Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on April 14, 2022
💭 In northern Ethiopia, a woman taken to an Eritrean Defense Forces camp was raped by 27 soldiers and contracted AIDS. In Central African Republic the bodies of a woman and two girls were found days after their kidnapping and rape by armed fighters. And in Iraq, 2,800 Yazidi woman and children have been captives of the Islamic State extremist group for eight years, many subjected to sexual violence.
These are some of the examples raised at a U.N. Security Council meeting Wednesday on accountability for such acts in conflicts by Pramila Patten, the U.N. special representative on sexual violence in conflict, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nadia Murad, a member of Iraq´s Yazidi religious minority forced into sexual slavery in 2014 who escaped her Islamic State captors.
Patten´s opening words were aimed squarely at the U.N.´s most powerful body, which has approved five resolutions that focus on preventing and addressing conflict-related sexual violence. What do those resolutions mean right now, she asked, for a woman in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Myanmar or Ethiopia´s northern Tigray region?
At this time of “great global turbulence marked by multiple crises,” she said, the world has seen “increased militarization, including an epidemic of coups, which have turned back the clock on women´s rights.” And every new war has seen human tragedies “including new waves of war´s oldest, most silences, and least-condemned crime” — sexual violence and rape in those countries and others whose victims “cry out for justice and redress.”
Patten said the gap between commitments by the Security Council, and compliance and reality is evident: The latest U.N. report covering conflicts in 18 countries documents 3,293 U.N.-verified cases of sexual violence committed in 2021, a significant increase of 800 cases compared to 2020. Again, she said, the highest number – 1,016 – were recorded in Congo.
Patten also cited examples in other conflict areas: two women from the Rohingya minority in Myanmar´s Chin state gang-raped by government soldiers resulting in unwanted pregnancies; a woman allegedly raped at gunpoint by Puntland police officer in Somalia where she said “abduction, rape and forced marriage are rampant;” documented cases in Colombia of sexual violence against women ex-combatants and their families; and the torture and killing of a female police officer who was eight months pregnant in Afghanistan´s Ghor province.
The U.N. special representative said the few cases of courts convicting perpetrators “are still the exception that prove the rule of justice denied.” Justice must be delivered in communities as well as courtrooms, and victims must receive reparations to rebuild their shattered lives, she said, stressing that “justice, peace and security are inextricably linked.”
Murad said at moments of global instability – like today’s world shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic, a climate crisis and war – issues like conflict-related sexual violence “tend to be pushed aside as though they are somehow secondary to the real issues.” But she said “the truth is these are precisely the moment when protecting, supporting and investing in women and girls should be urgent priorities.”
History shows that when conflict erupts brutality comes to the fore, and “we are seeing this in Ukraine as we speak, with reports of sexual violence that should alarm us.” Later, she told reporters, “my heart is with the people of Ukraine, especially the women and girls out there that are facing this brutality.”
“Sexual violence is not a side effect of conflict,” Murad said. “It is a tactic of war as old as time.”
Last year, a German court convicted an Islamic State member of genocide in a Yazidi girl’s death in a historic verdict, she said. But despite reams of evidence documenting atrocities IS committed against women and girls, she said the extremist perpetrators have faced few, if any, consequences.
Murad said survivors need “more than moral outrage” and urged the Security Council to vote to refer the Islamic State extremist group to the International Criminal Court to be tried for genocide and sexual violence. against Yazidis. In the meantime, she urged other countries to follow Germany´s example and use the principle of universal jurisdiction to try alleged perpetrators for war crimes.
“If you want to establish deterrence, if you want to assure Yazidi women and survivors everywhere that you stand with us, do not delay justice anymore,” she said.
Britain´s Minister of State Lord Tariq Ahmad, who chaired the meeting, joined her in launching “The Murad Code” which aims to tell investigators, journalists and others in the international community how to support survivors of sexual violence by reducing the burden on them and ensuring that their experiences are recorded safely and strengthen the pursuit of justice.
“The pathway to justice must have obstacles removed,” he said. “So ultimately, it´s all about survivors, that they know what their options are. … They have to be the center of our response.”
Controlling the terrestrial origin of all winds that create storms, tornados and hurricanes (Zion-Ethiopian Mountains) is the clandestine mission of the Luciferians. The on-going operation against ancient Christians of Ethiopia, against its churches and monasteries being as part of this mission.
The Holy Bible speaks of the north wind, the south wind, the east wind and the west wind. The four directions have immense spiritual significance. The west wind is symbolic of restoration. The west wind is mentioned only once in the Bible. The east wind brought the locusts and completely destroyed the vegetation in Egpt. But God brought the west wind to remove all the locusts in the land of Egypt and bring about restoration.
„And the LORD turned a very strong west wind, which took the locustes away and blew them into the Red Sea. There remained not one locust in the territory of egypt.“ [Exodus 10:19]
St. Thomas The Apostle brought Christianity to the south of the Indian Subcontinent to the current Kerela State in 52 AD. The west wind brought such European travelers and explorers like Marco Polo and Vasco da Gama to witness this. Vasco da Gama’s fleet reached India in 1498, the Portuguese were surprised to find Christian communities thriving in Southern India. They were even more surprised by the locals’ certainty that their church had been established by St. Thomas. They shouldn’t have been, as countless travellers, including Marco Polo, had claimed that the saint’s grave was there. St. Thomas had preached to the Hindus and the Jews of southern India and had won thousands of converts.
It was the west wind which brought The Holy Apostle Thomas, the apostle of Jesus Christ to begin God’s spiritual restoration of the Country of India. It must be also remembered that St Thomas landed on the West Coast, but was killed on the East Coast. St. Thomas was martyred on 3 July 72 AD, at Parangimalai, Chennai, in the Chola Empire, India.
🔥 GOING, GOING, GONE! Moment Church Spire Dramatically Topples to Ground in Storm Eunice Gales
THIS is the shocking moment a church spire snaps off and crashes to the ground after it was battered by Storm Eunice.
Damage to the Grade II listed building, built in 1856, has sparked concerns now arisen over its structural stability.
Matt Hodson, 17, who filmed the footage, told ITV news that he noticed the wind take a sudden violent turn when he went into his back garden.
“I was shocked – it was quite a surreal moment. I didn’t really expect it to actually fall – I was just filming just in case,” he said.
Reverend Claire Townes, a priest in at the church, added: “I literally thought to myself the church will be ok, it’s been here since Victorian times – and then two, three minutes later I had a telephone call from the police.”
The church said in a statement on Facebook: “Please do not come to the church to look at the fallen spire.
“We are awaiting the arrival of a structural surveyor as currently we cannot assure safety within the grounds until we know it is safe.”
Thankfully, nobody was injured by the the fallen spire.
Anglican Church Bans Women From Vicar’s Job on ‘biblical’ Grounds
An Anglican church has banned women from applying to its vacant post of vicar on ‘biblical’ grounds.
Holy Trinity Church in Wallington in south west London will now issue a job advert that specifically excludes female clerics from seeking the job.
The Church of England said such a move was rare but not unique. A spokesman said that because vicars and priests are ‘postholders’ rather than employees, the church does not fall foul of equal opportunities laws.
The decision to bar women from the £25,000 a year job was taken after a vote by Holy Trinity’s parochial church council.
The announcement made in the parish newsletter handed out to the congregation stated: “At our recent open evening we explained the parish church council’s view that the position of the overall leader (vicar) should be male for biblical reasons. Thank you to all those who shared their questions, views and points.
“We have now produced a summary sheet setting out the principle reasons from scripture for maintaining the historic position of this church on this matter.”
Women were first ordained as Church of England priests in 1994. Parishes can opt out of appointing female vicars by applying to the local diocese for ‘alternative oversight’ from a more conservative bishop.
A spokesman from the Diocese of Southwark said: “Although women play a full part in helping to lead a number of activities at Holy Trinity, Wallington they have asked for alternative oversight.
“Bishop Christopher Chessun has agreed to this and such oversight will be provided by the Bishop of Maidstone.
“This allows them to say, as a congregation, that they do not wish to receive the ministry of a woman Bishop or priest and thus to be able to advertise for a male priest.”
The campaign group Women and the Church (Watch) said it hoped that in the future discrimination against women priests would be outlawed but accepted the right of congregations to opt for men-only vicars.
A spokeswoman said: “Although Watch pray for the day when women and men, without caveat, can apply for any role within the Church of England, we accept that this is not currently the case. We endeavour to continue to work together with those with whom we disagree on this point.”
😈 Shame on you, callous President Sahelework Zewde!
😈 Shame on you, ignorant minister Dr. Liya Tadesse!
😈 Shame on you, traitor Journalist Hermela Aregawi!
😈 Shame on you, the heathen Bishop Abune Ermias
👉 Look at Filsan, Y’ALL!
She Was in Abiy Ahmed’s Cabinet as War Broke Out. Now She Wants to Set The Record Straight.
Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took a sizable risk when he chose her as the youngest minister in his cabinet: Filsan Abdi was an outspoken activist from the country’s marginalized Somali community with no government experience. She was just 28.
Like so many, she was drawn by Abiy’s pledges to build a new Ethiopia, free of the bloody ethnic rifts of the past — overtures that built Abiy’s global reputation as an honest broker and helped win him a Nobel Peace Prize.
Then the opposite happened.
Less than a year into her tenure, Ethiopia was spiraling into an ethnically tinged civil war that would engulf the northern part of the country — Africa’s second most populous — and as the head of the ministry overseeing women’s and children’s issues, Filsan found herself tasked with documenting some of the war’s most horrific aspects: mass rapes by uniformed men and the recruitment of child soldiers.
This week, Filsan, now 30, broke her public silence in a lengthy, exclusive interview with The Washington Post, in which she told of cabinet discussions in the lead-up to the war, official efforts to suppress her ministry’s findings about abuses by the government and its allies, and the resurgent ethnic divisions fracturing the country.
A spokeswoman for Abiy declined to comment on Filsan’s recollections.
“The war has polarized the country so deeply that I know many people will label me as a liar simply because I say the government has also done painful, horrible things,” Filsan said. “I am not saying it was only them. But I was there. I was in cabinet meetings, and I went and met victims. Who can tell me what I did and did not see?”
Disputed story lines
In the 14 months since Ethiopia’s war began, the world has largely relied on the scant access the government has granted to a handful of journalists and humanitarians for any kind of independent reporting. Tigray, Ethiopia’s northernmost region, where the war had been contained until June, has been subjected to a near-total communications blockade since fighting began in November 2020.
In the information vacuum, a propaganda war has flourished alongside the very real fighting that has claimed thousands of lives, and even the most basic story lines of the war are hotly contested.
Who started it? Who carried out the atrocities — massacres, summary executions, intentional starvation, mass rapes, hospital lootings, the arming of children — that people from across northern Ethiopia have recounted, either in their ransacked villages or in refugee camps? Is ethnic cleansing underway? Is Ethiopia’s government winning or losing the war?
In January, Abiy prematurely answered the last question by declaring the war over. He brought a group of ministers including Filsan to Tigray’s capital, Mekelle, which government troops had taken over from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, a well-armed regional political party resented elsewhere in Ethiopia for its outsize role in the repressive government that ran the country for three decades before Abiy’s ascendance.
Abiy accuses the TPLF of instigating the war with an attack on a military base, in which Tigrayan soldiers killed scores of non-Tigrayan soldiers. TPLF leaders say they were defending themselves. In any case, the conflict quickly metastasized, drawing in ethnic militias and the army of neighboring Eritrea.
In Tigray, Filsan was told to create a task force that would investigate widespread claims of rape and recruitment of child soldiers.
“We brought back the most painful stories, and every side was implicated,” she recalled. “But when I wanted to release our findings, I was told that I was crossing a line. ‘You can’t do that,’ is what an official very high up in Abiy’s office called and told me. And I said, ‘You asked me to find the truth, not to do a propaganda operation. I am not trying to bring down the government — there is a huge rape crisis for God’s sake. Child soldiers are being recruited by both sides. I have the evidence on my desk in front of me.’ ”
Filsan said she was told to revise the report to say that only TPLF-aligned fighters had committed crimes. And when her subordinates at the ministry wouldn’t release the full report, she chose to tweet that “rape has taken place conclusively and without a doubt” in Tigray.
Since then, even her childhood friends have shied away from being seen with her, fearful of the association. Colleagues in the ministry referred to her as a “protector of Tigrayans,” she said — implying that she was a traitor.
The task force’s conclusions have since been echoed by a slew of reports by human rights organizations, which have done interviews either with refugees or by phone because of access restrictions. A joint report written by the United Nations and Ethiopia’s state-appointed human rights agencies also found evidence that all sides in the war had “committed violations of international human rights, humanitarian and refugee law, some of which may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
Widespread allegations of crimes committed by Tigrayan rebels have piled up since June, when the force surged south into the neighboring Amhara and Afar regions, pushing back government troops and aligned militias and displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians. The five-month onslaught was recently reversed when the rebels retreated to within the borders of Tigray.
Filsan argues that the Ethiopian government could have avoided the wave of revenge rapes and massacres of the past months.
“If there had been accountability for the rapes that took place in Tigray, do you think so many rapes would have happened in Amhara and Afar? No,” she said. “Justice helps stop the cycle. But both sides felt they could just get away with it.”
‘Yes, I know the pain, too’
As the pendulum of momentum swings back and forth in the war, and a total victory seems more and more elusive, Abiy’s tone has shifted from the relatively straightforward anti-insurgency rhetoric of late last year to calling the war an existential battle against a “cancer” that has grown in the country.
In his and other official statements, the line between the stated enemy — the TPLF — and Tigrayans in general has increasingly blurred. And under a state of emergency imposed in November, Tigrayans around the country allege, thousands of their community members have been arbitrarily detained. Tigrayans crossing the border into Sudan recently recounted fleeing a final stage of what they say is ethnic cleansing in an area of Tigray claimed by the Amhara people.
Filsan recalled that before she resigned, she had been told first by a high-ranking official in Abiy’s Prosperity Party and then by an official in his personal office that all Tigrayans on her staff — and at other ministries, too — were to be placed on leave immediately.
“I said, ‘I won’t do it unless the prime minister calls me himself, or you put it in writing,’ ” she said, adding that subordinates of hers enforced the order anyway. “Many Ethiopians are lying to themselves. They deny that an ethnic element has become a major part of this war. They have stopped seeing the difference between Tigrayan people and the TPLF, even if many Tigrayans don’t support the TPLF.”
When she resigned in September, Abiy told her to postpone her decision for six months, claiming that the war was nearing its conclusion. But by then, she had lost trust in him. Even before the war, in cabinet meetings, Abiy had repeatedly implied that a conflict was coming and that the TPLF would be to blame for it, Filsan said. But she felt that peace had never really been given a chance, and that Abiy seemed to relish the idea of eliminating the TPLF, even though crushing dissent through brute force was a page right out of the TPLF’s playbook.
“It’s now been 100 days since the day we met, and it has only gotten worse. I knew it then, I knew it before then, and I know it now: He’s in denial, he’s delusional. His leadership is failing,” said Filsan.
The feeling that she was being drawn into the same ideology of ethnic domination that the TPLF had espoused when it presided over the country was hard to shake. As a Somali, she came from a community that had been trampled during those decades, and earlier, too, under communists and kings alike. Uncles of hers had been dragged from their beds and beaten; women she knew had to wear diapers after having been raped by soldiers; children were taught to kneel and put their hands up if confronted by a man in uniform.
“So, yes, I know the pain, too, I know the reasons people want revenge. But if we don’t back away from it, we are doomed,” she said. “One day we will wake up from this nightmare and have to ask ourselves: How will we live with the choices we made?”
Many of us feel, as poet John Donne put it in The Anatomy of the World in 1611, “Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone”.
The Christian tradition tells us to be on the lookout for the Antichrist, who will appear shortly before the big finish. Vast amounts of Christian ink have been used to try and work out when he will come and just how we might identify him when he does.
Here, then, are five things to know just in case:
1. He is the Son of Satan
The Antichrist was the perfectly evil human being because he was completely opposite to the perfectly good human being, Jesus Christ.
Just as Christians came to believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, so they thought that the Antichrist was the Son of Satan. Jesus was born of a virgin. So the Antichrist would be born of a woman who was apparently a virgin, but was really a whore. Where Christ was God in the flesh, the Antichrist was Satan in the flesh.
In The Christian New Testament there are only three passages that mention the Antichrist, all in the letters of John (I John 2.18-27, I John 4.1-6, 2 John 7). They suggest the end of the world should be expected at any moment.
Over the first several centuries of the Christian tradition, the scholars of the early Church started to pore over an array of other Biblical characters, finding references to the Antichrist within them: the “abomination of desolation” in the books of Daniel and Matthew; “the man of lawlessness” and “the son of perdition” in a letter of Paul.
The book of Revelation describes a singular figure as “the beast from the earth” and “the beast from the sea” whose number is 666.
2. He is an earthly tyrant and trickster
By the year 1000, the main outlines of the first of two narratives about the Antichrist was in place thanks to a noble-born Benedictine monk and abbot named Adso of Montier-en-Der (c. 920-92) who wrote a treatise on the subject.
According to him, the Antichrist would be a Jew from the tribe of Dan and born in Babylon. He would be brought up in all forms of wickedness by magicians and wizards. He would be accepted as the Messiah and ruler by the Jews in Jerusalem. Those Christians whom he could not convert to his cause, he would torture and kill.
He would then rule for seven years before being defeated by the angel Gabriel or Christ and the divine armies, prior to the resurrection of the dead and the Final Judgment.
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