Peace the World Cannot Give

AUGUST 3, 2012 4:00 A.M
Healing through a look at stories of heroic virtue.

An NRO Interview




Dawn Eden, author of My Peace I Give You


Dawn Eden has a new book about a difficult topic: sexual abuse. It’s called My Peace I Give You: Healing Sexual Wounds with the Help of the Saints. She writes as one who suffered from abuse as a child and converted to Catholicism as an adult. But what she presents, despite the title and what it might imply — something quite parochial — this is a book that tells the stories of heroic lives and the wisdom of their lived experience of faith. The book can serve as an inspiration for anyone, but it is a powerful aid for those who are suffering. Some of the men and women she covers are well known — such as Augustine ofConfessions fame — but others, including St. Josephine Bakhita, a Sudanese-born slave, are less famous than they ought to be. Eden talks about the book with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez.

LOPEZ: Did you find that writing this book was an obligation for you?

EDEN: Yes. I had the idea for it in December 2010, when, while looking at books at a friend’s house, I happened upon the story of Blessed Laura Vicuña in Ann Ball’s Modern Saints. I was stunned to discover that there was a young girl who had been declared Blessed by the Church — just one miracle away from canonization — who had been sexually abused, over a period of years, by her mother’s live-in lover, Manuel Mora. More than that, her mother even in some sense cooperated in the abuse, as she once tried to get Laura to dance with Mora at a party — fearful of what he would do if he were refused.


I had heard of other modern-day martyrs of chastity like Laura Vicuña, but they came from good Christian families. Laura’s story struck me because she knew what it was like to be without human consolation. More than that, she forgave on a level that was beyond anything I had seen in other saints’ stories. As she lay dying following a beating from Mora, she didn’t just forgive her abuser; she offered her life as a sacrifice for the conversion of her mother. Here was a saint who had emotionally suffered what I had suffered, and had the heroic virtues I so badly needed.



Then I thought about all the other people who had suffered childhood sexual abuse, and realized how much it might help them to know that they too had a kindred spirit in Blessed Laura.

LOPEZ: Why share about your own life?

EDEN: In proposing My Peace I Give You to my publisher, it was my intention to keep any revelations of my own life at a bare minimum. All I was going to say was that I was writing as a survivor of abuse; other than that, the book would just be stories of saints. The publisher insisted I put my own story into the book.

Although I make a point of not being graphic, just the same, it was not easy sharing about my own experience. But I’m glad I did, because victims are encouraged when they see other victims come forward.

I have come to believe that people who have suffered trauma as a result of the abuses that are widespread in secular society — the sins committed against the family and against the dignity of the human person — are going to be vital members of the next generation of Christian witnesses. Their witness will be particularly powerful because, having experienced their own Passion, they have risen to new life through faith in Christ.

LOPEZ: People other than abused children need the healing of “sexual wounds.” Is this a book for a lot of different kinds of sexual wounds? Some self-inflicted? Some cultural?

EDEN: I believe that the greatest wound caused by childhood sexual abuse is the wound to the child’s identity. John Paul II in his Letter to Families talked about how children need to develop their identity in an environment of truth and love. You can’t do that if you are subjected to lies and what John Paul called “the opposite of love,” which is “use” — that is, being treated as an object.

Being abused caused me to develop an identity that was founded not on truth but rather on the lies of my abusers — the utilitarian lies that made me believe I had no value beyond my usefulness to others. So, as a teenager and young adult, acting out of the lies I had absorbed, I compounded my pain by using people and letting them use me.

I tell readers in My Peace I Give You that they are not responsible for the abuse they suffered in childhood. We have that truth from the mouth of Christ when he casts woe upon those who would tempt little ones, and it has been affirmed again and again by the Church. But healing means more than recovering from the sins that were committed against us. It also means seeking and accepting God’s forgiveness for those sins we ourselves committed. I address both those issues in My Peace I Give You. For that reason, I believe its message helpful for anyone who is recovering from any kind of trauma or pain, particularly those in twelve-step programs, which likewise distinguish between healing from harm caused by others and ending harmful behavior.

LOPEZ: And it’s really a book for people who have no such memories — who have not been hurt in such a way — as well, don’t you think?

EDEN: I’m glad you picked that up, as I hoped in writing the book that readers would find it inspiring regardless of what experiences they brought into it. When I read Pope Benedict’s encyclical Spe Salvi — “Saved in Hope” — where he uses the story of St. Josephine Bakhita’s conversion to show what it means to have a real encounter with God for the first time, I felt it was a call to likewise use the power of storytelling to help people encounter God in their own lives. So that’s what I seek to do in weaving my own story with those of saints whose lives speak to me.

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Syria and the Invisible Hand of Foreign Intervention

Eric S. Margolis, National Interest, August 10, 2012
The Polish Zionist ideologue Vladimir Jabotinsky, the father of Israel’s right wing, observed nearly a century ago that much of the Arab world was a fragile mosaic. A few sharp blows, he wrote, would cause it to shatter, leaving Israel the region’s dominant power. Jabotinsky may have been right.

Even if the Bashar al-Assad regime manages to hang on in Syria, that country’s economy is being wrecked, its people driven into poverty and neighbors tempted to intervene. Israel just threatened to attack Syria’s modest store of chemical weapons. Turkey is stumbling into the morass, egged on by the Saudis and Gulf Arabs. Russia’s national prestige is increasingly involved in Syria—which is as close to its borders as northern Mexico is to the United States. Iran may yet get involved.

We could be observing the beginning of a twenty-first-century version of the 1930s’ Spanish civil war, which became a proxy struggle between Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union. The only thing we know for sure about Syria’s civil war is that it is extremely dangerous to the entire region. Its outcome is entirely unpredictable. Meanwhile, the West keeps fueling the fires.

As a veteran correspondent who has covered fourteen conflicts and closely followed events in Syria since 1975, I have become convinced that there’s much more to the civil war raging in Syria than Westerners are being told by their governments or the blinkered media.

Last week, Reuters reported a classified intelligence “finding” signed by President Obama authorizing aid to the Syrian rebels. This may be the tip of the iceberg that eventually reveals an extensive covert campaign by the United States, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia and Turkey to overthrow the Assad government in Damascus. According to this scenario, these U.S. allies would be using Qatar, assorted freelance jihadists and Lebanese rightists as cat’s-paws to sustain the uprising. Jihadists, both Syrian and foreign, may also play a spearhead role in the fighting.

In fact, the Assad clan was long a target of jihadist wrath, described as godless tyrants oppressing good Muslims, in bed with the heretical Shia of Iran and too often cooperating with Western powers. Osama Bin Laden called on all jihadists to overthrow the Assads. Bin Laden is gone, of course, but the movement he sparked continues to gain momentum.

That revolution has erupted again in Syria is no surprise: the Assad family and its Alawite power base have brutally ruled Syria for over forty years. Rebellions by the Sunni majority, led by the underground Muslim Brotherhood, have been crushed with ferocity. This writer was outside the city of Hama in 1982 when government heavy guns and tanks put down a Sunni rebellion there, inflicting an estimated ten thousand casualties.

But until recently, Syria was in our good books. The Assad regime quietly cooperated with Western powers and Israel, jailed or liquidated Islamists, and kept quiet about the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights. The Bush administration even sent Islamist suspects to be imprisoned in Syria. Assad was another of our unsavory allies.

However, that was before war fever over Iran gripped Washington. Overthrowing the Assad government, Iran’s only Arab ally, would be a natural first step in overthrowing Iran’s Islamic government and isolating, then eliminating, Israel’s bitter Lebanese foe, Hezbollah.

If Syria were shattered into little confessional ministates and Hezbollah crushed, Lebanon likely would become an Israeli protectorate. Such was the strategic plan of Israel’s General Ariel Sharon in 1982.

Western powers already may be employing destabilization methods in Syria that were perfected in Libya. The DGSE, French foreign intelligence, cobbled together a group of Libyan exiles to form the “National Forces Coalition,” which rallied anti-Qadaffi elements in Benghazi. Britain’s MI6 intelligence had been active there for decades stirring up opponents of the Qadaffi regime.

In Libya, NATO air power intervened on “humanitarian” grounds to halt killing of civilians. News reports showed only lightly armed civilians battling Qadaffi’s regulars. Not shown were French, British and some other Western special forces disguised as Libyans that did much of the fighting and targeted air strikes.

France made use of a similar tactics in its brief border war with Libya in 1986 over the disputed Aouzou Strip on the Chadian-Libyan desert border. Chadian troops supposedly routed Libyan forces. In reality, the “Chadians” were actually tough French Foreign Legionnaires decked out in Bedouin dress. I interviewed some of the Legionnaires involved.

Fast-forward to today’s Syria. As a former soldier, I cannot believe that anti-Assad forces in Syria have made such great strides on their own. All armed forces require command and control, specialized training, communications and logistics. How have anti-Assad forces moved so quickly and pushed back Syria’s capable, well-equipped army? Where does all their ammo come from? Who is supplying all those modern assault rifles with optical sights?

How have so many Syrian T-72 tanks and other armored vehicles been knocked out? Not by amateur street fighters. Powerful antitank weapons—likely French, American or Turkish—have been used extensively. You don’t blow up a modern T-72 tank with light, handheld RPG rockets. Powerful antitank weapons, like the U.S. TOW or French Milan, require professional, trained crews. The use of these weapons suggests that outside forces are involved in the fighting, as they were in Libya.

Now come reports that the rebels are receiving small numbers of man-portable antiaircraft missiles. If properly used, they would threaten the Assad regime’s armed helicopters. Yet using such missiles requires a good deal of training. I saw in Afghanistan in the 1980s how long it took the mujahidin to learn this skill from CIA instructors—and then how quickly the Red Air Force was denied air superiority.

If Syria’s rebels are being trained, it is probably happening in Turkey (which makes the deadly U.S. Stinger AA missile under license). However, the United States has a major campaign under way to prevent jihadist groups from acquiring such man-portable missiles. If the Taliban received effective antiaircraft missiles, U.S. military operations in Afghanistan would be seriously threatened.

According to Reuters sources, the United States may have worked with Turkish allies to set up a command HQ at Adana, close to its Incirlik airbase in eastern Turkey near the Syrian border. This is where it would make sense for U.S. intelligence to coordinate the flow of arms, communications gear, medical supplies, food and munitions to the Syrian rebels.

Other unverified reports from the Mideast suggest that the U.S. mercenary firm formerly known as Blackwater (it recently changed its name to Academi) is training Syrian rebels in Turkey, moving in veteran mercenaries from Iraq, where there were once fifty thousand U.S.-paid private soldiers, and sending combat units into Syria.

Antiregime groups such as the Free Syrian Army probably would be ineffective without some kind of covert Western support. Whether they can grasp power from the jihadis who now dominate the streets remains to be seen. This gambit worked in Libya—at least so far. Syria, in contrast, is a very complex nation whose modern era has been marked by instability and coups.

After overthrowing one Syrian government in the late 1940s, Washington wisely backed off from Syria. Now it may get drawn back into the vortex of one of the Mideast’s most difficult nations.

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Santos Sacrílegos

De Hugh Halter

Ele adora o cheiro de cachorro e leite.

Bosco agora tem 42 anos de idade, e é um ateu realmente benevolente que viaja ao redor do mundo e faz documentários para mostrar as pessoas sem teto, a fome e a horrível exploração do ser humano.

Há trinta e sete anos, aos 5 anos de idade, Bosco se viu escondendo-se debaixo da mesa no pequeno chalé de sua família no norte da Irlanda, tentando desesperadamente manter seu cão quieto distraindo-o com uma cuia de leite. Ele se escondia porque um bando de carrascos do IRA fora matar seu pai, que era um líder rival na resistência.

Bosco naquele momento fez uma oração sincera para Deus poupar a vida de seu pai. Dois segundos depois, e ele ouviu o disparo de uma arma e viu seu pai caído ao chão. Ele ainda se lembra do cheio do seu cãozinho e do leite. Ele também se lembra de ver o assassino de seu pai duas semanas depois na missa, cantando hinos e baixando a cabeça para orar. Naquele dia ele resolveu que Deus não existia.

Como vim a conhecer Bosco? Acabei de celebrar o casamento dele. Terri, uma pessoa que busca a Deus, estava tentando me contar um pouco da história da vida dele. “Bosco tem sido o homem mais gentil, amável e respeitoso que já conheci. Espero que um dia, quando eu conseguir entender Deus, ele esteja mais aberto comigo. Deb me disse que você seria uma boa pessoa para ele conhecer, e eu realmente lhe agradeço por celebrar a nossa cerimônia de casamento.”

Comecei com esta história porque Deus realmente Se importa com a história da vida de uma pessoa. Ele não categoriza as pessoas como ateias, agnósticas, boas ou más cristãs, pagãs ou santas. Ele simplesmente vê as pessoas como são e entende sua desorientação ou vertigens espirituais com as quais as pessoas lutam, especialmente a vertigem causada pela religião e as pessoas religiosas.

Foi por isso que houve a encarnação de Cristo. João 1:14, diz, “A Palavra se fez carne e habitou entre nós, e vimos a sua glória como a glória do unigênito do Pai, cheio de graça e de verdade.”

Nós super espiritualizamos ou teologizamos por que Deus veio à terra através de Seu filho, mas a verdadeira razão para isso é que Ele sabia que o ser humano não tinha condições de entender, ver ou perceber Sua verdadeira glória a não ser que Ele viesse e vivesse entre nós como uma pessoa o menos religiosa que eles jamais conheceram.

Jesus tinha uma beleza sacrílega.

Ele era companheiro da turma errada, era gentil com os pecadores, abraçou os doentes, permitiu que as crianças fossem até Ele, e os discípulos dEle eram ainda piores. Eles não lavavam as mãos direito, comiam, se divertiam e trabalhavam no Sábado, e Ele derrubou constantemente os seus sistemas religiosos focado no templo e nos sacerdotes. Ele foi o homem mais santo que eles já haviam visto, mas com certeza era excentricamente não religioso… chegava a ser sacrílego!

Sacrilégio pode parecer uma palavra forte, mas simplesmente significa desafiar o que os outros pensam ser religioso para expor o verdadeiro Deus. E de tudo o que Jesus vez como “Deus encarnado”, o aspecto mais sacrílego de Sua vida foi a maneira como Ele deu dignidade a história da vida de cada pessoa.

Ora, isto talvez seja muito for a dos padrões para muitos de vocês, mas apenas 30 minutos antes da cerimônia de casamento, chamei Bosco até o meu jipe e o levei para fora das “premissas sem bebidas alcoólicas” da igreja, parei o carro e tirei do porta-luvas um pequeno frasco do uísque irlandês Jameson e lhe dei. Ele ficou com os olhos cheios de lágrimas ao receber e me disse, “Eu não acredito que você fez isto por mim, trouxe meus amigos de todas as partes do país aqui para o meu casamento, mas os cristãos não me permitem ter nenhuma bebida alcoólica. Passei o dia sem jeito.

“Como é que você, sendo o pastor, me deu isto de presente?” Ao que respondi, “Porque Deus conhece a sua história e Ele parece não ter problema nenhum com deixar as pessoas beberem em casamentos.”

Ele tomou um gole, e eu então tomei um gole, e ele imediatamente colocou o seu braço ao meu redor e disse uma bênção irlandesa para mim. Eu então fiz uma oração irlandesa por ele.

“Então, por que você não termina?,” perguntei. Quando ele colocou a tampa de volta, disse, “porque quero dividir o resto com os meus amigos. Obrigado por honrar a mim e aos meus amigos hoje.”

Foi um bom momento, um momento de Deus, e ele sabia que a história de Bosco era importante para mim e quem sabe ele não começou a ver Deus de maneira diferente?

A encarnação o leva a se importar com a história de vida de cada pessoa. A vida incarnada tem a ver com ouvir especificamente aquelas coisas que desorientaram o coração e mente da pessoa. E ao aprender a colocar de lado as generalizações trivias, o dogma debilitante, o legalismo inútil e os versículos bíblicos fora de contexto, você chega a entender o verdadeiro contexto do coração de uma pessoa e descobre as maneiras mais estranhamente apropriadas de ajudar os outros a se aproximarem de Jesus.

Sacrilégio é o segredo para os seus amigos encontrarem Deus, e se você for um discípulo de Jesus e fizer da sua meta de vida ser o mais irreligioso, e até mesmo sacrílego, verá que todo o mundo frio e preto-e-branco do cristianismo explode com as cores do reino.

Fromhttp://www.catalystspace.com/content/read/sacrilegious_saints_what_the_world_needs_and_what_god_wants_us_to_become/
Publicado por Âncora em julho de 2012.
Tradução Denise Oliveira. Revisão Hebe Rondon Flandoli.

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Is Your Prayer Life Saving Souls?

A compilation

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The day started out as a celebration of God’s grace. Hundreds of new followers of Jesus had flocked to our church to publicly affirm their faith through baptism, while their friends, families, and members of the community looked on.

A sixty-something woman walked over to me to be baptized. Next to her was a brawny, tough-looking man who appeared to be a few years older. He looked like a construction worker, his leathery skin deeply etched with lines. I bet he didn’t even need a hammer to pound in a nail—he could probably use his fist.

I turned to the woman. “So, you’re here to be baptized,” I said.

She was brimming with joy. “Oh, yes, I am,” she declared.

I smiled at her answer. “Have you received Jesus Christ as your forgiver and leader?” I asked, although the inquiry seemed merely a formality after I had seen Jesus so clearly reflected in her eyes.

She nodded with enthusiasm. “With all of my heart.”

I was just about to baptize her when I glanced at the man at her side. He had been listening intently to what was being said. “Are you her husband?” I asked.

He straightened up. “Well, yes, I am,” he said matter-of-factly.

That’s when the question popped into my mind. In all of the hundreds of baptisms I have performed, I had never done this before. I asked him in a sincere and concerned tone, “Have you given your life to Jesus?”

He looked surprised and offended. For the briefest of moments, he glared at me. Then his face screwed into a pained expression, and I didn’t know what was going to happen. I thought he might hit me. But suddenly he burst into tears, weeping uncontrollably, his shoulders bobbing as he tried to catch his breath.

“No, I haven’t,” he managed to say between sobs. “But I want to right now.”

My knees almost buckled.

“Well, okay then,” I finally said. And with that, as thousands of people watched, he confessed that he was a sinner, he received forgiveness through Christ, and I had the privilege of baptizing him and his wife together.

He hardly looked like the same man moments later as he stood next to his wife as we all sang “Amazing Grace.” His smile was as broad and enthusiastic as hers.

Then at the end of the service, just after I stepped off the platform, another woman I didn’t know came bounding up and threw her arms around me. As she sobbed on my shoulder, all I could hear her say was, “Nine years, nine years, nine years ...”

As you can imagine, I was a bit flustered. “Excuse me, but who are you?” I asked. “And what do you mean, ‘Nine years’?”

She looked up at me, her eyes red from tears. “That’s my sister-in-law you baptized up there, and that’s my brother who you led to Christ and baptized with her,” she explained. “I’ve been praying for that man for nine long years, and the whole time I’ve never seen one hint of spiritual interest. But look what God did today!”

Instantly, a thought popped into my mind: Here is a woman who is glad she didn’t stop praying in year eight.

Maybe you’ve been in a similar situation. This woman would tell you to never give up. Never cease praying. Never stop lifting up those you care about to the throne of grace.

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t understand everything about prayer. I know that God lets each person decide whether or not to follow him, and we can’t impose our will on someone else, as much as we’d like to. But I’m just naïve enough to believe the Bible when it says, “The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.”1 In fact, I like the quote popularly attributed to Mother Teresa: “When I pray, coincidences happen. When I stop, they don’t.”—Lee Strobel2

*

When we pray for people who do not know the Lord, God works. God honors the faith of a person who is so burdened for the lost that he or she writes the names on a list and prays for them every day. This is not some sort of magic formula, however. You see, when you become burdened for people … and begin fervently praying for them, God not only works upon their hearts to open them to the gospel, but He works on your heart to go witness to them.

That people are not witnessing is evidence that they are not praying! For the most part, Christians have little burden for the lost. This is no surprise, since the only way to get a burden is to get in touch with the heart of God in prayer. If you want a burden for lost people, then make it personal and put it down on paper. Write the names of a few lost friends or family members on a list and pray over those names every day.

American Christians in particular have become accustomed to an easy brand of faith. We expect all the blessings of God to be hand-delivered to us without much effort on our part. We want people to be saved and complain if people are not walking the aisle, but we do very little witnessing. We want answers to our prayers, but pray very little. We certainly do not want to do anything that might be difficult or that might exact too high a price.

In another generation, praying for the lost was often referred to as “travailing in prayer.” “Travail” is a word most often used for the process of a woman giving birth. Applied to praying for the lost, it teaches us that souls will not be won to the Lord unless we are actively engaged in the labor of prayer. Praying for the lost is the front lines of the spiritual conflict that rages in this world.

Allow me to suggest three practical steps to help you become a praying, witnessing follower of Jesus. First, establish a prayer list of a few lost friends, family members, or acquaintances. I have never written out such a list and prayed over it without seeing people saved. There is something eternally significant about putting names to paper and committing yourself to prayer. God honors our praying when we get serious enough to ask Him every day to save our loved ones. It is best not to make a long list, at first. Begin with three, or maybe five, names. If you are a reader, make your list a bookmark that you keep in whatever book you may be currently reading. Pray over your list as you open your book and then again as you replace the bookmark when you are finished. Keep a list with your Bible and use part of your daily quiet time to pray for those on your list. Whenever and wherever you can, pray over that list, lifting to God their names and needs.

Second, when you pray, really pray. It does little good to have a list if you are not willing to travail in prayer. Christians often falter when it comes to praying. We talk much about prayer, but spend little time actually praying. Also pray that God will prepare your heart to witness. When we ask God to send someone to a lost friend as a witness, He most often sends us.

The third step is to speak. Having prayed, use your voice to invite those on your list to [learn about the Lord]. Share your testimony with them. Explain the gospel to them. Invite them to read the Bible with you. Talk to them about spiritual matters. Tell them you are praying for them. If at first they are cold and nonresponsive, do not give up. Keep praying and keep speaking Jesus to them. Listen to their needs and problems. Love them, and above all be patient as you persevere in prayer.—Woody D. Wilson3

*

It can take weeks, months, or even a lifetime to see the results of your prayers, but results are guaranteed! No matter how long it takes for Me to perform the miracle, it will be done, because I always answer the prayers of My children—sometimes immediately, sometimes further down the road, sometimes in the far future, or sometimes I answer in the spirit world.

So don’t ever stop praying for those you love, even if you aren’t seeing immediate results. Prayers bring results! Prayers weave the magical spell of My miracle-working power, and when it’s My time, the answer will be delivered.—Jesus, speaking in prophecy4

*

Oh, the lengths that I will go to save a lost soul! There is no sacrifice that is too much to make for even one of My lost children, no depths that are too deep for Me to stoop to in order to lift a weary and searching soul, no heart that is too far gone for Me to give My salvation to! How far are you willing to go for Me and for others?—Jesus, speaking in prophecy5

Published on Anchor August 2012. Read by Simon Peterson.


1 James 5:16 TNIV.

2 The Unexpected Adventure (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009).

3 The Shadow of Babel (Hannibal Books, 2009).

4 Originally published August 2003.

5 Originally published August 2003.

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Crime Wave Engulfs Syria as Its Cities Reel From War

By an employee of The New York Times and Damien Cave, August 9, 2012

ALEPPO, Syria—The consequences of the war here have become familiar: neighborhoods shelled, civilians killed and refugees departed. But in the background, many Syrians describe something else that has them cowering with fear: a wave of lawlessness not unlike the crime wave Iraq experienced during the conflict there.

From Dara’a, near the Jordanian border, to Homs, Damascus and here in Syria’s commercial capital—the fighting has essentially collapsed much of the civilian state. Even in neighborhoods where skirmishes are rare, residents say thieves prey on the weak, and police stations no longer function because the officers have fled.

Kidnapping, rare before, is now rampant, as a man named Hur discovered here last month. He simply wanted to drive home. The man shoving a pistol into his back had other plans. “Keep walking,” the gunman told Hur, 40, a successful businessman, as they approached his car. “Get in.”

Hur said he initially thought he was being arrested by government agents. But then, after blindfolding him, his three captors made a phone call that revealed baser motives.

“They asked my family to ransom me with 15 million Syrian pounds,” Hur said of the abductors’ demand for about $200,000. “They were criminals, not a political group. They told me they knew me and they knew my family could pay.”

Rebel leaders have been trying to fill the void. “We are running patrols to protect our areas from thieves and criminals,” said Abu Mohammad, 30, a rebel fighter in eastern Aleppo.

But as bloody ground battles rage throughout the city, rebel control is limited. Syrians in Aleppo and elsewhere now say they bury their jewelry and other valuables inside their furniture. Some people no longer keep money in their pockets when they venture outside; residents and business owners across the country are padlocking their property to protect against armed opportunists mingling with combatants.

“No one wants to leave their houses, because you never know who is going to stop you or attack you,” said Yasmin, 50, a resident of Aleppo who was too afraid to give her last name. “Chaos, lawlessness, fear, it is just so chaotic, and with all the thugs in the streets, you never know who might kidnap you and ask for a ransom.”

Aleppo’s slide toward something resembling anarchy began months ago. Factory owners here in the country’s industrial capital said the roads outside the city went first, as armed bandits seized whatever they wanted from passing vehicles. One of Syria’s main automobile exporters recently told a Lebanese friend that he had to start sending vehicles to Iraq by boat from Lebanon because of the insecurity.

Then more reports of kidnappings started surfacing. By the end of March, as the government claimed to have retaken control of nearby cities, ransom demands were a daily occurrence in Aleppo, said Amal Hanano, a Syrian writer and analyst living in the United States. Usually, she said, the kidnappers asked for around $75,000 and then dropped their price to a fifth of that after tough negotiations.

Hur, using a nickname out of fear that he could be targeted again, said that his brother talked his kidnappers down to about $30,000 in Syrian pounds. It took a week. He said he spent most of the time tied to a water pipe in the back of a small store somewhere outside Aleppo.

His kidnappers made sure he had enough food and water. They took his cellphone, his watch and a gold ring but they left his car near the city, to establish their credibility. “They told my family where to find the car and the keys to prove that I was with them,” said Hur, indicating that they had probably kidnapped before.

In addition to gaining more expertise as the conflict drags on, criminals are also becoming more brazen. Yasmin said that a few days ago her cousin, a 65-year-old man, was robbed in his garden at 1:30 in the afternoon. His family watched helplessly as the thieves stole all he had, about $70. Now her brother, who lives across the street, makes sure his pockets are empty before he leaves home.

“We’ve all become a lot more careful since that incident,” Yasmin said. “Can you imagine? It’s not even safe to carry $70.”

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Brave New War

By John Glaser, Antiwar.com, August 9, 2012

Since the end of World War II, American leaders bent on making war have faced two major obstacles: nuclear weapons and a reluctant public.

Since 1945, “there have been no wars among the major states of the world,” notes Kenneth N. Waltz, a renowned international-relations theorist. “Nuclear weapons are the only peacekeeping weapons that the world has ever known.”

Another constraint on bellicosity has been the public’s aversion to long, intractable conflicts. This so-called Vietnam Syndrome strongly influenced U.S. foreign policy until September 2001, and it has seemingly returned after the quagmires of the last decade. According to the Human Security Brief 2010, high-intensity wars have declined by 78 percent since 1988.

But a new method of waging war—using special operations forces and drones—offers a way around the public-opinion impediment.

“The appeal is obvious,” writes Tom Engelhardt in Terminator Planet, a collection of essays he co-authored with historian Nick Turse. “The cost (in U.S. lives) is low; in the case of the drones, nonexistent. There is no need for large counterinsurgency armies of occupation of the sort that have bogged down on the mainland of the Greater Middle East these last years.” Drones provide “new ways to cross borders and new technology for doing it without permission.”

Terminator Planet uncovers the largely secret history and charts the likely future of the U.S. government’s remote-controlled wars. As the book makes clear, today’s drones may be less spectacular than the Terminator cyborg of James Cameron’s hair-raising 1984 blockbuster, but they are no less dangerous.

Drones are “killing civilians in disputed but significant numbers in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, creating enemies and animosity wherever they strike, and turning us into a nation of 24/7 assassins beyond the law or accountability of any sort,” Engelhardt warns. “Thought of another way, the drones put wings on the original Bush-era Guantanamo principle—that Americans have the inalienable right to act as global judge, jury, and executioner, and when doing so are beyond the reach of any court of law.”

The Obama administration is indeed placing itself above the law with its drone offensive in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere (Turse discovers at least 60 U.S. bases from which drones conduct surveillance or bombing missions). Recent reporting confirms that the administration has an internal process for authorizing “signature strikes,” which target individuals who cannot even be identified. The secret, unregulated nature of this process contradicts the very idea of the rule of law.

Christof Heyns, special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, addresses this lawlessness in a recent report to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

“Current targeting practices weaken the rule of law,” Heyns argues. “Killings may be lawful in an armed conflict [such as Afghanistan], but many targeted killings take place far from areas where it’s recognized as being an armed conflict.”

U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay concurs. “I see the indiscriminate killings and injuries of civilians in any circumstances as human rights violations,” she says, adding, “Because these attacks are indiscriminate, it is very, very difficult to track the numbers of people who have been killed.”

Eyewitness accounts, corroborated by new research, indicate that the drone strikes have indeed killed significant numbers of civilians. The administration has suggested that drones rarely kill innocents, “embrac[ing] a disputed method for counting civilian casualties,” reported The New York Times in May, that “in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants … unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”

As Terminator Planet repeatedly reminds us, this is not only immoral, but also counterproductive. “In Pakistan,” writes Engelhardt, “a war of machine assassins is visibly provoking terror (and terrorism), as well as anger and hatred among people who are by no means fundamentalists.” Indeed, as Charles Schmitz, a Yemen expert at Towson University, told the Los Angeles Times, “The more the U.S. applies its current policy, the stronger al-Qaeda seems to get.”

The Pentagon has a history of exaggerating the efficacy of new weapons. In World War II, the U.S. rejected the British practice of nighttime carpet bombings of civilian areas. New technology, American officials said, enabled “precision bombing.” The Norden bombsight, which could calculate a bomb’s trajectory, was said to be capable of hitting a pickle barrel from 30,000 feet.

“In reality,” writes Yuki Tanaka in Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History, “‘precision bombing’ was a euphemism, as the bombs regularly fell at least a quarter mile from the target.” The report of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, issued in September 1945, concluded, “in the over-all, only about 20% of the bombs aimed at precision targets fell within this target area.”

“In the Gulf War,” Engelhardt recalls, “smart bombs” were supposed to “give war the kind of precision that would lower civilian casualties to the vanishing point.” Unfortunately, the smart bombs “turned out to be remarkably dumb.”

But genuinely smarter weapons raise new concerns. Terminator Planet examines the cutting edge of drone capabilities to see what tomorrow (and hefty sums of taxpayer money) will bring. Drones will soon be “small enough to fly through windows or down ventilation shafts,” Turse reveals, “and carry out lethal attacks, undertake computer-disabling cyber-attacks, and swarm, as would a group of angry bees, of their own volition,” that is, without human oversight.

And it won’t end there. The Pentagon “is planning to increase the funding of drone development by 700% over the next decade.”

Polls show that Americans largely approve of the president’s use of drones. “When we possess such weaponry, it turns out there is nothing unnerving or disturbing, apocalyptic or dystopian about it,” Engelhardt observes. But these technologies will not be exclusively American for long. As many as 40 countries are now developing versions of their own pilotless planes. “And when the first Iranian or Russian or Chinese missile-armed drones start knocking off their chosen sets of ‘terrorists,’ we won’t like it one bit,” Terminator Planet hauntingly warns. “Then let’s see what we think about the right of any nation to summarily execute its enemies—and anyone else in the vicinity—by drone.”

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Scott Neeson left Hollywood to save children rooting in Cambodia's garbage dumps

By Tibor Krausz, CS Monitor, August 10, 2012 

Phnom Penh, Cambodia—Scott Neeson’s final epiphany came one day in June 2004. The high-powered Hollywood executive stood, ankle deep in trash, at the sprawling landfill of Stung Meanchey, a poor shantytown in Cambodia’s capital.

In a haze of toxic fumes and burning waste, swarms of Phnom Penh’s most destitute were rooting through refuse, jostling for scraps of recyclables in newly dumped loads of rubbish. They earned 4,000 riel ($1) a day—if they were lucky.

Many of the garbage sorters were young children. Covered in filthy rags, they were scruffy, sickly, and sad.

Clasped to Mr. Neeson’s ear was his cellphone. Calling the movie mogul from a US airport, a Hollywood superstar’s agent was complaining bitterly about inadequate in-flight entertainment on a private jet that Sony Pictures Entertainment, where Neeson was head of overseas theatrical releases, had provided for his client.

Neeson overheard the actor griping in the background. ” ‘My life wasn’t meant to be this difficult.’ Those were his exact words,” Neeson says. “I was standing there in that humid, stinking garbage dump with children sick with typhoid, and this guy was refusing to get on a Gulfstream IV because he couldn’t find a specific item onboard,” he recalls. “If I ever wanted validation I was doing the right thing, this was it.”

Doing the right thing meant turning his back on a successful career in the movie business, with his $1 million salary. Instead, he would dedicate himself full time to a new mission: to save hundreds of the poorest children in one of the world’s poorest countries.

Much to everyone’s surprise, within months the Australian native, who as president of 20th Century Fox International had overseen the global success of block-busters like “Titanic,” “Braveheart,” and “Die Another Day,” quit Hollywood. He sold his mansion in Los Angeles and held a garage sale for “all the useless stuff I owned.” He sold off his Porsche and yacht, too.

His sole focus would now be his charity, the Cambodian Children’s Fund, which he had set up the previous year after coming face to face, while on vacation in Cambodia, with children living at the garbage dump.

“The perks in Hollywood were good—limos, private jets, gorgeous girlfriends, going to the Academy Awards,” says Neeson, an affable man with careworn features and a toothy smile. “But it’s not about what lifestyle I’d enjoy more when I can make life better for hundreds of children.”

He sits at his desk barefoot, Cambodian-style, in white canvas pants and a T-shirt. At times he even sounds like a Buddhist monk. “You’ve got to take the ego out of it,” he says. “One person’s self-indulgence versus the needs of hundreds of children, that’s the moral equation.”

On the walls of his office, next to movie posters signed by Hollywood stars, are before-and-after pictures of Cambodian children. Each pair tells a Cinderella story: A little ragamuffin, standing or squatting in rubbish, transforms in a later shot into a beaming, healthy child in a crisp school uniform.

Neeson has more than 1,300 sets of such pictures; that’s how many children his charity looks after. Every one of the children, the Australian humanitarian stresses, he knows by sight, and most of them by name. “You go through a certain journey with them,” he says.

Houy and Heang were among the first who started that journey with him in 2004. Abandoned by their parents, the two sisters, now 17 and 18, lived at the dump in a makeshift tent.

“We felt sick and had no shoes. Our feet hurt,” Houy recalls in the fluent English she’s learned. “We’d never seen a foreigner,” Heang adds. “He asked us, ‘Do you want to study?’ “

Today the sisters are about to graduate from high school. They want to go on to college.

Neeson maintains four residential homes around town for more than 500 other deprived children and is building another. He operates after-school programs and vocational training centers. He’s built day cares and nurseries.

His charity provides some 500 children with three meals a day and runs a bakery where disadvantaged youths learn marketable skills while making nutrient-rich pastry for the poorest kids. It pays for well over 1,000 children’s schooling and organizes sightseeing trips and sports days for them.

“I drive the staff crazy,” says Neeson, who employs more than 300 locals, many of them former scavengers. “If I come up with a plan, I want to see it implemented within 48 hours. If I see a need, I want to do something about it. You don’t want to see suffering prolonged.”

He sees plenty of both need and suffering.

After decades of genocide and civil war, millions of Cambodians live in abject poverty. Many children are chronically malnourished, and many never even finish primary school.

On a late afternoon, as garbage pickers begin to return to their squalid dwellings of plastic sheets, tarpaulins, and plywood, Neeson sets out on his daily “Pied Piper routine.”

Navigating a muddy path, pocked with fetid puddles and strewn with trash, which winds among clusters of derelict shacks and mounds of garbage, he picks his way around a squatters’ community. Everywhere he goes, children dash up to him with cries of “Papa! Papa!” They leap into his arms, pull at his shirt, cling to his arms, wrap themselves around his legs.

“Hey, champ!” he greets a boy who clambers up on him. “He needs a dentist so badly,” he notes, referring to the boy’s rotten teeth. His charity offers free health care and dental services to the children and their parents.

In 2007 Neeson won the Harvard School of Public Health’s Q Prize, an award created by music legend Quincy Jones. In June he was named “a hero of philanthropy” by Forbes magazine. (“Well, I finally made it into Forbes,” he quips. “But no ‘World’s Richest’ list for me.”)

When Neeson spots certain kids, he hands them their portraits from a sheaf of newly printed photographs he carries around.

“I want them to have mementoes of themselves when they grow up and leave all this behind,” he explains. They give him their latest drawings in return.

He stops at a windowless cinder-block shanty inhabited by a mother and her three teenage daughters. The bare walls are adorned with Neeson’s portraits of the girls in school beside their framed Best Student awards.

“I’m so proud of my children,” says Um Somalin, a garment factory worker who earns $2 a day. “Mr. Scott has done wonders for them.”

Neeson rescued one girl from being trafficked, another from domestic servitude, and the mother from a rubber plantation, after he had come across the youngest girl living alone at the dump. “We always bring the family back together,” he says. “We help everyone so no one slips through the cracks.”

The need is great: Life here can be unforgiving. “This girl has an abusive father. This one here fell into a fire when she was 6. That guy got shot. That one there lost an arm in an accident,” Neeson says, reeling off details.

Then, flashlight in hand, he doubles back down another path—and steps into what seems like a different world. Behind a high-security fence, children sit in neat rows in brightly painted classrooms, learning English and math in evening classes. Others play on computers in an air-conditioned room.

Until recently, the site where Neeson’s new school now stands was a garbage dump.

“When I started working for him, I was surprised how much he does for the children,” says Chek Sarath, one of his helpers. “He places their well-being above his own.”

Neeson stops by young children who have their eyes glued to a Disney cartoon playing from a DVD.

“I miss a lot about Hollywood,” Neeson muses. “I miss Sundays playing paddle tennis on the beach with friends and taking the boat out to the islands.

“Sundays here, I’m down at the garbage dump. But I’m really happy.”

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The Golden Rule According to Whom?

Georgia Purdom

At the end of the last school year, my daughter’s public school took part in an anti-bullying campaign.The cover of the short workbook they completed in class intrigued me. Here is a picture of it.



When I read it, I couldn’t help but smile! This is the so-called Golden Rule, which comes from Luke 6:31, “And just as you want men to do to you, you also do to them likewise.” Of course, the workbook doesn’t give credit to the Bible or to God. The workbook states, “Students will learn to follow The Golden Rule by being fair, kind, respectful, responsible, and honest. ‘Treating other people the way you want to be treated’ is an important life skill that needs to be modeled and encouraged by all.”

As I pondered these statements I couldn’t help but think how inconsistent these ideas are with the evolutionary worldview that is taught in public schools. Evolution works by “survival of the fittest,” not “survival of the fairest and kindest.” In fact, many eugenicists (those that promote the birth of the “well-born”) both of the past and present readily acknowledge that helping the sick, poor, and weak impedes the evolution of man to a higher level. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, wrote, “Organized charity itself is a symptom of a malignant social disease . . . our civilization has bred, is breeding, and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents. My criticism, therefore, is not directed at the failure of philanthropy, but rather at its success.”[1]

For the public schools to be consistent with an evolutionary worldview, they should actually be encouraging bullying and not campaigning against it. Bullying could be seen as an aspect of natural selection since those that cannot withstand bullying (the weaker) decrease, and those that stand up to the bullying or are bullies are stronger and increase. (Thanks to Todd Friel of Wretched for initiating my thinking on this topic!)

In addition, if humans are nothing more than animals then morality is irrelevant, as it does not apply to animals. When a cat kills a mouse, we don’t charge the cat with first-degree murder because the cat is an animal acting on instinct and not a moral agent. So, if people are just animals acting on instinct, if they are nothing more than the sum of their genes, then we cannot justifiably say bullying is wrong. Evolutionary biologist Dr. William Provine stated, “Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear–and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end of me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either. What an unintelligible idea.”[2]

The real question is by what authority does a teacher or a principal or a school say that bullying is wrong and that students should be fair and kind? They cannot claim a higher authority outside of themselves and promoting anti-bullying is actually inconsistent with the evolutionary worldview that, by and large, public schools teach. This is the same question I asked in Tuesday’s blog related to the issue of the definition of marriage. If we don’t have an ultimate authority outside of ourselves then it is just our arbitrary opinion.

What a joy for me to share with Elizabeth the biblical foundations of the exhortation to treat others as you want to be treated! She has a biblical basis for being fair and kind. Elizabeth has had the opportunity to live out the Golden Rule and show others the love of Christ by being fair and kind even when others were not treating her the same way. I hope as the school year begins that you will join with me in praying for Christians in the public school system, whether students, teachers, or administrators that seek to serve Christ in a very difficult setting. I also encourage parents to check out our resources and make sure you are equipped to equip your children with the authority and truthfulness of God’s Word.

Keep fighting the good fight of the faith![1] Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization (New York: Brentano’s, 1922), p. 108.

[2] William Provine, “Darwinism: Science or Naturalistic Philosophy,” Origins Research (1994) 16.

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US starts landmark Agent Orange cleanup in Vietnam

By Mike Ives, AP, Aug 8, 2012 DANANG, Vietnam (AP)—Vo Duoc fights back tears while sharing the news that broke his heart: A few days ago he received test results confirming he and 11 family members have elevated levels of dioxin lingering in their blood. The family lives in a two-story house near a former U.S. military base in Danang where the defoliant Agent Orange was stored during the Vietnam War, which ended nearly four decades ago. Duoc, 58, sells steel for a living and has diabetes, while his wife battles breast cancer and their daughter has remained childless after suffering repeated miscarriages. For years, Duoc thought the ailments were unrelated, but after seeing the blood tests he now suspects his family unwittingly ingested dioxin from Agent Orange-contaminated fish, vegetables and well water. Dioxin, a persistent chemical linked to cancer, birth defects and other disabilities, has seeped into Vietnam’s soils and watersheds, creating a lasting war legacy that remains a thorny issue between the former foes. Washington has been slow to respond, but on Thursday the U.S. for the first time will begin cleaning up dioxin from Agent Orange that was stored at the former military base, now part of Danang’s airport. “It’s better late than never that the U.S. government is cleaning up the environment for our children,” Duoc said in Danang, surrounded by family members sitting on plastic stools. “They have to do as much as possible and as quickly as possible.” The $43 million project begins as Vietnam and the U.S. forge closer ties to boost trade and counter China’s rising influence in the disputed South China Sea. Although the countries’ economic and military ties are blossoming, progress on addressing the dioxin legacy has been slow. Washington still disputes a claim by Hanoi that between 3 million to 4 million Vietnamese were affected by toxic chemicals sprayed by U.S. planes during the war to eliminate jungle cover for guerrilla fighters, arguing that the actual number is far lower and other environmental factors are to blame for the health issues. That position irks Vietnamese, who say the United States maintains a double standard in acknowledging the consequences of Agent Orange. The U.S. has given billions of dollars in disability payments to American servicemen who developed illnesses associated with dioxin after exposure to the defoliant during the Vietnam War. In 2004, a group of Vietnamese citizens filed suit in a U.S. court against companies that produced the chemical, but the case was dismissed and the Supreme Court declined to take it up. Until a few years ago, Washington took a defensive position whenever Agent Orange was raised because no one had determined how much dioxin remained in Vietnam’s soil and watersheds, and the U.S. worried about potential liabilities, said Susan Hammond, director of the War Legacies Project, a U.S. nonprofit organization that mainly focuses on the Agent Orange legacy from the Vietnam War. “There was a lot of the blame game going on, and it led nowhere,” Hammond said by telephone from Vermont. “But now at least progress is being made.” Over the past five years, Congress has appropriated about $49 million for environmental remediation and about $11 million to help people living with disabilities in Vietnam regardless of cause. Experts have identified three former U.S. air bases—in Danang in central Vietnam and the southern locations of Bien Hoa and Phu Cat—as hotspots where Agent Orange was mixed, stored and loaded onto planes. The U.S. military dumped some 20 million gallons (75 million liters) of Agent Orange and other herbicides on about a quarter of former South Vietnam between 1962 and 1971. The defoliant decimated about 5 million acres (2 million hectares) of forest—roughly the size of Massachusetts—and another 500,000 acres (202,000 hectares) of crops. The Agent Orange issue has continued to blight the U.S.-Vietnam relationship because dioxin can linger in soils and at the bottom of lakes and rivers for generations, entering the food supply through the fat of fish and other animals. Vietnam’s Ministry of Defense and the U.S. now plan to excavate 73,000 cubic meters (2.5 million cubic feet) of soil from the airport and heat it to a high temperature in storage tanks until the dioxin is removed. The project is expected to be completed in four years. The U.S. is rolling out a $9 million project to address disabilities in Vietnam through 2015, but it continues to dispute Vietnam’s claim that dioxin has caused health problems there. Every penny counts for Nguyen Thi Hien, who directs three rehabilitation and vocational training centers for 150 children and young adults with disabilities in Danang on a budget of roughly 100 million dong ($5,000) per month. The children, busy drawing and making plastic flowers that are sold to raise funds, suffer from a range of physical and mental ailments that Hien says are linked to dioxin. Vo Duoc, the steel salesman, will travel to the capital, Hanoi, next month to receive treatment for his diabetes. But he says he’s more concerned about what will happen to his six grandchildren, who haven’t yet been tested for dioxin. “They had nothing to do with the war,” Duoc said. “But I live in fear that they’ll test positive like me.

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Brazil Gains Business and Influence as It Offers Aid and Loans in Africa

By Simon Romero, NY Times, August 7, 2012

RIO DE JANEIRO—In Mozambique, Brazil’s government is opening a plant making antiretroviral drugs to fight the AIDS epidemic. Brazil is lending $150 million to Kenya to build roads and ease congestion in the capital, Nairobi. And in Angola, West Africa’s rising oil power, a new security agreement seeks to expand the training of Angolan military personnel in Brazil.

Brazil, which has more people of African descent than any other country outside of Africa itself, is assertively raising its profile again on the continent, building on historical ties from the time of the Portuguese empire.

The array of aid projects and loans recently extended to African countries points both to Brazil’s ambitions of projecting greater influence in the developing world and to the expanding business allure of Africa, where some economies are rapidly growing even as parts of the continent still grapple with wars and famine. The charm offensive is paying off in surging trade flows between Brazil and Africa, growing to $27.6 billion in 2011 from $4.3 billion in 2002.

“There’s the growing sense that Africa is Brazil’s frontier,” said Jerry Dávila, a historian at the University of Illinois who has written extensively about Brazil’s inroads across the South Atlantic Ocean. “Brazil is in the privileged position of finally reaching the institutional capacity to do this.”

Brazil’s forays into Africa are similar to the ambitions of other rising powers, like Turkey, which has established its sway in the Arab world, and India’s promotion of its culture across Asia.

The prominence given to Africa also reflects Brazil’s shift from aid recipient to provider. Big development challenges persist in Brazil, including woeful public schools and a sharp economic slowdown this year. But Brazil is a major agricultural exporter that recently surpassed Britain as the world’s sixth-largest economy, and it now boasts more embassies in Africa than Britain does—a notable change from when Brazil relied on foreign aid in the 1960s, largely from the United States, to alleviate hunger in the country’s impoverished northeast.

Africa now accounts for about 55 percent of the disbursements by the Brazilian Cooperation Agency, which oversees aid projects abroad, according to Marco Farani, the agency’s director. Altogether, including educational exchanges and an expanding loan portfolio, Brazil’s foreign aid exceeds $1 billion, he said. Big portions of Brazilian aid also go to countries in Latin America, and there is a smaller focus on East Timor, the former Portuguese colony in Southeast Asia.

“We still have a smaller foreign aid profile than other some countries, but we’re learning how to do cooperation,” Mr. Farani said.

After a surge of openings of diplomatic missions over the past decade, Brazil now has 36 embassies across Africa, and hopes to open its 37th in Malawi this year. Brazil is already using this presence to bolster its actions on the world stage, sending jets to fly delegations from Sierra Leone, Liberia and Cape Verde to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, which was held here in June.

Other projects are intended to lure Africans to study in Brazil. A new university began offering classes last year for students from Portuguese-speaking countries, including Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Principe.

Since Brazil does not need to import large amounts of oil or food, its plans in Africa differ somewhat from other countries seeking greater influence there. Outreach projects tie largely into efforts to increase opportunities for Brazilian companies, which sometimes work with Brazil’s government in offering aid.

Some of Brazil’s biggest inroads, predictably, are in Portuguese-speaking countries like Angola, where the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht ranks among the largest employers, and Mozambique, where the mining giant Vale has begun a $6 billion coal expansion project.

But Brazilian companies are also scouring other parts of Africa for opportunities, putting down stakes in Guinea and Nigeria. A leading Brazilian investment bank, BTG Pactual, started a $1 billion fund in May focused on investing in Africa. New links are also emerging, including Brazilian farming ventures in Sudan; a flight from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, to São Paulo; and a fiber optic cable connecting northeast Brazil to West Africa.

Brazil, closely linked for centuries to Africa through shipping routes and the slave trade, is thought to have imported 10 times as many slaves as the United States did before slavery was abolished here in 1888. For a stretch in the 19th century, Brazil was the seat of the Portuguese empire, making the capital then, Rio de Janeiro, a nerve center for trade with Africa.

Those ties withered until civilian leaders sought to establish relations with newly independent governments in Africa in the early 1960s. That process cooled after Brazil’s military rulers seized power in a 1964 coup supported by the United States.

Then economic necessity and a quest to build autonomy from the United States laid the foundations in the 1970s for today’s diplomatic buildup in Africa. Seeking to offset spending on oil imports, including cargoes from Nigeria, military rulers set about opening new markets in Africa for Brazilian companies. They found some success, notably in newly independent Angola.

Brazil’s former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, built on those inroads in trips to Africa from 2003 to 2010, referring to the “historic debt” Brazil had to Africa in its formation as nation

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