Russian backer gets massive Jesus statue put up in Syria

 

Visible from space? (Photo credit: Pravoslavie.ru)

It’s taller by about a meter than the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro.  On 14 October, Russian entrepreneur Yuri Gavrilov* and the London-based St. Paul and St. George Foundation realized a years-long dream of erecting a statue of Jesus on a mountain top near Sednaya, Syria (or Saidnaya).

Local reporting, cited by a number of credible news outlets like UAE’s The National, indicates that the parties to the Syrian civil war observed a mutual ceasefire while the statue was being put in place.

Oops – The IDF didn’t kill Baby Mashrawi (and other things that didn’t happen during Pillar of Defense)

[Warning: graphic images]

Diligent readers of the Washington Post may know by now that UN observers in Gaza attribute the death of 11-month-old Omar Mashrawi, during Operation Pillar of Defense in November 2012, to a Hamas rocket which fell short and hit a Gaza City home.

WaPo initially reported the death using an AP photo with a caption that implicated an “Israeli strike.” The corrected story has that reference removed from the caption, after AP removed it in a correction to its original posting with the photo.  Numerous print and online news outlets used the same AP photo, however, with the original caption alluding to an Israeli strike.

Yet bloggers doubted at the time that the damage done to the Gaza City home was caused by an Israeli strike.  Elder of Ziyon’s post on the Mashrawi question mentioned these doubts first,

How many old, belching Russian destroyers does it take to establish an international veto in Syria?

One, if the US is weak and undisciplined.

A picture is worth a thousand words.  The Bosphorus Naval News blog, an excellent source for ground-truth naval information in the Bosporus and Black Sea, has photos of the Russian Kashin-class destroyer Smetlivy transiting the Turkish Straits on 2 April, on her way to Syria.  “As you can see,” says blogger Cem Devrim Yaylalı demurely, “she was smoking heavily.”

According to Russian officials quoted in an AFP report on the deployment,