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* Giulio Meotti: Cruelty to Animals Gets More Media Coverage than Beheaded Christians
* Amir Taheri: Tehran and its Three Fantasies


** Cruelty to Animals Gets More Media Coverage than Beheaded Christians ([link removed])
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by Giulio Meotti • January 26, 2020 at 5:00 am
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* The Bishops' Conference of Nigeria described the area as "killing fields", like the ones the Khmer Rouge created in Cambodia to exterminate the population.
* "We are Aramaic people and we don't have this right to have anyone protect us? Look upon us as frogs, we'll accept that -- just protect us so we can stay in our land". — Nicodemus Daoud Sharaf, the Syrian Orthodox Archbishop of Mosul the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, home to many of the Christians who fled jihadis, National Catholic Register, April 7, 2017.
* In an era of round-the-clock information... the abominations suffered by Christians have been left without images, while the brutality against the Chinese pig was streamed all over. Christians are an endangered species; pigs are not.
* One of the last Nigerian Christians was executed by an Islamic State child soldier. Slaughterhouses' workers go on trial in France for abuses to animals. But the same France has already repatriated more than 250 ISIS fighters, the same people who turn Iraqi churches into slaughterhouses.

"The world prefers to worry about pandas rather than about us, threatened with extinction in the land where we were born", said Nicodemus Daoud Sharaf (pictured), the Syrian Orthodox Archbishop of Mosul as well as a refugee in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, home to many of the Christians who fled jihadis. (Photo by Safin Hamed/AFP via Getty Images)

First there was the beheading of 11 Nigerian Christians during the recent Christmas celebration. The next day, a Catholic woman, Martha Bulus, was beheaded in the Nigerian state of Borno with her bridesmaids, five days before the wedding. Then there was a raid on the village of Gora-Gan in the Nigerian state of Kaduna, where terrorists shot anyone they met in the square where the evangelical community had gathered, killing two young Christian women. There was also a Christian student killed by Islamic extremists who recorded his execution. Then pastor Lawan Andimi, a local leader of the Christian Association of Nigeria, was beheaded.

"Every day", says Father Joseph Bature Fidelis, of the Diocese of Maiduguri, "Our brothers and sisters are slaughtered in the streets. Please help us not be silent in the face of this immense extermination that is taking place in silence".

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** Tehran and its Three Fantasies ([link removed])
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by Amir Taheri • January 26, 2020 at 4:00 am
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s://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15481/tehran-fantasies#print
* The first of these is that Iranians as a nation are united behind Khomeini's messianic regime and ready to put up with poverty, injustice and even oppression in order to keep "The Revolution" alive. Over the past few years that fantasy has been punctured by almost continuous protests, strikes and socio-political turmoil at various levels throughout Iran.
* For years, that [second] fantasy has been fed by foreign leaders and groups who have revived the ancient industry of flattery in a new form.... The idea that a majority of Lebanese, Iraqis, Yemenis and Syrians love the Islamic Republic and adulate Khamenei may still deceive the "Supreme Guide". But more and more Iranians now realize that Khamenei, and through him, the Islamic Republic as a whole, have been sold a bill of goods.
* The third fantasy in the fable of which Soleimani is but the latest propagator-cum-victim, is that the Islamic Republic's strategy of "exporting the revolution is virtually cost free and that, shaking in fear, the rest of the world won't dare oppose it.... That fantasy was generously fed by people like former US President Barack Obama and former European Union foreign policy tsarina Federica Mogherini who, perhaps with good intentions, treated the Islamic Republic like an unruly teenager who should be cajoled into more reasonable behavior through kind inducements rather than parental punishment
* This means that news from the Islamic Republic is not as bad as sober heads in Tehran believe. It is much worse.

For Iran to continue to live, and hopefully even prosper, one must hope and pray for the end of the strategy of which General Qassem Soleimani was the poster-boy. (Photo by Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images)

"He died, so that Iran lives!' This is the slogan attached to posters and T-shirts distributed in Tehran as the Islamic Republic prepares to mark the 40th day of General Qassem Soleimani's "martyrdom" in accordance with religious mourning traditions.

Whoever invented the slogan may not have known about the Persian literary device known as "iham" or double-entendre that enables the poet or writer to say something that might sound as if he intended the opposite.

The Tehran slogan writer must have hoped to persuade the Iranians that Soleimani somehow sacrificed himself in order to ensure Iran's continued existence. However, the slogan could also be read as a statement that for Iran to continue to live, it was imperative that Soleimani should die.

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