MRN

By Bill Van Auken

(source:World Socialist Website)

Ten members of a Baptist Church-affiliated “rescue” group from Idaho have been detained in Haiti, accused of child trafficking for attempting to spirit 33 Haitian children out of the country without any official permission.

The group claimed to be taking the children to an orphanage in the neighboring Dominican Republic, ultimately to be adopted by evangelical Christian families in the US. The orphanage, however, exists only on paper, and many of the children said that their parents or other close relatives had survived the January 12 earthquake.

The incident is part of what amounts to a second invasion of Haiti, following the country’s occupation by thousands of US soldiers and Marines and the blockading of its coastline by US warships and Coast Guard cutters.

Read More »Us group charged with child trafficking in haiti

By Revd Frank Julian Gelli

(source: Father Frank’s Rants-Rant Number 369)  

Open Letter to Islamophobe Dutch MP Geert Wilders
 
Dear Mr Wilders,
 
They say you can only take a horse to the water, you can’t make it drink. But human beings are not horses.  Unlike animals, they can be reasoned with. I offer these few remarks in the faint hope you are amenable to reason.
It is about your recent speech to the Alliance of Patriots in New York. In which you paint an apocalyptic picture of ‘the Islamization of Europe’. You describe some European cities with Muslim neighbourhoods in lurid terms. It is a world ‘where women walk around in figureless tents…Their husbands, or slave holders, if you prefer, walk three steps ahead’.

Mr Wilders, I live bang near one of those areas in West London. I often visit Whitechapel and Edgware Road – parts of our colourful Londonistan – I have never seen a Muslim woman walking behind her husband. Rather, the mothers stroll about in a proud, dignified manner, alongside the men. Nothing in their behaviour suggests a subordinate role, let alone slavery. And there are tons of lively, even feisty Muslim girls wearing all sorts of gear.

True, they may not, as a rule, behave like permissive, liberated females, baring the flesh, hugging and kissing partners in public, no. I would even guess most of them don’t sleep with boys before marriage. But since when are chastity, modesty and self-restraint so bad? The traditional, Christian mores of the Western civilisation which you claim to uphold used to prize such things, no?

Read More »Priests letter to islamophobe