An attack by militant Muslims which has thus far destroyed at least a dozen churches may signal an expansion in anti-Christian violence in Ethiopia as the next front in the recent escalation of the Jihad’s war against Christianity.
Although the majority of Ethiopian Christians are Coptic, having membership in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the latest anti-Christian violence has targeted Protestant churches in the area of Asendabo, approximately 250 kilometers southwest of Addis Ababa. According to press reports, a dozen Protestant churches and the homes of at least two pastors — as well as numerous other Christian homes and properties — have been destroyed in a wave of violence which began on March 2. It should be noted that other sources indicate that the damage may be far worse than the more conservative number cited; according to Reuters and a story at WorldNetDaily the number of churches destroyed may stand at more than 50.

According to a report from AsiaNews:

Muslims [began] their attacks on March 2, after accusing the Christians of having desecrated the Koran. A crowd of Muslims shouting “Allahu akbar” (God is greatest) attacked three evangelical churches[,] setting them on fire. When the federal police arrived, the riots continued, and agents, overwhelmed by numbers, were unable to prevent other places of worship suffering the same fate.

With every passing day the violence has not decreased. According to sources, a Christian was killed, several others were injured and more than a dozen homes and places of prayer have been burned including a school, an orphanage and the offices of a church. Nearly three thousand Christians have been displaced by the wave of violence. A local Christian leader told to International Christian Concern that the attacks were organized by members of Kwarej, a radical Islamic group which aims to create a Muslim state in the majority Coptic country. Those responsible for the attacks come from different regions of the country, including those close to Somalia.

Currently, Muslims make up only roughly one-third of the population of Ethiopia, and they live primarily in a few regions of the country. According to census data published by the Ethiopian government, 43.5 percent of Ethiopians are members of the Orthodox (Coptic) Church, while another 18.6 percent are members of various Protestant churches and less than one percent are members of the Roman Catholic Church. Much of the Muslim minority (which accounts for 33.9 percent of the overall population of Ethiopia) is found within a few areas of Ethiopia — including the Afar and Somali regions, where they constitute over 95 percent of the population. The scene of the recent violence, the town of Asendabo, is in the Oromia region, which the census report indicates has a population which is almost evenly divided between Christians (48.7 percent) and Muslims (47.5).

According to WorldNetDaily, the supposed act of “desecration” which served as the excuse for the latest anti-Christian violence may have been the work of a Muslim agent provocateur:

International Christian Concern’s Jonathan Racho has been in contact with a pastor in Ethiopia who confirms that more than 50 churches have been burned — along with a school, an orphanage and an office.

Racho said the wave of arson was touched off by Muslims framing Christians for desecrating a Quran. “The Muslims desecrated a Quran and put it in a church compound and then accused Christians of desecrating a Quran, then started attacking,” Racho said. “Since this happened, since it happened in a part of Ethiopia where Muslims have the majority, the police failed to protect the Christians.

“So the Muslim mobs were able to carry out attacks in many cities,” he said.

Meles Zenawi, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, blames a Kwarej (or Kawarja) Muslim sect for the violence. Reuters reports:

Meles told a news conference late on Saturday that “elements of the Kawarja sect and other extremists” had been preaching religious intolerance in the area.

“The government has been trying to stop the violence. That has been done quite successfully in spite of the property damage and the death of one Ethiopian,” he said. International Christian Concern said Kawarja, about whom little is known, aimed to set up an Islamic state in mainly Christian Ethiopia, where Muslims make up a quarter of the population. …

Meles said it was hard to prosecute Islamic extremists. “We knew that they were peddling this ideology of intolerance, but it was not possible for us to stop them administratively because they are within their rights,” he said.

“If we can find some association between what they are doing by way of preaching and what happened by way of violence, then of course we can take them to court.”

As reported previously for The New American, the timing of attacks on churches in Ethiopia coincides closely with similar attacks in the town of Soul, Egypt. In Soul, the incident which was followed by at attack on Christians was allegedly a controversy over a relationship between a Coptic man and a Muslim woman. In both Egypt and Ethiopia, the excuse for violent attacks on Christian churches was an alleged infraction of Islamic Sharia law.

At present, there is no direct evidence linking the attacks in Ethiopia to other anti-Christian violence which has erupted in the past few months — no direct link, that is, other than that which has been consistently present in Islamic doctrine. The close ties between the Copts in Ethiopia and in Egypt presumably leave them with few illusions about the plight of Christians living under an Islamic state.

By: Dan Gainor – Media Research Center Network

Two years ago, George Soros said he wanted to reorganize the entire global economic system. In two short weeks, he is going to start – and no one seems to have noticed.

On April 8, a group he’s funded with $50 million is holding a major economic conference and Soros’s goal for such an event is to “establish new international rules” and “reform the currency system.” It’s all according to a plan laid out in a Nov. 4, 2009, Soros op-ed calling for “a grand bargain that rearranges the entire financial order.”

The event is bringing together “more than 200 academic, business and government policy thought leaders’ to repeat the famed 1944 Bretton Woods gathering that helped create the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Soros wants a new ‘multilateral system,” or an economic system where America isn’t so dominant.

More than two-thirds of the slated speakers have direct ties to Soros. The billionaire who thinks “the main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat” is taking no chances.

Thus far, this global gathering has generated less publicity than a spelling bee. And that’s with at least four journalists on the speakers list, including a managing editor for the Financial Times and editors for both Reuters and The Times. Given Soros’s warnings of what might happen without an agreement, this should be a big deal. But it’s not.

What is a big deal is that Soros is doing exactly what he wanted to do. His 2009 commentary pushed for “a new Bretton Woods conference, like the one that established the post-WWII international financial architecture.” And he had already set the wheels in motion.

Just a week before that op-ed was published, Soros had founded the New York City-based Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), the group hosting the conference set at the Mount Washington Resort, the very same hotel that hosted the first gathering. The most recent INET conference was held at Central European University, in Budapest. CEU received $206 million from Soros in 2005 and has $880 million in its endowment now, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

This, too, is a gathering of Soros supporters. INET is bringing together prominent people like former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker and Soros, to produce “a lot of high-quality, breakthrough thinking.”

While INET claims more than 200 will attend, only 79 speakers are listed on its site – and it already looks like a Soros convention. Twenty-two are on Soros-funded INET’s board and three more are INET grantees. Nineteen are listed as contributors for another Soros operation – Project Syndicate, which calls itself “the world’s pre-eminent source of original op-ed commentaries” reaching “456 leading newspapers in 150 countries.” It’s financed by Soros’s Open Society Institute. That’s just the beginning.

The speakers include:

Volcker is chairman of President Obama’s Economic Advisory Board. He wrote the forward for Soros’s best-known book, ‘The Alchemy of Finance’ and praised Soros as “an enormously successful speculator” who wrote “with insight and passion” about the problems of globalization.
Economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of The Earth Institute and longtime recipient of Soros charity cash. Sachs received $50 million from Soros for the U.N. Millennium Project, which he also directs. Sachs is world-renown for his liberal economics. In 2009, for example, he complained about low U.S. taxes, saying the “U.S. will have to raise taxes in order to pay for new spending initiatives, especially in the areas of sustainable energy, climate change, education, and relief for the poor.”
Soros friend Joseph E. Stiglitz, a former senior vice president and chief economist for the World Bank and Nobel Prize winner in Economics. Stiglitz shares similar views to Soros and has criticized free-market economists whom he calls “free market fundamentalists.” Naturally, he’s on the INET board and is a contributor to Project Syndicate.
INET Executive Director Rob Johnson, a former managing director at Soros Fund Management, who is on the Board of Directors for the Soros-funded Economic Policy Institute. Johnson has complained that government intervention in the fiscal crisis hasn’t been enough and wanted “restructuring,” including asking “for letters of resignation from the top executives of all the major banks.”

Have no doubt about it: This is a Soros event from top to bottom. Even Soros admits his ties to INET are a problem, saying, “there is a conflict there which I fully recognize.” He claims he stays out of operations. That’s impossible. The whole event is his operation.

INET isn’t subtle about its aims for the conference. Johnson interviewed fellow INET board member Robert Skidelsky about “The Need for a New Bretton Woods” in a recent video. The introductory slide to the video is subtitled: “How currency issues and tension between the US and China are renewing calls for a global financial overhaul.” Skidelsky called for a new agreement and said in the video that the conflict between the United States and China was “at the center of any monetary deal that may be struck, that needs to be struck.”

Soros described in the 2009 op-ed that U.S.-China conflict as “another stark choice between two fundamentally different forms of organization: international capitalism and state capitalism.” He concluded that “a new multilateral system based on sounder principles must be invented.” As he explained it in 2010, “we need a global sheriff.”

In the 2000 version of his book “Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism,” Soros wrote how the Bretton Woods institutions “failed spectacularly” during the economic crisis of the late 1990s. When he called for a new Bretton Woods in 2009, he wanted it to “reconstitute the International Monetary Fund,” and while he’s at it, restructure the United Nations, too, boosting China and other countries at our expense.

“Reorganizing the world order will need to extend beyond the financial system and involve the United Nations, especially membership of the Security Council,’ he wrote. ‘That process needs to be initiated by the US, but China and other developing countries ought to participate as equals.”

Soros emphasized that point, that this needs to be a global solution, making America one among many. “The rising powers must be present at the creation of this new system in order to ensure that they will be active supporters.”

And that’s exactly the kind of event INET is delivering, with the event website emphasizing “today’s reconstruction must engage the larger European Union, as well as the emerging economies of Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia.” China figures prominently, including a senior economist for the World Bank in Beijing, the director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the chief adviser for the China Banking Regulatory Commission and the Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations.

This is all easy to do when you have the reach of George Soros who funds more than 1,200 organizations. Except, any one of those 1,200 would shout such an event from the highest mountain. Groups like MoveOn.org or the Center for American Progress didn’t make their names being quiet. The same holds true globally, where Soros has given more than $7 billion to Open Society Foundations – including many media-savvy organizations just a phone call away. Why hasn’t the Soros network spread the word?

Especially since Soros warns, all this needs to happen because “the alternative is frightening.” The Bush-hating billionaire says America is scary “because a declining superpower losing both political and economic dominance but still preserving military supremacy is a dangerous mix.”

The Soros empire is silent about this new Bretton Woods conference because it isn’t just designed to change global economic rules. It also is designed to put America in its place – part of a multilateral world the way Soros wants it. He wrote that the U.S. “could lead a cooperative effort to involve both the developed and the developing world, thereby reestablishing American leadership in an acceptable form.”

That’s what this conference is all about – changing the global economy and the United States to make them “acceptable” to George Soros.

Radical Islam threatens American democracy. It is slowly subverting America from within and without. If it is not stopped, U.S. civilization is doomed.

For decades, Europe has been in the grip of an Islamist assault. Largely ghettoized Muslim populations have become dangerously alienated from the European mainstream. From Paris to Hamburg, Germany, radicalized imams preach the virtues of global jihad. Subway systems in London and Madrid have been bombed; hundreds of civilians have been slaughtered. Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered.

These atrocities were committed largely by homegrown terrorists — people who were either born or raised in European countries. They felt no loyalty to their homelands. Instead, they considered themselves part of the Muslim ummah, the international Islamic political community. Their religious identity supersedes their national one.

America faces the same kind of threat. Yet when anyone tries to put a spotlight on the growth of domestic Muslim extremism, liberals, Islamic lobby groups and their fellow travelers cry “Islamophobia” and “racism.”

The latest example was the congressional hearing held by Rep. Peter King, New York Republican, who dared to examine how some U.S. Muslim youth are being radicalized and recruited by terror networks. The American Civil Liberties Union, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Democratic Party all claimed the hearing was not only unjustified and deeply discriminatory, but could spark an intense backlash among many in the U.S. Muslim community. The critics even argued that this could provide fodder for Al Qaida and other jihadists to commit more terrorist acts. In other words, Islam is a “religion of peace” unless you investigate some Islamic extremists who may be plotting to kill or maim Americans; then that will compel peaceful, law-abiding Muslims to wage jihad. This is the twisted — and perverse — logic of the multicultural left.

The overwhelming majority of Muslims — both in and outside America — are decent, nonviolent individuals. They want what most people want: to raise their families in dignity without being harassed. Yet there is a significant minority — many experts claim it is between 7 percent and 10 percent of the population — who are radicalized. They seek to erect a global caliphate based on Shariah law. Their goal is to destroy the West. There are more than 1 billion Muslims in the world. Simple math suggests there is a potential army of jihadists out there.

U.S.-born militant Muslims have been waging an internal holy war — one that has received little to no attention in the mainstream media. Take Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. Maj. Hasan is accused of committing in November 2009 the most devastating terrorist atrocity on U.S. soil since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He is charged with deliberately gunning down 13 colleagues and wounding 30 others at Fort Hood, Texas, explicitly in the name of political Islam. The difference between Maj. Hasan and the Sept. 11 hijackers is his citizenship: He was born in America of Palestinian Muslim parents.

Maj. Hasan has not been the only one. In June 2009, a 23-year-old Army recruiter in Little Rock, Ark., was killed by a black American convert to Islam. The killer admitted that his motivation was opposition to the war in Iraq. Five Muslim men — born and raised in and near Washington, D.C. — were arrested in Pakistan for trying to wage guerrilla war against U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The list goes on. Yet liberals refuse to acknowledge the obvious: We are in an ideological struggle with Islamic fascism.

The price for speaking out against creeping Islamism is very high. Just ask talk-radio host Michael Savage. The populist conservative is one of the most listened to and influential voices in the media landscape. Mr. Savage is a rare breed: a nationalist who opposes the socialist New World Order. He is a vocal critic of Western society’s gradual surrender to political correctness and growing Islamic extremism.

CAIR has been seeking to muzzle him for years. His criticisms of Shariah law and Islamist barbarism have landed him in hot water. Under the previous Labor government, Britain banned Mr. Savage from entering the country. He has been put on a blacklist alongside Hamas killers, murderous Russian skinheads and neo-Nazis. He has never advocated or committed violence. In fact, he is a champion of democracy and human freedom. Prime Minister David Cameron has refused to lift the ban. The goal is clear: Mr. Savage is to be sacrificed on the altar of multiculturalism.

The ban is a fundamental assault on freedom of speech. Mr. Savage has been living with a huge target on his back; the ban tacitly encourages jihadists to assassinate him. It whets the limitless appetite of Muslim fanatics everywhere. Today, it is Mr. Savage; tomorrow, it could be any other prominent spokesman on the right. The ban is a cultural watershed — a key battle in radical Islam’s relentless advance. Instead of defending him, most Republicans have turned their backs.

One of the few exceptions is Rep. Allen B. West of Florida. Mr. West recently wrote a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton asking that the State Department look into the ban and demand that Britain overturn it. It won’t happen. Foggy Bottom is not interested in defending democratic values or free speech — never mind the innocence of an American citizen who has spent his career speaking truth to power.

That truth — especially that Islamic fundamentalism poses a mortal threat to the West — is precisely what Mrs. Clinton and the ruling class do not want to hear. They are too busy worshipping the false god of multiculturalism.