United Arab Emirates to Help Restore Church of Nativity

NOVOSTI, April 29 — The United Arab Emirates will finance the restoration of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity and the nearby Omar Mosque, each of which were damaged in the battle between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants, the Russian news agency reported.

Sheikh Hamdan al-Nahayan, the UAE's foreign minister and chairman of the UAE Red Crescent Society, has contacted Palestinian authorities and begun negotiations for immediate restoration of the religious sites after Israeli troops pull out of Bethlehem.

Instructed by the UAE president, the Red Crescent Society has already discussed the issue with the Palestinian authorities. Sheikh Hamdan said to journalists that historically, Muslims have always respected and protected Christian shrines.

European Politics Affected by Fertility Decline, Group Says

CATHOLIC FAMILY & HUMAN RIGHTS INSTITUTE, April 26 — The recent advances of right-wing, anti-immigration parties in France, the Netherlands, Britain and other European countries are a consequence of the refusal of European families to have children, the New York-based organization said in a press release.

Pointing to Europe's “precipitous drop in fertility,” C-FAM president Austin Ruse warned that “the electoral success of the anti-immigrant French presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen appears indicative of a continent-wide embrace of nationalistic political parties, which hold that cultures are being eroded and that a sharp rise in crime is attributable to the influx of an ever-growing number of poor and uneducated immigrants.”

Ruse noted that France, the United Kingdom, Austria, Italy, Belgium, Spain, and the Netherlands all possess sizeable and influential nationalist, anti-immigrant parties. In the absence of a major rise in birth rates across the continent, Ruse added, this trend could only continue.

Muslim Radicals Blamed for Renewed Indonesian Violence

BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION, April 28 — The February 2002 peace deal between Christian separatists and Muslim nationalists in the eastern Moluccan Islands has begun to fray, the British network reported.

BBC said that Indonesia's three-year sectarian conflict flared up again after the radical Islamist group the Laskar Jihad renounced the deal in late April. Its leader, Jafar Umar Thalib, told a rally of thousands of supporters to resume attacks on local Christians.

The Laskar Jihad militia, thought to have some 15,000 active members, has been importing Islamic fighters from Java to the Christian region of Sulawesi in the Moluccan Islands to attack Christians. This mirrors the strategy employed by the Indonesian government last year to attempt to crush East Timorese Christians who sought independence.

Only the intervention of U.N. peacekeepers, mostly from Australia, brought that genocide to a halt, and smoothed the way for East Timor's recent free elections as a sovereign nation.

Laskar Jihad seeks to impose Islamic law throughout Indonesia, which is about 85% Muslim with Christian, Hindu and animist minorities.

BBC noted that “the fighting in the eastern Moluccas has left more than 6,000 people dead and forced 750,000 to flee their homes since January 1999,” and suggested that Jafar Umar Thalib may be connected to the al-Qaeda terrorist network of Osama bin Laden.