Does your faith need strengthening? Are you confused and wondering if Jesus Christ is really "The Way, the Truth, and the Life?" "Fight for Your Faith" is a blog filled with interesting and thought provoking articles to help you find the answers you are seeking. Jesus said, "Seek and ye shall find." In Jeremiah we read, "Ye shall seek Me, and find Me, when ye shall seek for Me with all your heart." These articles and videos will help you in your search for the Truth.
By Gardiner Harris and Stanley Reed, NY Times, June 26, 2018
The United States said on Tuesday that it will impose sanctions against all importers of Iranian oil by Nov. 4, a surprisingly tough position that roiled oil markets and is likely to further alienate allies and adversaries alike.
The policy shook financial markets that had become accustomed to waivers for American sanctions that in years past had been granted to companies in countries like India and China as long as they showed steady reductions in their imports of Iranian oil.
But a senior State Department official said Tuesday morning that such routine waivers were not likely to be issued by the Trump administration.
Sanctions experts expressed a mixture of bafflement and scorn at Tuesday’s announcement. They noted that countries like India and China never entirely ended their imports of Iranian crude even before Tehran agreed to the 2015 nuclear accord.
Following Washington’s withdrawal from the deal, European allies vowed to resist reimposing of sanctions. And in the midst of an increasingly bitter trade war with China, the likelihood that Beijing will entirely end its imports of Iranian oil is dubious, analysts said.
“They’re going to go after the Central Bank of China just before the midterms?” said Daniel Fried, a top White House and State Department official in the administration of President George W. Bush. “The next day’s headline will be: ‘Dow Drops 5,000 Points.’”
Peter Harrell, a former sanctions official in the State Department, dismissed the idea outright. “I don’t see China and India going to zero,” he said.
This month, European leaders applied for waivers to the renewed American sanctions against Iran, saying that preserving the agreement was vital to the security of their respective nations. Few expected the waivers to be granted, but Tuesday’s abrupt announcement, which largely ruled them out, could cause further strains.
European diplomats spent months negotiating a side agreement to the Iran deal with Brian Hook, a top State Department official, hoping such an agreement would persuade Mr. Trump to stay in the accord. In April, President Emmanuel Macron of France told Mr. Trump in the Oval Office that negotiations with Mr. Hook were about to yield a strong agreement. “Who’s Brian Hook?” Mr. Trump responded, according to a person with knowledge of the exchange.
The failure of the nuclear negotiations, Mr. Trump’s unusually combative posture at the recent Group of 7 meeting in Canada and his recent imposition of trade tariffs have left European allies weighing how far they can and should go to defy the United States. A growing number of large European companies have announced, however, that they intend to abandon Iran.
Robert A. Pape, director of the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Threats, said that sanctions only work when a country’s military suppliers participate in the effort. With Russia and China likely to continue to supply Iran with sophisticated hardware despite the sanctions, the Trump administration’s efforts are not likely to succeed, he said.
“This is big stick diplomacy, and that has a long history of failure,” Mr. Pape said.
Katherine Bauer, a former Treasury Department official, said that countries are likely to balk at the Trump administration’s maximalist posture.
“The risk is that you push countries to look for ways around sanctions,” she said.
Dennis Edwards: Is Donald Trump isolating America even from its former allies and in so doing preparing for the fulfillment of Bible Prophecy?
In Revelation chapter 17 we see the 10 nations, which come out of the former Roman Empire, join for a short period with the "Beast" or Antichrist to destroy the great Commercial Prostitute's city in one hour by fire.
Many Bible Eschatalogy students believe New York City could be the present day fulfillment of Babylon the Whore of Revelation chapters 17 and 18. Donald Trump's policies of isolation, "America First," could very well lead to the ten nations of former Roman Empire aligning themselves with Russia.
Many believe the Antichrist will have something to do with Russia. Some say he will come out of from Russia, others say he will have a close alliance with Russia. In any case, Trump's actions are only isolating America further from the rest of the world. America is closely aligned with Israel. Will the desruction of Babylon the Whore, which could very well be America, occur at the time of the invasion of Israel from the north?
Is Trump pushing us further along the road to eventual confrontation and world destruction as predicted by Jesus and the book of Revelation? Will it happen in our life time, or that of our children or grandchildren? Be attentive. It may be later than you think.
Cornelia or Corrie Ten Boom was a Dutch Christian. Born 15th April 1892 Corrie saw the outbreak of World War II and after the occupation of Holland worked along with her father to help Jews escape the Nazi Holocaust. While many quietly kept their heads down to stay alive, Corrie, her father and other family members took great risks to help the Jews of Holland. These risks would eventually lead to many of the family being imprisoned.
After the war Corrie returned to The Netherlands and did much good with her life, travelling the world as a public speaker, appearing in more than sixty countries around the world, and writing many books until her eventual death in 1983, on the day she came into the world, 15th April.
Her most famous book is The Hiding Place, and it’s a personal favourite of mine. Corrie’s resilience and faith during her time in captivity cannot fail to lift the heart, despite the horrors she lived through and so I am honoured today to be the one to collect some of my favourite Corrie Ten Boom quotes and share them with you.
I’d have to confess to not being a very religious person, but through The Hiding Place I learned that faith in anything can get you through hard times, that love is greater than any evil, and in the end forgiveness is the only key to a happy life. Thank you, Corrie.
In the first week of June two farms were attacked in the South African province of Free State. The modus operandi was more or less the same. Armed intruders tied up the victims and stole guns, cash, mobile phones–whatever they could get their hands on–and then fled in the farm vehicles
Attacks on farms, which are particularly vulnerable due to their isolation, are the nightmarish reality for those living and working on the land in South Africa, which is tormented by a level of heinous crime Australians struggle to comprehend.
Dan Kriek, the president of AgriSA, the largest representative body of commercial farmers in South Africa, condemns both attacks “in the strongest possible terms”.
But there is a difference between the two that troubles him.
One of the attacks, on a white farmer and his wife, was reported in the media. But the other attack–where the victims were two black farmers–received no coverage.
“The point I am trying to make is the media is not reporting the true state of affairs–farm attacks and farm murders are shared by all racial groups in this country,” Kriek says.
He believes the media portrayal of the farm murders as an onslaught on white farmers does nothing to help social cohesion in a country still haunted by apartheid.
“The whole narrative, the fact black farmers and farm workers get attacked and murdered, gets lost in the whole conversation. How do we–in a country with our history–then convince the whole of society this is a problem we all need to address?”
Kriek, a mild-mannered white farmer with a prize cattle stud near the town of Tweeling in the Free State, is at the epicentre of an emotive debate around race, rural violence and land reform that is roiling South Africa.
There are few more affected than Kriek–as AgriSA president and a farmer he knows many of the victims of farm attacks.
Far-right extremists, both in South Africa and other countries including Australia, claim white South African farmers are facing a genocide.
Most people don’t accept the hyperbolic claims of a white genocide–it is difficult to equate South Africa with Rwanda or Nazi Germany.
But there is a concern among white farmers (large-scale commercial farms are almost all white-owned) that they are being deliberately targeted.
They are alarmed by farm attacks and murders–in some cases involving gruesome torture–and land reform aimed at addressing racial disparities in land ownership.
“From the farmers’ perspective the political landscape has recently become more hostile, largely as a result of calls by political leaders for more radical land reform,” says Dr Johan Burger from the Institute for Security Studies.
“They point to statements by various political leaders such as those accusing white farmers of having stolen the land and calling for the expropriation of land without compensation.”
The vexed questions of whether white farmers are killed at a higher rate than the rest of the population and whether attacks are a normal part of crime or fuelled by racial animosity are the source of much conjecture in South Africa.
In 2015 the South African Human Rights Commission said most evidence presented to it suggested the criminal element but it did not dispute some farm attacks and murders were motivated by hate or racial hostility.
This debate will be reignited at the end of June when Ernst Roets, the deputy CEO of Afrikaner-rights group AfriForum, launches a book, Kill the Boer, warning a “looming process of ethnic cleansing should be regarded as a serious threat”.
The narrative of a white persecution has gained considerable traction in Australia, where about 163,000 (mostly white) South African-born people now live.
Earlier this year Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton caused a diplomatic furore when he said Australia had “the potential to help some of these people that are being persecuted”.
His comments followed a spate of headlines in Australia including “South Africa’s white farmers attacked, raped and forced from land”, “Whites persecuted, but who cares?” and “White minority ‘targeted’ in South Africa”.
Dutton said these people “need help from a civilised country like ours”.
Dutton has never specifically referred to white farmers. However his comments caused uproar in South Africa.
“Oz minister who wants white SA farmers has history of racist rants,” screamed one headline.
“I was pissed off,” says South African Tourism Minister Derek Hanekom.
“It was reckless, irresponsible and it was just pandering to a right wing group. I think there was a lot of concern about this statement.”
A spokeswoman for Dutton said Australia’s program “doesn’t discriminate on any basis. The minister has never suggested otherwise and therefore I would discount ill informed comment.”
It’s a miracle Johnny Muller is even alive, let alone that he can still see and doesn’t have brain damage.
Muller, a dairy farmer from a property near the town of Frankfort in the Free State, was shot while struggling with an intruder during a farm attack on September 24 last year.
He shows us the scars; the bullet entered above his right eye and came out on the left side of his neck. It dodged an artery.
Someone told the family the barrel of the gun must have been almost touching his head or it would have blown out a bigger hole. “We didn’t google that,” Johnny’s wife Dalene says drily.
The Mullers believe the motive for the attack was theft: ‘I don’t think all farm attacks are for money reasons, I think some are just to hurt and injure people, but in our case they really wanted money,” Dalene says.
Somehow she managed to press a panic button. The intruders escaped in the Muller’s bakkie (small truck) when they heard the alarm.
“I closed the door and I told the children: ‘Daddy has been shot. We don’t know if he is dead or alive, probably dead, but we cannot go out there.”
It’s hard to imagine the agonising wait for help in the Muller’s cheerful kitchen, with its fruit salad tablecloth, and multi-coloured sign that says “Many people have eaten here & survived”. (The sign, Johnny says, smiling, was there before the attack.)
Dalene says although the farm attacks are a problem, they are not the only people suffering in South Africa.
“There are a lot of people being hijacked, there are a lot of people being attacked in their houses, even in the cities.”
The family never considered not coming back to the farm. “This is where we live. We decided we are not going to let some barbarians ruin our lives.”
Do they think many other South Africans farmers would be interested in coming to Australia? “I think there would be some. In this area I don’t think there would be many,” Dalene says.
Earlier this year Tony Abbott claimed that “something like 400 white farmers have been brutally murdered over the last 12 months”.
However South African police say there were 47 farm murders and 561 farm attacks in 2017-18 (they do not identify the race of the victims or their occupations). The highest recorded number of farm murders was in 1997-98 when there were 153.
AfriForum disputes the police figures and says the real toll is higher. It says there were 84 farm murders last calendar year.
AgriSA, which represents about 28,000 farmers, says an increase in farm attacks during the past two financial years is in line with national crime statistics.
The spectre of violence is everywhere in South Africa. A guard with an automatic gun stands outside Wimpy, a fast food chain in a suburban Johannesburg shopping mall. A metre away a child eats his hamburger.
Middle-class houses hide behind towering walls, topped with electric fences and coiled barbed wire. Signs warn of armed security.
Our car windscreen is cracked from an earlier “smash and grab”–a brick through the window at a robot, which is what South Africans call traffic lights, followed by “give me your cell phone or I’ll shoot you”.
The life of almost every South African I meet has been scarred by violence. They tell horrifying stories of brutal home invasions, carjackings and murders with the same tone of sad resignation Australians use to talk about cancer.
In 2016-17 there were more than 19,000 murders in South Africa–an average of 52 every day. Most victims were young black men.
The division of wealth is stark. Just a few kilometres from Johannesburg’s affluent financial hub of Sandton, where tourists pose under a gigantic statue of Nelson Mandela and then have a glass of Chenin Blanc, is the township of Alexandra.
One of the poorest urban areas in South Africa, the township, its population almost entirely black, is crammed with corrugated iron shacks. Most don’t have running water so the people use communal pumps and outdoor toilets.
The World Bank says South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world, with its poverty “a demonstration of the enduring legacy of apartheid”.
When Mandela campaigned ahead of South Africa’s first multiracial elections in 1994, his slogan promised: “A better life for all”.
But democracy has not ended all white privilege.
Almost 25 years after the end of apartheid, two thirds of agricultural land is still in the hands of the white minority. Less than 9 percent of South Africans are white.
The African National Congress failed to achieve its target of a 30 per cent transfer of farmland to blacks by 2014. In December it adopted a policy position that land should be expropriated without compensation to accelerate reform.
The government insists there will be no “smash and grab interventions”, referring to the violent land grabs that occurred in Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe, and the economy and food security will not be adversely affected.
Farmers have been assured productive agricultural land will not be taken.
Land expropriation without compensation would only occur in limited situations, such as where land was sitting idle for speculation. Cases would be tested in the Constitutional Court.
But still there is uncertainty and fear.
This is exacerbated by militant populist politician Julius Malema, who has urged blacks to occupy white-owned land. He says he is not calling for whites to be killed … “for now”.
Malema, then a member of the ANC, also caused an outcry in 2010 when he sang the apartheid-era song Shoot the Boer, Shoot the Farmer, which a High Court judge ruled constituted hate speech.
Malema was later expelled from the ANC and formed the radical ultra-left Economic Freedom Fighters party, which commands just 6 per cent of the vote, but his inflammatory comments have alarmed white farmers.
“Politicians say ‘Kill the farmer, kill the farmer’ so they get it in their heads,” Johnny Muller says.
In 1998 Nelson Mandela said the government deplored the “cold-blooded killings on farms”.
Farm attacks were made a national security priority alongside other special crimes such as gang violence, cash in transit robberies and taxi violence.
But AfriForum is concerned the government has since de-prioritised it as a crime, including abolishing the commando system, a voluntary part-time force of the South African Army that assisted police.
AfriForum claims farmers are three to four times more likely to be killed than the average South African and the significance of racial and political motives is underplayed.
Despite the backlash from South Africa, Dutton has said he will “not step back” from the necessity of providing support to people who face persecution.
Somewhat ironically, given its advocacy promoting the plight of South African farmers overseas, AfriForum is not especially enthusiastic about Australia’s offer to take farmers.
“We were very grateful that there is recognition of the problem, that there is acknowledgement outside of South Africa that there is a problem in South Africa,” Roets says.
“But we know that exporting people would not solve the problem, at least not the collective problem. We would want to fix the problem here.”
It is difficult to imagine a more unlikely pairing. Allen Ginsberg, beat poet and icon of the counterculture, and Richard Helms, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 1966-1973, during the most controversial years of the Vietnam War. But in March 1971, in a drawing room of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC, the two came face to face in a fittingly bizarre encounter.
Ginsberg, due to give a reading at the gallery that evening, approached Helms with a wager. He told Helms that he suspected the CIA of being involved in the illegal opium trade in South-East Asia. If he was right about this controversial allegation, Ginsberg proposed that Helms should agree to meditate for one hour every day for the rest of his life. “It is terribly important to get him into an improved mind-consciousness,” Ginsberg later told reporters.
But if Ginsberg was wrong, and Helms could demonstrate the innocence of his agency, then Ginsberg agreed to gift Helms his Vajra, a brass Buddhist-Hindu ritual instrument that symbolised “the lightning doctrine of sudden illumination”. Confident that, on this score at least, the CIA had nothing to hide, Helms agreed to the bargain.
Accompanying the clippings, a smug Ginsberg sent Helms some notes and advice on meditation techniques.
Perhaps more troubling for Helms though, particularly at a time of mounting public suspicion of the CIA, was the publicity that Ginsberg gave to these allegations.
A few months after their encounter Ginsberg wrote an open letter to Senator Clifford P Hansen asking him to investigate the matter. Hansen refused, and instead issued a firm rebuttal in an open letter that was drafted for him by the CIA’s public affairs staff.
But Ginsberg wasn’t one to give up. The following winter, he raised the issue again, this time on television, as a guest on the Dick Cavett Show. And then in March 1972 Ginsberg published the first draft of his ever-evolving poem “CIA Dope Calypso” in an issue of Earth Magazine that contained a series of damning articles about the CIA by other authors.
The poem drew heavily from the analysis of Alfred W McCoy, a graduate student at Yale who was commissioned by Harper and Row to write a study of the purported heroin epidemic in Vietnam. Ginsberg had met McCoy at a rally in New Haven to free Black Panther leader Huey P Newton.
McCoy’s book, based on more than 250 interviews with heroin dealers, police officials, and former French and American intelligence agents was published later that year as The Politics of Heroin in South-East Asia. Needless to say, it supported Ginsberg’s accusation that the CIA were complicit in the opium trade.
When the CIA found out about McCoy’s book after he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, they took strong objection to it. Cord Meyer, the CIA’s deputy director of plans, was sent to pay a visit to Harper and Row’s offices in New York and petitioned the publisher to share the galley proofs with them prior to publication. Reluctantly, Harper and Row consented.
But the CIA’s intervention backfired. Against their objections, Harper and Row chose to publish the work in full, and sped up the production of the book by a month to cash in on the controversy. “I had hoped that my work would be interesting enough to spark a public debate,” McCoy later wrote, “now the CIA, by attempting to suppress it, has itself sparked the debate”. After it was published, Ginsberg was often seen marching at protests with a copy on his head, exclaiming “he had something on his mind”.
It was not the first time the CIA had been subjected to Ginsberg’s particular brand of activist irreverence. During the trial of the “Ann Arbor Three”, a group of White Panther activists accused of blowing up a CIA recruitment station in Michigan, Ginsberg appeared as a defence witness, proclaiming himself as the spokesperson for all young people under the age of 28 in his vociferous opposition to the CIA (a claim that was vigorously rejected by the prosecution).
But perhaps there was a grain of truth in Ginsberg’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek exaggeration. He was undoubtedly one of the most high-profile representatives of the American counterculture and anti-war movement.
As a result, he played a small but significant role in raising the American public’s suspicions about their most secretive foreign intelligence agency at a time of immense discord and social upheaval. And, in the process, he helped to cement the CIA’s place in American culture as a lightning rod for wider public anxieties regarding secrecy and the excesses of US foreign policy.
Dennis Edwards: The trouble is the men behind the politics of heroin have never been brought to face the consequences. They continue to rule and reign from behind the scenes. They put up Presidents and remove them. The make Popes and have Popes removed. They make financial crisis and later solve them. They are none other than the famous Illuninati who are the hidden movers and shakers in the world. They follow closely their Lord, the spiritual forces that work in the children of disobedience. Read the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" to get a feel for their ideology.
At least 230 civilians have died in Libya in the chaotic, multiparty air war that has followed the ouster of dictator Moammar Gaddafi in 2011, a report has found.
The study from Airwars, a London-based watchdog group, and New America, a Washington-based think tank, examined the outcome of 2,158 strikes conducted since September 2012 by at least seven local and international actors, underscoring the fraught and fractured nature of post-revolution Libya.
After a NATO-led air campaign helped Libyans topple Gaddafi in 2011, the country has descended into a simmering civil conflict that included the establishment of rival Libyan governments and the rise of militant groups, including a virulent local branch of the Islamic State, that have taken advantage of ungoverned areas to grow strong.
The report, which The Washington Post obtained ahead of its release this week, is the first comprehensive examination of the death toll caused by air operations in Libya’s post-revolution period.
Using social media accounts and other sources to assess individual incidents, researchers concluded that at least 237 and as many as 387 civilians were killed in those strikes. At least another 324 civilians were wounded in those attacks, the report found.
While the civilian death toll appears to be far smaller than that caused by Western air operations against militants in Iraq and Syria, one important feature of the Libyan conflict has been its murky, mysterious nature.
According to Airwars and New America, strikes have been repeatedly conducted in Libya not only by rival local factions and the United States, but also, with far less transparency, France, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. But fewer than 50 percent of reported strikes have been publicly declared, leading to questions about responsibility and accountability when civilian deaths do occur.
“Not one belligerent has taken responsibility for a single civilian death in Libya since 2012, and that’s a continuation of what we saw with NATO back in 2011,” said Chris Woods, director of Airwars. “It’s a tragedy for the Libyan people.”
Among Libyan actors, the report found that forces led by Khalifa Hifter, who has emerged as eastern Libya’s most influential power broker, have been responsible for the largest share of civilian deaths since 2012. Backed by outside powers including Russia, Hifter has vowed to clear Libya of extremist militants who have taken root since Gaddafi’s death.
But Hifter has been criticized for harsh tactics and his refusal to support the Western-backed Government of National Accord that seeks, in a rivalry to his own power, to assert authority across Libya.
Hifter’s self-proclaimed Libyan National Army is believed to have conducted about 1,100 strikes resulting in at least 95 civilian deaths, and potentially as many as 247, researchers found. Most of the attacks by Hifter’s forces have taken place in the eastern cities of Benghazi and Derna and in the country’s central oil region.
The GNA, which has fewer air assets, has conducted about 54 strikes, probably resulting in seven to 63 deaths, the researchers said.
Of the outside powers involved in post-revolution Libya, the United States has played the most significant military role. According to Airwars and New America, U.S. aircraft have conducted about 525 strikes on militants in Libya since September 2012.
That included an intense four-and-a-half-month operation in 2016 to push the Islamic State out of Sirte, the coastal city that became the group’s most important stronghold outside of Iraq and Syria.
U.S. Africa Command has said its operations have caused no confirmed civilian casualties in Libya during that period, but Airwars and New America assessed they probably resulted in 11 to 75 noncombatant deaths.
U.S. estimates of civilian casualties have been far lower than those from outside groups, partly because the U.S. military does limited follow-up after strikes occur to assess whether civilian deaths took place.
Often, it has been difficult to determine who has been behind a particular strike in Libya, with no local factions or foreign actors taking responsibility and locals assigning blame to multiple parties.
“This is one of the world’s forgotten wars,” said Peter Bergen, a vice president of New America. “The NATO intervention didn’t end the conflict; it precipitated a new phase and Libya is now an arena for proxy warfare.”
Researchers say the smaller civilian death toll in Libya–compared with over 6,000 in Iraq and Syria–is due to Libya’s lower population density and, perhaps, poorer reporting.
