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In this mailing:
* Raymond Ibrahim: Hatred for the Christian Cross
* Amir Taheri: Yesterday's Treaty and Tomorrow's Threats


** Hatred for the Christian Cross ([link removed])
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by Raymond Ibrahim • December 26, 2021 at 5:00 am
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* "Under no circumstances is a human permitted to wear the cross." Why? "Because the prophet — peace and blessings on him — commanded the breaking of it [the cross]." — Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Tarifi, Saudi expert on Islamic law, YouTube, May 8, 2013.
* One Pakistani shoe-seller placed the image of the cross on the soles of his shoes so that the crucifix could be trampled with every footstep.
* Despite being called "people of the book" — a view apologists for Islam tend to strain — both Christians and Jews are, in the end, also classified as infidels (kuffar; singular, kafir). Thus Koran 5:51 warns Muslims against "taking the Jews and Christians as friends and allies ... whoever among you takes them for friends and allies, he is surely one of them"—that is, he too becomes an infidel. Koran 5:73 declares that "Infidels are they who say God is one of three," a reference to the Christian Trinity; Koran 5:72 says "Infidels are they who say God is the Christ, [Jesus] son of Mary"; and Koran 9:30 complains that "the Christians say the Christ is the son of God ... may Allah's curse be upon them!"
* The final word on both Christians and Jews was "revealed" in Koran 9:29: "Fight those among the People of the Book who do not believe in Allah nor the Last Day, who do not forbid what Allah and His Messenger have forbidden, and who do not embrace the religion of truth [Islam], until they pay the jizya [monetary tribute] with willing submissiveness and feel themselves utterly subdued." With that, their fate was sealed; like all other infidels, Christians and Jews were to be warred on until "subdued".
* While attacks on people would of course be worse than attacks on inanimate religious symbols, appeasement, sadly, seems only to encourage these outbursts of hate.
* 2014: After Muslims were granted their own section at a cemetery, and allowed to conduct distinctly Islamic ceremonies, they began to demand that Christian symbols and crosses in the cemetery were offensive and that they should be removed or at least covered up during Islamic funerals.
* "At this hospital there are members of staff who go to a mosque four times a day and no one says anything to them. Hindus wear red bracelets on their wrists and female Muslims wear hijabs in theatre. Yet my small cross around my neck was deemed so dangerous that I was no longer allowed to do my job." — Mary Onuoha, a 61 year-old Christian woman who escaped her Nigerian homeland to Britain in 1988 in order to worship freely and was "bullied" out of her London job as a nurse for refusing to remove her small cross necklace; Daily Mail, October 8, 2021, United Kingdom.

In Trabzon, Turkey, locals interrupted the burial of a Christian woman — in part by shouting, "Allahu Akbar!" — at the cemetery of the Santa Maria Catholic Church on January 18, 2020. On February 14, her grave was found desecrated, its wooden cross broken and burned. Pictured: The funeral of 60-year-old Italian Catholic priest Andrea Santoro at Santa Maria on February 6, 2006. Santoro was shot and murdered at the church by a 16-year-old shouting "Allahu Akbar". (Photo by STR/AFP via Getty Images)

Muslim Brotherhood members in Egypt mauled a young Christian woman, Mary, to death after they saw her cross.

Also in Egypt, Ayman, 17, a Christian student, was strangled and beaten to death by his teacher and fellow students for refusing to obey the teacher's demand that he cover his cross. When the school's principal was informed of the attack, he ignored it and "continued to sip his tea."

This year in Egypt, after the headmaster of a school ordered all of the students to remove any jewelry bearing a cross and the Christians refused, they were "beaten up by teachers and fellow students, according to a November 21, 2021 report. In another incident, a female teacher "attacked a Christian student, then encouraged other students to do the same, take his cross pendant from him and destroy the cross."

At least these latest rounds of anti-cross rage were not fatal; others have been.

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** Yesterday's Treaty and Tomorrow's Threats ([link removed])
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by Amir Taheri • December 26, 2021 at 4:00 am
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* Is the world on the eve of a new arms race that could spread nuclear weapons to a dozen or more countries within the next few years?
* The so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) clearly states that it is tailor-made solely for Iran and will not be applicable to any other country.
* However, a precedent is set to bypass the NPT and the IAEA by putting in charge a group of nations that have not created a formal legal status and pretend to replace the UN just as a posse replaces the sheriff in some Western movies.
* The twice-postponed golden jubilee of the NPT may provide an occasion for serious reflection on its failures and ways of reshaping it as an effective instrument to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and speed up the dismantling of arsenals that, if the NPT is to be believed, pose as great a threat to the planet as does climate change, the currently fashionable "big cause".

Is the world on the eve of a new arms race that could spread nuclear weapons to a dozen or more countries within the next few years? (Image source: iStock)

Is the world on the eve of a new arms race that could spread nuclear weapons to a dozen or more countries within the next few years?

This is one of the questions that haunt the next Review Conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).

Twice postponed because of the Covid-19 crisis, the conference which, under the NPT, should be held once every 10 years, is now scheduled for January 4-28 in New York.

Looking back to the past five decades, that is to say since the launching of the treaty in 1968, one could observe three distinct phases in how the world regards the possession of nuclear weapons.

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