CONGRESS CORE GROUP MEETS TO DISCUSS RAMDEV'S AGITATION

New Delhi: Congress top brass, including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and party chief Sonia Gandhi, are expected to deliberate, Thursday, on the situation arising out of yoga guru Ramdev's plans to go on a hunger strike on the issue of black money here from June four. A meeting of the Congress Core Group headed by Gandhi has begun at PM’s residence, 7 Race Course Road, in the backdrop of apparent differences between the party and the government over the way the issue needed to be tackled. The Core Group, which generally meets on Friday is meeting a day ahead, reflecting the concern in the party and the government over Ramdev's plans. Top Congress leaders and senior ministers, including Pranab Mukherjee, A K Antony, P Chidambaram and Political Secertary to Congress chief Ahmed Patel are part of the group which decides on major policy issues. Importantly, the Prime Minister and Sonia Gandhi held separate talks before the meeting of the entire Core Group. Meanwhile, Baba Ramdev has cancelled a press conference scheduled this evening in view of " serious dialogue" with government. His aides notified the media about the cancellation of the press conference at Ramlila Maidan, where he is to sit on fast from Saturday, saying the yoga guru would update the media about " conclusive" outcome tomorrow. Earlier in the day, Ramdev held a meeting with his close associates here to finalise the strategy ahead of his proposed June 4 hunger strike on black money issue and talks with the government which wants him to call off the agitation. 

The yoga guru maintained that he will go ahead with the protest from June four. A meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs was held a few days back to discuss Ramdev's fast and Singh had also written a letter to the yoga guru asking him not to go ahead with the fast, promising him to find a " practical and pragmatic" solution to tackle the issue of corruption. Congress has distanced itself from the government's unprecedented step of sending four senior ministers to receive Ramdev at the airport here in a bid to persuade him not to go ahead with the protest saying it was "unnecessary" and the party has "nothing to do" with it. "The party is not at all related to this entire exercise from here to the airport (ministers going to the airport to receive the Yoga Guru)," top sources in the Congress said.

What Baba Ramdev wants

 Special Correspondent Yoga guru Baba Ramdev, who has threatened to field candidates in every Lok Sabha constituency in 2014, has stopped the Union government in its tracks with a set of demands, ranging from the serious to the bizarre.
The demands of the jetsetting Baba — whose acolytes recently bought him a little Scottish island to open an ashram — include:
— Tough Lokpal Bill, with a provision for death sentence for the corrupt, especially corrupt officials
— Immediate return of all black money stashed away in tax havens abroad to the country
— Declaring all wealth in foreign countries being held illegally by Indians as national property and charging those with such accounts under the sedition laws
— Abolishing Rs.1,000 and Rs.500 currency notes
— Disabling the operations of any bank which belongs to a country that is a tax haven
— Replacing the British-inherited system of governance, administration, taxation, education, law and order with a swadeshi alternative
— Reforming the electoral system to ensure that the Prime Minister is directly elected by people
— Ensuring that all citizens declare annually their incomes
— Bringing income-tax details under the Right to Information Act
— Increasing substantially the Minimum Support Price of grains
— Making wages of different categories of labourers uniform across the country
— Revoking the Land Acquisition Act, as farmers should not be deprived of their land for industry
— Promoting Hindi at the expense of English.

THE CRIMES OF RAKTO MLADI

Ratko Mladić is an easy man to hate. In his prime, he not only talked and behaved like a thug, but he also looked like one – the kind of bull-necked, pale- eyed, snarling psychopath who would gladly pull out your fingernails just for fun. Apart from many other cruelties, the Butcher of Bosnia was responsible, in the summer of 1995 , for the killing of around 8 ,000 unarmed Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the woods around Srebrenica. So it will give most of us a feeling of warm satisfaction that he has finally been arrested in the Serbian village of Lazarevo. Serbia has gained respect by arresting Mladić, which should speed up its membership in the European Union. The former victims of Mladić’s Bosnian Serb forces will feel that some justice is being done at last. Yet the forthcoming trial of Ratko Mladić raises certain uncomfortable questions. Why, in the first place, can’t he be put on trial in Belgrade, instead of The Hague? And is it really wise to charge him with genocide, as well as crimes against humanity and war crimes? Both questions reveal how much we still live in the shadow of the Nuremberg Tribunal, where the Nazi leaders were tried by an international judicial panel.

It was believed, perhaps correctly, that the Germans would be incapable of trying their own former leaders. And the Nazi crimes had been so horrendous in scale and intent that new laws – “crimes against humanity” – had to be created to try those who had been formally responsible for them. States, too, should be held accountable for their deeds – hence, in 1948 , the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The Holocaust was not the main issue at stake in the Nuremberg Trials. Nevertheless, the allies thought that the Nazi project of exterminating an entire people called for an entirely new legal approach, to ensure that such an atrocity would never happen again. The problem with genocide, as a legal concept, is that it is vague. It refers to “ acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” The emphasis is on “intent,” not on the numbers of people whose lives are destroyed. Mao Zedong murdered up to 40 million Chinese, but did he intend to destroy them as a group? Surely not. 

We know that Hitler did intend to destroy every last Jewish man, woman, and child. Even though mass killings are not rare in history, Hitler’s extermination plan was, if not unique, certainly highly unusual. However, the laudable effort to prevent such a thing from recurring has had unfortunate consequences. For, in our zeal to learn lessons from history, we often learn the wrong ones, or distort history towards dubious ends. In a way, the killings at Srebrenica also were affected by the memories of World War II. The United Nations’ Dutch battalion promised to protect the Muslims there, even though it was in no position to do so. It was a promise that partly reflected the feeling of guilt that still haunts the Dutch for looking the other way as the Germans rounded up and deported two-thirds of their country’ s Jewish population to death camps. 

This time, it would be different. This time, they would act. Alas, outnumbered and outgunned by Mladić’ s forces, the Dutch surrendered Srebrenica to its fate. Because of the trauma of Hitler’s intention to murder all of the Jews, genocide has become the one compelling reason for military action, including armed invasion of other countries. But what constitutes genocide? Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Doctors Without Borders, wanted the world to intervene in Nigeria in 1970 , because he saw the killing of Ibos by Nigerian troops as a genocidal echo of Auschwitz. Others saw a brutal civil war, and cautioned that intervention would make things worse. For some, we are forever living in 1938 , or rather, 1942 , when the Nazis approved what Hitler called “the final solution of the Jewish question.” President George W. Bush and his cheerleaders, invoking the Munich Agreement at every opportunity, regarded the terrorist attacks of September 11 , 2001 , as a call to arms. Saddam Hussein was Hitler, so we had to send in the troops. We should stop Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir’s genocide in Darfur. We must stop Col. Muammar el- Qaddafi from committing mass murder in Benghazi. And so on. Sometimes intervention might save lives. But wars often beget more wars, or longer ones. Military action can cause more violence, and more civilian deaths. 

This is especially true of intervention in civil wars, where the sides cannot easily be divided into victims and aggressors, good and evil. Of course, the world becomes much simpler if we choose to see it in black and white. And the Mladić trial will, no doubt, encourage this perception. He will be tried for genocide, because the UN’s tribunal for ex-Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice decided that the Bosnian Serbs were genocidal. Since his subordinate, Radislav Krstić, was already sentenced for his complicity in the genocide at Srebrenica, Mladić will presumably be convicted. We need not feel sorry for Mladić. There is no doubt that he is guilty of serious war crimes. And a trial, however unsatisfactory, is in most cases still to be preferred to an assassination. But trying him for genocide, even though it will be hard to prove that he ever intended to exterminate Bosnian Muslims as a group, just because they were Muslims, will further muddy the term’s already vague definition. Mladić was engaged in ethnic cleansing, which, though reprehensible, is not the same as genocide. Loose definitions will encourage more military interventions, thus more wars. By invoking Hitler’s ghost too often, we trivialize the enormity of what he actually did.

PC(USA) Opens Doors to Gay Ministers, But is Anyone Following?

For three decades pro-gay factions within the Presbyterian Church (USA) have pressed for the ordination of homosexual church officers. This time they’ve carried the day, with a majority of presbyteries now voting to amend the PC(USA) Book of Order to permit sexually active gays and lesbians to be ordained.

Prior to the amendment, the Book of Order directed the governing bodies of presbyteries (regional organizations of the denomination) to ordain as deacons, elders, and ministers only those who lived “a life of obedience to Scripture,” whether in single “chastity” or married “fidelity.” Those “persons refusing to repent of any self-acknowledged practice which the confessions call sin” should not be ordained.

The newly passed Amendment 10-A removes this language and directs the governing bodies simply to be “guided by Scripture and the confessions in applying standards to individual candidates.” The presbyteries are not compelled to ordain non-celibate homosexuals, but they are no longer forbidden to do so, just as they are no longer forbidden to ordain heterosexuals who are sexually active outside of marriage.

The denominational debate about homosexuality, and related issues of biblical interpretation and authority, has been going on ever since Northern and Southern Presbyterians joined to form the PC(USA) in 1983. The debate grew so intense that the denomination declared a three-year moratorium on the subject in 1993. Conservatives won a victory in 1997 when they successfully added the “fidelity and chastity” requirement. Ever since, liberal Presbyterians have proposed a series of possible substitutes that would permit gay ordination. While those proposals were defeated every time, the margins of defeat grew progressively smaller—until May 10, when the Twin Cities presbytery in Minnesota gave the new ordination standards majority support among presbyteries. The new rule will take effect on July 10.

Bruce Reyes-Chow, moderator of the PC(USA)’s General Assembly from 2008 to 2010, said he could “weep with joy for friends long yearning for this day.” Presbyterians for Renewal, a group devoted to strengthening the denomination’s commitment to biblical authority, expressed “unspeakably deep grief.” Some noted that the earlier standards called for “a life of obedience to Scripture,” whereas the new standards only ask the governing bodies to “be guided by Scripture.” As author and minister Mark D. Roberts wrote, “Guidance implies far less than obedience,” and viewing the Bible as only as a source of guidance “appears to put Scripture on a par with other sources of guidance.”

The amendment to PC(USA) ordination standards occurs against the backdrop of a long numerical decline. The denomination has lost one-fifth of its membership in the past decade, and four out of five worshippers in its pews today are over the age of 45. At the same time, the movement for gay ordination across Christian denominations may be slowing down. Although many mainline denominations have opened the doors to homosexual priests and pastors, no other denominations are waiting in the wings to follow their lead. There is no obvious next battleground for this fight.

For the Presbyterian Church (USA), the battle will now shift to individual presbyteries as they will decide for themselves whether or not to ordain gay candidates, as renewal movements will continue to protest. The Fellowship PC(USA), a nascent movement led by prominent Presbyterian traditionalists, stated tartly, “We as a Fellowship choose to remain obedient to Scripture and guided by theBook of Order.”

Publication date: May 27, 2011

US Muslims will double by 2030: study

THE number of Muslims in the United States is expected to increase from 2.6 million in 2010 to 6.2 million by 2030.

The rise will in large part be because of immigration and higher-than-average fertility among Muslims, according to a study.

According to Pew Research, the Muslim share of the US population (adults and children) is projected to grow from 0.8% in 2010 to 1.7% in 2030. The rise will make Muslims roughly as numerous as Jews or Episcopalians are in the United States today.

“Although several European countries will have substantially higher percentages of Muslims, the United States is projected to have a larger number of Muslims by 2030 than any European country other than Russia and France,” Pew Research reported.

About two-thirds of the Muslims in the US today (64.5%) are first-generation immigrants, while slightly more than a third (35.5%) were born in the U.S. By 2030, however, nearly half of the Muslims in the U.S. (44.9%) are expected to be born here.

The top countries of origin for Muslims in the US are Pakistan and Bangladesh, according to a study by Pew Research Center.

Algerian sent to jail for sharing faith with neighbor

An Algerian Christian has been sentenced to five years in prison for sharing his faith with his neighbor.

According to International Christian Concern, Siagh Krimo was given the sentence last week in Djamel District, Oran, Algeria.

Krimo was charged of proselytizing after his neighbor made a complaint, and accused him of making defamatory statements against the Islamic prophet Muhammad.

He was sentenced under Article 144 bis 2 of the Algerian Penal Code which makes it a criminal offence to ‘insult the prophet’ or ;denigrate the creed and precepts of Islam.’

Aidan Clay, ICC Regional Manager for the Middle East, said: “Algerian Christians have been under attack in recent weeks as laws have been increasingly enforced to discriminate against them.

“While Algeria professes that it upholds religious freedom, it also embraces a blasphemy law that, by its very nature, can be used to prosecute anyone who does not adhere to the religion of Islam.

“We urge Algeria to acquit Siagh of all charges and repeal Article 144 bis 2 of the Penal Code.”

Krimo, who is a husband and father, now faces the bleak prospect of spending the next five years in prison, unless he managed to stage a successful appeal against the judgment. According to ICC, Krimo has 10 days to appeal the sentence.

Does ‘Replacement Theology’ play a role in anti-Israel behavior?

HARSH criticism directed towards Israel from among some Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox communities raises the question if they believe in the ‘Replacement Theology’.

Replacement theology, which is also referred to as Supersessionism, endorses the belief that Christianity or the “church” has replaced the Jews and Israel.

So, what does the Bible say?

In Genesis 15:18 God promised Abraham the land. Then in Genesis 17:7-8 and 17:19 the Lord gave Abraham His “everlasting covenant” which included blessing Abraham, his seed born from Sara, and to be their God.

The same covenant was confirmed to Abraham’s son Isaac in Genesis 26:3-4.

Next God established His covenant with Abraham’s grandson (Isaac’s son), Jacob in Genesis 28:13-15. Jacob was renamed Israel by God in Genesis 35:10.

Later, God reconfirmed the exact same covenant to Jacob (also called Israel) and to his seed in Genesis 35:12. Sons of Jacob (Israel) include Judah and generations later Jesus Christ was born from Judah’s family.

They all lived, as instructed by God (Genesis 12:1-3) in the land known today as Israel which bears the name God gave Jacob.

But does God guarantee His promise to the Jews and Israel despite the division (of Jesus Christ as Messiah) between Christianity and Judaism?

Old Testament prophecies have several examples of how God, near the end times, will forgive, bless, protect and avenge His chosen Jews (and Israelites).  For example in Jeremiah 31:31-34, “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah:”

Then the Lord elaborates, “But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”

The Lord God repeats His prophetic promise in Ezekiel 39:25-29.

More confirmation is in Zachariah 8:23 “Thus saith the Lord of hosts; In those days it shall come to pass, that ten men shall take hold out of all languages of the nations, even shall take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying, We will go with you: for we have heard that God is with you.”

Additional testimony which extends into the future is in Isaiah 14:1, 49:3-23, Jeremiah 16:14-15, Ezekiel. 36:1-15, 36:21-38, 37:1-14, and other verses in Joel and Zachariah.

Moreover, New Testament scripture comprehensively confirms the Jews and Israel are chosen by God and Jesus Christ, who is also referred to as ‘King of the Jews’, (Matthew 2:1-2, Luke 23:38), and contains warnings against arrogant (Gentile) Christian behavior.

Verses in Matthew 15:24, John 4:22, Romans 1:16-17, 9:4, 11:1-5, 11:16-21, 11:26, 11:29, Revelation 7:3-8, 12:13-17 and the description of New Jerusalem in Revelation 21:12 plainly describe the special place both the Jews and Israel have with the Lord.

God has made it perfectly clear. The Bible effectively verifies that the Jews are God’s chosen people and Israel is God’s chosen land. Prophecy as well affirms that the Jews, Israel and the Lord God will be reunited in their unbreakable bond.

Also, the Bible plainly states that Jesus Christ is Jewish (Hebrews 7:14), Jesus has a Royal Jewish birth line, He was born in Israel (John 7:42 and Micah 5:2) and in the latter days God will again bless His chosen people and their country Israel.

Thus, if a Christian from any domination believes the Bible is the concrete, protected Word of God yet dislikes Jews and maligns Israel, they might be in for a terrible shock at the Judgment Seat of Christ

Furthermore, rejection of the Jews and Israel might be the very cause of the tribulations and turmoil occurring in many churches, denominations and individuals’ lives.

As a result, Christians should be extremely wary of distorting what God chooses, does, says and promises.

Particularly, if individuals are using their Christian authority to spread their intolerance against God’s chosen people and land, and against Jesus Christ’s bloodline and birthplace.