Christian leaders in Syria ask your support to stop the anti-Syria sanctions

Green: SIGN! Text: "We invite you to sign the following appeal - "Enough with the sanctions on Syria and the Syrians" - written by religious leaders operating in Syria."

Petition: stop the anti-Syria sanctions
This title is the link. The part where you sign is in English. 
Here is what the Italian says:

Enough with the sanctions on Syria and the Syrians! In 2011 the European Union initiated the sanctions against Syria, presenting them as "sanctions on personnel of the regime," but which imposed an oil embargo, blocked any financial transaction, and prohibited the trade of many goods and products. This measure continues today, although with a somewhat inexplicable decision, in 2012 the oil embargo was removed from areas controlled by the armed and jihadist opposition, in order to provide economic resources to the so-called "revolutionary forces and the opposition" .

In these five years, the sanctions on Syria have helped destroy Syrian society condemning her to hunger, epidemics, poverty, and encouraging fundamentalist militia fighters and terrorist who also strike in Europe And add to that a war that has already resulted in 250,000 deaths, six million displaced and four million refugees.The situation in Syria is desperate. Food shortages, widespread unemployment, inaccessibility of medical care, rationing of drinking water, electricity. Not only that, the embargo makes it impossible for the Syrians who settled abroad before the war to send money to their relatives or family members left behind.

Non-governmental organizations engaged in assistance programs are unable to send money to their workers in Syria. Companies, power plants, aqueducts, hospital departments are forced to close because of the inability to procure spare parts or gasoline.Today the Syrians see the possibility of a better future for their families in running away from their land. But, as you see, this solution also involves many difficulties and causes intense controversy within the European Union. Exile cannot be the only solution that the international community knows how to propose to these poor people.

So we support all humanitarian initiatives and initiatives towards peace that the international community is implementing, in particular through the difficult negotiations in Geneva, but whole waiting and hoping for such expectations to find concrete answers after so many bitter disappointments, we ask that the sanctions that affect the daily life of every Syrian be immediately removed. The expectation of the longed-for peace can not be divorced from a concrete concern for those who today are suffering because of an embargo whose weight falls on an entire people.

That's not all: rhetoric about refugees fleeing the Syrian war appears hypocritical if at the same time we continue to starve, prevent medical care, deny drinking water, work, security, and dignity to those who remain in Syria. So we turn to the parliamentarians and mayors of each country so that the iniquity of sanctions on Syria is made known to the citizens of the European Union (now totally unaware) and become, finally, the subject of a serious debate and consequent resolutions.

Signatories 

Father Georges Abou Khazen - Apostolic Vicar of the Latins in Aleppo 

Father Pierbattista Pizzaballa - Emeritus Custos of the Holy Land 

Father Joseph Tobji - Maronite Archbishop of Aleppo 

Father Boutros Marayati- Armenian Bishop of Aleppo 

Sisters of the Congregation of St. Joseph of the Hospital "Saint Louis," Aleppo

The Trappist community in Syria

Dr. Nabil Antaki - M.D. in Aleppo, the Marist Brothers

Sisters of the Congregation of Perpetual Help - Center for children and orphans displaced, Marmarita

Father Firas Loufti - Franciscan Monsignor

Jean-Clément Jeanbart - greek-Catholic Archbishop of Aleppo 

Monsignor Jacques Behnan Hindo - Syrian Catholic Bishop of Hassaké-Nisibi 

Father Mtanios Haddad - Archimandrite of the Melkite Catholic Church and the patriarchal Attorney

Msgr. Hilarion Capucci - Archbishop Emeritus of greek-Melkite Catholic Church 

S.B. Ignace Youssef III Younan, Patriarch of Antioch of the Syrians 

Mgr.Georges Masri, Procurator to the Holy See of the Syro-Catholic Church 

S.B. Gregory III Laham - Patriarch of the Melkites

Translation from Italian for Fort Russ by Tom Winter     Follow us on Facebook!                                                  
                                                 

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Petition to get France out of NATO

Sortirdelotan.fr, May 28, 2016

Here at Fort Russ, we do not expect that signatures outside of France will be of use, but it seemed that Fort Russ readers would be interested in knowing of this project and in reading its rationale... 

Translation by Tom Winter

Headline:
"At Warsaw they are getting set for war. Let's get out of NATO!

"The next NATO summit in Warsaw July 8 and 9, just one more provocation against Russia. With this appeal, the signatories mean to say "STOP" to this nuclear escalation before something undoable gets done"

Text:
The hour is grave. A new missile crisis is brewing against Russia, a mirror image of the 1962 missile crisis when the Soviet Union deployed missiles in Cuba, at the very portals of the United States. The situation has gotten upside down: then NATO was struggling against the Warsaw Pact; today it meets in Warsaw!

Therefore, we the undersigned, find that we are faced with a provocative policy of encirclement:

1. continuous expansion of NATO to Russia's borders, despite the guarantees given by the West to Gorbachev in 1989 that this would not happen;

2. deployment of the Aegis missile defense shield in Romania, Poland, Turkey, and Spain. Featuring MK41 launch systems, these weapons can be used for defense missions (anti-aircraft, anti-submarine, anti-ship), but also for attack missions against ground targets;

3. deployment in the Baltic countries, Poland, and Romania, by rotation, of four regiments of a thousand men each with permanent military equipment;

4. constitution of a "northern" front against Russia, bringing together NATO members (Denmark, Iceland and Norway) or its Partnership for Peace (Sweden and Finland).

To end this menace we demand:
1. That the French government use the "policy of the empty chair" at the upcoming NATO summit in Warsaw; 

2. that it announce its decision to leave the organization that no longer has any raison d’être. 

We call on France to create the conditions for a return to an order of peace in the world, based on "win-win" cooperation proposed by the BRICS, which Europe and the United States have an interest in joining. 

Let us mobilize today all those means that we have committed in the twentieth century for war, for peace through mutual development!


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