News, Prophecy and other

[Shammu]

You're right about that Brother, I pray more people will come to their senses and receive Jesus as Lord of their lives, while there is yet time. Tomorrow may never come for many, and if the Lord comes before tomorrow, those left behind will really suffer.

Thats one of the reasons for my websites in my sigline sister. You have read them, you know what the lost are going to be up against.

[Soldier4Christ]

Iran Elected Deputy On The UN Commission of Disarmament:


Here is some absolute insane irony at the U.N. found thanks to Gateway Pundit.

    On Tuesday, the same day that Iran surprised the world that they may have successfully enriched enriched uranium to 3.5%, they were elected Deputy on the UN Commission of Disarmament:

    United Nations Commission on Disarmament on Tuesday elected Iran as deputy for Asian nations.

    The UN Commission opened its annual meeting on Monday which will work until April 28.

    The UN Commission on Disarmament which is subsidiary organ of the General Assembly will review disarmament and international security.
    In their first day of meetings the Commission pressed nuclear states to demolish their nuclear arms and:

    They also called on Israel to sign up to NPT and give access to all its nuclear sites for monitoring by UN nuclear agency.

And this the organization the left have faith in to resolve our dilema in a diplomatic fashion. Insanity!

[Soldier4Christ]

Dhimmicrats Attempt To Reframe Debate On Iran

Bill Scher at the Huffington Post makes a feeble attempt to reframe the debate on Iran.

    So far, the neoconservatives have done a good job of re-running their Iraq playbook and framing discussion on Iran, by laying out these premises:
    1. Iran is close to getting nukes.
    2. Iran’s President is crazy and irrational and committed to wiping Israel off the map. He can’t be reasoned with.
    3. Bush is trying real super hard to get the UN to do something about it, but if they won’t…

    If we are to have any hope of preventing a senseless war with Iran, we cannot accept this frame. If all of the above points are reported as fact and accepted by Americans across the ideological spectrum, anti-war arguments will be seen as knee-jerk, immature and reckless, and not get a fair hearing. In turn, Democrats in Congress will get steamrolled again.

    How can we reframe the discussion? Our arguments should flow from the following framework:

    1. Iran presently has a strong, rational incentive to get nukes. …
    2. Iran has acted rationally and can be reasoned with. …
    3. There is plenty of time to negotiate. …

I’m not even going to try picking this moonbat garbage apart, when Cox and Forkum and Dan Riehl have already done such an excellent job. Of course their main point is that we can’t trust Bush. If he says the sky is blue, then it must be black. I just wanted to note how ridiculous there number 2 point is. Iran has acted rationally? When did this happen? Is it within the frame of the left to consider statements like, “Israel should be wiped off the face of the map”, and absolute refusal to listen to the international community as reasonable? Here is more of Iran’s “reasonable” actions.

    “You must bow down to the greatness of the Iranian nation”, he said, addressing the West.

    He added that if the United States continued to seek to use “bullying” tactics then “every nation of the world” would chant “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”.

The liberal moonbats with their pre-emptive anti-war attempts are laughable. Are they getting their talking points from Cindy Sheehan? Maybe we should start calling these moonbats Dhimmicrats.

[Shammu]

They also called on Israel to sign up to NPT and give access to all its nuclear sites for monitoring by UN nuclear agency.

And this the organization the left have faith in to resolve our dilema in a diplomatic fashion. Insanity!

Yes brother, the world is shaping up nicly for Jesus's call to us! We are seeing the Bible Prophecies in action! AMEN!!

[Shammu]

He added that if the United States continued to seek to use “bullying” tactics then “every nation of the world” would chant “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”.

As if they aren't chanting that already brother.

[Shammu]

As if they aren't chanting that already brother.

Hizbullah Leader Hassan Nasrallah: Death to America

The following are excerpts from two speeches by Hizbullah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah. Al-Manar TV aired these speeches on February 18 and 19:

Hassan Nasrallah: Israel is our enemy. This is an aggressive, illegal, and illegitimate entity, which has no future in our land. Its destiny is manifested in our motto: "Death to Israel."

Crowd:Death to Israel

Death to Israel

Death to Israel

Death to Israel

Death to Israel

Hassan Nasrallah: The American administration is behind Israel. I must clarify that when I say 'America' I do not mean the American people, most of whom are distant and ignorant of what is going on in the world, and of what its government and army are doing in the world. Nevertheless, we consider the current administration an enemy of our [Islamic] nation and of the peoples of our nation, because it has always taken a position of aggression, of occupation, and of supporting Israel with weapons, airplanes, tanks, money, as well as political support, and unlimited protection.

We consider it to be an enemy because it wants to humiliate our governments, our regimes, and our peoples. Because it is the greatest plunderer of our treasures, our oil, and our resources, while millions in our nation suffer unemployment, poverty, hunger, unmarriageability, ignorance, darkness, and so on. America… This American administration is an enemy. Our motto, which we are not afraid to repeat year after year, is: "Death to America."

Crowd: Death to America

Death to America

Death to America

Death to America

Death to America

Death to America

Hassan Nasrallah: Some people may wonder and say: "Is there no end to this hostility?" Yes, there is an an end. If the Zionists leave our lands and holy places and give them back to their owners, this conflict will come to an end. If America stops interfering in our countries' and nation's affairs, stops its aggression, stops its occupation, stops its plundering of our resources and treasures, we will have no problem with it. We don't want to go to Washington to fight America. We are defending our countries and our existence.

Any rift, civil strife, disintegration, or dispersion in any Arab or Islamic country, or in the entire nation, serves our Zionist enemy and its plan of hegemony, and serves the Great Satan – the American administration, whose main concern is to control our oil, our treasures, our resources, and our markets. [They want us] to become millions of slaves who eat and drink but are living dead, devoid of honor, respect, and existence.
--

Hassan Nasrallah: How can death become joyous? How can death become happiness? When Al-Hussein asked his nephew Al-Qassem, when he had not yet reached puberty: "How do you like the taste of death, son?" He answered that it was sweeter than honey. How can the foul taste of death become sweeter than honey? Only through conviction, ideology, and faith, through belief, and devotion. We do not want to live merely in order to eat, drink, and enjoy life's pleasures, and leave our homeland to Israel so it will slaughter it upon the altar of its aspirations, desires, hate, and historic vendettas. Therefore, we are not interested in our own personal security. On the contrary, each of us lives his days and nights hoping more than anything to be killed for the sake of Allah. The most honorable death is to be killed, as the Leader Imam Al-Khamenei said when 'Abbas [Musawi] was martyred. He said: "Congratulations to 'Abbas, congratulations to 'Abbas." The most honorable death is death by killing, and the most honorable killing and the most glorious martyrdom is when a man is killed for the sake of Allah, by the enemies of Allah, the murderers of the prophets [i.e. the Jews].

Hizbullah Leader Hassan Nasrallah: Death to America

[Soldier4Christ]

Ahmadinejad to U.S.: West Must Bow Down To Iranian Greatness


In what some are calling the Iranian Missle Crisis, in which some reports are saying that they could produce a nuclear bomb within 16 days, and others saying they are a good ten years away, there is one thing that everyone wants; diplomacy to work.

The left are scared to death we will rush to war with Iran without giving diplomacy its full course. They are freaked out that we actually have contingency plans if it fails, while folks with common sense know that it would be quite stupid if we didn’t have those plans ready to go. Regardless, the Whitehouse hopes that engaging Iran with words will be the solution to the problem. We all hope that.

If diplomacy is going to work, we need the International community, not just Condi Rice, to stand up and make a strong statement with some real consequences attached to it. So far, Iran has ignored every effort to solve this diplomatically, and I hate to be a pessimist, but I don’t see it changing any time soon.

So while we are discussing how to peacefully discuss things in a diplomatic fashion on this serious issue, and the left are scared about a plan B in case this fails, lets take a look at one reason we need a plan B. Lets take a look at one huge reason, that diplomacy could possibly fail with Iran, and how dangerous it would be if we didn’t have a plan for military action….you know, just in case?

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is “not a rational human being!” Rove nails it here.

    We are engaged in a diplomatic process with our European partners and the United Nations to keep them from developing such a weapon,” Karl Rove, deputy White House chief of staff, told an audience of business people at the Houston Forum.

    “It’s going to be difficult. It’s going to be tough because they are led by ideologues who have a weird sense of history,” he said.

    Rove said his characterization of Ahmadinejad was based on statements the Iranian president made after speaking to the United Nations.

    “Ahmadinejad spoke to the United Nations and afterwards was quoted as saying that for the 23 minutes that he spoke, there was a halo around his head that transfixed the audience and caused them to be completely focused on his message,” he said.

Or how about this..

    Iran’s radical President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a fiery sermon demanded that “Iran’s enemies”, or the West, bow down before Iran and apologize for having held back Tehran’s nuclear program for three years. He also warned the West that it would “burn” in the “fire of the nations’ fury”.
    “Those who insulted the Iranian nation and set back Iran’s movement for progress for several years must apologise”, Ahmadinejad said at a rally in the eastern town of Rashtkhar. His comments were aired on state television and carried by the official news agency.

    “You must bow down to the greatness of the Iranian nation”, he said, addressing the West.

    He added that if the United States continued to seek to use “bullying” tactics then “every nation of the world” would chant “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”.

    “If you do not return to monotheism and worshipping god and refuse to accept justice then you will burn in the fire of the nations’ fury”, Ahmadinejad said.

Thats what Iran really wants. Hmmm..lets take a look at some more of the “rational” things this nut has to say.

    Ahmadinejad drew international condemnation for saying the Holocaust was a myth. He also said Israel should be wiped from the map.

He also thinks he is ushering in the Muslim’s apocalypse. Is this the kind of person that we can truly put all our hopes into diplomacy for? Seriously! Wake up! We all hope diplomacy works, its just that some of us don’t have that much faith in the U.N., much less an insane dictator with a messiah complex.

[Shammu]

Ahmadinejad to U.S.: West Must Bow Down To Iranian Greatness

Some how, I don't think so. Theres only One that I will bow down to, for only He is worthy.

“Ahmadinejad spoke to the United Nations and afterwards was quoted as saying that for the 23 minutes that he spoke, there was a halo around his head that transfixed the audience and caused them to be completely focused on his message,”

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.............

That almost sounds like the anti-christ.

Daniel 7:7 After this I saw in the night visions, and behold, a fourth beast [the Roman empire]--terrible, powerful and dreadful, and exceedingly strong. And it had great iron teeth; it devoured and crushed and trampled what was left with its feet. And it was different from all the beasts that came before it, and it had ten horns [symbolizing ten kings].

Revelation 11:7 But when they have finished their testimony and their evidence is all in, the beast (monster) that comes up out of the Abyss (bottomless pit) will wage war on them, and conquer them and kill them.

Most Importantly!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Revelation 13:5 And the beast was given the power of speech, uttering boastful and blasphemous words, and he was given freedom to exert his authority and to exercise his will during forty-two months (three and a half years).

[Soldier4Christ]

I thought so too brother. If not "The" antichrist he certainly is an antichrist.

[Shammu]

I thought so too brother. If not "The" antichrist he certainly is an antichrist.

AMEN brother, that was my thinking back when Ahmadinejad called for extermating Israel. But I could say that yet, if you know what I mean.

[Shammu]

Europe's Abandonment of Christianity May Spell Disaster
Ed Vitagliano
AgapePress

(AgapePress) - Anyone know where we can find some Etruscans? You know, members of the Etruscan civilization that existed in ancient Italy, predating even Rome?

Well, there aren't any. The Etruscans were absorbed by the Roman civilization and ceased to exist as a distinct people.

Ominously, if a growing number of experts and cultural observers are right, it's entirely possible that the same question may be asked 100 years from now -- only about Italians or Spaniards or Russians.

As writer Mark Steyn glumly put it in The New Criterion, "Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries."

A Birth Dearth
What could possibly cause such a cataclysm? Another world war? A nuclear confrontation? The devastation of a plague, similar to that caused by the Black Death in the 14th century? Nothing quite so dramatic, say the experts. Rather, Europe is slowly dying simply by refusing to have enough children to replace the people who die each year.

Catholic scholar George Weigel, a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of The Cube and The Cathedral, says Europe is "committing demographic suicide, systematically depopulating itself."

For any population to remain stable, it must maintain a birthrate of 2.1 births per woman. That rate provides a replacement for both mother and father, while the .1 covers infant and child mortality. When the birthrate falls below that number, a population goes into decline -- unless it invites in large numbers of immigrants.

"The 'birth dearth' is what demographers call plummeting birth rates in most of the industrialized world," says culture critic Chuck Colson. "Throughout Western Europe and East Asia, the birth rate is well below 2.1 births per woman..."

Sociologist Ben Wattenberg, author of Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future, puts this birth dearth in historical perspective. "Never in the last 650 years, since the time of the Black Plague, have birth and fertility rates fallen so far, so fast, so low, for so long, in so many places."

According to U.N. figures and other projections, Patrick Buchanan states in The Death of the West that by 2050 Europe (from Iceland to Russia) will see its population drop from 728 million (in 2000) to 600 million -- and perhaps 556 million. And if current trends continue, by the end of the century Europe's population will stand at 207 million.

Collapse of Family Values
Why has this happened? As it turns out, a variety of factors and trends have combined to create, as it were, the "perfect storm."

World magazine's Gene Edward Veith sums it up this way: "Why the population decline? The worldwide collapse of what are, literally, family values. Thanks to contraceptive technology, sex has become separated from childbearing. With women pursuing careers of their own and men getting sex without the responsibility of marriage, why bother with children? For many women and men, pregnancy has become an unpleasant side effect, something to prevent with contraceptives or easily treated with a trip to the abortion clinic."

Abortion comes in for particular blame in Veith's view. "The dirty little secret of the population implosion, one seldom mentioned by demographers, is that the world is aborting its future generations," he says.

Pro-family groups in the U.S., for example, rightly bemoan the abortion rate here, where Veith says one-third to one-fifth of all pregnancies end in abortion. Some European nations are far worse, however. "In Russia, the average woman may have as many as four abortions in her lifetime," he says. "There are two abortions for every live birth. That is to say, Russians kill two-thirds of their children before they are born."

All this is symptomatic of a pervasive hedonism that permeates the West, "a complete philosophy of pleasure," according to Allan Carlson, president of The Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society.

"Everywhere in the European Community and Anglo-America, real attention focuses on the consumption of food (alternately rich and fat-free), frequent sex, and raucous fun," Carlson says. "Relatively few are pestered these days by children. Fertile young adults rely on mechanical devices and chemical agents to thwart the designs of nature. In places as culturally different as Spain, Italy, Denmark and Germany, the sexual experimentation starts early, but hardly anyone brings forth a child."

Despite efforts on the part of some European nations to increase the desire of adults to have children -- such as tax breaks or cash incentives -- some experts think the pursuit of personal fulfillment will triumph.

Joseph Chamie, director of the U.N. Population Division, says, "No demographers believe birth rates will rebound. How much will it take to convince a woman to have four children? People are concerned about their appearances, their education, their careers."

What's ironic, however, is that this pursuit of personal pleasure and personal wealth may result in economic ruin.

"When it comes to forecasting the future, the birthrate is the nearest thing to hard numbers," Steyn argues. "If only a million babies are born in 2006, it's hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2026..."

Veith lists but a few of the ramifications of population decline. "Citizens are not just consumers but producers," he says. "Having fewer people can wreak havoc on an economy, creating both a labor shortage and a shortage of buyers. A government with a shrinking population faces a smaller military and fewer taxpayers. Dwindling populations have always signaled cultural decline, with less creativity, energy, and vitality on every level of society."

Abandoning Christianity
These explanations do not go far enough to suit culture critic and columnist Don Feder, who sees Europe's abandonment of its Christian heritage as the true root cause of its population problems.

"It's no coincidence that central to the new Europe ... is a refusal to acknowledge the continent's origins," says Feder, who is Jewish. "The proposed constitution for the European Union (a document of over 70,000 words) contains not a single reference to Christianity. Thus more than a millennium of European history is effectively erased."

The abandonment of Christianity in most European countries has been well-documented. For example, author and journalist James P. Gannon says that in five key European countries -- France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy -- over the last 30 years regular church attendance has fallen from roughly 40% of the population to about 20%." As Weigel says, Western Europe has become a "post-Christian society."

Feder believes there is a clear link between a lack of faith and the loss of that sense of duty to the future that leads people to conceive and bear children. "Having lost their faith and embraced an ethic of radical autonomy," he says, "Europeans stopped going to church, stopped taking the Bible seriously, stopped believing in the future and stopped having children."

Maria Burani, president of the Parliamentary Commission for the Family and Infancy in Rome, told Citizen magazine that faith is a foundation for the kind of lifestyle that parenting requires. "If you don't have inside your head great religious and ethical principles," she insists, "you're just not going to want to go and have these kids because it's a sacrifice."

Beyond that, of course, is the fact that religious principles also restrain the often selfish behavior that grows out of the "radical autonomy" that permeates Europe. "Among the consequences of Europe's abandonment of its religious roots and the moral code that derives therefrom is a plunge in its birth rates to below the replacement level," says Gannon. "Abortion, birth control, acceptance of gay marriage and casual sex are driving the trend."

Islamification of Europe
However, the prognosis for Europe gets even worse because many of the nations there have chosen a risky path for making up for their population shortfalls: immigration. Because North Africa and the Middle East represent a relatively convenient source of cheap labor, millions of Muslim immigrants have been flooding the continent for a half century.

"Western Europe has gone from a Muslim population of 250,000, 50 years ago, to 20 million today," says Feder.

Unlike Westerners, however, Muslims typically have large families. According to Robert S. Leiken, director of the Immigration and National Security Program at the Nixon Center, higher Muslim birthrates combined with Muslim immigration have led the U.S. National Intelligence Council to project that Europe's Muslim population will double by 2025.

Cont'd next post

[Shammu]

As a result, Colson says flatly, "[d]emographics may bring about what the Moors and Ottoman Empire couldn't: a Muslim Europe."

But so what? Isn't such hand-wringing about Muslim immigrants nothing more than utter bigotry?

Hardly, say concerned Westerners. The Islamification of Europe would bring incredible cultural changes to Europe. "In 50 to 100 years, the Europe of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, the Europe of Rembrandt and Bach, the Europe of Churchill and Karol Wojtyla will exist only in textbooks and museums," Feder says. "Or, perhaps the remnants of Christian Europe will be subjected to the fate of Afghanistan's Buddhist statues, demolished by the Taliban regime."

Political changes would also be inevitable, Steyn insists. "Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?"

It is a rhetorical question, of course, and Steyn predicts that by 2050 many European nations will be forced to apply Sharia -- Muslim law -- to Muslim communities. He notes the results of a 2004 poll that found that over 60 percent of British Muslims want to live under Muslim law -- while living in the United Kingdom.

At first, most European governments would probably resist the demands of an increasingly assertive Muslim population. But in response, it would not be surprising to see an escalation of what has already begun to transpire: terrorist bombings in London and Madrid; the 2002 assassination of conservative Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, who campaigned on a platform of limiting Muslim immigration; the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004 for allegedly insulting Islam; rioting by Muslim youths throughout France in 2005; and rioting this year in response to political cartoons that were deemed offensive to Muslim sensibilities.

Steyn thinks Europe will see more such unrest -- and soon. "It seems more likely that within the next couple of European election cycles, the internal contradictions of the [European Union] will manifest themselves in the usual way," he says, "and that by 2010 we'll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on American network news every night."

In any case, Carlson says, "the Great Party [of Western hedonism] will not last much longer. There is an iron law in history: the future belongs to the fertile. Just as the clan-centered, child-rich barbarian tribes of the Germans swept away the sensuous and sterile Western Roman Empire, so shall new barbarians arise."

Scripture teaches that God rules over the nations, and the future of Europe looks increasingly like that of Israel when its prophets warned of impending chastisement and judgment. Are we on the brink of God's chastisement of Europe, even after a century of wars and other atrocities failed to bring the continent back to Christianity?

How ironic it would be that a European culture that demanded unlimited personal freedom might wind up living under the repressive heel of Muslim totalitarianism. Or that a culture that rejected its Christian heritage might, instead, be subjected to Islamic fundamentalism.

Cultures have disappeared before. Just ask the Etruscans. If you can find one.

I can't post the link because of advertisment.

[Shammu]

Iran issues stark military warning to United States
Apr 15 4:42 AM US/Eastern
Email this story    

Iran said it could defeat any American military action over its controversial nuclear drive, in one of the Islamic regime's boldest challenges yet to the United States.

"You can start a war but it won't be you who finishes it," said General Yahya Rahim Safavi, the head of the Revolutionary Guards and among the regime's most powerful figures.

"The Americans know better than anyone that their troops in the region and in Iraq are vulnerable. I would advise them not to commit such a strategic error," he told reporters on the sidelines of a pro-Palestinian conference in Tehran.

The United States accuses Iran of using an atomic energy drive as a mask for weapons development. Last weekend US news reports said President George W. Bush's administration was refining plans for preventive strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities.

"I would advise them to first get out of their quagmire in Iraq before getting into an even bigger one," General Safavi said with a grin.

"We have American forces in the region under total surveillance. For the past two years, we have been ready for any scenario, whether sanctions or an attack."

Iran announced this week it had successfully enriched uranium to make nuclear fuel, despite a UN Security Council demand for the sensitive work to be halted by April 28.

The Islamic regime says it only wants to generate atomic energy, but enrichment can be extended to make the fissile core of a nuclear warhead -- something the United States is convinced that "axis of evil" member Iran wants to acquire.

At a Friday prayer sermon in Tehran, senior cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Janati simply branded the US as a "decaying power" lacking the "stamina" to block Iran's ambitions.

And hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told AFP that a US push for tough United Nations sanctions was of "no importance."

"She is free to say whatever she wants," the president replied when asked to respond to comments by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice highlighting part of the UN charter that provides for sanctions backed up by the threat of military action.

"We give no importance to her comments," he said with a broad smile.

On Thursday, Rice said that faced with Iran's intransigence, the United States "will look at the full range of options available to the United Nations."

"There is no doubt that Iran continues to defy the will of the international community," Rice said, after Iran also dismissed a personal appeal from the UN atomic watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief must give a report at the end of April on Iranian compliance with the Security Council demand. In Tehran he said that after three years of investigations Iran's activities were "still hazy and not very clear."

Although the United States has been prodding the council to take a tough stand against the Islamic republic, including possible sanctions, it has run into opposition from veto-wielding members Russia and China.

Representatives of the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany are to meet in Moscow Tuesday to discuss the crisis.

In seeking to deter international action, Iran has been playing up its oil wealth, its military might in strategic Gulf waters and its influence across the region -- such as in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.

At the Tehran conference, Iran continued to thumb its nose at the United States and Israel.

"The Zionist regime is an injustice and by its very nature a permanent threat," Ahmadinejad told the gathering of regime officials, visiting Palestinian militant leaders and foreign sympathizers.

"Whether you like it or not, the Zionist regime is on the road to being eliminated," said Ahmadinejad, whose regime does not recognise Israel and who drew international condemnation last year when he said Israel should be "wiped off the map."

Unfazed by his critics, the hardliner went on to repeat his controversial stance on the Holocaust.

"If there is serious doubt over the Holocaust, there is no doubt over the catastrophe and Holocaust being faced by the Palestinians," said the president, who had previously dismissed as a "myth" the killing of an estimated six million Jews by the Nazis and their allies during World War II.

"I tell the governments who support Zionism to ... let the migrants (Jews) return to their countries of origin. If you think you owe them something, give them some of your land," he said.

Iran's turbaned supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, also accused the United States of seeking to place the entire region under Israeli control.

"The plots by the American government against Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon aimed at governing the Middle East with the control of the Zionist regime will not succeed," Khamenei said.

There was no immediate reaction from Washington, but French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy severely condemned Ahmadinejad for his latest remarks on Israel.

"As I have had occasion to do before, when the Iranian president made similar statements, I condemn these inacceptable remarks in the strongest possible terms," Douste-Blazy said in a statement.

"Israel's right to exist and the reality of the Holocaust should not be disputed," he added.

Iran issues stark military warning to United States

[Shammu]

Peres says Iran's president to end up like Saddam
Sat Apr 15, 2006 10:10am ET

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli veteran statesman Shimon Peres, responding to the latest verbal attack on the Jewish state by Iran's president, said on Saturday that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would end up like Iraq's Saddam Hussein.

In a speech to a conference on the Palestinian issue on Friday, Ahmadinejad said: "The Zionist regime is a decaying and crumbling tree that will fall with a storm."

Peres, in a statement quoted by Israel Radio, called Ahmadinejad's comments a direct threat to Israel's existence.

"His statements are reminiscent of those voiced by Saddam Hussein. Ahmadinejad will end up like Saddam Hussein," he said, referring to the Iraqi leader ousted by a U.S. invasion in 2003 and on trial for the killings of 148 Shi'ites two decades ago.

"Ahmadinejad represents Satan, not God," Peres said. "History has denounced the madmen and those who waved the sword."

Peres, a former prime minister, is a senior member of acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's centrist Kadima party. He is expected to hold a top cabinet post in the government Olmert is forming, following Israel's March 28 election.

Last year, Ahmadinejad was quoted by Iran's official IRNA news agency as telling a conference that Israel must be wiped off the map.

Ahmadinejad has repeatedly questioned the veracity of the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were killed by Nazi Germany. In December he described it as a myth.

On Friday, he said: "Are the consequences of the establishment of this (Israeli) regime less than the Holocaust which you (the West) are claiming? If there are doubts regarding the Holocaust, there is really no doubt regarding the Palestinian disaster and holocaust."

Ahmadinejad, a religiously conservative former member of the hardline Revolutionary Guards, came to power last year. He has toughened government policies, including on nuclear issues.

On Tuesday, Ahmadinejad declared that Iran had enriched uranium to a level used in power stations and wanted to pursue industrial-scale production. He said the achievement meant the world should now consider Iran a nuclear power.

The West believes the move is part of Iranian efforts to develop nuclear bombs, a charge Iran denies.

Giora Eiland, head of Israel's National Security Council that reports to the government, said despite Ahmadinejad's declaration, it was not too late for international diplomacy to try to head off production of an Iranian atomic bomb.

"It's true they (the Iranians) have taken a certain step up in capability, and have created a research and development capability in uranium enrichment," Eiland told Israel Radio.

"But there's a technological and time gap between this stage ... and the ability to manufacture a real (nuclear) arsenal," he said, without giving a timeframe.

Peres says Iran's president to end up like Saddam

[Shammu]

Fear Prevails after Priest's Murder

By Annette Grossbongardt

Christians are a vanishing minority in predominately Muslim Turkey. The murder of a priest in February shows that the situation has become precarious -- both for Catholics and for Turkey's EU bid.

Father Pierre Brunissen is deeply immersed in thought as he bumps along in the night bus along the Black Sea coast from Samsun to Trabzon in northern Turkey. There is, on this trip, little for the priest to be happy about. He is hurrying to a Christian congregation in Trabzon -- a city of 250,000 Muslims -- which boasts barely a dozen members. And he is needed because the former priest in Trabzon, Father Andrea Santoro, was murdered in his church.

It's a church which is now casting about for a caretaker. In the vicarage, which gives off a distinct air of neglect, a small plastic tree left over from Christmas gathers dust in the visiting room. Because no one volunteered to replace the murdered priest, the 75-year-old Father Pierre was instructed to travel the 250 kilometers by bus from Samsun to Trabzon once a month to look after things in the city's tiny congregation.

The Catholic Santa Maria Church was founded by Capuchin monks 150 years ago. Santoro had the church restored, and now colorful ornaments and images of the saints once again grace the building's walls and ceilings. But in early February, Santoro was shot dead by two gunshots while he was praying in the last pew of the church. The first shot penetrated his lung and the second went straight to his heart. In the dark wood of the pew, a splintered mark made by one of the bullets can still be seen. On this day, Father Pierre will celebrate the first mass in the church since Santoro's murder, but the church bells remain silent -- there is nobody there to ring them.

Christians are a tiny, tolerated minority in Turkey, a country which is 99 percent Muslim, and the Catholic priest is wary of being too conspicuous. He even advises the members of his congregation in Samsun not to wear any visible symbols of their faith, such as a cross dangling on the outside of a blouse or shirt.

"Murdered priests aren't good for Trabzon"

"We have nothing against Christians," says Volkan Canalioglu, the mayor of Trabzon. "On the contrary, we respect other religions; after all, Turkey is home to many cultures." A giant Turkish flag hangs in his office, and he is a member of the Republican People's Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi or CHP) founded by Kemal Atatürk, which promotes the secular legacy of the founder of the modern Turkish state. "You will find no one in Trabzon who approves of this horrible deed."

The vice president of the local soccer team, Trabzonspor, is also upset about the incident. "We were playing a match in Ankara when the murder happened. We won the match, but we couldn't really enjoy our victory," says Hasim Sayitoglu. "Headlines about murdered priests aren't good for Trabzon or for us." Sayitoglu grew up not far from the Santa Maria Church, although he says he doesn't know a single Christian.

Trabzon, an ancient trading city that now hopes to develop a thriving local tourist industry, places little value on its Byzantine heritage. There are many churches and monasteries dating from centuries of Byzantine Christian rule, although most have since been converted into mosques. During the great population exchange between Turkey and Greece in 1923, almost 1.5 million Orthodox Christians were expelled from Asia Minor and replaced by 356,000 Muslims from Greece. As a result of the mass murder and expulsion of the Armenians in World War I, the country had already lost almost a million Christians. The result was an almost entirely Muslim state.

Turkey is still home to about 100,000 Christians. Their status is one of the barometers being used to determine Turkey's suitability for European Union membership, making the murder of Father Santoro especially inconvenient for the administration in Ankara, which is rooted in Islam but is doing its utmost to portray Turkey as tolerant and liberal-minded. "The gunshots were not just aimed at Santoro, but also at the atmosphere of stability Turkey enjoys today," says Interior Minister Abdülkadir Aksu. Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül describes the murder as an "isolated case."

But isolated cases have been on the rise in Turkey.

Churches have few rights

Recently a young man attacked a monk and a priest with a kebab knife in a Catholic monastery in Mersin, a small city on the Mediterranean. "We are no longer safe here," says the Vicar Apostolic for Anatolia, Luigi Padovese. "Until now, Mersin was one of our most peaceful congregations." Nowadays, the bishop never travels without bodyguards, a precaution the interior ministry has practically forced him to accept.

Shortly after the murder in Trabzon, nationalist youth attacked a Catholic priest in Izmir. They grabbed him by the neck and shouted: "We will kill you!" and "Allahu akbar! God is great!" The priest barely made it to safety. After the incident, police officers were routinely posted in front of the church in Izmir, a measure that had already been taken in other cities.

Turkey's Christian minorities had hoped that reforms introduced by the administration of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan -- as part of its effort to gain EU membership -- would not just lead to a few improvements, but to complete religious freedom. Although Christians are permitted to practice their faith freely, in many cases their churches have practically no rights and often have no claim to the property they stand on.

When Bishop Padovese requested work permits for two church employees in Trabzon, the interior ministry denied his request, arguing that because a Catholic Church doesn't exist in Turkey, it cannot file requests. "That's the paradox," says Padovese, "We are here, but legally we don't exist." It was not until recently that pastors, who were previously registered as consular employees, have been allowed to register as members of their own profession.

"The basic level of anti-Christian sentiment has increased," says Felix Körner, a German Jesuit whom the Vatican sent to Ankara to encourage a Christian-Islamic dialogue. Turkey's efforts to enter the EU have triggered nationalist counter-reactions, says Körner. "Even in educated circles, people are saying that Turkish unity and national sovereignty are in danger."

Risking physical attack

Conspiracy theories have likewise been making the rounds in Turkey for some time, producing a climate in which Christians distributing the New Testament risk being physically attacked. In a sermon against missionaries it distributed last year, the state religious authority rails against what it calls "modern crusades," claiming that their goal is to "turn our young people away from the Islamic faith."

Cont'd next post