Saturday, December 06, 2025

Violent Hatred 'In Good Faith'

"We fear that because representatives, or would-be representatives, of some groups, came to the committee and sat there, that the Liberals fear backlash against them within some communities and that because of that, they have cancelled today's meeting."
"If the Liberals had, in the matter of religious exemptions, the same courage that they have for oil and gas infrastructure, this would have been dealt with a long time ago."
"[The minister proposed that] our amendments, particularly of course the one putting an end to the religious exemption, be integrated into C-9 in order for it to be adopted with the Bloc Quebecois's support because no one else was interested in doing it and the Bloc Quebecois holds the balance of power at the justice committee."
Bloc Quebecois Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet 
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Unsaid, but quite well understood is the identity of those would-be representatives, the Muslim community in Canada's various representative groups, all of which are offended by a move by the minority federal government, requiring support from opposition parties to pass bills that would affect them. As in 'freedom of speech' careening into hate speech which moves beyond the civil permissible into the dark areas of threats and support for violence to the point where killing a certain segment of the population is inferred, if not outright stated.
 
The Canadian-Jewish community has been increasingly targeted by various Islamist Muslim groups within Canada in constant 'demonstrations' and mass rallies where masked, keffiyeh-clad, Palestinian-flag -waving groups gather in the public square, block highways, pose threats in front of synagogues, Jewish parochial schools, Jewish community centres, private Jewish businesses, municipal council chambers to shout the invectives of 'globalize the intifada', 'final solution', 'from the river to the sea', and 'Jews go back to Europe!'
 
There are laws in Canada that prohibit this kind of action and activities that border on and often exceed permissible public social behaviour where property is damaged, defaced, and otherwise vandalized, threats are issued and peoples' ingress and egress to schools, meetings, hospitals are impeded. Much less vehicular traffic stopped, including fire trucks and ambulances when shouting, threatening groups fill the space and become deliberately immovable, or prostate themselves in unison in displays of public prayer.
 
Unfortunately, those laws have not been enforced; neither municipal authorities nor the police associated with those municipalities act to stop such events, clear the streets and apprehend those whose actions stand out as abusive and threatening and criminal in nature. What is cited is the sacrosanct right of  'freedom of speech', amidst the intimidating scenarios. And the propensity of many wearing masks, holding placards damning Israel and shouting 'globalize the intifada' to become physically violent, including toward police, when arrests will take place.
 
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In a speech to protesters on Oct. 28, Imam Adil Charkaoui, speaking Arabic, denounced "Zionist aggressors" and called on Allah to "kill the enemies of the people of Gaza and to spare none of them." X
 
Now, instead of using the laws prescribing acceptable social behaviour, a new anti-hate bill is being proposed, one that will remove a clause forgiving abusive activity if it is done in a spirit of 'sincere belief' in a religious context which would exonerate say, a Muslim who proclaims 'kill the Jews', because something in his sacred scripture allows that. The Canadian Council of Imams attended the last committee meeting discussing the amendment to the Criminal Code's religious defences for hate speech charges. They opposed the religious defences removal.
 
The proposed legislation seeks to make it an offence to intimidate or obstruct at places of worship. Presented by Justice Minister Sean Fraser, it proposes the criminalization of hate promotion through the display of symbols that have links to designated terror groups. The rise in police-reported antisemitic violence in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war has spurred Jewish advocacy groups to call for additional measures of protection for the Jewish-Canadian population. 
 
It was the Bloc Quebecois's proposal for the religious defences to be removed dealing with the 'wilful promotion of hate' and promotion of antisemitism, defined by the law as minimizing or denying the Holocaust, which states specifically that anyone in 'good faith' who expresses or communicates an opinion "on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text" not be convicted of hate speech. The Bloc has advocated for the religious exemptions to be removed from the Criminal Code. 
 
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Pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered in downtown Montreal in October 2023. In November, Montreal police received a complaint about speeches made during those demonstrations. (Danielle Kadjo/Radio-Canada)
 
 
 

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Friday, December 05, 2025

Jihad, a Muslim's Destiny: The Muslim Brotherhood

 

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Adil Charkaoui's speech to kill the Jews has drawn broad condemnation from politicians like Premier François Legault and groups like the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. (Adil Charkaoui/X)

"An Explanatory Memorandum for the Muslim Brotherhood's Goals in North America."
"The process of settlement is a 'Civilization-Jihadist Process' with all the word means."
"The Ikhwan ['brotherhood'] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions."
"It is a Muslim's destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes and there is no escape from that destiny." 
The Muslim Brotherhood
 
"Canada's permissive environment, shaped by a fragile national identity, a culture of victimhood, vote-bank politics, and unchecked immigration, has made it the ideal incubator for Islamist expansion."
"[Canada has] become 'ground zero' for their soft-power operations, from campaigns to criminalize 'Islamophobia' to the indoctrination of children under the banner of 'anti-Palestinian racism'."
Joe Adam George 
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Muslims pray outside McGill University's Roddick Gate during pro-Palestinian protest in Montreal Monday October 7, 2024 on the one year anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel. (John Mahoney / MONTREAL GAZETTE)
 
The Muslim Brotherhood and its many associated arms well established in Canada as Muslim-Canadian groups whose purpose is to advance 'human rights', the protection of the Muslim-Canadian population of several million from criticism under threat of being labelled 'Islamophobic' in a greater society that shrinks from being thought of as 'racist' has infiltrated every level of society and government. Sitting in municipal chambers, on school boards, as directors in national public institutions, and among the professorial class in academia, advance a narrative of Muslim rights.
 
The installation of Islamic Sharia will once again crop  up as the Muslim demographic increases. Muslim groups, particularly those who associate their activities with the 'Palestinian cause', feel entitled to express their hatred toward a much smaller demographic of Canadian Jews by amassing mobs of anti-Israel, pro-Hamas agitators who have for the past several years since the Palestinian terrorist orgy of sadistic savagery in southern Israel on October 7/23, marched through city streets chanting 'globalize the intifada', 'Jews back to Europe', 'Final Solution', and 'From the river to the sea'. 
 
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Pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered in downtown Montreal in October 2023. In November, Montreal police received a complaint about speeches made during those demonstrations. (Danielle Kadjo/Radio-Canada)
 
In the process demonizing Israel as a 'genocidal' nation intent on exterminating Palestinians when it is the Palestinians who have for generations launched attacks against Israel and Jews, while Israel is left defending its population, against those portraying themselves as pitiable victims of Israeli aggression. The CEO of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, originally established with a focus on the Holocaust, has decided to mount a permanent 'Nakba' exhibit, damning the creation of Israel, grieving the 'catastrophe' it brought to Palestinian ambitions to own the geography of Judean ancestral land. Isha Khan, the CEO, assures that the exhibit will undergo the strictest adherence to the museum's human rights goal.
 
While the American Congress and Senate are working toward blacklisting the Muslim Brotherhood and its arms like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Canada's Liberal government tolerates Islamist 'pro-Palestinian' marches through Jewish neighbourhoods, hostile gatherings of Islamists in front of Jewish old-age homes, parochial schools, and synagogues that intimidate and threaten Canadian Jews. Pro-Palestinian encampments on  university grounds that targeted Jewish students saw no action from any level of Canadian government to protect Canadian Jews.
 
That inaction led to criminal assaults against Jewish institutions and private businesses that were vandalized, fire-bombed and shot at. Public gatherings of Muslims for group prayer sessions, shutting down traffic and access to the public have been tolerated, as 'expressions of free speech and religion', while the very fact of that kind of 'occupation' is an Islamic expression of conquest of the public sphere. Canada's political, cultural and educational institutions have been subjected to entryism by Muslim jihadists using the soft-touch approach to insurgency.
 
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Muslim prayer in front of a Montreal church   Screenshot
 
Groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, members of the Iranian IRGC, are present in Canada representing the ideologies of jihad and terror, and official Canada does nothing to deter their presence, nor their criminal activities in money-laundering funds from criminal activities. The Brotherhood was described by a member of the European Parliament as "a clear and present challenge to European values" whose response was "to persuade the European Commission to change its policy and stop all contributions to Islamist organizations".
 
Ward Elcock, formerly director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) testifying on terrorist organizations that raise funds in Canada, warned Canada "cannot become, through inaction or otherwise, what might be called an unofficial state sponsor of terrorism", back in 1998. For the past ten years and counting, the government of Canada has been invested in appeasing Islamist terror, taking statements and accusations levelled against the State of Israel by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas as credible.
 
Slowly and surely the Muslim Brotherhood's silent stealth within Western countries, establishing itself as a legitimate voice of reasonable accommodation for the religion of peace as the true face of Islam -- as opposed to the murderously violent Islamist jihadists ravaging Africa, making incursions into Latin America, and roiling the Middle East, where most countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Jordan ban the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization --  has gained it a solid footing of trust, only now beginning to fray. But not yet in Canada.
 
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Pro-Palestinian protesters at the corner of Bathurst Street and Sheppard Avenue in Toronto, Nov. 2, 2025. (Credit: Lila Sarick)
 

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Thursday, December 04, 2025

India's Backtrack on Cyber Security Rules

"Accounts on instant messaging and calling apps continue to work even after the associated SIM is removed, deactivated, or moved abroad, enabling anonymous scams, remote 'digital arrest' frauds and government‑impersonation calls using Indian numbers."
"Long‑lived web/desktop sessions let fraudsters control victims' accounts from distant locations without needing the original device or SIM, which complicates tracing and takedown. A session can currently be authenticated once on a device in India and then continue to operate from abroad, letting criminals run scams using Indian numbers without any fresh verification."
"This mechanism enables service providers to validate, through a decentralized and privacy-compliant platform, whether a mobile number used for a service genuinely belongs to the person whose credentials are on record – thereby enhancing trust in digital transactions."
Department of Telecommunications, India  Monday
 
"Government has decided not to make the pre-installation mandatory for mobile manufacturers." 
India's Ministry of Communications  Wednesday 
 
"This is a welcome development, but we are still awaiting the full text of the legal order that should accompany this announcement, including any revised directions under the Cyber Security Rules, 2024."
"For now, we should treat this as cautious optimism, not closure, until the formal legal direction is published and independently confirmed." 
Internet Freedom Foundation  
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Sanchar Saathi app logo and Indian flag appear in this illustration taken December 2, 2025. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
"[The app] 'Sanchar-Saathi', translated 'communication partner' in Hindi, [must be] preinstalled on all mobile handsets manufactured or imported for use in India."
"[Phone makers are asked to ensure the app is readily visible and accessible to the end users at the time of first  use or device  setup and that its functionalities are not disabled or restricted."
"[For those devices already manufactured and in the market across the country], the manufacturer and importers of mobile handsets shall make an endeavour to push the App through software updates."
Government of India declaration 
 
"[The order] represents a sharp and deeply worrying expansion of executive control over personal digital devices."
The state is asking every smartphone user in India to accept an open-ended, updatable surveillance capability on their primary personal device, and to do so without the basic guardrails that a constitutional democracy should insist on."
Internet Freedom Foundation  advocacy group
 
"[The rules are] clearly [an invasion of privacy]." 
"How do we know this app isn't used to access files and messaging on our device, which is unencrypted on device? Or a future update won't do that?"
"This is clearly an invasion of our privacy."
Cybersecurity analyst Nikhil Pahwa 
Samsung mobile phones are displayed for sale at an electronics store in India with three men looking at phones in the background
Internet privacy groups and political opposition had raised concerns that the app could be used as a mass surveillance tool. Photograph: Firdous Nazir/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
 
Smartphone makers on Monday received orders from New Delhi to henceforth pre-install the government-operated cybersecurity app, one that cannot be removed. India's mobile phone users number a massive 1.6 billion. According to government authorities, the app is meant to protect users from fraud; an ostensibly laudable concern meant to protect Indian citizens. Manufacturers were given 90 days to comply with the new rules detailed in a press release.
 
The app, it was explained. was specifically designed so that users could block and track lost or stolen phones. It also enables them to identify and disconnect false mobile subscriptions in their name, as well as a number of other protective functions. According to government figures, the app had to date assisted in the tracing of over 2.6 million phones. Statistics that failed to placate human right advocates and those politicians alarmed over the prospect of the possibility of  emerging serious consequences.
 
Opponents of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the Congress party lost no time in demanding an immediate rollback of the order they described as unconstitutional. "Big Brother cannot watch us",  said Congress politician K.C. Venugopal. "A preloaded government app that cannot be uninstalled is a dystopian tool to monitor every Indian. It is a means to watch over every movement, interaction and decision of each citizen."
 
It is, in fact, a carbon copy of what pertains in China, where the Peoples' Republic monitors all of its equally numerous citizens' every move, in the world's largest, most populous communist country, and India's nemesis. As it happens, Russia issued a similar directive in August that ordered manufacturers to include a messaging platform named MAX on all new phones and tablets; yet another dictatorial regime intent on surveilling its public.
 
The backlash from cybersecurity experts was swift and condemnatory, however, in democratic India despite that 14 million users had downloaded the app, and that 2,000 frauds were being reported daily. Passed last week, made public on Monday, making registration mandatory, by Tuesday 600,000 new users registered. And by Wednesday, the order was rescinded

And nor were smartphone giants Apple and Samsung among others pleased; the new directives causing them to resist the app pre-installation on their phones.Condemnation and resistance that led the government by Wednesday to rescind the directive even while arguing that the move was necessary to verify the authenticity of handsets. India IS a democracy, after all and sensitive to any questioning of its upholding of democratic citizens' rights. 

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India has 1.2 billion mobile users   Bloomberg via Getty Images
 

 

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Wednesday, December 03, 2025

Compassion for Non-Citizen Criminals in Canadian Law

"A senior Liberal [Member of Parliament Kevin Lamoureux] debating my bill to stop leniency for serious crimes said this: 'If someone is going out raping another individual, do we really believe they'll get special treatment from a judge'?"
"The next day, there was a story of a non-Canadian raping a 13-year-old girl and impregnating her twice, and the rapist was given an adjournment to see the impact of a guilty pleas on what? His immigration status."
"Will the Liberals admit they were wrong?" 
Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner
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"There are individuals who make bad decisions. Sometimes it does not necessarily justify a deportation."
"At the end of the day, with the types of crime that are being suggested, people are going to be deported anyway."
"If someone is going out there and raping another individual, do we really believe that they are going to get special treatment from a judge when they go before a court?"
"It is nowhere near the degree to which the Conservatives are trying to put it on the record."
Liberal MP Kevin Lamoureux
 
"There are provisions in place if a non-citizen commits a crime and serves a sentence, they are removed from Canada."
"CBSA [Canada Border Services Agency] works on these cases and they prioritize criminal cases, in fact, when making removals."
Liberal MP Ruby Sahota
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The Barrie courthouse at 75 Mulcaster St.
 
An unnamed now-47-year-old man, a non-citizen living in Bradford, Ontario pleaded guilty to "two counts of sexual interference, one charge of child luring and another to breaching his release conditions" last week, according to local news outlet BarrieToday. The man had met the girl at a convenience store when he was 44. He groomed her, and than raped her. This occurred on two separate occasions; each time the rape resulted in a pregnancy.
 
One of those pregnancies was carried to term. The  girl, now a few years older, has kept her baby. To protect identities of the girl and child, a publication ban is in place. Court orders to stay away from the girl were ignored by the man. He raped her again while out on release. When he breached conditions of his release a third time he was arrested and since has been  incarcerated for over two and a half years. The man is said to have had 13 children born to women he has been associated with over the years.  
"The actual harm (inflicted) are of the highest magnitude, [listing aggravating details in the case]."
"[The victim’s] normal social interactions were completely fractured. [She will be forever] entangled [with the man because she bore his child]."
"[Her 104-month sentence request was already a] mitigated number'."
Crown attorney Elizabeth Stokes  
The Crown had called for a 8.5-year prison sentence. However, the man, not a Canadian citizen, was permitted an adjournment as a reflection of how a lengthy potential prison sentence would affect his immigrant status. His guilty plea evidently, and his apology, are being weighed in a type of compassionate exoneration of his sexual crimes, specifically the violence suffered by a trusting child whose childhood was essentially viciously ended. 
 
Immigrants are conventionally subject to deportation if convicted of a serious crime. Yet in the past several years, sentencing has tended to favour 'compassion' for crimes committed by immigrants arriving from different cultures. Needless to say, rape as a cultural proclivity does not conform to the values of any civilized society. And much less so violent crimes committed against children. 
 
The man is now due back in court for a sentencing hearing, on January 29, with the Crown seeking a ten-year sentence. This aura of compassion for violent criminals exudes from the ranks of the Liberal government in Canada. The Conservative official opposition has stated time and again its calls for tougher penalties for violent crime, and in this instance such crimes should be viewed through the lens of consequential desserts. 
"In recent years, there have been multiple instances of judges issuing sentences to non-citizens convicted of serious crimes that were designed to allow them to evade deportation."
"[This creates a] two-tiered system between non-citizens and those with Canadian citizenship."
"[This is] unfair [listing seven examples of convicted non-citizens who received] lenient sentences in very recent history."
"Despite the judge admitting that six to 12 months would have been a more appropriate sentence, this was to avoid deportation. The judge even said this." 
Michelle Rempel Garner 
Indeed, before the advent of the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau for the decade following his election in 2015, criminal law application in Canada has been considerably softened in favour of the  criminal class, much to the outrage of Canadian police associations, and certainly of the victims of crime. The 'progressive', left-Liberal government of Canada in that decade -- and continuing under a new Liberal government -- altered much of the traditional values of Canadian society, while inviting an inundation of new immigrants, refugees, illegal migrants without due consideration to their background cultures and histories.  
"[It is an] unbelievable perversion of justice [that non-citizen criminals were receiving lower sentences] in order to allow them to stay."
"It should be a stated policy of our system to get criminals out of Canada."
"If someone is not a citizen, not a Canadian, and commits a crime, then they should be shown the door."
Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre 

 

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Tuesday, December 02, 2025

Syria's Mass Graves

"Shortly after the fall of Bashar Assad in Syria in December 2024, reports emerged of mass graves being uncovered in liberated areas."
"Grim as such discoveries are, they should come as little surprise. The scale of the regime’s torture and killings in its detention facilities became evident years earlier, when in January 2014 a forensic photographer defected and left the country with a cache of 55,000 photos of people who had been tortured and died in detention."
"As an expert in forensic anthropology and mass casualties in conflict, I was asked to evaluate what became known as the “Caesar photographs.” What was clear to me then, and is even more so now, is that those photos represented a systematic approach to torturing, killing and disappearing massive numbers of people by the Assad regime."
"With Assad now gone, the newly formed government of the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has vowed to seek justice for the crimes Syrians suffered under Assad. Doing so will be difficult, even with the civil war in Syria being one of the better monitored conflicts in recent history. Yet it is a task that is imperative for the sake of pursuing justice in a shattered country and reducing the likelihood of violence returning to Syria."
Stefan Schmitt,  Project Lead for International Technical Forensic Services Global Forensic Justice Center, Florida International University 
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Members of the volunteer Syrian Civil Defense conduct work at a mass grave in the Baghdad Bridge area outside Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 17, 2024. Emin Sansar/Anadolu via Getty Images
 
"According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the uncovered graves were distributed as follows:
*November 6: Remains believed to belong to more than 5 people were found inside a farm near the village of Al-Ghizlaniyah on the road to Damascus International Airport.
*November 11: Remains of 3 people were found in a mass grave in the village of Tal Melah, northwest of Hama, during rubble removal. The victims’ identities remain unknown.
*November 17: Remains of 6 people were discovered inside the Air Defense Battalion "Batchoura" in the town of Otaya in Rif Damascus, during sewage rehabilitation work.
*November 30: A mass grave containing the remains of 10 unidentified individuals was found on the Tarablous road opposite the village of Al-Mazraa west of Homs, during construction work."
ANHA, Hawar News Agency  
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The month of November witnessed a series of shocking discoveries across several Syrian regions, where a number of mass graves containing the remains of 24 individuals were uncovered during debris removal and infrastructure cleaning operations. ANHA
 
 Following the overthrow of Syria's dictatorial president Bashar al-Assad in December, families of missing Syrians would arrive a the Najha cemetery hoping to find remains of their missing loved ones. They were intent on digging up the mass grave there marked by mounds of overturned dirt with their shovels. Once the realization set in that what they would find would represent bones in body bags with no way left to them to determine to whom those bones belonged, they gave up their desperate searches.
 
Tens of thousands of Syrians whom the Assad regime considered opponents had been detained and disappeared during the 14-year civil war between the Alawite Shiite regime of Bashar al-Assad and the majority Sunni Syrians. Many of those in Assad's prisons were killed under torture or executed, pointed out human rights groups. This was a regime that used chemical agents in their bombs to asphyxiate people, barrel bombs to tear them limb to limb, helicopter gunships targeting people waiting in bread lines.
 
Uncountable numbers of regime victims were hurriedly buried at the Najha cemetery outside the capital Damascus. Syrian families are haunted by the fate of their missing relatives. No fewer than 60 mass graves have so far been identified in Syria, with new ones discovered on a regular basis. The exacting forensic work to determine the identity of each of the bodies being recovered has become a problem for Syria's new government which has pledged accountability and justice for the Assad regime's war crimes.
 
For one man, 36-year-old Khaled al-Mishtowli, the loss of his family members are many in number; three brothers, his father, three cousins and two aunts. The agonizing work of identifying the bodies would have been advanced, he says wistfully, if those burying them "had at least buried the people's ID cards with their bodies".  The process of of exhuming and identifying the bodies will be a long, arduous, undertaking, which he and others call on the government and international groups to undertake. 
 
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An uncovered mass grave believed to contain the remains of civilians killed by the ousted Assad regime in Daraa, Syria. Bekir Kasim/Anadolu via Getty Images
 
According to the Syrian minister of emergency and disaster management, about 140,000 Syrians are missing. The figure of 400,000 deaths by the Assad regime has long been recognized. In 2013, Mr. al-Mishtowli explains, his relatives began disappearing from their town of Sayida Zeinab on Damascus' outskirts as they were engaged in ordinary pursuits, or on their way back home from their workplaces. His family members, all of whom were Sunni Muslim, were apprehended by pro-regime Shiite militias, he believes.
 
"We are asking for anyone, international organizations, the United Nations, anyone who can exhume the bodies and identify them", he pleaded. In response, a spokeswoman for a new Syrian commission on missing people responded: "This is a very long process, one that began now but will unfortunately extend over many years". Her commission will be dependent on international organizations to assist in building the required technical and forensic capabilities such as DNA laboratories. 
 
"The international community has to help the Syrian authorities to build infrastructure first, and to train their people to learn how to eventually do this on their own", explained Karla Quintana of the U.N. Independent Institution on Missing Persons in Syria, -- whereas in the past the United Nations and other international bodies took responsibility for exhuming mass graves.  
"We really haven’t seen anything quite like this since the Nazis."
"From the secret police who disappeared people from their streets and homes, to the jailers and interrogators who starved and tortured them to death, to the truck drivers and bulldozer drivers who hid their bodies, thousands of people were working in this system of killing."
"We are talking about a system of state terror, which became a machinery of death."
"I don’t have much doubt about those kinds of numbers given what we’ve seen in these mass graves."
Stephen Rapp, former U.S. war crimes ambassador at large
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People search for human remains at a trench believed to be used as a mass grave on the outskirts of the Syrian capital, Damascus.   Aris Messinis / AFP via Getty Images
 
  

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Monday, December 01, 2025

Pope Leo's Two-State Solution

"Türkiye has a number of, if you will, qualities about it; it is a country with the vast majority being Muslims, and yet the presence of numerous Christian communities there, although a very small minority, and yet people of different religions are able to live in peace. And that is one example, I would say, of what I think we all would be looking for throughout the world."
"To say that in spite of religious differences, in spite of ethnic differences, in spite of many other differences, people can indeed live in peace. Türkiye itself has had, of course, in its history various moments when it was not always the case, and yet to have experienced that and to have been able to speak also with President Erdogan about peace, I think, was an important element, a worthwhile element of my visit."
Pope Leo XIV
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Pope Leo (C) was welcomed to Ankara by Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan   Anadolu via Getty Images
"Christians in Türkiye face everyday discrimination for their faith. Foreign Christians with Turkish spouses and children have been banned from entering or re-entering the country. Religion is recorded on the Turkish ID card, making it easy to discriminate against Christian job applicants. Even Greek and Armenian Christians who attend traditional churches aren't considered full members of Turkish society. Their churches struggle with legal obstacles and red tape intended to obstruct the practice of their faith."
"Historical Christian groups, such as the Armenian and Assyrian (Syriac) churches, face high pressure and hostility in the southeastern region of Türkiye. For decades, they have been caught between the rivalries of the Turkish army and Kurdish resistance groups. Most Christians from those churches no longer live in their ancestral regions but have moved to western areas of Türkiye."
Open Doors International 
"Ramazan Arkan, the pastor of the Antalya Evangelical Churches in Turkey, spoke during the meeting.
“Turkish churches face many difficulties and much discrimination, and unfortunately, when we have tried to address those issues with the Turkish authorities, we have most often been ignored because Christians are the religious minority in Turkey,” he said."
"Missionaries are also being deported. Their residence permits are not being renewed, and they are labeled as possible security threats. Fearing they could be deported at any time, many foreign missionaries in Turkey avoid participating in church meetings or activities to go undetected."
"Members of the Christian community are not free from hate crimes, either. Many of them face threats and social isolation online."
"We encounter speech filled with insults and profanity directed at official church social media accounts, church leaders, Christianity, Christian values, and Christians in general,” the Turkish Association of Protestant Churches stated in its latest Human Rights Report."
Persecution.Org. International Christian Concern 
Hagia Sophia in Turkey
“We will not allow you to brainwash our Muslim youth!” the man shouted from his car. “Oh, infidels, you will be defeated and swept up into hell!”  Persecution.Org
 
Pope Leo  travelled to Turkey to attend the historic Nicaea gathering dating from the Christian gathering at the Turkish city of Nicaea in A.D.325 of bishops from the Eastern and Western churches in unity with one another; Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant; where the Nicaean Creed originated. While he was in Turkey he met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, where discussions took place related to the conflict in Gaza. Pope Leo asked Mr. Erdogan to work toward bringing peace to Gaza.
 
Just as Pope Leo has exonerated Turkey from persecution of Christians in Turkey -- where significantly, ancient Constantinople was the eastern seat of Christianity under Emperor Constantine whose mother Helena, an early convert to Christianity, persuaded her son to support Christianity. Constantinople's  transition to Istanbul, Turkey's largest city and its cultural capital took place in 1080 when Seljuk Turks invaded, installing Islam and wrenching the country from Christianity -- so too does he overlook the very fact that it is Erdogan himself that supports Gaza's terror against Israel. 
 
He cannot be unaware that President Erdogan's Sunni Islamist ideology is one of conquest achieved by violent force. Nor can he be ignorant of the fact that Erdogan has given haven to Hamas leaders, and along with Qatar, arms and supports Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups on a cohort with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Yet this pope has chosen to foster amicable relations with a dictator who persecutes his own country's Christians and actively engages in the jihadist Islamofascist plot to destroy Israel.
 
Catholics, in their faith creed universally recite "I believe in one God, the Father almighty...", yet give no mind to the fact that their monotheistic religion owes its existence to Judaism. In humble deference to the source of their one-God creed it might behoove the Catholic Church to recognize its indebtedness to the Judaic YHWH, the source of all they hold dear in their faith. That it was a Jewish man whose Judaic prescriptions they revere, and that the welfare of that crux of civilization would be of concern to Catholics and to the Pope.
 
https://www.usccb.org/sites/default/files/styles/article_news_full_detail/public/2024-12/20241210T0800-POPE-CRECHE-TREE-1786397.JPG.jpeg?itok=-bM3-JHf
Pope Francis stops to pray in front of a Nativity scene from Bethlehem in the Vatican audience hall Dec. 7, 2024. The baby Jesus is lying on a white and black kaffiyeh, a Palestinian headdress. Around the star, written in Arabic and Latin, are the words of the angels: "Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to people of good will." (CNS photo/Vatican Media)
 
Instead, Israel, the home of the Jewish world, is held by this Pope, as it has been by his predecessors as a condemned entity, itself persecuted throughout the ages by the Catholic Church itself, a tradition that continues, now honouring a narrative of victimhood of those calling themselves Palestinians, oppressed by an 'occupying force' engaged in the commission of genocide. Pope Francis's honouring of a 'Palestinian' Jesus before his death spoke volumes of a willing abandonment of the source of Christianity, preferring to honour an Arab pretender to a Jewish originator of the religion 1.4 billion people worship globally.
 
Insisting that a two-state solution is an absolute necessity to see an end to the 80-year old conflict between the Jewish world and that of Islam that focuses on a 'Palestinian State' when since 1947 onward that Palestinian State has been rebuffed time and again in favour of castigating and casting out a Jewish presence on land 'consecrated to Islam', yet representing Judaic ancestral land, only a small portion of which is occupied by the State of Israel, a mere sliver in the total geography of the Middle East, as an intolerable affront which must be destroyed. 
 
A two-state solution, a concept originally accepted by Israel, and offered time and again in negotiations which Palestinian leadership turned away time and again, is a purely Western-supported ideal, one which Palestinians have no interest in whatever, holding out for Israel's destruction, and a one-state Palestinian solution. Israel has surrendered its support of that elusive two-state 'solution' to achieve a longed-for peace, when its people will no longer be targets for murder by its neighbours, solidified into a stone etching reflective of the  tablets of the Ten Commandments' 'thou shalt not kill', when to protect its own it must do just that. 
Reuters Pope Leo smiles as he looks towards Erdogan while wearing a white robe with a silver cross on a necklace while standing outside the Presidential Palace on Thursday.
The Pope met Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the Presidential Palace in Ankara on Thursday Reuters
 
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