💭 Six Brit and Italian tourists injured and one killed in Tel Aviv suspected attack
A 30-year-old man from Italy was killed and four other people are receiving medical treatment for mild to moderate injuries after a car rammed into a group of people and flipped over in Tel Aviv, Israel
Police said a car rammed into a group of people near a popular seaside park before flipping over.
Police said they shot the driver of the car. The driver’s condition is unknown at the moment.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry referred to the incident as a “terror attack”, a term Israeli officials use for assaults by Palestinians.
🥚 That is, During Passover – and on the eve of Easter 🥚
These rockets were fired at the Galilee region in northern Israel. The Galilee is where many of the miracles of Jesus occurred, according to the New Testament, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.
🔥 Rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israel on Thursday and answered by a burst of cross-border artillery fire, officials said, amid escalating tension following Israeli police raids on the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.
The Israeli military said it had intercepted at least one rocket as sirens sounded in northern towns near the border, while two Lebanese security sources said there had been at least two attacks, with multiple rockets.
Israeli news outlets reported that around 34 rockets were launched from Lebanon, half of which were intercepted, while five landed in Israeli areas. Israel’s ambulance service said one man had sustained minor shrapnel injuries.
In a written statement, the United Nations peacekeeping force in south Lebanon (UNIFIL) described the situation as “extremely serious” and urged restraint. It said UNIFIL chief Aroldo Lazaro was in contact with authorities on both sides.
Israeli broadcasters showed large plumes of smoke rising above the northern town of Shlomi and public sector broadcaster Kan said the Israel Airports Authority closed northern air space, including over Haifa, to civilian flights.
“I’m shaking, I’m in shock,” Liat Berkovitch Kravitz told Israel’s Channel 12 news, speaking from a fortified room in her house in Shlomi. “I heard a boom, it was as if it exploded inside the room.”
Too bad; We Ethiopians are in an age where we face suffering, hatred and violence wherever we go. Even if we are in Ethiopia, Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Australia, we will not escape the challenge anywhere.
It is surprising that when the Jewish US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is heading to Ethiopia; Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu too planned to go to “Pergamon” Berlin; However, they delayed their visit because the Western media are shouting loud that “Israel is violating human rights”.
The German government is under pressure for hosting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was due to arrive in Berlin later Wednesday and facing strong criticism over planned legal reforms.
On the eve of Netanyahu’s departure for Germany and ahead of a planned trip to Britain, 1,000 writers, artists and academics wrote to the two European nations’ ambassadors urging their governments to scrap the visits.
👉 So let’s compare this with the situation in Ethiopia and encounter ‘double standards:
When the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken heades departs for Ethiopia to meet the barbaric Gala-Oromo Ahmed Ali, who massacred more than a million Orthodox Christians, all the media and governments that said, “We will fight for human rights” say and do nothing. Hypocritical, ugly and dirty world!
💭 Mixed Jewish-Arab city has been a flashpoint of nationalistic crime in the past.
Israel Police have arrested two Arabs on suspicion that they set fire to the “Beit HaGadzo,” a cultural center for Ethiopian Jews located behind the pre-military training school in the Ramat Eshkol neighborhood of Lod.
“We will not be silent,” local residents responded, and announced that they would be holding a demonstration. “At 8:30 p.m. we will all gather at the site for the evening prayer and raise a cry of protest.”
Investigators from the Lod Police Station used advanced technological means to investigate the crime leading to the swift apprehension of two Lod residents aged 18 and 25, who are suspected of the arson. At the conclusion of their interrogation, it will be decided whether to ask the court to extend their detention.
💭 The Islamic State in Mozambique (ISM) has ordered Christians and Jews to pay a Jizya tax for infidels as a sign of their submission to an Islamic Caliphate, the Barnabas Fund reported Thursday.
Christians and Jews in the region have been threatened with death unless they either convert to Islam, vacate the area, or pay the tax.
“We will escalate the war against you until you submit to Islam,” states a handwritten message from ISM. “Our desire is to kill you or be killed, for we are martyrs before God, so submit or run from us.”
The letter, which menaces Christians and Jews with “endless war” if they do not submit to Islam or pay the tax, also threatens moderate Muslims with death if they do not join the Islamist cause.
The ISM publishes a weekly newsletter, which has also demanded that Jews and Christians either convert to Islam or pay the infidel tax.
In demanding the Jizya, which according to sharia law allows Jews and Christians to remain in the land as second-class “dhimmi,” the ISM is echoing the tactics applied by the Islamic State in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere.
In 2014, the Islamic State issued a statement demanding that Christians in Mosul either convert to Islam, pay the Jizya, leave the city, or be killed. This led every in the region to leave, ending 2,000 years of Assyrian Christian presence.
In 2015, the Islamic State launched a series of attacks on Christian towns along the Khabour River in northeast Syria, during which the jihadists abducted hundreds of Christian hostages, who were similarly told they must convert to Islam, pay the Jizya, or face death.
The imposition of the Jizya has repeatedly been employed as a means of emptying regions of Christians.
💭 Selected Comments:
☆ Islam is incompatible with human life.
☆ Islam has always used the edge of the sword to evangelize. Muslims do not assimilate. They always try to dominate. The West had better recognize this, or they will be the next Mozambique.
☆ Mozambique has a Christian majority at least 60% mostly from the Portuguese ,
and about 20% Muslim.
☆ Where is the UN? As always, selective response measures to radical Islam.
☆ The UN hates Jews and Christians.
☆ The UN is composed of a Muslim majority voting bloc. The OIC. The organization of Islamic cooperation. The rest are communist that side with them. The UN will do nothing but run interference and cover this up. And attack any that try to speak out about it.
☆ Yet we still give them foreign aid? That is ridiculous.
☆ God bless and protect these Christians in danger for their faith in our Lord and Savior , Jesus Christ.
💭 BBC & and its Somali reporters are conspiring against the cradle of Ethiopian Christianity – against Christians of Northern Ethiopia. (Amhara + Tigray + Eritrea). They never bring such ‘revelations’ about the atrocities that the fascist Oromo invaders of Southern Ethiopia — that are in power for the past 130 years – are committing since their arrival in Ethiopia in the 15th century. We never hear or see reports on the ongoing genocidal ethnic-cleansing campaign in the so-called Oromo region of Ethiopia. Over thousand Orthodox Christians are massacred daily in this region. But have you ever heard or seen any report about these tragedy? No! Even in this BBC video the reporter, by avoiding the ethnicity of the government forces, which is Oromo – he wishes to portray ‘Amharas’ as Perpetrators, and ‘Oromos’ as victims, inciting ethno-religious animosity between them.
As we currently observe it in Ethiopia, whether Europe, America, Russia or China, they all support the wrong side, providing support to the perpetrator, explicitly or implicitly Imagine the genocide that is taking place against Orthodox Christians of Ethiopia was a genocide against Muslims? NATO would have bombed the hell out of Christian Ethiopia. We saw that in 1999 when NATO blasted Orthodox Serbia on Orthodox Easter Sunday
I had previously believed that incompetence and concurrent Islamic ascendancy (secondary to social media and the fall of the prior bipolar world which kept modern Islam in check) was the reason that Islamic jihad continued to make steady advances, and the West acted out a nonstop Comedy of Errors and could make no progress impeding the advance of Jihad. It is far more Machiavellian than I had imagined.
There is simply no other explanation for the meteoric rise of Islamic jihad/caliphate except to accept the West supports these developments. I am now firmly convinced the West supports Jihad and the aspired Caliphate, but the reasons for the Civilization Treason could be multiple. Islamic jihad and its threats are not unusually ascendant because they are concurrent with the West’s unusual unraveling and self destruction (historical timing and synchronicity being the jihadist’s helper-nonsense). Its the contrary. The West believes a collective voice for disparate Muslims peoples would provide stability, a degree of multipolar security, and great economic opportunities. Very sad, but the West wants a Muslim caliphate at the deepest levels of power.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on November 10, 2022
💭 “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”—Martin Niemöller
💭 ‘Bolshevist’ Congressman Jamie Raskin Calls to Destroy ‘Orthodox Christian’ Russia by Jihad
💭 Anti-Orthodox Conspiracy: NATO ‘Ready to Act’ in KOSOVO if Tensions with SERBIA Escalate
💭 Ethiopian Jews Can’t Get The Same Embrace From Israel as Ukrainians
👉 Courtesy: Ynetnews
Opinion: Ukraine crisis is clear evidence of a racial imbalance in how the world responds to tragedies; while many open their doors to Europeans, few do so when it comes to refugees from Ethiopia, or other countries with populations of color
The past few days I couldn’t stop crying about the situation in Ukraine. Watching the news, reading articles and hearing reports took me to dark moments in my past. My heart broke to see people being victims again in a war that they did not choose to be part of.
I have watched videos of fathers saying goodbye to their children, mothers trying to save their babies. When I watch the news it invokes painful memories of my own childhood, of my family’s history. I don’t remember the experience of escaping civil war and famine in Ethiopia as a child. However, I heard and learned about it over the course of my childhood through my father, my family and my community. With the very limited information that I had, I began to piece together the true history of my people.
I only had a few years of happy home memories before everything changed forever. This was after my family and I escaped, in 1990, from a war-torn Ethiopia where Jews were targeted, and settled in Israel, in the town of Beit She’an. My fondest memories are of gathering around the dinner table, talking about our days and laughing at my father’s jokes. I was too young to realize the realities of being a refugee and the racism around me. I was in a naive reality, before the horrors of the world were to enter my life.
My father got sick when I was still very young. I was around 10 years old when I heard him cry for the first time. I didn’t understand why, but the more I listened carefully the more I started to hear him. He repeated one name so often that I had to ask someone in my family who it might be. It was his nephew, who was killed in front of my father by agents of the Derg junta as my father watched, unable to do anything to save him.
The world around me shattered. I learned that the world is a cruel place, and that there are people who are meant to suffer unfathomable things when they don’t deserve it because of disconnected leaders with selfish agendas.
I was overwhelmed and overjoyed, then, to see how the world came together in condemning and isolating Russian President Vladimir Putin for what he is doing to Ukraine. The way Israel and the world acted so quickly to help Ukrainians to escape, and to help others to fight the war alongside them, was nothing short of extraordinary. When people started to advocate for Ukraine, I joined. I changed my profile picture on social media to the Ukrainian flag.
A few days later, however, someone from my Ethiopian community asked why I didn’t post the Ethiopian flag, when the government there has recently and regularly targeted civilians in a 16-month-old war against rebellious forces of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.
I was ashamed. I had done what many white people do: I had brushed off what happened to my people, to Africa, to the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America. Why does the survival of one country matter more than another’s? Why does one group of people have more value than another?
When I realized my mistake, I felt rage and the urge to do something about it. I started to do research, make phone calls, ask questions. I reached out to everyone I knew in order to find out more about what is happening in Ethiopia and what we are doing about it.
There is clear evidence of a racial imbalance in how we respond to tragedies, not just in Israel but throughout the world. Many countries have opened their doors to the Ukrainian people, but not to refugees from Ethiopia, or other countries with populations of color.
Despite a pledge to speed up its evacuations of some of the relatives of Ethiopian Israelis who remain in the country in the midst of an escalating civil war, the Israeli government seems to be making it more difficult for Ethiopian Jews to make it into Israel. Case in point: The Israeli High Court has frozen the planned entrance of 7,000-12,000 Ethiopians into the country for more than a month. Meanwhile, the same government is preparing to receive several thousand Jewish Ukrainians, and to take in 5,000 non-Jewish Ukrainian refugees.
Preventing these Ethiopians from entering Israel keeps them in harm’s way while their case gets reviewed by the High Court, and it’s all because of those in Israel who question the Jewishness of those individuals. Ukrainians of any faith are rushed in, while Ethiopians of Jewish heritage are kept out.
The Ukrainian conflict is a perfect example of the world’s hypocrisy. It shows how little Black and brown skin matters. The voices of other refugees aren’t shared on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. War in Ethiopia and other countries is not as appealing to the international media.
But it’s up to each one of us to be their voice. We’re seeing big companies, sports teams, celebrities and governments boycotting Russia and blocking Putin in every way they can. But my wish is that the world will also treat Black and dark-skinned people the way they treat those who are white. A world, for example, that won’t stand for border guards in a war-torn Ukraine preventing brown students from fleeing the country while allowing white Ukrainians to get out.
What is happening in Ukraine is appalling, and we should all absolutely unite to fight oppression and murder any time it happens, but we can’t only do this when it is appealing to our racial or economic biases. Ethiopia is worthy of our time; all suffering around the world is worthy of our time. If we cared about human life more than we care about oil and military spheres of influence and our own racial biases, there would be less suffering in this world.
Let’s be a megaphone for the voices that have been drowned out.
As Prime Minister Abiy prepares what is possibly a final, bloody stand in the war he has wrought
There are similar efforts to scapegoat all Tigrayans, led personally through the prime minister’s statements and state media, though the rampant use of hateful and dehumanizing speech makes the case that the government may well be inciting genocide as part of its last-ditch defense effort to save itself.
As Ethiopia crosses the one-year mark since the start of its devastating war in the Tigray region, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is preparing the capital, Addis Ababa, for one final stand against a blitzkrieg attack at the hands of Tigrayan rebels, who months ago turned the tide of the war and who now stand poised to turn out the country’s Nobel prize-winning prime minister.
In the process, as international diplomats and Ethiopian-Americans scramble to leave the country, the risk of state-sponsored genocide, and even state collapse, remain frighteningly real scenarios that will have catastrophic consequences for the country, the region, and U.S. interests for years to come.
This was an unfathomable scenario at the start of the conflict. Abiy promised a limited “law-and-order operation” against a select number of Tigrayan leaders who challenged his rule through, in his mind, an unwavering commitment to an anachronistic ethnically-based system they put in place during their more than 20 years of autocratic rule.
In reality, Abiy likely never believed Tigrayans would “go along to get along” and so set about from the start of his time in office to weaken their ties to the state and ensure their future banishment from power. It was those efforts to treat Tigrayans as Tigrayans treated the majority of Ethiopia’s ethnic groups during their time in power that created the self-fulfilling prophecy Abiy is now struggling to survive.
But with the bulk of the Ethiopian army’s best fighters and tacticians hailing from Tigray, the government has slowly seen its overwhelming strategic advantage eroded on the battlefield against a rump force more adept at insurgency combat and clearly more motivated by a fight for its literal survival.
The government’s response to its own tactical shortcomings and sagging morale has been to wage an asymmetric battle against not just the Tigrayan Defense Forces but more broadly against the people of Tigray. A recent joint report from the United Nations and Ethiopia’s own human rights body points out the widespread use of sexual violence as central to the government’s war strategy.
An ongoing government humanitarian blockade of the region has for months put more than 900,000 civilians at risk of famine and forced Tigrayan fighters to expand their fight into neighboring Amhara and Afar regions in a bid to break the siege, expanding the death toll and humanitarian suffering.
There are similar efforts to scapegoat all Tigrayans, led personally through the prime minister’s statements and state media, though the rampant use of hateful and dehumanizing speech makes the case that the government may well be inciting genocide as part of its last-ditch defense effort to save itself.
Reports this past week of mass roundups of Tigrayans living in and around Addis Ababa, under a far-reaching state of emergency declaration “to ensure national security,” suggest a possible last-ditch effort to deter the oncoming onslaught by holding hostage an entire people.
As the situation deteriorates, and the vast human and economic implications begin to take shape for the region, Ethiopia’s neighbors have only just begun to respond. Forced by the possible fall of one of Africa’s most important cities and the continent’s diplomatic capital, after months of callously treating the devastating conflict as Ethiopia’s “internal affair,” Kenya, Uganda and the African Union itself are finally calling for a ceasefire and political talks.
While Washington and its European allies have been sustained in their condemnations of the violence and abuses, they have done little to force either side’s hand to relent. Importantly, a bipartisan Senate bill, introduced last week in the Foreign Relations Committee, makes use of the Biden administration’s own Executive Order sanctions regime — rolled out in September but never applied — by mandating “the imposition of targeted sanctions against individual actors … undermining efforts to resolve the conflict or profit from it.”
Coupled with a freeze of more than $200 million in trade preferences — which, again, the administration was forced to announce last week under congressional deadline — and efforts to impose costs on belligerents are only beginning to take shape after a year of fighting.
As Prime Minister Abiy prepares what is possibly a final, bloody stand in the war he has wrought, will last-minute calls for calm and pressure tactics be enough to change the calculations of the warring parties and avoid catastrophe in the Horn of Africa?
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Addis Ethiopia Weblog 