UN: Both Sides Committing War Crimes in Syria

Syrians in "leadership positions" who may be responsible for war crimes have been identified, along with units accused of perpetrating them, UN investigators say.

Both government forces and armed rebels are committing war crimes, including killings and torture, spreading terror among civilians in a nearly two-year-old conflict, they said on Monday.

The investigators' latest report, covering the six months to mid-January, was based on 445 interviews conducted abroad with victims and witnesses, as they have not been allowed into Syria.
The independent team, led by Brazilian Paulo Pinheiro, called on the UN Security Council to "act urgently to ensure accountability" for grave violations, possibly by referring the violators to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for prosecution.

"The international community, and the UN Security Council, must take the decision to refer this to justice," Carla del Ponte, a former UN prosecutor and a member of the commission, said.
"We suggest the International Criminal Court."

War crimes on both sides

The list of suspects, building on lists drawn up in the past year, will remain a secret; it will be entrusted to Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights.
Pillay, a former judge at the ICC, said on Saturday that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad should be probed for war crimes and called for immediate action by the international community, including possible military intervention.

"The evidence collected sits in the safe in the office of the high commissioner against the day it might be referred to a court and evidence would be examined by a prosecutor," a European diplomat said.

The death toll in Syria is by some estimates approaching 70,000 people, Pillay told the Security Council last week in a fresh appeal for it to refer Syria to the ICC.

Government forces have carried out shelling and aerial bombardment across Syria including Aleppo, Damascus, Deraa, Homs and Idlib, the independent UN investigators said, citing corroborating evidence gathered from satellite images.

"In some incidents, such as in the assault on Harak, indiscriminate shelling was followed by ground operations during which government forces perpetrated mass killing," it said, referring to a town in the southern province of Deraa where residents told them that 500 civilians were killed in August.
"Government forces and affiliated militias have committed extra-judicial executions, breaching international human rights law. This conduct also constitutes the war crime of murder."

They have also targeted queues at bakeries and funeral processions, in violence aimed at "spreading terror among the civilian population", and used cluster bombs, the commission said.
Rebel forces fighting to topple Assad have committed their own war crimes including murder, torture, hostage-taking and using children under age 15 in hostilities.

"They continue to endanger the civilian population by positioning military objectives inside civilian areas," the report said, adding that rebel snipers have caused "considerable civilian casualties".
"The violations and abuses committed by anti-government armed groups did not, however, reach the intensity and scale of those committed by government forces and affiliated militia," the report noted.

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Syrian Opposition Adds Hizbullah Terrorists to Target List

 

The Syrian opposition fighting to oust President Bashar al-Assad has added another target to its hit list: the Lebanon-based, Iranian-funded Hizbullah terrorist organization.

 

According to a report published Wednesday in The Washington Post, the Free Syrian Army threatened Tuesday to attack Hizbullah guerrilla fighters not only in Syria, but also on their home territory – Lebanon.

The threat comes just a few days after Hizbullah terrorists were involved in attacking three Syrian villages near the border between the two countries, around the Syrian border town of Qusayr.

"If the Hizbullah shelling on the Syrian land, on the villages and unarmed civilians, from inside the Lebanese land does not stop in the next 48 hours from the release of this statement, we will take matters in our own hands to respond to the source of the shooting and stop it inside Lebanese territory", the Free Syrian Army warned.

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Russia Calls for End to Syrian Crisis

 

 

Russia is calling for an end to the nearly two-year crisis in Syria.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday after a meeting with Arab diplomats in Moscow that neither the Syrian government nor rebels can pursue a military solution, saying that is a path to mutual destruction.

Russia has used it veto power in the United Nations Security Council to block three rounds of resolutions against Syria, stressing the need for Syria to find an end to the fighting without foreign interference.

Lavrov's comments come a day after rebels fired mortar rounds at one of President Bashar al-Assad's palaces in Damascus. The strike was the first confirmed by the government close to a presidential building.

Activists also reported a missile strike Tuesday in the northern city of Aleppo that killed at least 31 people. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says approximately 140 people died in fighting across Syria Tuesday. 

 

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Expert: Islam Demands Subjugation of Christians

WND.com reports: “Catholic psychologist Dr. William Kilpatrick is warning that Christian Americans are naïve about Islam and working towards their own extinction.

‘We often hear that the true Islam is a religion of peace that has been hijacked by a minority of violent extremists,’ Kilpatrick told WND. ‘If that’s true, why not open the books on Islam? Islam deserves the kind of inspection and scrutiny that Christianity has received for decades.’

Kilpatrick, author of ‘Christianity, Islam and Atheism: The Struggle for The Soul of The West,’ said alarms should be sounding.
‘Muhammad said that he came as a ‘warner,’’ wrote Kilpatrick in his book, published in November. ‘Among the banners that can be seen in various Muslim demonstrations in Europe is one that reads, ‘Islam – our religion today, your religion tomorrow.’ For anyone who follows the pronouncements of Islamic religious authorities around the world, there can be little doubt that this is their goal.’

Kilpatrick chronicles Islam’s war on Christian civilization as a war on universal human rights. He cites three factors working against all people of goodwill: cowardice or malice by secular governments, naïve Christian leaders and irreligious or atheist news media preaching indifference.

Indifferentists purport that all religions are equal and valid, except Christianity. Among them are secular media who whitewash Islam’s history and agenda, charging instead that Christianity is guilty of intolerable extremism…”

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Video: Egyptian Salafi Cleric Calls to Kill Opposition Leaders

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has posted a video to YouTube which shows a radical Egyptian cleric calling to kill the leaders of the country’s opposition.

The fatwa (Islamic ruling) by Salafi cleric Sheik Mahmoud Shaaban was aired by Al-Hafez TV via the Internet on February 1, 2013.


“The leadership of the National Salvation Front, which clearly aspires to the [presidential] throne, should be killed, according to Islamic law,” Shaaban says in the video. “Are you with me, Dr. ‘Atef? According to Islamic law, they should be killed.”

“The National Salvation Front, which wants the presidency, and whose leadership is setting fire to Egypt, in an effort to gain the presidency, should be killed,” he repeats.
Shaaban is a professor at Sunni Islam's main seat of learning in Egypt, Al-Azhar. His fatwa gives the green light to kill opposition leaders including former UN nuclear watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei and ex-presidential candidate Hamdeen Sabbahi.

Another hardline cleric, Wagdi Ghoneim, recently urged President Mohammed Morsi to kill “thugs” and “criminals” who are burning the country, otherwise people will do it themselves.
According to an AFP report on Friday, security was stepped up outside the homes of ElBaradei and Sabbahi ahead of anti-Morsi protests throughout Egypt which the opposition had called for.
The Egyptian presidency has condemned the fatwas as "terrorism".

"Some are promoting and inciting political violence while others who claim to speak in the name of religion are permitting ‘killing’ based on political differences and this is terrorism," the presidency said, according to AFP.

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Western Links To Terror Attacks Raising Concern That Canadian Passport May Become Tainted

Reports of Canadians involved in two terror attacks are raising new concerns that the Canadian passport might become tainted in the eyes of the world.

The link of two Westerners – a Canadian and an Australian – to a fatal attack in Bulgaria has heightened the fear that Hezbollah and other terrorist groups are deliberately using dual-citizen operatives with the so-called “clean” passports of unassuming, supposedly “low-risk” nations.


That comes on top of an Algerian claim, still unconfirmed in Ottawa’s eyes, that two Canadians, including a ringleader, were involved in the crisis at the Tigantourine gas plant in Algeria, which left at least 38 hostages and 29 attackers dead. The two links are raising uncomfortable questions about whether security services around the world will start to eye Canadians more suspiciously when they cross their borders.

“In all good intelligence services, you look at patterns, you look at trends, you attempt to try to weight things, and say, ‘Given the preponderance of activity with Canadian passport holders, they seem to be representing a higher threat profile, maybe we should take other measures,” said Ray Boisvert, a former assistant director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Canada’s spy agency.


Foreign intelligence services don’t yet view Canada suspiciously as a source-country for terrorists, Mr. Boisvert said, but he noted that CSIS said last year that 50 to 60 Canadians had left the country to train as terror operatives. “That’s not onesies or twosies. Secondly, we’ve had two back-to-back,” Mr. Boisvert said.

U.S. intelligence officials have already expressed concern over the Canadian link to the Algerian case, even though Ottawa insists it has yet to see the evidence.
But it’s a problem without simple solutions. The Canadian suspect in the Bulgarian bombing, according to Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, came to Canada at 8, became a citizen, and returned to Lebanon at 12 – suggesting there’s little Canadian intelligence could have done to intervene. The case put a spotlight on the many dual-citizens living abroad – an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 in Lebanon. But most counterterrorism experts don’t see links to a pair of attacks as reason to place tight restrictions on dual citizenship – and Mr. Kenney insists that’s not “viable.”

Bulgarian investigators have linked last July’s bombing in Burgas – which killed five Israeli tourists, a Bulgarian driver, and the bomber – to the Lebanese-based militant group Hezbollah. That group has a practice of recruiting overseas sleeper cells, according to Israeli terrorism expert Boaz Ganor, executive director of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism. But there are also signs that Hezbollah is using dual citizens to conduct terrorist attacks in third countries, using their real passports so they don’t need counterfeited documents.

“When you come in with your real identity, the risk that you will be exposed prior to your attack is much smaller,” Dr. Ganor said. That makes someone with a Canadian passport a useful operative. “It would be easier to move from state to state, from border to border, with the Canadian passport, than for example, a Peruvian passport.”

The actions of the Burgas bombers demonstrate that advantage. Two of the plotters entered the country with real passports, one Canadian and one Australian. Once inside Bulgaria, they adopted false identities using crudely faked Michigan drivers’ licences, counterfeits so bad that a rental-car agency in Pomorie, near Burgas, refused to rent a car to one of the plotters.

Politicians have scrambled for a response: Mr. Kenney has proposed stripping citizenship from those who commit terror acts, but that’s an after-the-fact, symbolic response – not prevention.
Canadians have seen terrorism threaten their easy passage across borders before, notably after Sept. 11, 2001, when U.S. lawmakers repeated false assertions that the attackers entered the U.S. through Canada’s porous borders. The two recent cases raise concerns Canada’s reputation will be challenged again.

“We should take these sorts of incidents very seriously, but we should not overstate the issue,” Mr. Kenney said, arguing most Western nations have bigger problems with “homegrown” terrorists. The Harper government examined dual citizenship after Canada evacuated tens of thousands of Lebanese-Canadians during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah conflict, Mr. Kenney noted. Revoking citizenship for those who leave Canada for years, he said, “is not a viable idea.”

Mr. Kenney said the government is increasing efforts to ensure that those who do become Canadian citizens have greater ties to the country – increasing checks to ensure immigrants have lived in Canada for three years before becoming citizens, and tests of attachment, like requirements citizens speak English or French and understand Canada’s democratic “values.”

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Tunisian President's Party Quits Coalition Government

Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki’s secular party is quitting the coalition government in anger at the dominant Islamist party’s handling of the country’s worst political crisis since it unleashed the Arab Spring uprisings two years ago.

The move by the Congress for the Republic party threatens to deepen the crisis, prompted by the assassination of an opposition leader last week.

Marzouki was a longtime human rights activist whose ascension to the presidency was seen as a sign of Tunisia’s democratic progress after it overthrew a longtime authoritarian president in 2011.

The centre-left Congress for the Republic party, which Marzouki founded, said Sunday that it is quitting the coalition government, the state news agency TAP reported. The party had wanted negotiations on a new government.

The coalition government is currently led by the Islamist Ennahda party, which dominated Tunisia’s first free elections. Marzouki’s party and the secular Ettakatol party also held some government seats.
Fringe violence by radical Islamists has mounted in Tunisia, and secular critics of Ennahda accuse the party of not doing enough to stop the extremists.

The shooting death on Wednesday of opposition leader Chokri Belaid — one of Ennahda’s most outspoken critics — sparked nationwide protests and calls for a new government.

The prime minister, an Ennahda member, wants to form a new government of non-political technocrats. But Ennahda party leadership rejects that idea. A crucial party council is meeting Sunday to discuss what to do.

After three days of street violence, the capital Tunis was relatively quiet Sunday, under the watchful eye of riot police.

Professor Khaled Adouani expressed hope Sunday that the government would find a “disciplined” solution to the crisis, noting that a pro-Ennahda rally in Tunis ended peacefully. “We must not in these delicate circumstances think about anything else other than legality,” he said.

Musician Imed Amar, however, echoed concern about a divide within Ennahda between moderates and hard-liners. “Things are getting complicated, the disagreements are growing inside the Ennahda itself,” the 29-year-old said.

Source: The Globe and Mail

UK: Over 40,000 Teachers ‘Face Sack’ Over Gay Marriage

More than 40,000 teachers say they will probably refuse to teach about “the importance of” same-sex marriage, according to a new poll.
And 56 per cent of teachers believe any colleague who takes such a stance risks damaging their career.

The survey has led to concerns that tens of thousands of teachers may face being sacked or disciplined over their views, because of how legislation is worded.
It comes ahead of an important vote on redefining marriage in the House of Commons tomorrow.

The poll, conducted by ComRes, found that one in ten teachers say they are likely to refuse to teach about gay marriage.
It also uncovered that a further 17 per cent of teachers, 74,000, said they would probably teach the importance of gay marriage but “wouldn’t be happy about it.”

The results come as a leading employment lawyer warned of the effect redefining marriage would have on teachers.
John Bowers QC explained that legislation currently “gives a privilege to marriage in the school curriculum”.
However if same-sex marriage was brought in to law, the current definition of marriage would change.

Mr Bowers said: “The stark position in my view is that a Christian teacher (or indeed any teacher with a conscientious objection) may have to teach about (and positively portray) a notion of marriage (and its importance for family life) which they may find deeply offensive.”

“If the Marriage Bill becomes law, schools could lawfully discipline a teacher who refused to teach materials endorsing same sex marriage.”

Responding to the survey of teachers Campaign Director for the Coalition for Marriage, Colin Hart, said: “As this recent poll shows, tens of thousands of teachers face the real prospect of being disciplined, or sacked, over the Government’s proposals to redefine marriage, creating a poisonous atmosphere in every staffroom in every school.

“The legislation contains no safeguards for those who work in the public sector.
“The quadruple lock is not sustainable and instead of answering these questions the PM plans to ram this bill through Parliament in just a few months, including having to appoint 50 new peers to ensure the measure is not rejected by the Lords.”

Mr Hart concluded: “There has been very little good news for the PM just days ahead of the Second Reading vote on the Government’s gay marriage bill, which he is expected to win.

“What puzzles most people is why, when the economy continues to flat line, and he has consistently failed to implement policies that were actually in his manifesto, he decides to press on with this profoundly undemocratic and unpopular policy?

“As those within his party are saying, Mr Cameron is no Tony Blair and this policy will not be his Clause 4 moment, but his Iraq War moment. It’s time he ditched these plans, or finds the courage to put the change to the British people in a referendum.”
The ComRes poll questioned 500 teachers between 21 and 31 January about the Government’s plans to redefine marriage. It is a representative sample of the nearly 440,000 teachers in England.

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Ravi Zacharias On Christ and The Bible

One of the most articulate Christian Apologists in the world today, Ravi Zacharias discusses an assortment of topics including why Christianity, the flaws in atheism, and the flaws of Islam.

Big Shock To Big Bang Theory

According to astronomers a recently discovered group of quasars exceeds in size anything previously believed possible, requiring a fundamental revision of cosmological theory.

But perhaps the real mystery is how the scientific media failed to acknowledge that discoveries of this sort were predicted by one of the 20th century's leading astronomers, Halton Arp.

Many years ago, Arp observed that astronomers were misinterpreting quasar redshift, placing these objects at the boundaries of observable space. Quasars, he said, are much closer than assumed and nothing like the size required by the standard interpretation of redshift.