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Resources updated Friday, May 19, 2017
May 19, 2017
UNESCO's Jerusalem Lies Article
Authorities in Bangladesh on Friday arrested 27 men on suspicion of being gay, a criminal offense in the Muslim-majority country, and plan to charge them with drug possession, an official said Friday.
A commander of the Rapid Action Battalion, an elite police unit that made the arrests, said the suspects, mostly students aged 20-30 years, had traveled from across the country and were picked up in a raid on a community center at Keraniganj, outside the nation's capital, early Friday.
Zahangir Hossain Matobbar said they recovered illegal drugs and condoms in their possession and plan to charge them with drug offenses and not homosexuality because they were detained before they engaged in sex.
The agency also arrested the owner of the community center where the suspects used to gather every two months and stay overnight for partying.
Last year, suspected militants killed a leading LGBT activist and his friend in Dhaka.
The 35-year-old Xulhaz Mannan, a USAID official, was hacked to death in April last year at his home.
He had founded the country's only LGBT magazine Roopbaan and was a leading organizer of gays, who are ostracized in Bangladesh.
Since then, many of the gays and lesbians have left the country after they received death threats. Many still live double lives to avoid reprisals.
Homosexuality is a crime in Bangladesh under a law dating back to the British colonial rule, and it has never been amended. The law is rarely enforced.
Bangladesh arrests 27 men on suspicion of being gay Document
ISIS savages have executed and then dismembered dozens of women and children amid fears the terror group is plotting a wave of massacres in Shiite villages.
Extremists beheaded some prisoners and used bricks to kill children before hacking off their limbs during horrific raids in Hama province in central Syria.
More than 50 were killed during clashes including at least 24 women and children in villages where many residents belong to the Ismaili branch of Shiite Islam.
It has raised fears of a new atrocities mirroring those ISIS carried out in other minority communities - including Yazidi areas - in Syria and Iraq.
The villages, Aqareb and Al-Mabujeh, are located near the town of Salamiyeh and the highway that links the capital, Damascus, to the northern city of Aleppo.
The two villages are home to members of several religious minority sects, and Al-Mabujeh has been targeted by IS before.
In March 2015, the group killed dozens of people and kidnapped some 50 civilians in an attack there.
Media reports and doctors in the area said some of those killed in the latest raid were beheaded and others dismembered.
At least three of the civilians, a man and his two children, were executed with knives, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
ISIS extremists are notorious for mutilating bodies of their adversaries, particularly members of other sects than Sunni Islam.
The militants stormed homes in the southern part of Aqareb al-Safi village before government forces pushed them back into the desert, the state news agency SANA reported.
The head of the National Hospital in Salamiyeh, Dr. Noufal Safar, said it received 52 bodies, including 11 women and 17 children.
Some of the bodies were badly mutilated, beheaded or had their limbs severed but 'most appear to have died as a result of gunfire,' Safar told The Associated Press by telephone.
Rami Razzouk, a coroner at the hospital who inspected the bodies, said those of children were brought in mostly dismembered while the men had died from shelling or heavy machine-gun fire.
He said at least nine children were beaten on the head with heavy objects such as bricks or stones.
The Syrian Observatory also said that 52 people were killed in the fighting, with the dead including 15 civilians, 27 Syrian soldiers and 10 unidentified people.
Razzouk said 120 people were wounded; SANA said 40 were wounded.
The ISIS-linked Aamaq news agency said the militants captured villages of Aqareb al-Safi and Mabouja. It identified residents as members of Assad's Alawite sect, an off-shoot of Shiite Islam. The Sunni extremists view Shiites as apostates deserving of death.
ISIS has massacred thousands of Shiites and other opponents in Syria and Iraq, often boasting about the killings and circulating photos and videos of them online.
Aamaq claimed that 100 Syrian troops and pro-government gunmen were killed in the fighting.
'Dozens of people are missing but it is not clear if they were kidnapped' by IS, the Observatory's chief Rami Abdurrahman said.
ISIS savages execute and then dismember dozens of women and children Document
A UN Committee has embraced the idea of a remembrance day for Palestinians mimicking Holocaust remembrance day. The comments came during a meeting on May 17, 2017 at UN Headquarters of the "UN Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People." Addressing the Committee, the Palestinian representative harked back to the alleged original crime of the creation of Israel itself. In the words of Feda Abdelhady Nasser: "we meet in these days that the Palestinian people are solemnly commemorating the 69th anniversary of the Nakba of 1948, an injustice that our people continue to suffer the consequences of to this very day." The remarks are a stark reminder of the reason Israel has no Palestinian peace partner.
The Palestinian Rights Committee is composed of 26 UN member states and another 24 observers, and includes many countries with some of the world's worst human rights records, such as Cuba, Pakistan, Turkey, Venezuela, China, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen. The Committee's executive is: Senegal (Chair), Malta (Rapporteur), Cuba (Vice-Chair), Indonesia (Vice-Chair), Nicaragua (Vice-Chair). The latter three do not even have diplomatic relations with Israel.
At Wednesday's meeting, the UN Committee engaged in another display of modern antisemitism by appropriating Jewish history and experience as Palestinian. Reporting on the Committee's recent activities, Ambassador Carmelo Iguanez (Malta) called for the UN to establish a "Palestine Occupation Remembrance Day" and repeatedly repeatedly referred to a "Palestinian diaspora."
Similarly, Palestinian representative Feda Abdelhady Nasser alleged there was "Israeli settler terror and incitement against our people" - well aware of the reality of Palestinian terrorism and incitement.
Nasser then demanded more money from the UN, by way of an increase to the budget of the UN's Palestinian Refugee Agency, UNRWA. The money grab was made openly without regard to the needs of any other community around the globe. In her words: "We...have recently circulated to all delegations a...resolution aimed at stabilizing and sustainably funding UNRWA...Here I believe it is necessary to clarify for delegations that...there is no call for an increase in the UN regular budget itself, but rather for a larger share for UNRWA from the budget...for the organization as a whole for the 2018-2019 biennium."
During the meeting, the Committee also demanded that the Secretary-General start producing written reports on Israel's non-compliance with UN Security Council Resolution 2334. (To date the reports have been oral.) Resolution 2334, adopted in December 2017, was the first time that the Security Council declared Israeli settlements to be illegal, and was adopted after the Obama administration joined forces with the Palestinians and abandoned America's closest ally.
The Committee holds Israel-bashing meetings on a year-round basis. Next up: the Committee adopted the program for a major two-day conference to be held at UN Headquarters on June 29 and 30, 2017.
UN Committee wants a UN "Palestine Occupation Remembrance Day" Mimicking Holocaust Remembrance Day Development
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