Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on June 9, 2013
ATTENTION! Disturbing footage
This small Ethiopian Orthodox Christian church was burned by 500 Muslim students supported by local Muslim police. This happened four days after local Muslim authorities ordered demolition of the building. They poured gasoline on the building and burned it in broad daylight. The most alarming and disturbing thing is that this is done by the ‘normal’ inhabitants who had lived together with tolerant Christians for many years. It’s disturbing to see men, women, children and elderly come out of their homes to celebrate the burning down of Saint Arsema Orthodox Tewahedo Church
This hateful barbaric act happened in the particular region of Christian Ethiopia where the followers of Islam are in a majority. As predictable as it’s the larger the number of Muslims in the area, the more hostile are Muslims to the non-Muslims living there, so those non-Muslims are forced to move away. More and more Muslims move to the area until it becomes, for all intents and purposes, a small Muslim state. As one Ethiopian Christian victim said with his eyes watering with tears, “They were our friends, our neighbors with whom we shared everything. I never thought that this day would ever come.”
Now, we all ask how this is happening in Ethiopia, a country that is 70% Christian and only 25% Muslim? How could this happen to the land of Ethiopia where Muslims were welcomed and got refugee during their days of trouble and desparation? This is called “biting the hand that feeds you,” and pretty much everyone agrees that’s the worst, most ungrateful form of behavior in existence.
Ethiopian Christians, who have been dominant in their country since the 4th century, are in a state of shock due to the “religious hatred and violence” of their Muslim neighbors.
Christian Ethiopians never retaliate to fight back the Islamic aggression by hating the Muslim population or attacking its mosques. Whereas, Saudi, Egypt, Qatar and Turkey supported Islamists never stop to undermine and destroy Christian Ethiopia by all means.
The black horse of Saudi Arabia maltreats Ethiopians in every Arab Muslim country, their Trojan horses in Ethiopia murder Christians, their religious and political leaders, they set fire to their churches and drive out Ethiopians in their own country.
When they persecute Christians in „their“ 53 Muslim majority countries, we remain silent or say, well, those are their countries they are allowed to do whatever they want, even the United Nations and the Medias may show their indifference – but in one small country of the Ethiopians nobody has the right to bring things that are unEthiopian or anti-Christian. Ethiopians have no other country but Ethiopia, Ethiopians don’t impose their Religion, ideology or culture on others, so, others, specially those who don’t belong to Ethiopia must stop imposing their way of life on Ethiopians
Christians & Jews: Middle East Genocide
“We do nothing as Muslims eradicate the last vestiges of Christians and Jews from nation after nation….even the dust cries for justice, and we look away”
But all they possess does not suffice for Islamist fanatics. Israel must be blotted from the earth, and the last Christians must be driven out.
This is an old, old story, nearing its end. We shroud it in lies to excuse ourselves from taking a stand, even accepting the preposterous Arab claim that Muslim failures today are the fault of the Crusades, a brief interlude when Christians occupied a coastal strip hardly larger than Israel. In fact, it was the Mongols, then the Muslim Turks, who shattered Arab civilization. And as for conquests, Muslims occupied Spain in all or part for 800 years — and brutalized the Balkans for half a millennium. The Crusades were hardly a burp.
We also accept extravagant claims that “civilized” Arabs rescued the classical texts that formed our civilization. That’s utter nonsense. The Arab hordes that burst out of barren Arabia in the 7th century were composed of illiterates. Conquering at a time when the warring Byzantine and Persian empires had exhausted themselves, the new rulers found that tribal practices didn’t suffice to run provinces. So they took over the existing bureaucracies, staffed by Greek-speaking Christians and Jews. It was those officials who saved the Greek classics for Europe’s future Renaissance — and their descendants designed Islam’s greatest monuments.
Yes, some Arab rulers came to value learning — but the Arab world never produced a Homer, Plato, Sophocles or Thucydides whose appeal transcended their culture.
Islam was a religion spread by war. It was only a “religion of peace” where it had conquered. True, Islam sometimes proved more tolerant of minorities than Europeans, but that was at the zenith of the faith’s power.
There’s yet another illusion of ours — that Islam is gaining strength. Islam is on the ropes. What we’ve seen in the pogroms and outright genocides over the last 150 years has been the spleen of a once-triumphant faith whose practices and values can’t compete in the modern age.
Consider today’s Middle East, apart from Israel. Despite the massive influx of oil wealth, there isn’t one world-class university. Nothing of quality or technological complexity is manufactured between Morocco and Pakistan. Not even Saudi Arabia has first-rate health-care. Research is nil. Patent applications are statistically zero. Women are regarded as lesser beings, wasting half of the region’s human capital. Not one Arab society’s a meritocracy. And corruption cripples all.
A handful of glitzy hotels and shopping centers do not make a civilization (especially when the merchandise is all imported). Should Islamist fanatics succeed in driving all minorities from the region, they’d be left with a human wasteland of comprehensive failure, seething with hatred and uncontainable violence. The self-segregation of the Islamic heartlands would be a tragedy for humanity — but, above all, for Muslims.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on June 9, 2013
Egypt’s Morsi Government has initiated a return to covert war against Ethiopia, which controls the source of the Blue Nile, Egypt’s and Sudan’s principal source of water.
The result will almost certainly lead to an increased level of insecurity in the strategic Red Sea/Suez sea lane and in the upper Nile riparian states, such as South Sudan, with some impact on global energy markets. Certainly it promises to see greater instability in the Horn of Africa at a time when Western media portrayals hint at a return to stability in, for example, Somalia.
Significant, mounting public unrest in Egypt during May and June 2013 (with more promised), expressing discontent with the economic and social policies of the Ikhwani Government of Pres. Mohammed Morsi caused the President to search for a major foreign distraction — a perceived threat to Egypt — to turn public attention away from the worsening domestic social and economic climate. The campaign includes a major media offensive at the alleged threat, and also included the commitment of major political, intelligence, and military resources to a trenchant reversal of Egypt’s brief period of rapprochement with Upper Nile riparian states, particularly Ethiopia.
This amounts to a full — even expanded — resumption of the indirect war to isolate Ethiopia politically and economically and to ensure that it cannot attract foreign investment and political support. It also attempts to ensure that Ethiopia’s main avenues for trade, through the Red Sea ports in Eritrea, Djibouti, and Somaliland, become closed to it. This, in particular, means that the Egyptian campaign to prevent recognition of independent Somaliland (former British Somaliland) has been reinvigorated, and military aid given to Somalia (former Italian Somaliland) to help overrun the Republic of Somaliland, thus cutting Ethiopia’s trade link through Somaliland’s port of Berbera.
The discontent in Egypt — and Morsi’s search for a foreign distraction — coincided with the start of work on Ethiopia’s major Great Millennium Dam (aka the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam), which some Egyptians have claimed, without evidence, would take Nile waters away from Egypt. The coincidence of the timing has proven explosive, although the Morsi Government had already initiated discreet steps to re-escalate indirect hostilities against Ethiopia.
The Egyptian military knows that Egypt is not in a position — even allied with neighboring Sudan — to take direct military action against Ethiopia, but Pres. Morsi had begun returning to the confrontational approach with Ethiopia which had characterized the former governments of Pres. Hosni Mubarak. The move away from this approach, which had failed to gain any traction against Ethiopia or other upstream riparian states, began under the post-Mubarak military Government of Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi with an initiative aimed at achieving negotiated results.
Pres. Morsi, on assuming power in Egypt, discovered during his visit to Addis Ababa for an African Union summit in 2011, that the Great Millennium Dam project would proceed, although Ethiopian officials assured Egypt that this would not interfere with the flow of water to Egypt. The dam was expected to produce 6,000 megawatts of power, and its reservoir was scheduled to start filling in 2014.
An independent panel of experts concluded that the dam would not significantly affect downstream Sudan and Egypt, but Younis Makhyoun (Zakaria Younis Abdel-Halim Makhyoun), leader of the ultraconservative Salafist al-Nour party, said on June 3, 2013, that Egypt should back rebels in Ethiopia or, as a last resort, destroy the dam. The Morsi Government, in fact, had already begun that action, using the allied Sudanese Government of Pres. Umar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir to support Ethiopian radical Islamist leaders sitting in exile in Khartoum. These leaders prompted major anti-Government demonstrations to take place in Addis Ababa in the first days of June 2013. One, on June 1, 2013, involved some 10,000 demonstrators, mostly Muslim, calling for increased religious freedom, the release of political prisoners, and so on. [Reports claiming that there were 100,000 demonstrators dramatically overstated the reality.]
What was significant was that the demonstrations attracted the support of urban, Christian youth, who saw the demonstration as a chance to protest against the Government. But it was the extreme Islamist elements which, with considerable Egyptian backing through the Khartoum connection, made the protests significant. The rally was formally organized by the secular Semayawi (Blue) Party, which received official permits for the rally, but the event was co-opted by the Islamists, making it just the event which Cairo had sought.
Not coincidentally, a senior Egyptian Ministry of Defense delegation arrived in Mogadishu, Somalia, on June 4, 2013, officially to begin discussions on an Egyptian project to rebuild the headquarters and offices of the Ministry of Defense of Somalia. However, the Egyptian delegation made it clear to its hosts that it also intended to equip, train, and rebuild the Somali Armed Forces, with the intent to support a Somalian move to assume control of the Republic of Somaliland, to its North. The independent and internationally-recognized Republic of Somaliland had joined with the former Italian Somaliland to create Somalia, on June 1, 1960. Following a massive brutalization of Somaliland by southern “Somalian” forces, Somaliland on May 18, 1991, withdrew from the union.
The Egyptian Government, however, has, since that time, ensured that the African Union (AU) and Arab League did not recognize the return to independence of Somaliland, largely in order to ensure the isolation of, by now, landlocked Ethiopia, and to limit Ethiopia’s economic viability and therefore its ability to engage in major projects on the Blue Nile headwaters. Egypt’s pressure within the (then) Organization for African Unity (OAU), later the AU, the Arab League, and on its US ally, ensured that no bid for recognition of Somaliland made headway.
That process was beginning to be reversed when elections in Somaliland on July 26, 2010, installed Pres. Ahmed Mohamed Silanyo and the Kulmiye party. Significantly, Silanyo, beset by advanced diabetes and probable dementia, has relied increasingly on Minister of Presidency Hersi Ali Haji Hassan (Somali: Xirsi Xaaji Xasan), who is essentially an ally and front for the salafist jihadi movement, al-Shabaab. He has essentially taken control of the Government. Thus, progress by the outgoing Somaliland Government with the governments of the US, Britain, and Germany for de facto recognition ended.
Egypt, then, is now advancing on several fronts in its campaign to isolate Ethiopia: through Somalia; through Sudan; through its sponsorships via a number of channels of Ethiopian Islamist and other opposition movements (including the Oromo Liberation Front: OLF); and via Eritrea (although the Eritrean option has become limited because of the paralysis of the Government there, under the ailing President, Isayas Afewerke).
Significantly, Cairo actually has no real national security case on which to base its new war. There is no evidence that the Ethiopian dam would constrain Nile water flow to Sudan and Egypt, and, anyway, there is little Egypt could do, either legally or militarily if the flow was threatened: other than to bring Ethiopia into a state of chaos.
But the major reason for the Egyptian initiative was, according to sources in Cairo, to mobilize Egyptian public opinion around Pres. Morsi. Significantly, however, by posing such a threat to Ethiopia, Egypt risks actually galvanizing Ethiopian public opinion around the Government in Addis Ababa, and perhaps creating a reason for Ethiopia to consider using water flow as a weapon against Cairo.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Dessalegn, who was elected as a stop-gap leader following the death of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi in mid-2012, has only a modest power base of his own. But his one option now may be to do what Meles had been dissuaded from doing before: to formally recognize the sovereignty of Somaliland. Hailemariam, in May 2013, promised in Parliament to defend Somaliland. Other African states have promised to recognize Somaliland, but did not want to be the first. Somaliland’s senior military officials, meanwhile, flew to Addis for talks on June 5, 2013.
The war has begun, but it may not save Pres. Morsi from the collapsing Egyptian economy, even bigger demonstrations of unrest, and even opposition to his policies of antagonizing upper Nile states