Video - 2 police cars set ablaze in Belgian 'Islamist hotbed' Molenbeek.

Video - 2 police cars set ablaze in Brussels’ mostly Muslim district of Molenbeek.

Hmmm.....nothing but smiling faces. Read the full story here.

Jihadist group takes credit for the killing of three Israeli teenagers last month in the West Bank

Jihadist group takes credit for Israeli teens killings. (TOI).

A new Palestinian jihadist group pledging allegiance to the Islamic State (formerly known as ISIL) has claimed responsibility for the killing of three Israeli teenagers last month in the West Bank, as well as other recent deadly attacks against Israeli soldiers and civilians. 

In a statement posted on jihadi websites Tuesday, the Supporters of the Islamic State in Bayt al-Maqdis said it was behind the capture and killing of “the three soldiers” in Hebron (actually, it was in the nearby Etzion bloc), sniper attacks in Hebron and Tarqumia, and missile launches from Gaza into Israel a month and a half ago.

The actions were carried out in honor of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed “caliph” of the Islamic State, the reincarnation of the Islamic State in Syria and the Levant (ISIL) declared last month, the statement said.

“We are not a partisan group like the humiliated organizations, many of whose leaders sold their religion for the benefit of politics,” the communique read, in a critique of both Fatah and Hamas.

“They have entered polytheistic parliaments and allied themselves with heathens and Shiite leaders, transferring their preaching and religion to the West Bank and Gaza, God help us.”

Aaron Zelin, a Richard Borow Fellow at the Washington Institute and expert on global jihadist organizations, said he knew nothing of the group.

“It is difficult to assess whether it’s legitimate,” he said.Hmmm.......probably the same guys who took care of Jimmy Hoffa.Read the full story here.

Syria's Christian population Could Be main Casualty Of U.S. Attack on Syria.

Syria's Christian population Could Be main Casualty Of U.S. Attack on Syria.HT: TIP.

Syria's ancient Christian population could become a major casualty of an American strike against the Assad regime in retaliation for last week's chemical-weapons attack, should any strike shift momentum in favor of the rebels.

Many Syrian Christians have held deep sympathies for Bashar al-Assad's secular Ba'athist Party since its founding in 1947. Michel Aflaq, one of the Ba'ath Party's co-founders, was a Christian.

The majority of Syria's Christians struggled to remain neutral in Syria's civil war or have backed Bashar al-Assad's regime fearing annihilation should his secular police state be replaced by an Islamist theocracy.

"Enough with the intervention," Patriarch Gregory III, who heads Syria's Damascus-based Melkite Greek-Catholic Church, told the Catholic News Service (CNS). "It is fueling hatred, fueling criminality, fueling inhumanity, fueling fundamentalism, terrorism -- all these things are the fruit of intervention. Enough!"
It would be better to try to help bring about reforms to the Syrian government, he said, "But not in this way, with blood," he continued.
Syria's Christians have found themselves under assault by the U.S. and European-backed Free Syrian Army since Syria's civil war broke out in March 2011 and from the al-Qaida-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra.
Christian villages have been wiped out, and the rebels have confiscated Christian land. Churches around Homs and Aleppo have been destroyed.
On May 27, the Free Syrian Army raided the Christian village of al-Duvair in Syria's western province of Homs, massacring most of the village's Christian population. 

The peril faced by Christians was highlighted this spring when the Syrian Orthodox and Greek Orthodox archbishops of Aleppo were kidnapped. Their fates remain unknown; however, rumors suggest they may have been murdered.




All of these atrocities against Syria's Christians raise the specter of a repeat of what happened in Kosovo in the 1990s after Western troops intervened, and Albanian Islamic extremists ethnically cleansed the Christian population.
Russia's concern for the welfare of Syria's Christians has factored into its calculus for supporting Bashar Assad's regime.

"[I]n those places where the authorities are being replaced by rebel groups, Christianity is being exterminated to the last man: Christians are expelled or physically destroyed," Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow spokesman Metropolitan Hilarion told the U.K. –based Christian Voice.

They could face an even worse fate should Assad fall, reminiscent of Iraq's ancient Christian population in the wake of the U.S. invasion in 2003.
"The policy that is used today in Syria, under the excuse of getting rid of the regime, is very dangerous," Yonadam Kanna, member of the Iraqi National Assembly and secretary general of the Assyrian Democratic Movement told Christian Today in June. "If the state collapses, then the jihadists are in power. If the jihadists are in power, it's a huge risk, not only for Christians, but also Muslims of that region — not only in Syria, but in the rest of Middle East and then Europe, too."