Iraq: ... Shi'ite, ... What A Mess!

Didn't See This Coming! ... Turns Out That The Shi'ite Majority in Iraq Really Don't Want No Damned Sunni's In Their Government! ... Go Figure!

Iraq issues arrest warrant for Sunni vice president

BAGHDAD, Dec 19 (Trust.Org) - 

Iraqi authorities have issued an arrest warrant for Sunni Muslim Vice-President Tareq al-Hashemi on suspected links to terrorism after the government said it obtained confessions from his bodyguards, an interior ministry spokesman said on Monday.

The warrant risks fuelling sectarian tensions in Iraq following the withdrawal of the last American troops almost nine years after the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein. It also puts the country's fragile power-sharing agreement at risk.

Interior Ministry spokesman, Major General Adel Daham, told a news conference confessions by suspects identified as Hashemi's bodyguards, linked the vice president to killings and attacks of several Iraqi government and security officials.

"An arrest warrant has been issued for Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi according to Article 4 of the terrorism law and is signed by five judges... this warrant should be executed," Daham said, waving a copy of what he said was the warrant in front of reporters.

The ministry showed taped confessions, aired on state-run Iraqiya television and other local media, of men it claimed were members of Hashemi's security detail. The men said they had been paid by his office to carry out killings.

The identity of the men could not be independently confirmed.

Hashemi, who could not be contacted for a response, was in Kurdistan, a semi-autonomous enclave in the north, Kurdish political sources said. Kurdistan has its own government and security forces.

Political tensions between Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and his Sunni partners in the country's delicate power-sharing deal have sharpened during the U.S. withdrawal as both parties traded accusations and counter charges.

The completion of the U.S. withdrawal on Sunday left many Iraqis fearful that a shaky peace between majority Shi'ites and Sunnis might collapse and reignite sectarian violence.

Two days earlier Maliki asked parliament for a vote of no-confidence against another leading Sunni politician, Saleh al-Mutlaq, who is deputy prime minister, on the grounds that he lacked faith in the political process.

Hashemi and Mutlaq are both leaders of the Iraqiya bloc, a secular group backed by minority Sunnis, which joined Maliki's unity government only reluctantly and recently boycotted parliament sessions after complaining of being marginalised, even though it is the single biggest bloc in the assembly. (Reporting by Rania el Gamal; writing by Patrick Markey; Editing by Serena Chaudhry/Maria Golovnina) 

Chestnuts Roasting on a Church on Fire ...

The image shown here, taken from a video posted online, is purported to
show attacks on businesses in northern Iraq following a sermon Dec. 2.
The authenticity of the video could not be verified.

The Mullahs of Northern Iraq Would Like To Take This Opportunity To Wish All Christians "Festive Felicitations For The Slaughtering  Season And To All A Very Dhimmi New Year!"

A rash of attacks on Christian-owned businesses in northern Iraq has raised troubling questions about the future safety of the country's shrinking Christian community, particularly as U.S. forces withdraw completely from the nation they've refereed since 2003. 

The attacks, which have received little international attention, raged through northern cities following a sermon last Friday by a local mullah. Video purportedly from the riots posted online shows mobs burning and wrecking businesses, which included liquor stores, hotels and hair salons. 

"The extremists prepared themselves to attack on more locations ... but they were prevented by local police and security in addition to some guards from the villages," Kanna said in an email. 

The incident underscored the perilous circumstance the country's dwindling Christian population finds itself in, as U.S. forces withdraw and the surrounding region takes what could be an Islamist turn, if early results in the Egypt elections are any gauge. 

"The Iraqi Christians ... are living in fear," said U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., who is pushing for the creation of a special religious freedom envoy in the region. "Now with the forces leaving ... I think the Iraqi Christians are going to go through a very, very difficult time." 

Fox News ... More Here!

The Vanishing Little Star of Bethlehem

Human Events

News coming out of the Middle-East in the last few months has focused on two principal areas: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the so-called “Arab Spring”. The headlines have been restricted to these two topics. Buried deep within the bodies of such prestigious papers as the New YorkTimes, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, if covered at all, are stories of the on-going destruction and persecution of millennia-old Christian communities within the cradle of Christianity: the Middle-East. The phenomenon is not exactly new; it’s been going on for decades if not centuries, but the growth and spread of Islamic fundamentalism within the last decade and the overthrow of Western-oriented Arab dictatorships has set in motion a rising tide of anti-Christian behavior that threatens to wipe out Christianity in the Middle-East in what amounts to a repetition of what has occurred to Jewish communities throughout Islamic nations within the past six decades since the creation of the Jewish State of Israel.

Five nations that demonstrate the ongoing obliteration of Christianity in the region will serve to illustrate the point: Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iran. 

We start with Egypt, a nation of eighty million with a 10 % minority population of eight million Coptic Christians. The Coptic Church is one of the world’s oldest, and its appearance in Egypt precedes Islam by at least half a millennium. Earlier this past month, Copts throughout Egypt organized demonstrations to protest the fire-bombing of a church in upper Egypt the prior week, as well as one  back in mid-March, and the on-going campaign of harassment by Islamists in the region. At the October 9, 2011 demonstration in front of the Maspero district headquarters of the national television network, attended by a reported figure of 10,000 Copts,  the Egyptian army opened fire with live ammunition, killing Copts indiscriminately. Then armored military vehicles appeared driving into the crowds randomly, causing widespread mayhem. Final tally: 24 dead and over 300 wounded. The on-going Islamist attacks against the Copts are causing many to consider seeking refuge in the West.

Let’s move on to Iraq. Twenty years ago, Iraq’s Christian community numbered over a million members. A decade ago, out of a total population of almost 24 million, 850,000 identified as Christians. Today, with a population of 30.7 million, the Christian population appears to be less than 335,000. What has happened? Although the new Iraqi constitution guarantees freedom of religion, there is no provision in the Iraqi system for those that wish to convert, especially if it is from Islam to Christianity. And radical Islam has been launching attacks on Christian Iraqis ever since 

Saddam Hussein’s ouster. This past year has seen the level of violence increase, starting with last year’s al-Qaeda attack on Our Lady of Deliverance Syrian Catholic Church in Baghdad which left 52 dead. Anti-Christian persecution continues, unabated.

In Afghanistan, along with the country being virtually “Judenfrei” or “Judenrein”, it is now free of any overt symbol of Christianity with the destruction of the last remaining church in March 2010. The U.S. State Department’s recently released report on religious freedom indicates that the small native Christian population feels tremendous pressure to remain out of sight, and the case of the Moslem who converted to Christianity and was nearly executed under Afghanistan’s Sharia law for Islamic apostasy demonstrates that freedom of conscience does not exist in present day Afghanistan despite the presence of American and NATO forces in that country for a decade. 

When we turn to the Palestinian Territories, we are looking at the birthplace of Christianity. To see this two millennia community threatened with disappearance must be gut-wrenching for devout Christians. But like it or not, the Christian Arab population of the Holy Land faces the threat of extinction. The causes are many, but explosive Muslim birth rates compared with bare replacement rates among Arab Christians have caused the Christian percentage of the Palestinian Territories to diminish sharply. In actuality, the Palestinian Christian population has increased in the past forty-four years from 42,494 in 1967 to slightly more than 50,000 today. However, because of the changing percentage ratios of Christians to Muslims in the greater Bethlehem area—a region traditionally associated with very high percentages of Christian populations (70-95%)—the decreases to 28-60% appear as precipitous declines. More Here