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Friday, April 06, 2012

The Council Has Spoken!! This Week's Watcher's Council Results

The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for this week's Watcher's Council match up.

This weekend celebrates hope and freedom, with the beginning of Passover starting tonight and Easter Sunday coming afterwards. This linkage is entirely appropriate, since Jesus had come to Jerusalem for the Passover ceremonies and the famous Last Supper was a Passover seder...the ritual meal where Jews all over the world retell the story of the Exodus, celebrate their G-d-given freedom and eat the unleavened bread, matzoh, to commemorate their ancestor's journey and deliverance from bondage and slavery.



The story of the Resurrection is a story of freedom too...freedom of the soul, and a promise of eternal life to believing Christians who understand what the rolling away of the stones means for them.



Both holidays change their dates on our calender from year to year Passover because it is based on the centuries old Hebrew calender, and Easter because the early Church fathers determined that Easter is always celebrated on the Sunday immediately following the Paschal Full Moon date of the year, which always occurs after Passover.

However, it's rare that the two holidays occur this close together, and in this momentous year, I likewise see in that a sign of hope for the future.

I and my brothers and sisters on the Watcher's Council wish you and yours Chag Pessach Sameach and a blessed Easter.




There's an old quote of Neville Chamberlain, circa 1938 concerning Nazi Germany's attempt to swallow Czechoslovakia, which he referred to as "a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing. "

This week's winner,Joshuapundit's -Silent Scream;The Sudan Ethnically Cleanses Its Christians concerns a similar kind of event...and one that is going almost entirely unnoticed or remarked upon:

The government of the predominantly Muslim nation of Sudan has stripped its 500,000 to 700,000 Christians of citizenship and has put them on notice that they have one week to leave the country. Even sub-jim crow dhimmi status is to be denied them.

According to an ENI report, the government of Sudan has declared that all whose “parents, grandparents or great grandparents [were] born in the South Sudan or [who] belong to any southern ethnic group” are no longer citizens of Sudan and must leave the Sudan by April 8..or else.

There's more to this than meets the eye, of course.

The Sudan has always been a borderland between Arab and black African, between slavemaster and slave. And increasingly, between Muslim and Christian. During the decades long jihad by the Sudan between the early 1980 and today against the black Africans to the east in Darfur and in the south, conservative estimates put the death toll at over 2 million.The Sudan's President Omar Al-Bashir has already been indicted by the International Criminal Court for genocide, something the Arab League has thumbed their collective noses at, with al-Bashir is able to freely attend meetings and travel all over the region without fear of arrest. The charges he was indicted for, the mass rapes, the slavetaking, the wanton murders make what's going on now in Syria look like a particularly sedate bridge party.

In July 2011, the jihad officially ended when the largely Christian South Sudan achieved independence, although sporadic attacks by al-Bashir's military and aircraft still continue in places like the Nuba Mountains and along the South Sudan borders.

Due to the discord caused by the breakaway, al-Bashir is under pressure to turn the Sudan into a extremist fundamentalist, Muslim Brotherhood ruled Islamist state.

The key figure involved is a Muslim cleric by the name Hasan al-Turabi, who leads the Sudanese branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Turabi is an interesting figure, rather like our old friend the late and unlamented Imad Mugniyeh in that he has the ability to transcend the usual Sunni/Shiah divide and stay on good terms with a lot of different players and factions.

In our non-Council category, the winner was Victor Davis Hanson with a piece that may very well become a modern classic, The New Anti-Semitism submitted by Joshuapundit.


Here are this week’s full results. Only New Zeal was unable to vote this week, and only New Zeal was affected by the 2/3 vote penalty:

Council Winners



Non-Council Winners



See you next week! And don't forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter..'cause we're cool like that!
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