News Snippets From All Beats

An estimated 500 Christians, mostly women and children, butchered with machetes as soldiers delay assistance for two hours in Nigeria.  Witnesses describe victims were caught in fish nets and animal traps before being hacked to death by Muslims in the three-hour period on Sunday.  Reports claim Muslim village residents warned in advance to escape by text messages.  The murderers chanted “Allah is the greatest” in Arabic as the hymn accompaniment to the exercise of their religion of peace.¹  This is Islam, and the engine of its violence is Islamic theology. In countries that look the other way and allow Islamic religion to come to full expression, this is the fate that awaits Jews, Christians, and any others who refuse to convert to Islam.

^1. Aminu Abubakar, “Appeals for calm after Nigerian sectarian slaughter,” Google news (AFP), March 8, 2010.   http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5h9mUhpdN3aBNC7zA7AgyCwUaOIDA  

This is the question that gang members ask when on the prowl for victims, but gangs of cutthroats have been cruising the textbook publishers looking for facts to assassinate:  ”The founder of the Council on Islamic Education, the chief Islamic group for vetting textbooks in the United States, refers to his work as a ‘bloodless revolution inside American junior high and high school classrooms.’”

An Abu Dhabi investment firm is negotiating to purchase New York Chrysler building for 800 million.¹ That purchase would add to several other landmark purchases made by super-rich Arab nations, including the GM building sold last month to a group of investors that include Kuwait and Qatar. What’s interesting about the Abu Dhabi acquisition is what is taking place elsewhere in the United Emirates (of which Abu Dhabi is the capital city).

Dubia continues in an unprecedented skyscraper building spree that incorporates Western architectural styles, and the efforts of Western architects who have been lured there by seemingly limitless investment capital that is funding large real estate development projects. With the mass of new projects already completed in the hot new tourist destination, Dubai is competing with other famous cities of the world, such as Paris and New York, for prestige and attracting more tourism and investment.

There is an aspect to competition that might prove too inviting for Dubia and other Arab countries to ignore: monopoly. What is to stop the new owners of American landmarks from dismantling them in order to secure their own standing as the only architecturally stunning metropolis in the world? After all, open season was declared on the American skyline by Muslim extremists in this decade, and the idea of transplanting skylines for municipal aggrandizement and to attack more tourism is not uncommon. Look at Las Vegas.

Notes:

^1. Lois Weiss, “On the Block: Sovereign Arab Fund to Pay 800M,” New York Post, June 11, 2008.
http://www.nypost.com/seven/06112008/business

/chrysler_bldg__on_the_block_115016.htm

Addressing a group of journalists at a Reuteres Newsmaker event in London in June, retired Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu called on the media to tone down its harsh language when reporting on mass murders and grisly beheadings committed by the Muslim terrorists and faithful. He also likened the bloody history of Muslims to a bloody history for Christians, and showed that he is either ignorance of Islamic teachings, or complacent with them, by declaring: “Fundamentally there is no faith that I know that propagates violence that says it’s a good thing to oppress anybody.”[i] Normally such remarks as these would be categorized as absurd displays of senility beneath assessment, but Tutu’s particular affiliation provides a fair prospect for establishing his motive for complacency, and aids in explaining why so many share a fallacious reasoning along the line of characterizing Islam as religion of peace. (more…)

United Methodist Committee on Relief is partnering with Muslim Aid to amass up to $25 million dollars for disaster relief, conflict relief, and other kinds of trouble in places like Sri Lanka. It is likely, however, that not one dollar of that money is earmarked for spreading the Gospel.

These days there are almost always restrictions placed on humanitarian aid providers, particularly in Muslim areas, that prevent them from proselytizing. Several Christian organizations and churches embark on programs of providing aid and comfort in those places anyway with the hope that over time resistance to sharing the Gospel will soften. Results have usually been disappointing even when not handicapped with a huge Muslim oversight committee.

Coming in under the cover of Muslim Aid, United Methodist should easily be able to divest themselves of several million dollars with little or no resistance. As an interfaith partnership, the only message to be preached will be that “cultures can work together to help humanity.” That probably wasn’t the message that put all that money in the Methodists’ collection plates back home. Was it?

David Dansker

(Read about it in The Christian Post)