Showing posts with label Israel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Israel. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 07, 2024

Sri Lanka Army Medical Corps Departs for S. Sudan

NOTE from Sudan Watch Editor: Any attack on a peacekeeper constitutes a war crime. Sadly, the bodies of two UN peacekeepers, one from Ghana and the other from Pakistan, were flown home from South Sudan last week. I have documented news of hundreds of peacekeepers being murdered in Sudan and South Sudan. They gave their lives to protect a thankless lot. 

Sudanis and aid orgs on social media are demanding the international community to help. It is time they pressure African leaders and African Union for help. To paraphrase the previous prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Luis Moreno Ocampo: the international community is like a unicorn, everyone knows what a unicorn looks like but it doesn't exist.   

Over the last 60-70+ years, millions of people outside Africa have reached out to help those in Africa less fortunate than themselves. I guess there has come a time when many of those who are still alive couldn't be more disappointed in South Sudan after all the hard work, goodwill and money freely given to help them on their feet. Money to pay for aid, protection and organisations such as the United Nations and the ICC comes from the pockets of hardworking taxpayers in developed countries across the world. 

Sudan and South Sudan have had enough time to get their house in order. The world will not forget them but can't afford to subsidise them forever. Time marches on, the world changes. Russia is at war with Ukraine. Israel is at war with Gaza. The US, UK and French navies are stationed in the Red Sea to protect trade routes. Europe has war at its door. The US has bigger fish to fry. The UK is in the crosshairs of Russia. Foreign aid budgets will need to be cut and illegal migrants stamped out. Sudan and South Sudan are rich enough to pay their own way and look after their own. Tough love is in order.

From News First
Written by Staff Writer    
Dated Tuesday, 06 February 2024, 2:16 PM - here is a copy in full:

Army Medical Corps Departs for South Sudan

COLOMBO (News 1st); The 10th contingent of the Sri Lanka Army Medical Corps (SLAMC) departed Sri Lanka early this morning (06 February), to assume duties at the Level-2 SRIMED Hospital in the United Nations Peacekeeping Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS).


The 10th South Sudan bound contingent, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel D.M.D.J Dissanayake RSP USP and Second in Command, Major N.I Rathnayake, comprises 64 Army personnel, including 14 Army Officers, 01 Naval Officer and 49 Other Ranks.


Representing the Commander of the Army, Major General P.A.C. Fernando USP, Colonel Commandant, SLAMC and Director General Army Health Services, Brigadier G.L.S.W Liyanage USP psc, Director, Directorate of Overseas Operations, Brigadier W.A.U.S Wanasekara RWP USP, Centre Commandant, SLAMC and other Senior Officers bid farewell to the contingent at the Bandaranaike International Airport.

View original: https://www.newsfirst.lk/2024/02/06/army-medical-corps-departs-for-south-sudan/


Related


FROM AFP NEWS 

Sudan Conflict: $4.1 Billion Needed For Humanitarian Aid In 2024

Wednesday, 7 February 2024

https://www.barrons.com/news/sudan-conflict-4-1-billion-needed-for-humanitarian-aid-in-2024-35f3c888


FROM UN NEWS

UN appeals for $4.1 billion in aid for war-torn Sudan and refugee-hosting countries

Wednesday, 7 February 2024

The United Nations on Wednesday urged countries not to forget millions of people caught up in the war between rival militaries in Sudan, as it called for $4.1 billion to help stave off famine and help those who have fled into neighbouring countries. “Half of Sudan’s population, 25 million people, needs humanitarian assistance,” Martin Griffiths, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, told journalists in Geneva. 

The appeal comprises two key components: the $2.7 billion Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan, targeting 14.7 million people within Sudan, and the $1.4 billion Regional Refugee Response Plan, aimed at assisting 2.7 million people in five countries surrounding Sudan. 

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) will manage the response in Sudan, while the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) will lead the regional initiative. 

Full story: https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/02/1146317


END

Saturday, January 20, 2024

Sudan reaffirms readiness to reestablish ties with Iran

From Tehran Times

Dated Saturday, 20 January 2024 - 22:47 - here is a copy in full:


Sudan reaffirms readiness to re-establish ties with Iran


In a meeting with Iran's First-Vice President Mohammad Mokhber on the sidelines of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit in Uganda, Sadeq expressed Sudan's regret over the severance of ties with Iran in 2015 under foreign pressure, emphasizing the shared stances of the two nations in supporting the Palestinian people and seeking an end to Israeli atrocities in Gaza.


Mokhber, in turn, highlighted the Palestinian resistance movement's efforts to break the Zionist regime's hegemony in the region, calling for increased international pressure to lift the Gaza blockade and provide immediate relief to the besieged enclave.


The vice president expressed deep concern over the recent unrest and conflicts in Sudan, which he attributed to the conspiracy of foreign interventionists, including the Zionist usurping regime. 

Photo: TEHRAN- Sudan's acting Foreign Minister Ali Sadeq reiterated Khartoum's desire to revive diplomatic relations with Tehran.


He affirmed Iran's unwavering support for the Sudanese people and the legitimate government in their quest for peace and stability.


Sadeq elaborated on the recent events in Sudan, linking them to the interference and collusion of the Zionist regime and its regional allies, asserting that Sudan remains a victim of foreign machinations.


Sadeq attributed the Zionist regime's support for the unrest in Sudan to the country's refusal to normalize relations with Israel. 


He stressed that Sudan remains committed to its principles and will not compromise its independence.


The two officials agreed to further enhance cooperation between Sudan and Iran, particularly in the areas of trade, investment, and cultural exchange. They expressed their commitment to advancing the cause of Palestine and promoting regional peace and stability.

View original: https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/493969/Sudan-reaffirms-readiness-to-re-establish-ties-with-Iran

ENDS 

Saturday, December 30, 2023

Joe Biden's long history of pro-Israel statements

THIS video shows a history of surprising statements US President Joe Biden has made about Zionism and Israel.  

"Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel." -Joe Biden

SourceMiddle East Eye 

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Further Reading

“Most Zionists don’t believe that God exists but they do believe that he promised them Palestine” -Ilan Pappe, Israeli Historian


Pappe, I. (2016). “The Bible in the service of Zionism: “we do not believe in God, but he nonetheless promised us Palestine” in I. Hjelm and T. L. Thompson, eds., History, Archaeology and the Bible Forty Years After “Historicity”, 1st ed. Oxon, Routledge, pp. 205-217. 


Palestine 1896

First film footage taken in Palestine (Lumier Bros.)

Extracted from "Palestine: Story of a Land", by Simone Bitton

http://www.pointdujour-international....

Link to video at YouTube: https://youtu.be/1vaIK8wlAl0


Source: https://vridar.org/2017/05/26/we-do-not-believe-in-god-but-he-nonetheless-promised-us-palestine/


ENDS

Sunday, December 24, 2023

In Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christianity, Christmas celebrations have been cancelled

NOTE from Sudan Watch Editor: Watched this video at X and found the footage and chat by British journalist and author Peter Oborne interesting. 

It is here to provide food for thought and show different situations and perspectives. And why in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christianity, Christmas celebrations have been cancelled and replaced by prayer.

ENDS

Why our world today is uncannily - and worryingly - like the one Jesus was born into 2,023 years ago

From The Mail Online

Written by NIALL FERGUSON 

Niall Ferguson is Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, and columnist with Bloomberg Opinion


Dated: Saturday, 23 December 2023, 01:43 - here is a copy in full:


Why our world today is uncannily - and worryingly - like the one Jesus was born into 2,023 years ago

The story of Jesus's birth is rarely told with much 
attention to its historical context 

It happened during the reign of the first Roman emperor. A child was born in an obscure farm building in a Middle Eastern province of the empire. 


All kinds of strange events occurred around the time of His birth, including a massacre of children, ordered by the Judean King Herod.


Along with some bewildered shepherds, three foreign 'magi' (wise men) found their way to the child's birthplace. But no one in the imperial capital Rome paid much attention.


This proved to be a mistake, as the birth of this child would ultimately transform the empire — and the world — for ever.


The story of Jesus's birth is rarely told with much attention to its historical context. But this year the circumstances of the time seem uncannily relevant. The Middle East is in just the kind of turmoil that had led the Romans to impose their imperial rule on Judaea.


And the United States is in just the kind of political crisis that led the Roman republic to become an empire under Augustus Caesar. In other surprising ways, too, what we are living through is similar to what the people of the early first century experienced.


Like our ancestors two millennia ago, we inhabit a distressing spiritual vacuum marked by pleasure seeking and unbridled consumerism. 


Christianity, the old religion, has become hollow to us, even as we go through the motions of recollecting the story of Christ's birth.


Let's begin with the war in the Middle East, which I believe will ultimately lead the United States to send troops back into the region, despite the painful memories of the 2003 Iraq invasion and subsequent occupation — which, in truth, are painful only for the families of the relatively small number of U.S. service personnel who were killed (3,519) or wounded (32,000) there. God bless them and their British counterparts this Christmas.


Most of us have strongly held but casually informed political opinions on the Middle East. On one side, supporters of Israel — not all of them Jews — regard it as obvious that Israel has a right to defend itself after the horrendous atrocities perpetrated against Israeli civilians by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) on October 7.


Supporters of the Palestinians, some of whom shamelessly celebrated those atrocities, insist that the Palestinian resistance is justified because of the wretched conditions in Gaza and the lack of Israeli commitment to a viable Palestinian state. Arguments about the issue will ruin many a family Christmas this year.


However, this debate about whose cause is more just — the Israelis' or the Palestinians' — misses the point. 


The reality is that, in the 50 years since the last surprise attack on Israel on the Holy Day of Yom Kippur (October 6, 1973), it has proved impossible for Israel to find a peaceful modus vivendi with the Palestinians.


Israel made peace with Egypt at Camp David in 1978. It made peace with Jordan in 1994. It signed the Oslo Accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1995. 


And, under the Abraham Accords of 2020-21, Israel normalised its relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.


Indeed, it was about to reach a similar rapprochement with Saudi Arabia when the slaughter of the innocents happened on October 7, freezing if not killing the negotiations.

The United States is in just the kind of political crisis that led the Roman republic to become an empire under Augustus Caesar

There are two obvious reasons why peace with the Palestinians has proved elusive. First, the Palestinian Authority established under the Oslo Accords has proved to be an oxymoron — it lacks any kind of authority.


Second, many Palestinians themselves have preferred the path of violence, turning to Hamas and other terrorist groups for leadership, apparently oblivious to Hamas's true character as a criminal racket. 


While ordinary Gazans bear the brunt of Israel's war of retaliation, the Hamas mafiosi live in luxury in Qatar on the money sent to Gaza by naive international donors.


But there is a third explanation for the agony of the Holy Land, and that is geopolitical. The Abraham Accords were one of the diplomatic triumphs of Donald Trump's administration. 


Yet Joe Biden decided to change course, opting to try to revive the obviously dead Iran nuclear deal, the 'Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action' of 2015.


That deal was President Barack Obama's attempt to induce the Islamic Republic of Iran to suspend — not to end — its nuclear weapons program in return for relief from U. S. sanctions.


It did nothing to prevent Iran using the money it received under the deal to finance terrorist organisations throughout the region, including not only Hamas and PIJ, but also Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.


That was why Trump abandoned the nuclear deal and re-imposed sanctions on Iran. It was why in 2020 he killed one of Iran's principal malefactors, Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.


The present crisis in the Middle East is, therefore, the result of a combination of Iranian aggression and American pusillanimity.


Consider the passivity with which Washington has reacted to a succession of Houthi attacks on U.S. bases in the region and, most recently, merchant shipping in the Red Sea. 


Why send two aircraft-carrier strike groups to the region if you have no intention of using them for fear of 'escalating' the crisis?


However, the haplessness of the Biden administration's foreign policy is not the main reason why Trump is now narrowly the favourite to be the next president of the United States, though the perception that Biden is drifting into new 'forever wars' is playing its part.


The probability of Trump's re-election on November 5 next year is now, in my view, above 50 per cent. The prediction market agrees. So do most recent polls.


Despite his sea of legal troubles — and perhaps partly because of them — the former president is the clear frontrunner to be the Republican nominee, about 50 points ahead of Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis. 


And Trump is well placed to defeat Biden in a rerun of the 2020 contest, especially if you look at his polling leads in key swing states.


The crucial issue is not Biden's foreign policy flops. Nor is it his advanced age, though even a majority of Democratic voters admit that, at 81, he is too old to be president. The key issue is 'Bidenomics,' a term devised by the dotard president's handlers.

Trump is well placed to defeat Biden in a rerun of the 2020 contest, 
especially if you look at his polling leads in key swing states

Objectively, by most conventional measures, the U.S. economy is in good shape — certainly in better shape than Britain's or Europe's. Unemployment is low (3.7 per cent). Inflation has come down substantially (to 3.1 per cent, compared with a peak of 9.1 per cent in June last year). The financial markets are rooting for interest-rate cuts next year. 


But voters have still not forgiven the administration for the inflation they suffered last year. They also sense that a slowdown is coming, if not a recession — the inevitable result of the Federal Reserve's interest rate hikes.


As a consequence, Biden's polling on this key issue is terrible: on average, nearly 61 per cent of voters disapprove of his handling of the economy, and 65 per cent his handling of inflation. An even higher proportion (69 per cent) think the country is 'on the wrong track'.


Though he has not sunk as low as Jimmy Carter in 1979, Biden's position is uncomfortably similar to that of Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush at the same stages in their only presidential terms.


I do not entirely blame my fellow Americans for considering re-electing Trump. His first term was much better for the average U.S. household — who saw their real income surge 9 per cent before Covid struck, after 17 years of stagnation — than most elite media coverage would have you believe.


However, in view of all that has emerged about Trump's unconscionably reckless conduct between election night 2020 and the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, I fear that his return to the White House could mark the beginning of the end of the American republic and the first step towards an unconstitutional American empire.


And I worry that Trump will be able to justify overriding the constitution by pointing to both domestic and international emergencies.


At home, there will inevitably be 'mainly peaceful' (i.e. partly violent) protests in Democratic strongholds if Trump is declared the election winner.


Abroad, Trump will inherit a triple global crisis in Ukraine, Israel and potentially also Taiwan. Even if China's President Xi Jinping does not risk blockading the island he covets, it would not surprise me if Hezbollah opened a new front against Israel in the New Year.


Consider how the Roman republic died as the ruthless political operator Octavian — Julius Caesar's adopted son — asserted his power.


He became emperor by steps: first as one of the second triumvirate — an alliance between three rival statesmen, Octavian, Mark Antony and Lepidus, giving them absolute power; then as lifetime commander-in-chief (imperator), tribune and censor; and finally as 'princeps civitatis' (First Citizen) with the title 'Augustus'.


What made the Roman Empire possible — indeed, necessary — was the need to end a state of recurrent civil war at home and of geopolitical crisis abroad, especially in the Middle East, but also in central Europe — Rome's Ukraine was Germania — and even in unruly Britannia, conquered by the Romans after AD 43.


Augustus won power by ousting Lepidus and then defeating Mark Antony and his lover Queen Cleopatra and invading Egypt, which he subsequently annexed. It was Augustus, too, who incorporated Judaea, including Herod's kingdom, into the Empire. It was a Roman census that required Joseph and the pregnant Mary to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem.


And this brings me to the other major resemblance between our time and the time of Jesus's birth 2,023 years ago.


One reason why Donald Trump's return to power is now a possibility is that we in the West inhabit a moral and ethical wasteland. If we were still a truly Christian civilisation, Trump would stand no chance of becoming president again.


A people who were committed to the teachings of the Old and New Testaments would have no hesitation in identifying him as a serial violator of at least half the Ten Commandments and, therefore, morally unqualified to occupy the highest office in the republic.


Yet the U.S. today is only nominally a Christian country, in the sense that a majority of Americans still identify as Christians of one denomination or another.


According to survey data, both faith and observance have significantly declined in the 20 years since I have lived and worked there. In the 1990s, 90 per cent of Americans identified as Christians. It's now down to two-thirds. Weekly church attendance has also slumped.


In this respect, the U.S. is beginning to resemble England, where less than half the population (46.2 per cent) now say they are Christians. More than a third (37.2 per cent) say they have no religion, according to the 2021 census.


Like the people of the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago, we are almost entirely consumed by the pleasures and preoccupations of this world. One of many symptoms of our spiritual bankruptcy is the epidemic of mental ill-health sweeping the English-speaking world.

Dark days may lie ahead. It is some comfort, surely, that a saviour could be born at such a time

Another symptom is the slump in fertility rates as more and more couples opt to have just one child or no children at all.


Whatever people may say when they rationalise this decision to limit their reproduction below the replacement rate (to sustain the species), in truth the decision to restrict or forgo parenthood is an implicit expression of despair.


For there is no greater joy to be had in this world than that of bringing a baby into it. It is, I would argue, the ultimate affirmation of faith. Yes, we know that every child is doomed, as are we, to experience suffering and, inevitably, death.


And yet we know that the delights of life are worth all its trials and its inevitable end. A Christian knows that we humans are more than mere naked apes. We know that God made us 'in His image'.


It is, thus, no accident that at the heart of the Christian faith is the Nativity. The greatest story ever told begins with the birth of a baby boy, immaculately and divinely conceived, to a young Jewish woman. 


And the story ends, not with His cruel crucifixion in Jerusalem, but with the conquest of the Roman Empire itself by the religion founded by Him — Christos, the Anointed One of the Lord God.


This Christmas, let us remind ourselves that His 2,000-year reign over the faithful began not only amid a Middle Eastern crisis, but also in the period of transition from republic to empire.


Dark days may lie ahead. It is some comfort, surely, that a saviour could be born at such a time.


View original: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12895595/world-today-uncannily-one-Jesus-born.html#comments


ENDS

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Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, said to be Jesus's birthplace  

Mail writer Richard Pendlebury pictured inside 
the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, said to be Jesus's birthplace 

ENDS