Here's hoping that more than a few Christians living in the Arab world are gay as well

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Alternate headline: All minorities are equal. Some just more equal than others.



News from earlier this month:

The Obama administration announced on Tuesday that the United States would use all the tools of American diplomacy, including the potent enticement of foreign aid, to promote gay rights around the world.

In a memorandum issued by President Obama in Washington and in a speech by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton here, the administration vowed to actively combat efforts by other nations that criminalize homosexual conduct, abuse gay men, lesbians, bisexuals or transgendered people, or ignore abuse against them.

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And in what is apparently totally unrelated news and unless you've been living under a rock, what follows is entirely far from being an isolated incident.

At a Nigerian Catholic church where a terror attack killed 35 people on Christmas, women tried to clean the sanctuary ahead of Mass on Monday while one man wept uncontrollably amid the debris.

Outside St. Theresa Catholic Church, crowds gathered among the burned-out cars in the dirt parking lot, angry over the attack claimed by a radical Muslim sect and fearful that the group will target more churches.

Rev. Father Christopher Jataudarde told The Associated Press that Sunday's blast happened as church officials gave parishioners white powder as part of a tradition celebrating the birth of Christ.

Some already had left the church at the time of the bombing, causing the massive casualties. In the chaos after the bombing, Jataudarde said one mortally wounded man, cradling his shredded stomach, begged him for religious atonement.

"Father, pray for me, I will not survive," the man said, according to the priest.

At least 52 people were wounded in the attack, said Slaku Luguard, a coordinator with Nigeria's National Emergency Management Agency. Victims filled the cement floors of a nearby government hospital, some crying in pools of their own blood.

On Christmas, attacks by the radical Muslim sect left 39 dead across Africa's most populous nation. A bomb also exploded amid gunfire in the central Nigeria city of Jos and a suicide car bomber attacked the military in the nation's northeast.

After the bombings, a Boko Haram spokesman using the nom de guerre Abul-Qaqa claimed responsibility for the attacks in an interview with The Daily Trust, the newspaper of record across Nigeria's Muslim north. The sect has used the newspaper in the past to communicate with public.

"There will never be peace until our demands are met," the newspaper quoted the spokesman as saying. "We want all our brothers who have been incarcerated to be released; we want full implementation of the Sharia system and we want democracy and the constitution to be suspended."

We applaude the President for using his bully pulpit as the most powerful man on the planet to defend specific minority groups from persecution. However, considering this muscle-flexing does not appear to be extended on behalf of another minority group that is being systematically erased from the Arab world, it pains us to come to the conclusion that this gesture from the great post-partisan uniter is merely a cynical and shameless sop to his base.

Quote of the Day

"We Chinese people love the Olympics and support the Olympics, and that's why there are no protesters,"

… and the white wash continues.

If it weren’t for turning on the TV early this morning looking for USA vs. Germany in hoops and accidentally running across a small news item on NBC’s crappy local affiliate which reported on a group of Christians refusing to leave Beijing’s airport until their confiscated Bibles were returned, we would never have heard about it.

Good to know the Chinese “take care of” Bibles the way they take care of dissidents. Story here.


The Chinese promise of setting up “protest pens” for peaceful Chicomm-sanctioned demonstrations was made just to get everyone off their back as there have been, to date, zero demonstrations in the 3 designated venues… one of which is in an amusement park where there is a $10 fee just to get in.

In fact, the Chinese police state can be commended for streamlining their processes to the degree that they don’t waste energy by going out and finding the malcontents, they simply just wait until the malcontents come down to the Olympic security offices to apply for a protest and arrest them there.

Nicholas Krisof of the New York Times decided to take a spin on the protest merry-go-round. His dizzying account of stonewalling, excessive red tape, mountains of conditions and forms all smothered in a thick layer of mind-numbing bureaucracy can be found here.

Amazingly, though, at the end of the article Kristof gets all fair’n’balanced, essentially shrugging his shoulders and implying, “hey, could be worse”… the totality of his little experiment is kind of brushed-off as nothing more than a trip to the DMV. Kristoff: “China is changing: it is no democracy, but it’s also no longer a totalitarian state.”

We don’t want to get into the parsing of political terminology but when we think of a planned, centralized economy, the state being that which "guarantees security and prosperity" (quote from the Opening Ceremonies), young children ripped from their families and taken to Olympic factories where they only see their parents once a year, people being arrested for merely attempting to file paperwork for a protest and a completely empty protest zone, we will just paraphrase a quote used during the primaries,

“China is (still) totalitarian, enough.”

Actions of the Government have caused fear and panic among its citizens.

"The recurring violations of liberties [in Algeria] have lately reached an intolerable level. The most recent of these is the witchcraft trial that took place on the stage of the courthouse in Tiaret. The victim, a 37-year-old woman, is in danger of being sentenced to three years' imprisonment for the crime of Christianity."

This is typical of the persecution of Christians in Africa. Actually, this woman is getting off easy as Christians and animists are just hunted down and slaughtered elsewhere on the Continent, particularly the Sudan. Full story here.

H/T: MEMRI