The six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) are discussing setting up a Gulf confederation, Kuwait’s Al Seyassah daily reported on Tuesday.

According to the report, which comes as tensions mount between Shiite Iran and the Sunni-ruled Gulf states, the proposed  confederation would have a unified foreign, defence and security policy, but each of the six countries would retain their independence and sovereignty.

Quoting unamed highly placed sources, the report said such a move will help Gulf Arab states confront challenges and threats from Iran to their security, sovereignty and independence.

“The confederation is seen as a crucial development after the blatant Iranian interference in Bahrain’s domestic affairs and Tehran’s repeated attempts to undermine the security and stability of the Gulf states through mercenaries working for the Revolutionary Guards and the Iranian intelligence services even though they have Arab nationalities,” the paper quoted the sources as saying.

The GCC secretariat is coordinating “wide and expansive” talks between senior officials in GCC countries with the ideal outcome being the formation of a confederation.

Under the confederation plan, a single foreign affairs ministry will be in charge of the GCC relations with other countries and the six Gulf states will have only one common embassy in foriegn countries, which in turn will have only one diplomatic mission in the Gulf.

The Gulf countries would also turn the existing Peninsula Shield, their military cooperation arm, into a fast intervention force with higher military and fighting capabilities to repel regional threats and confront plots to undermine stability in any of the six member countries.

“The competent agencies in the Gulf countries will also unify their combat training and will hold massive military manoeuvres involving land, sea and air forces annually,” the sources said.

“The Gulf states will activate and reinvigorate their agreements and will sign new ones while speeding up the implementation of the accords on the customs unions and oil policies,” the sources said.

The proposed GCC force would be mere kilometers from Israel via the Gulf of Aqaba. Its effects on Arab-Israeli relations as a separate entity from the Arab league remains unknown.kilometers from Israel via the Gulf of Aqaba.

The Peace Forest is a small grove of pines sandwiched between the Abu Tor neighborhood and main promenade in Jerusalem. Anyone walking along the road that snakes through the grove can see a green pipe rising from the ground and reaching a height of several meters.

This pipe, if journalist Simcha Jacobovici is to be believed, this is the physical tip of an archaeological detective story in the style of the Da Vinci Code.

And this pipe is the sole evidence of the burial cave discovered by chance while the road was being laid in 1990. Digging at the site uncovered two ossuaries (stone vessels in which the bones of the dead were placed, according to custom at the end of the period of the Second Temple). On one of the ossuaries is inscribed the name Caiaphas (in Hebrew Kayafa) and on the second Joseph son of Caiaphas.

The name Caiaphas is rare for the Second Temple era and in fact is totally unknown among archaeological finds. This allowed the digging detectives to say with confidence that the site is the burial cave of the family of Caiaphas, the Jerusalem high priest in Jesus’ time and one of the primary antagonists in Christian scripture.

It was this Caiaphas who gave Jesus up to the Romans. He, along with Judas Iscariot, was the symbol of Jewish treachery, a denier of the truth and the de facto basis for Christian anti-Semitism.

Aside from the ossuaries, the cave held other treasures: coins, a perfume bottle, an oil lamp in an earthenware pot, and two rusty and bent nails. These nails, Jacobovici claims, are no less than the original nails hammered into the hands of Jesus Christ as he was crucified.

And if Jacobovici is to be believed, these nails have the potential to cause a revolution in the way we view early Christianity, the Jewish religion from which Christianity emanated and the relationship between the two faiths. But first one must believe Jacobovici; many, primarily in the archeological world, do not, and even view him as a charlatan.

Jacobovici, an observant Jew sporting a large skullcap, has a light American accent that disappears as his outrage at the archeologists who dismiss his findings grows. He was born in Israel, but has lived in Canada for many years, garnering recognition for several documentaries he has made, including a film on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and another on the trafficking of women. He has won two Emmys for his work.

He is also known for his documentary series, aired on Israel’s Channel 8, provocatively titled “The Naked Archaeologist”. Some eight years ago he collaborated with James Cameron (director of Titanic and Avatar) to produce the movie “The Lost Tomb of Christ”.

The movie presents the controversial claim that a burial cave discovered in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Armon HaNatziv 30 years ago is in fact the original burial site of Jesus and his family.

Jacobovici was to dispute popular beliefs about Jesus again at a Jerusalem press conference Tuesday, this time regarding the nails he claims were used to hammer Jesus to the crucifix. These findings are documented at length in his soon-to-be-released movie titled “Nails of the Cross”.

Jacobovici’s main claim is that the character of Caiaphas must be reconsidered. According to him, Caiaphas may have changed his mind about Jesus after the crucifixion, and his descendents thought it appropriate to bury the father of Christianity with the nails alongside other items meant to accompany him to the next world.

Jacobovici says that Caiaphas even became a member of the Judeo-Christians – those who maintained their Jewish identity while claiming Christ was the messiah (but not God). Jacobovici says that evidence of Caiaphas’ paradigm shift can be found in multiple places, including the mysterious symbols that were engraved upon the ossuary.

Other archeologists do not rule out the possibility that Caiaphas was buried in the cave; they say it is reasonable to assume that it was the family’s cave, although other members of the family may be buried there.

Dissenting archeologists maintain, however, that although the ossuary is elaborate in design, it is not in the style of a typical high priest burial site.

The excavation of the cave was done by two senior archaeologists, Dr. Zvi Greenhut, today a leading official at the Israel Antiquities Authority, and Dr. Ronny Reich, now the chairman of the Archeological Council, the highest archeological body in Israel.

Jacobovici has been cautiously critical of these two experts for ignoring what he perceives to be the most important finding in the cave: the nails. The other items discovered in the grave have been stored in the warehouses of the Israel Antiquities Authority, and the ossuaries can be viewed at the Israel Museum.

The nails, on the other hand, have been neglected – barely documented in the excavation’s findings and disappearing shortly after the dig. Now, they are in the hands of Simcha Jacobovici.

President Obama is presiding over the end of American dominance in the Middle East. Across the region, U.S. power is receding — and radical Islam is filling the void. Mr. Obama has betrayed our allies and emboldened our enemies. He is slowly helping make the Middle East safe for jihadists, thereby undermining America’s national security.

Contrary to the spin of the mainstream media, the fever that is sweeping the Middle East is not some long-suppressed desire for political liberty. These are not secular democratic revolutions.

Instead, they represent the fury of subjugated peoples who have been deeply embittered by decades of autocratic rule, corruption and the pro-Western policies of their leaders. Many of the demonstrators despise America and Israel. They want one-man, one-vote democracy only once — to erect a theocratic state based on Shariah law.

As the leader of the Free World, Mr. Obama should be standing against this reactionary tidal wave. Instead, he is openly encouraging and embracing it. The result is that the United States is losing its influence in the Middle East.

In Tunisia, Mr. Obama abandoned President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, a friend of the United States. In Egypt, Mr. Obama abandoned President Hosni Mubarak, who for 30 years was a staunch ally of Washington. Mr. Mubarak may have been a tinpot dictator, but he supported America in the war on terrorism, cracked down on Muslim extremists and kept the peace with Israel. His downfall has led to a surge in new Islamic fundamentalist parties — especially those that champion a virulent Salafism. Presidential and parliamentary elections are scheduled to be held in September. Cairo’s liberals admit that the expected big winner will be the Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks to forge an Islamic regime and break the peace treaty with Israel. In Yemen, President Ali Abdullah Saleh, an ally in the fight against Al Qaida, is on the verge of being overthrown by jihadists.

In Iraq, U.S. troops are being withdrawn precipitously. They will all be gone by year’s end. The power vacuum is being filled by Iran. Baghdad’s government says its laws must correspond with the Koran. Half of Iraq’s Christians have been exterminated or expelled; the other half lives in fear. Muqtada al-Sadr, the fiery anti-American Shiite cleric, wields considerable clout behind the scenes. The war has cost more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers dead and 30,000 wounded. Yet Iraq is under Tehran’s sphere of influence.

In Afghanistan, Mr. Obama’s surge has failed. It is becoming another Vietnam — a military quagmire squandering precious American blood and treasure in a futile effort at nation-building. Al Qaida is gone from that Godforsaken land. It has dispersed to Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Sudan. The Taliban are resurgent. They are taking advantage of Washington’s severe rules of engagement, which make it almost impossible for U.S. forces to win.

Other allies also are beginning to turn away from America. Turkey’s Islamic government is increasingly anti-Western and hostile to Israel. Ankara is drifting out of America’s orbit, pursuing a policy of neo-Ottomanism — the attempt to restore Turkey’s historic role as the defender of the region’s Muslims. Pakistan is seething with anti-Americanism. Lebanon is dominated by Hizbullah. Bahrain’s pro-U.S. king is facing a massive revolt. Jordan’s royal family is being threatened seriously for the first time in decades.

Mr. Obama’s inept foreign policy is starkly evident in Libya. His administration’s diplomacy has been confused and incoherent. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has admitted that there is “no vital national interest” at stake. In that case, why are we there? Our military is not an international charity; its purpose is not humanitarian intervention. This is a recipe for endless wars that will overextend and break America.

Mr. Obama insists that had he not ordered the airstrikes, the rebel stronghold of Benghazi would have been overrun by pro-Moammar Gadhafi loyalists. This would have led to a slaughter — a Libyan version of Srebrenica, where more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were butchered by Serb forces in 1995.

The president, however, is content to turn a blind eye to massacres in Sudan, Somalia and Syria. In fact, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton ridiculously refers to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad as a “reformer.” Mr. Assad is the very opposite: a murderous anti-reformer whose security forces recently gunned down peaceful demonstrators. Yet the White House refuses to bomb Damascus. In short, Mr. Obama and his team are hypocrites.

Moreover, the Libyan campaign will only empower radical Islamists. Elements of the anti-Gadhafi rebels are al Qaeda insurgents; others are Libyan jihadists who fought in Iraq against U.S. forces. American pilots are risking their lives, and American taxpayers are funding a war on behalf of terrorist thugs who have American blood on their hands. The rebels’ goal is not just to topple the Libyan strongman. Many want an Islamist Libya — more radical and anti-Western than Col. Gadhafi’s crazed regime.

Mr. Obama has accomplished his primary foreign-policy goal: creating a post-American world. He is an academic leftist who believes that the United States must be constrained and ultimately weakened. Its might must be tethered to the United Nations in order to serve the “international community” — including the Muslim world, which he says has been the victim of Western imperialism. This kind of liberal guilt and self-hatred may play well with the media class. But from Teheran to Tripoli, Baghdad to Benghazi, Mr. Obama’s anti-Americanism only invites contempt from both our close friends and our mortal foes. Nobody respects weakness, even from a transnational progressive messiah.

Abboud al-Zomor — the former intelligence officer who supplied the bullets that killed President Anwar el-Sadat and is Egypt’s most notorious newly released prisoner — waxes enthusiastic about ending the violent jihad he once led.

“The ballot boxes will decide who will win at the end of the day,” Mr. Zomor said during an interview in his large family compound in this hamlet on Cairo’s western edge. “There is no longer any need for me to use violence against those who gave us our freedom and allowed us to be part of political life.”

In its drive to create a perfect Islamic state, his Islamic Group and other groups like it were once synonymous with some of the bloodiest terrorist attacks in Egypt. But they are now leaping aboard the democracy bandwagon, alarming those who believe that religious radicals are seeking to put in place strict Islamic law through ballots.

The public approval of the constitutional amendments on March 19 provided an early example of Islamist political muscle, the victory achieved in no small part by framing the yes vote as a religious duty. But perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Islamist campaign was the energy invested by religious organizations that once damned the democratic process as a Western, infidel innovation masterminded to undermine God’s laws.

Mr. Zomor, 64, with his bushy gray beard and nearly 30 years in prison, has emerged as a high-profile spokesman for that sea change since he was released on March 12.

He and other Salafis, or Islamic fundamentalists, rhapsodize about founding political parties and forging alliances with the more mainstream Muslim Brotherhood to maximize the religious vote.

Several reasons lie behind this remarkable turnabout, according to senior religious sheiks, junior members and experts.

Foremost is the desire to protect, if not strengthen, the second amendment of Egypt’s Constitution, which enshrines Shariah, or Islamic law, as the main source of Egyptian law. The parliament to be elected in September will guide the drafting of a new constitution.

“If the constitution is a liberal one this will be catastrophic,” said Sheik Abdel Moneim el-Shahat, scoffing at new demands for minority rights during a night class he teaches at a recently reopened Salafi mosque in Alexandria. “I think next they will tell us that Christians must lead Muslims in the prayers!”

Second, the Salafis arrived late to the revolution, with many clerics emphatically supporting President Hosni Mubarak and condemning the protesters.

Young Salafis rebelled — extremely rare for a group that reveres tradition and hierarchy.

“The majority of the Salafi youth were the people who actually said, ‘No, this is impossible, we have to be part of this, it is a just cause,’ ” said Sherif Abdel Naser, a 24-year-old Egyptian-American who now attends political classes three nights a week at Sheik Shahat’s cramped mosque.

The Salafi movement is inspired by the puritan Wahhabi school of Islam that dominates Saudi Arabia, whose grand mufti churned out a fatwa condemning the Arab uprisings as a Western conspiracy to destroy the Islamic world. But an array of philosophies exists under the Salafi umbrella, ranging from apolitical groups that merely proselytize on the benefits of being a good Muslim to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. Ayman al-Zawahri, Al Qaeda’s No. 2, is an Egyptian Salafist.

Some Egyptians are convinced that the government released the likes of Mr. Zomor as a kind of bogeyman — to frighten the country about the possible downside of democracy. Mr. Zomor said Salafist violence was only a reaction to the repression of the Mubarak government, but he shocked many Egyptians by advocating punishments like amputating thieves’ hands.

In an example of fundamentalists now emerging into public light, the sons of Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheik who is serving a life sentence in the United States, convicted in a conspiracy to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993, recently addressed a conference at a five-star Cairo hotel, demanding that the United States release their ailing father.

“Somebody wants to give the impression that democracy will bring about the worst in Egypt,” said Hossam Tammam, an expert on Salafi groups.

He finds the threat exaggerated, but noted that the Salafis would be hampered in political participation because they did not accept the idea that all Egyptian citizens should enjoy equal rights. The Salafi model is based on medieval Islamic caliphates where minorities were protected but had to pay a tax for the privilege, and were barred from the military and many government positions, he said.

Some famous Salafi clerics have been preaching national unity and have said they would preserve the peace treaty with Israel. But more exclusionary thinking also emerges in sharp relief.

Sheik Mohamed Hussein Yacoub, a prominent Cairo cleric, generated outrage by labeling the referendum results as a “gazwa al-sanadiq,” or “conquest of the ballot boxes,” using a freighted Arabic word for conquest associated with Islam’s early wars. Egypt belongs to the observant, he said, and those who object could emigrate to North America.

He later claimed he was joking, but such attitudes are easy to find among Salafi foot soldiers. At the University of Alexandria, within sight of the sparkling Mediterranean, five bearded Salafi students set up a small table at the Faculty of Commerce on Tuesday to advocate the benefits of an Islamic state.

When a Christian student objected, one fundamentalist argued, “When we launch wars, we do it to strengthen our religion,” he said. “Will you fight alongside us to spread our religion?”

“I will be angry,” replied the other student.

”We cannot put God’s orders to a referendum,” said Ibrahim Mohamed, 21, one of the Salafi students. “Islam says adulterers must be stoned.”

Various Salafi groups have been taking the law on social issues into their own hands, including severing a teacher’s ear about 10 days ago in upper Egypt after accusing him of renting an apartment to prostitutes. And the army intervened on Monday to calm violence in the oasis of Fayoum that broke out after Salafists destroyed places selling beer and the owners shot a Salafi dead. Critics say the Salafi program is too religious to have broad appeal; while the Muslim Brotherhood frames its arguments in policy terms, the Salafis emphasize spiritual benefits that play well among the poor.

Alarmed by the violence, Ali Gomaa, Egypt’s grand mufti, is planning a conference of spiritual leaders in mid-April to try to establish consensual guidelines for separating religious and political discourse — for both Muslims and Christians.

Some experts hope the emergence of the Salafis will create a healthy attempt to reconcile Islam with democracy.

“The Salafis have realized that the only way for them to survive is to be politically engaged,” said Mr. Tammam, the expert. “If the Salafis are absorbed into the political system here, they can be reformed, but this will not eliminate radical thinking for good.”

They could be the earliest Christian writing in existence, surviving almost 2,000 years in a Jordanian cave. They could, just possibly, change our understanding of how Jesus was crucified and resurrected, and how Christianity was born.

A group of 70 or so “books”, each with between five and 15 lead leaves bound by lead rings, was apparently discovered in a remote arid valley in northern Jordan somewhere between 2005 and 2007.

A flash flood had exposed two niches inside the cave, one of them marked with a menorah or candlestick, the ancient Jewish religious symbol.

A Jordanian Bedouin opened these plugs, and what he found inside might constitute extremely rare relics of early Christianity.

That is certainly the view of the Jordanian government, which claims they were smuggled into Israel by another Bedouin.

The Israeli Bedouin who currently holds the books has denied smuggling them out of Jordan, and claims they have been in his family for 100 years.

Jordan says it will “exert all efforts at every level” to get the relics repatriated.
Incredible claims

The director of the Jordan’s Department of Antiquities, Ziad al-Saad, says the books might have been made by followers of Jesus in the few decades immediately following his crucifixion.

“They will really match, and perhaps be more significant than, the Dead Sea Scrolls,” says Mr Saad.

“Maybe it will lead to further interpretation and authenticity checks of the material, but the initial information is very encouraging, and it seems that we are looking at a very important and significant discovery, maybe the most important discovery in the history of archaeology.”

They seem almost incredible claims – so what is the evidence?

The books, or “codices”, were apparently cast in lead, before being bound by lead rings.

Their leaves – which are mostly about the size of a credit card – contain text in Ancient Hebrew, most of which is in code.

If the relics are of early Christian origin rather than Jewish, then they are of huge significance.

One of the few people to see the collection is David Elkington, a scholar of ancient religious archaeology who is heading a British team trying to get the lead books safely into a Jordanian museum.

He says they could be “the major discovery of Christian history”, adding: “It’s a breathtaking thought that we have held these objects that might have been held by the early saints of the Church.”

He believes the most telling evidence for an early Christian origin lies in the images decorating the covers of the books and some of the pages of those which have so far been opened.

Mr Elkington says the relics feature signs that early Christians would have interpreted as indicating Jesus, shown side-by-side with others they would have regarded as representing the presence of God.

“It’s talking about the coming of the messiah,” he says.

“In the upper square [of one of the book covers] we have the seven-branch menorah, which Jews were utterly forbidden to represent because it resided in the holiest place in the Temple in the presence of God.

“So we have the coming of the messiah to approach the holy of holies, in other words to get legitimacy from God.”
Location clues

Philip Davies, Emeritus Professor of Old Testament Studies at Sheffield University, says the most powerful evidence for a Christian origin lies in plates cast into a picture map of the holy city of Jerusalem.

“As soon as I saw that, I was dumbstruck. That struck me as so obviously a Christian image,” he says.

“There is a cross in the foreground, and behind it is what has to be the tomb [of Jesus], a small building with an opening, and behind that the walls of the city. There are walls depicted on other pages of these books too and they almost certainly refer to Jerusalem.”

It is the cross that is the most telling feature, in the shape of a capital T, as the crosses used by Romans for crucifixion were.

“It is a Christian crucifixion taking place outside the city walls,” says Mr Davies.

Margaret Barker, an authority on New Testament history, points to the location of the reported discovery as evidence of Christian, rather than purely Jewish, origin.

“We do know that on two occasions groups of refugees from the troubles in Jerusalem fled east, they crossed the Jordan near Jericho and then they fled east to very approximately where these books were said to have been found,” she says.

“[Another] one of the things that is most likely pointing towards a Christian provenance, is that these are not scrolls but books. The Christians were particularly associated with writing in a book form rather than scroll form, and sealed books in particular as part of the secret tradition of early Christianity.”

The Book of Revelation refers to such sealed texts.

Another potential link with the Bible is contained in one of the few fragments of text from the collection to have been translated.

It appears with the image of the menorah and reads “I shall walk uprightly”, a sentence that also appears in the Book of Revelation.

While it could be simply a sentiment common in Judaism, it could here be designed to refer to the resurrection.

It is by no means certain that all of the artifacts in the collection are from the same period.

But tests by metallurgists on the badly corroded lead suggest that the books were not made recently.

The archaeology of early Christianity is particularly sparse.

Little is known of the movement after Jesus’ crucifixion until the letters of Paul several decades later, and they illuminate the westward spread of Christianity outside the Jewish world.

Never has there been a discovery of relics on this scale from the early Christian movement, in its homeland and so early in its history.

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.