four military personnel were arrested after video footage showed them abusing people displaced from Falluja. He pledged on Twitter to prosecute any serviceman involved in such acts.
“Harassment of IDPs (internally displaced persons) is a betrayal of the sacrifices of our brave forces’ liberation operations to expel Daesh (Islamic State) from Iraq,” he said.
Falluja is a historic bastion of the Sunni insurgency against U.S. forces that toppled Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, in 2003, and the Shi’ite-led governments that followed.
In the north of the country, troops fought with Islamic State militants in the village of Haj Ali for the second day in a row, an Iraqi officer taking part said.
Haj Ali is near the Qayyara, a town under Islamic State control which has an airfield that Baghdad’s forces seek to use as a staging ground for a future offensive on Mosul, about 60 km (40 miles) north.
STRICT ORDERS
“Strict orders were issued to protect the civilians,” government spokesman Hadithi said, adding that these instructions were also given to the Hashid Shaabi, or Popular Mobilisation Forces, the coalition of mostly Shi’ite militias backed by Iran which are involved in the fighting.
The United Nations said last week it knew of “extremely distressing, credible reports” of men and boys being abused by armed groups working with security forces after fleeing Falluja.
Iraqi authorities routinely separate males aged over 15 from their families when they manage to escape Falluja, to screen them to ensure they do not pose a security risk and check if they may have been involved in war crimes.
U.N. human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said screening was legitimate but should not be done by paramilitary groups.
“The country must avoid further divisions or violence along sectarian lines, lest it implode completely,” he said on Monday.
A spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State said the Baghdad government was aware of the abuses.
“We know that the prime minister has come out and said that he believes that these abuses have happened and that he … has demanded accountability of any perpetrators,” Colonel Chris Garver said. “We think that is the right course of action.”
The Iraqi army launched the offensive on Falluja on May 23, with air support from the U.S.-led coalition. The United Nations has said up to 90,000 people are trapped in the city with little food or water.
Repeated phone calls to three spokesmen of the Popular Mobilisation Forces were not answered. Last week, one of them, Kareem Nuri, said past accusations of human rights violations were “politically motivated and baseless”.
(Additional reporting by Ahmed Rasheed and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Maher Chmaytelli; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)
Venezuela lootings, food protests leave three dead
CARACAS (Reuters) – The recent wave of lootings and food riots in crisis-hit Venezuela has left three people dead in the last week, authorities and a rights group said.
The state prosecutor’s office is investigating the deaths of a 21-year-old man in eastern Sucre state on Saturday, another 21-year-old man in the Caracas slum of Petare on Thursday, and a 42-year-old woman in the western state of Tachira last Monday.
All three suffered gunshot wounds during chaotic scenes outside supermarkets, which have become a flashpoint for violence and looting amid scarcities of basics across the South American OPEC member country, according to local rights group Provea.
A policeman has been arrested over the Tachira death.
With basics such as flour and rice running short, crowds chanting “We want food!” are thronging supermarkets daily, presenting a major problem for the struggling leftist government of President Nicolas Maduro.
More than 10 incidents of looting are occurring daily, according to the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, a local monitoring group.
Venezuela’s political opposition is pursuing a recall referendum in an effort to remove the socialist Maduro from office.
Maduro, 53, won election to succeed Hugo Chavez in 2013. The government accuses its opponents of deliberately stirring up trouble and seeking a coup.
(Reporting by Sarah Dagher and Girish Gupta; editing by Andrew Cawthorne, G Crosse)
U.N. Human Rights Chief urges alternatives for migrants
GENEVA (Reuters) – The U.N. human rights chief on Monday decried a “worrying rise” in detentions of migrants in Greece and Italy and urged authorities to find alternatives to confining children while asylum requests are processed.
More than one million migrants, many fleeing Syria’s war, have arrived in Europe through Greece since last year. More than 150,000 have come in 2016 so far – 38 percent of them children, according to United Nations refugee agency data. Italy has also set up mandatory detention centers.
“Even unaccompanied children are frequently placed in prison cells or centers ringed with barbed wire. Detention is never in the best interests of the child – which must take primacy over immigration objectives,” Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said in a speech to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.
“Alternatives to the detention of children must be developed,” he told the start of a three-week council session.
Zeid said it was possible for Europe to create “well-functioning migration governance systems”, with fair assessment of individual requests for international protection while removing what he called “hysteria and panic from the equation”.
Zeid deplored anti-migrant rhetoric “spanning the length and breadth of the European continent … This fosters a climate of divisiveness, xenophobia and even – as in Bulgaria – vigilante violence”.
In April, Bulgarian police arrested a local man who had posted video on social media showing how he tied up three migrants near the Turkish border.
The migrant influx has drawn a rising public backlash, in part because of strains it has imposed on housing and social services. Concerns have also been raised in some EU countries about their ability to integrate many mostly Muslim migrants.
(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Tom Miles/Mark Heinrich)
U.N. sounds alarm about Falluja children, food supply
BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Thousands of children are facing extreme violence in Falluja, which the Iraqi army is trying to retake from Islamic State, and food stocks in the besieged city are dwindling, the United Nations warned on Wednesday.
At least 20,000 children remain inside the Islamic State’s stronghold near Baghdad and face the risk of forced recruitment into fighting and separation from their families, the United Nations’ children’s agency UNICEF said.
The World Food Program, in a separate statement, said the humanitarian situation was worsening as family food stocks were running down, pushing up prices to a level few can afford.
“We are concerned over the protection of children in the face of extreme violence,” UNICEF Representative in Iraq Peter Hawkins said in a statement.
“Children face the risk of forced recruitment into the fighting” inside the besieged city, and “separation from their families” if they manage to leave, he added.
Backed by Shi’ite militias and air strikes from the U.S.-led coalition, the Iraqi armed forces launched an offensive on May 23 to recapture the city, 50 kms (32 miles) west of Baghdad. [nL8N18S1HF]
The assault on Falluja, the first Iraqi city to fall under control of the ultra-hardline Sunni militants in January 2014, is expected to be one of the biggest battles fought against Islamic State.
About 50,000 civilians remain there, according to the U.N.
Iraqi security forces operating in Falluja systematically separate men and boys over 12 from their families to check possible links with Islamic State.
“UNICEF calls on all parties to protect children inside Falluja, provide safe passage to those wishing to leave the city and grant safe and secure environment to civilians who fled Falluja,” Hawkins said.
The WFP statement said the city was inaccessible for assistance and market distribution systems remained offline.
“The only food available does not come from the markets, but from the stocks that some families still have in their homes,” it added.
(Reporting by Maher Chmaytelli; Editing by Michael Perry and Richard Balmforth)
Egypt Muslims attack Christian woman, burn houses after affair rumor
CAIRO (Reuters) – Hundreds of Muslims have set fire to homes of Christians in southern Egypt and stripped a 70-year-old woman naked after rumors her Christian son had an affair with a Muslim woman, the local church and witnesses said.
The Christian man fled with his wife and children on May 19, said Ishak Ibrahim at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. His parents went to the police, fearing for their lives.
The next day, around 300 Muslim men set fire to and looted their house in the southern province of Minya and stripped the mother naked out on the street. They also set fire to and looted six other houses, eyewitnesses told Reuters.
“They burned the house and went in and dragged me out, threw me in front of the house and ripped my clothes. I was just as my mother gave birth to me and was screaming and crying,” the woman, who requested anonymity, told Reuters.
President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi condemned the attack in a statement on Thursday and ordered authorities to bring those behind it to justice. He also ordered local authorities and the military to rebuild all damaged properties within a month at state expense.
Coptic Orthodox Pope Tawadros II called for calm and restraint in a statement on Thursday. He said he was pursuing the matter with Egyptian officials and that he had spoken to the woman and all those whose homes were attacked.
The woman accuses three Muslim men of stripping her and dragging her in front of her house, her lawyer Ehab Ramzi told Reuters.
Security sources said police arrested five men in connection with the incident and the public prosecutor had ordered their detention and the arrest of 18 others.
Ten members of parliament put forward a motion to cross-examine Interior Minister Magdi Abdel Ghaffar over the incident.
Orthodox Copts, who make up about 10 percent of Egypt’s 90 million people, are the Middle East’s biggest Christian community. They have long complained of discrimination under successive Egyptian leaders.
(Reporting by Mohamed Abdellah and Ahmed Aboulenein; Additional reporting by Ali Abdelaty; Writing by Ahmed Aboulenein; Editing by Tom Heneghan)