THE CHURCH MILITANT
Ephesians 5:11-"And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them". This Christian News Blog maintains a one stop resource of current news and reports of its own related to church, moral, spiritual, and related political issues, plus articles, and postings from other online discernment ministries, and media which share the aims to obey the biblical commands to shed light on and refute error, heresy, apostasy, cults, and spiritual abuse.
Yvette Bronx (yvette.vmf@gmail.com) discusses the tyranny Virginians are facing in a 2nd Amendment Sanctuary County hearing.
Virginians For Liberty & Self Defense: http://bit.ly/2M2Mfj1
JEWISH LEADERS CALL FOR STATE OF EMERGENCY IN NEW YORK FOLLOWING WAVE OF ANTI-SEMITIC HATE CRIMES
Antisemitic attacks occur almost daily in New York. Following the most recent attack (multiple stabbings at a rabbi's house during a Hanukkah celebration in the New York City suburb of Monsey), Jewish leaders are calling for a state of emergency. As anti-Semitism increases, so do hate crimes. Will NY Governor Andrew Cuomo find a solution, or is the Jewish community at the mercy of people like the murderous Grafton E. Thomas? David Wood (Acts 17 Apologetics) discusses the issue.
5 Stabbed at NYC-Area Rabbi's Home
Terror Strike on Hanukkah in New York
Son of rabbi among five victims, stabbed with a machete
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research
purposes:
On Saturday in Monsey, New York, at least 100 people gathered in the home of Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg. Shortly before 10 p.m., as the rabbi was lighting the candle on the seventh night of Hanukkah, a man with face partially covered burst into the home and began stabbing people with a machete.
“I was praying for my life," Aron Kohn, 65, told reporters, “he started attacking people right away as soon as he came in the door. We didn’t have time to react at all.” The intruder stabbed five people, including the rabbi’s son. Other stabbing victims were reported in critical condition. One attendee followed the attacker and got his license number. That number was picked up as the suspect crossed the George Washington Bridge and when police arrested him in New York City early Sunday, he was covered in blood.
News reports identified the stabber as Thomas Grafton but others named him as Grafton Thomas, 37, an African American from Greenwood Lake, New York, some 20 miles from Monsey. As the New York Daily News reported, Thomas has one prior arrest “which is sealed, making the bloody machete rampage inside an Orthodox rabbi’s home in which five people were wounded all the more incomprehensible.” The default response, as Daniel Greenfield noted, was meaningless statements “about the evils of hatred.”
New York’s Democrat attorney general Letitia James, a former New York City Council member and public advocate, proclaimed “zero tolerance for acts of hate of any kind and we will continue to monitor this horrific situation.”
Democrat presidential candidate Andrew Yang tweeted “Anti-Semitism is a horrifying scourge that has no place in America. We must do all we can to prevent, punish and investigate these crimes and protect all who gather and worship in peace.” Fellow candidate Julian Castro denounced “what appears to be another hateful attack,” adding “We must combat the rise of anti-Semitism and hate.”
New York governor Andrew Cuomo cited recent attacks, “motivated by hate. They are doing mass attacks. These are terrorists in our country perpetrating terrorism on other Americans, and that's how we should treat it and that's how I want the laws in this state to treat it.”
The Hanukkah stabbings follow a series of anti-Semitic attacks in the New York area. Last Monday, as authorities are charging,Steven Jorge, 28, punched a Jewish man, 65, in the face, knocked him to the ground then kicked him repeatedly while yelling “fuck you Jew!” The next day a group of teenagers in Crown Heights knocked a Jewish man to the ground.
On Tuesday afternoon, a Jewish man was assaulted by a group of teenagers in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights. The teens followed the victim down the street, with one hitting him in the head and knocking him to the ground. A case of aggravated harassment in Brooklyn was also reported, and none of the cases involved provocation by the victims. That was also the case on December 10 in Jersey City.
As NBC News reported, “hate-fueled domestic terrorism motivated the harrowing and prolonged shooting attack that killed three people inside a Jersey City kosher market and took the life of a veteran police detective.” In the “targeted attack,” suspects David Anderson and Francine Graham, heavily armed with rifles, handguns, and a shotgun, “were bent on taking out Jewish people and members of law enforcement.”
Police officers Ray Sanchez and Ferenella Fernandez were wounded in the attack. The dead included detective Joseph Seals, a father of five; Mindel Ferencz, co-owner of the grocery; rabbinical student Moshe Deutsch, 24, and store employee Douglas Miguel Rodriguez. Both attackers, found dead in the store, had been associated with the Black Hebrew Israelites, according to NBC, “a movement whose members have been known to rail against white people and Jews.”
As Joseph Klein noted, the Hebrew Israelites are part of “a black supremacist group known as The House of Israel,” based in New York. The Southern Poverty Law Center flags “black supremacist groups on the extremist fringe of the Hebrew Israelite movement.” This group believes they are “God's true chosen people because they, not the people known to the world today as Jews.” The group has been defended by the New York Times as innocent street preachers who practice “tough love.”
At this writing, any connections of Grafton Thomas to black supremacist groups remain unclear. On Sunday, Thomas pleaded not guilty to five counts of attempted murder and one count of burglary. Bail was set at $5 million and Thomas remains in jail.
President Trump condemned the “horrific” attack at the rabbi’s home and tweeted: “We must all come together to fight, confront, and eradicate the evil scourge of anti-Semitism. Melania and I wish the victims a quick and full recovery.”Earlier in December, the president issued an executive order targeting anti-Semitism on college campuses.
Also on Sunday, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, a former Democra presidential candidate, told Fox News, “An atmosphere of hate has been developing in this country over the last few years. A lot of it is emanating from Washington and it’s having an effect on all of us.”
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research
purposes:
One of the groups that believe in these books will refuse to submit or accept the new book, even unto torture and death.
The other group will riot and kill until this new book is definitively repudiated by everyone.
Guess which is which?
The repressive measures of the Chinese government are bad enough. This one, however, is just stupid, as no believers are going to accept the new books. This is likely to blow up (literally) in their faces.
“China to rewrite Quran and Bible to fit ‘socialist values,’” by Hamza Saleem, Islam21c.com, December 26, 2019:
In recent months, the world has had its eyes fixated on China, anticipating its next moves. The torturous methods inflicted on its Uyghur Muslim minority have come to light, millions of whom are held in modern-day concentration camps….
Chinese authorities have constantly denied its “ethnic cleanse” of the Uyghur Muslims since 2017, despite its blatant attempts to create a communistic nation. Instead, they claim them to be “vocational training centres designed to combat Islamic extremism.”…
But now China have outdone themselves and said that all “classical religious books” will be “re-evaluated”. It intends to rewrite the Islamic and Christian Holy Books in order to prevent “extreme thoughts” and “heretical ideas” from eroding the country.
The instruction for the rewriting of the Quran and Bible was given at a meeting in November held by the Committee for Ethnic and Religious Affairs, which is responsible for all religious matters of the country, so that it may be fitting of the “era of President Xi Jinping,” who despite being President, is also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC)….
Beijing finalised the decision at the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, calling for a “comprehensive evaluation of the existing religious classics aiming at contents which do not conform to the progress of the times.”
The project apparently extends to all major religions, including sutras from Buddhism, with the core aim of them needing to reflect the socialist values and beliefs of China’s leading Community Party….
They even highlighted that “Jesus Christ’s parables” will have to fall “in line with the Communist Party, without whom failing which they run the risk of being purged from the bibles available to the faithful.”…
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research
purposes:
“Pakistan is a multi-religious and pluralistic country where people of all faiths enjoy religious freedom under constitutional protections,” said Pakistan’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Aisha Farooqui.
And here is the truth about Pakistan. Scroll and see.
“Pakistan Fumes After US Keeps It on Religious Freedom Blacklist,” by Patrick Goodenough, CNS News, December 26, 2019 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):
(CNSNews.com) – The Trump administration’s decision to keep Pakistan on a blacklist of religious freedom violators is irking the world’s second most-populous Islamic nation, which slammed the move as “unilateral and arbitrary” and complained that its archrival India had not been similarly targeted.
“The designation is reflective of selective targeting of countries, and thus unlikely to be helpful to the professed cause of advancing religious freedom,” Pakistan’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Aisha Farooqui said in a Christmas Day statement.
“Pakistan is a multi-religious and pluralistic country where people of all faiths enjoy religious freedom under constitutional protections,” she said.
In fact, Pakistan oversees the world’s most notorious blasphemy laws, with Christians, Ahmadis and other minorities disproportionally affected by provisions that carry the death penalty for disparaging Mohammed; life imprisonment for defiling the Qur’an; and shorter jail terms for insulting Mohammed’s wives, relatives or “companions.”
Aside from the legal perils, Pakistanis professing various faiths have been targeted by murderous vigilante mobs or individuals determined to punish purported “blasphemers” in cases where the authorities have not yet acted.
As recently as last weekend, a U.S.-educated Pakistani university lecturer in the city of Multan, Junaid Hafeez, was sentenced to death for blasphemy after being accused of insulting Mohammed on Facebook.
Hafeez had been imprisoned, mostly in solitary confinement, for six years while awaiting finalization of his trial. His first lawyer was shot dead in 2014 for defending a client accused of blasphemy.
After the sentence was delivered, the BBC reported, prosecution lawyers handed out candy to their colleagues “who chanted ‘Allahu akbar’ and ‘death to blasphemers.’”
Waivers
According to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), an independent statutory body, at least 80 individuals are currently imprisoned or in death row in Pakistan after being convicted of blasphemy.
Citing the blasphemy laws and other concerns, the USCIRF from 2002 to 2018 called on the State Department each year to designate Pakistan a “country of particular concern” (CPC) under the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA), but to no avail.
It was only in late 2018 that the Trump State Department broke with the Obama and Bush administrations, blacklisting Pakistan as a CPC despite its purported status as an important counter-terror ally.
Last Friday Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the renewal of CPC designations for Pakistan and eight other “egregious” violators of religious freedom.” (The others are Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan.)
It was that decision that the Pakistani foreign ministry was condemning on Wednesday.
“This pronouncement is not only detached from ground realities of Pakistan but also raises questions about the credibility and transparency of the entire exercise,” Farooqui said.
Despite the designation, Pakistan does not face any immediate consequences for its poor record….
