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The World Suffers Because of Myopic Leftist Rage

On November 7, 2020, four days after the General Election, a millennial friend who identifies as a Christian and is a devoted disciple of critical race theory and BLM posted this sacrilegious image on her Facebook page:

These were the last words of Christ before he died on the cross. The debt mankind owes to God for our sin and rebellion was finished, that is, paid in full, by Christ’s suffering and death. Jesus provided the means—the only means—for man to be reconciled to God. Satan was defeated. The sinless lamb of God’s self-sacrifice for the sins of man fulfilled all Old Testament prophecies. And this millennial Christian used that biblical allusion to celebrate the defeat of Donald Trump.

In addition to being sacrilegious, it is nonsensical as an analogy. If “it” refers to Trump’s tenure as president, in what precise way or ways is that analogous to Christ’s finished work on the cross? If Trump’s presidency is in no ways akin to Christ’s finished work—which, of course, it wasn’t—why use that allusion? Did she think it was clever? Funny? Unifying?

One thing is clear, this millennial and countless other Never-Trump, pro-Biden evangelicals believed that the country suffered under Trump’s presidency and that Biden would be America’s savior. And with their eyes blinded by rage at Trump and their minds clouded with foolish ideology, they have brought untold suffering to the world.

Cultural regressives who self-identify as “progressives” ripped Trump for his purported foreign policy ineptitude, claiming that he was destroying America’s reputation on the international stage. And here we are now with Western European leaders publicly savaging Biden’s astonishingly inept exit from Afghanistan, the effects of which worsen every day. As of this writing, two ISIS-K bomb blasts at the Kabul airport have left at least 12 U.S. service members dead, 15 injured, and an unknown number of Afghans dead or injured.

Politico has reported that “U.S. officials in Kabul gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies to grant entry into the militant-controlled outer perimeter” of the Kabul airport. An outraged defense official who described this act as “appalling and shocking,” said, “they just put all those Afghans on a kill list.”

Rebecca Klapper writing in Newsweek Magazine—no friend of conservatism—paints a vivid picture of the dim view European leaders have of bumbling Biden and his gang of accomplices who are too busy planning the forced entrance of men in dresses into women’s locker rooms to plan an exit of soldiers and allies from one of the most dangerous countries in the world:

Markus Soeder, a leading member of German Chancellor Angela Merkel‘s center-right Union bloc, called for accountability from the United States.

Soeder said Washington should provide funding and shelter to people fleeing Afghanistan, since “the United States of America bear the main responsibility for the current situation.”

Even in the United Kingdom, which has always prided itself on a its “special relationship” with Washington … barbs were coming from all angles.

Former British Army chief Richard Dannatt said, “the manner and timing of the Afghan collapse is the direct result of President Biden’s decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of 9/11. At a stroke, he has undermined the patient and painstaking work of the last five, 10, 15 years to build up governance in Afghanistan, develop its economy, transform its civil society and build up its security forces. ” Dannatt said Wednesday in Parliament.

In response to attempts to “absolve” Biden of culpability for the botched exit, Charles Cooke writing for National Review said,

The Biden administration could. … quite obviously have ensured that before our troops were drawn down we had got every American, permanent resident, and eligible Afghan out; we had removed both our weaponry and any sensitive information; and we had consulted properly with our allies. That part … was within Joe Biden’s control. And he completely and utterly screwed it up.

Allies are not angered by just the exit debacle but also by Biden’s unconscionable lies concocted to shift blame, lies that provoked unprecedented bipartisan rebukes by members of Parliament:

Biden putting much of the blame on Afghan forces for not protecting their nation has not gone down well with Western allies, either.

Conservative Parliament member Tom Tugendhat, who fought in Afghanistan, was one of several British lawmakers taking offense.

“To see their commander-in-chief call into question the courage of men I fought with, to claim that they ran, is shameful,” Tugendhat said.

Chris Bryant, from the opposition Labour Party, called Biden’s remarks about Afghan soldiers, “some of the most shameful comments ever from an American president.”

Cranky leftists with their gender-neutral underpants in a twist repeatedly croaked that Trump lied about Stormy Daniels, lied about the weather on his inauguration day, and lied about the number of attendees at his inauguration.

Contrast those lies with Biden’s. Biden lied when he said al Qaeda was gone from Afghanistan. He lied when he said, “we know of no circumstance where American citizens are—carrying an American passport—are trying to get through to the airport.” He lied when he said, “I have seen no question of our credibility from our allies around the world.” And he lied when he said, “The Afghan military gave up, sometimes without trying to fight.”

Add those lies to the mound of whoppers from leftist journalists, members of Congress, Democrat Party operatives, the CIA, and FBI (aided and abetted by the algorithmic mischief of Big Tech) throughout Trump’s presidency and the 2020 campaign—lies which were created to take down a duly elected president and then to prevent his reelection.

They lied when they claimed Trump called all illegal immigrants rapists and murderers. They lied when they said Trump put immigrant children in cages. They lied about Trump and a Russian prostitute. They lied about Russia-collusion. They lied about Hunter Biden and his colorful computer.

And now in addition to the tragic scene of suffering on our southern border created by Biden, China, Russia, Iran, the Taliban, al Qaeda, and ISIS-K are celebrating the humiliation of America. Our relations with our allies have never been worse. Americans are dead or stranded in the hellhole of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. And Afghan women and girls await their fate as sex slaves to barbarians.

I wonder if my millennial friend still thinks the election of Biden signaled the arrival of a savior who will end the suffering caused by former President Trump. It’s hard to know because she hasn’t posted a single thing about Biden since her sacrilegious post.





When Christian Conservatives Are Compared to the 9/11 Terrorists

You may have thought I was overstating things in my recent article, “Will California Go from Banning Religious Books to Burning Them?” You may have thought I was exaggerating when I referenced LGBT activists who compared Christian conservatives to ISIS and Al-Qaeda. Be assured that there was not a word of hyperbole in what I wrote. The truth is unsettling enough.

To put things in perspective, when Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, he stated clearly that marriage was the union of one man and one woman. And he knew he needed to do this to win the conservative, black vote.

Today, you are branded a radical and a dangerous fanatic if you espouse that same view. You will be grilled by the tolerance inquisition!

Ten years ago, you would have laughed me to scorn if I told you Bruce Jenner would become Caitlyn Jenner and be named woman of the year. You would have ridiculed me if I told you the federal government would punish schools that refused to open the girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms to boys who identified as girls.

Today, “transphobic” is a household word, a gender-confused teen has his (her?) own reality TV show, and drag queens are reading stories to toddlers in libraries.

Ten years ago, you would have said “Impossible!” to the idea that a minor with unwanted same-sex attraction would be forbidden by law to receive professional counseling, even if that child expressly requested it and even if that child had been sexually abused. And you would have dismissed completely the notion that some states would seek to bar such counseling from adults as well.

Today, a number of states have outlawed this much-needed counseling for struggling minors, while California is poised to make it illegal for anyone of any age to receive professional help for unwanted same-sex attraction or gender-confusion. That is the unvarnished, unembellished truth.

And what happens when we draw attention to this outrageous California bill? We are attacked as maniacs.

As one gay activist put it (specifically, in the context of my opposition to the California bill), “Brown is a religious zealot — a Christian convert — who is barely distinguishable from the folks who flew airplanes into buildings for their god. Unlike them, Brown is nonviolent. However, like those 9/11 maniacs, Brown substitutes literalist religious belief for logic, science and common sense. Brown, I think, relishes the negative attention and while I say that he is nonviolent he does equivalent violence to LGBT people every day through misinformation.”

To parse these words in any serious way is to give them a dignity they do not deserve. I simply post them to say, “You see! I was not exaggerating.”

This is what comes your way when you oppose radical LGBT activism. This is what you can expect when you take a stand for liberty and freedom. This is what happens when you tell the truth.

This same gay activist wrote, “In the final analysis, Michael Brown is an advocate of pseudoscience in order to conform the world to his religious beliefs. It should be noted that Brown sports a PhD in Near Eastern Languages. Obviously, he has no training or work experience relative to human sexuality.”

And after claiming that there is no scientific evidence that sexual orientation can be changed through counseling or that gender-confused children can, with help, become at home in their own bodies, he writes, “If Michael Brown knows of more compelling research, he has not cited it. He has failed to make any meaningful argument in support of conversion therapy. Promoting the existence of this mythical approach only creates prejudice and discrimination. It serves no useful purpose. Come to think of it, Michael Brown serves no useful purpose. It is a cheap shot but the guy rails against LGBT people all day, every day. Maybe he needs a new hobby.”

Actually, I and others have been citing scientific literature for years, along with an endless number of personal anecdotes from friends and colleagues. (I’m talking about former-homosexuals and former-transgenders.) But whoever we cite gets discredited immediately, since the psychologists and psychiatrists and therapists and scholars do not adhere to the standard LGBT talking points.

Ryan Anderson provides ample scientific literature about transgender issues in his new book, while a major review of scientific literature by two prominent psychologists addresses broader issues of sexual orientation change as well. Be assured that the science is there.

This, however, is not to deny that there are many gays and transgenders who have tried to change, without success. They have suffered depression and fear and self-loathing, spiraling even deeper into hopeless after unsuccessful therapy efforts. I do not minimize their struggles, I do not pretend to be able to relate to what they have endured, and I constantly call on the Church to show great compassion to such strugglers.

But to each of them – and to the critics who attack us with such venom – I make a simple appeal. Allow others to find their own path.

When you try to pass laws that will take away essential freedoms of those you differ with, and when you demonize those who oppose your values, you only discredit yourselves. In the long run, this will work against you. We will overcome your venom and anger and bills and laws with grace and truth and love – and God’s help.


This article was originally published at Townhall.com




ISIS: Break the Cross

The Islamic State released the fifteenth issue of their English-language Jihadi magazine, Dabiq, this past week, titled “Break the Cross.”

In the first issue following the attacks in Orlando, Nice, Normandy, Wurzburg, and Ansbach, ISIS orders even more attacks to be launched without delay.

In an effort to delegitimize the politically correct narrative that Islam has nothing to do with ISIS, they repeatedly clarify that their message is: There is no God but Allah, who “is to be worshipped alone via love, hope, fear, supplication, prostration, sacrificial slaughter, etc.”

Further, ISIS lays out point by point why they hate us and why they fight us:

  • Because we are disbelievers who reject the oneness of Allah;
  • because our secular liberal societies permit things prohibited by Allah;
  • because of the crimes we commit against Islam, such as mocking the prophets and burning the Quran; and, finally,
  • because of the crimes we commit against Muslims, such as bombing and invading their lands.

However, contrary to popular belief, they clarify that American foreign policy is not the sole, let alone main, reason that they attack us:

“The fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam.

ISIS will not stop fighting until the West is willing to accept one of three options: conversion, submission by paying the jizyah (infidel tax), or death.

More than simply explaining why they fight us, this issue provides strategies on how best to bring down the West. For example, they suggest Muslim children learn infidel languages in order to spy on enemy communications or execute operations on infidel ground.

They also mention constructing a new language that would be used to “encrypt communication back and forth between [a jihadi] and the Islamic State foreign operations leadership before executing [an] attack against surveyed targets.”

As done in previous issues, Dabiq again stresses the importance of attacking the non-believer at home if you are not able to travel to the Islamic State, hitting the “Crusaders” where it hurts most, behind enemy lines, on their own territory. Finally, they give advice for future attacks, saying to keep their plans simple and effective, attacking as soon as possible.

The Islamic State further legitimizes their killing of civilians by arguing that every nation that claims to be ruled by the will of the people “has implicated their own populations in the crimes their militaries commit against the Muslim nation,” strengthening the Muslim obligation to target them.

This is a tactical deviation from previous issues, which placed a heavy emphasis on attacking U.S. law enforcement and military targets. ALL infidels are now a target, meaning that any large gathering of people — a sporting event, a movie theater, a mall — is  vulnerable, making the job of our law enforcement officers that much more difficult.


This report was originally posted at TheGorkaBriefing.com.




Media Needs to Press Obama on Islam

Written by Lt. Colonel James G. Zumwalt, USMC (Ret.)

In response to the July 14 Nice, France terrorist attack that killed 84, former House Speaker Newt Gringrich called for deportation of Muslims supporting sharia law. President Barack Obama immediately criticized the suggestion as “repugnant” and “un-American.”

Shariah law evolves primarily from the Koran, a body of moral and religious laws dictating almost every aspect of Muslim life. Coming from the lips of Allah, they supposedly represent perfection and are incorruptible by man’s interpretation.

However, many verses of the Koran conflict with each other. This led Muslim clerics to adopt the concept of abrogation – giving later verses preference – lest Allah be deemed imperfect!

Application of shariah should concern any rational person for various reasons including intolerance for non-Muslims, brutal punishments for sinning Muslims and oppression of women.

Why has the media failed to query Obama on such aspects of Islamic law? Why specifically should Obama believe it repugnant to oppose such intolerance, brutality and inequality simply because it is packaged as a religion?

A recent poll of young (18-29) American adherents to Islam and its law reveals a startling 26 percent believe suicide bombings are justified against non-believers, with another 15 percent more lukewarm to the idea, believing justification is warranted only “often/sometimes.” In France, among the same age group, 42 percent believe it always justified and 19 percent often/sometimes justified.

Why has the media failed to query Obama on such numbers of young people justifying violence based on their religion while he sees no connection?

As we witness a world in turmoil-caused by millions of fleeing Middle East Muslim refugees, by ungrateful Muslim immigrants expecting host nations in Europe to tolerate their religious beliefs while they refuse to reciprocate, by Muslims murdering Muslims in Muslim lands, by the West repeatedly being targeted by Muslim terrorists – only to hear Obama declare Islam is peaceful, why does the media fail to query him on his belief?

A website monitoring the number of Islamic terrorist attacks taking place globally since 9/11 records more than 28,800 occurrences. These are not acts of “violent extremism” as Obama labels them; these are calculated acts of terrorism by Muslims seeking to kill apostates or infidels in the name of their religion.

Why has the media failed to query Obama on his refusal to distinguish between violent and Islamic extremism?

In June alone, 238 such Islamic terrorist acts were committed in 33 different countries. Another source reports since 9/11, a total of 89 Islamist terror attack plots have been uncovered in the U.S.

Why has the media failed to query Obama on his refusal to link terrorism and Islam to these plots?

Muslim leaders, such as Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, have acknowledged Islam is not peaceful and in need of reform to accommodate a 21st century world. Obama has yet to support Sisi’s call for reform.

Why has the media failed to query Obama about Sisi’s call for a not-so-peaceful religion’s reformation?

Islamist threats have prompted Middle East states to start monitoring mosques in their countries (more than 3000 in Egypt and 20,000 in Saudi Arabia).

Why has the media failed to query Obama on why such monitoring is necessary if Islam is a peaceful religion?

Obama chastises our police officers for failing to acknowledge internal problems have caused deaths of black suspects during arrests.

Why has the media failed to query Obama on acknowledging his own problem – leading to far many more deaths – in refusing to recognize Islam’s violent side?

In addition to Obama, only one other American president has read the Koran. Having learned from Islam’s holy book and a Muslim ambassador in 1805 at the end of the first Barbary War that the Koran encouraged unprovoked attacks against non-Muslims, Thomas Jefferson sought funding to build a navy. His knowledge of the Koran’s mandate enabled the U.S. Navy to defeat the Muslim pirates in the second war.

Why has the media failed to query Obama on why he remains blind to Jefferson’s justified concerns about Islam’s aggressive mandate?

The Muslim Brotherhood, which declared war against America in 2010, has been embraced by Obama. This is in spite of its once-secret but still operational war plan to undermine U.S. laws by “civilization jihad,” forcing America’s submission to sharia. A 2015 poll indicates 51 percent of American Muslims seek to make this happen.

Why has the media failed to query Obama on the Brotherhood’s nefarious war plan – a president who instead of banning its leadership from the White House welcomes it? He continues to embrace it even as Congress considers legislation to join our allies in declaring it a terrorist organization.

In choosing a site to give his 2009 kumbaya speech concerning U.S. relations with the Muslim world, Obama selected Egypt’s al-Azhar University – the most influential Islamic learning center in the Sunni world. Al-Azhar endorses the centuries old “Conditions of Omar” as a mandate of the Koran by which non-Muslims are forced to convert to Islam, die or pay tribute. Astonishingly despite this Obama praised al-Azhar in his speech for carrying “the light of learning through so many centuries…”

Why has the media failed to query Obama on selecting a university of Islamic learning still adhering to non-Muslim intolerance?

Polls also report 83 percent of Palestinian Muslims, 62 percent of Jordanians and 61 percent of Egyptians approve of jihadist attacks on Americans; 1.5 million British Muslims support Islamic State; 45 percent of British Muslims say clerics preaching violence against the West is representative of “mainstream Islam;” 80 percent of young Dutch Muslims approve of holy war against non-believers.

Why has the media failed to demand Obama defend his position Islam is peaceful in the face of such overwhelming numbers revealing otherwise?

Sadly, at a time we suffer an incompetent president, we also suffer an incompetent media.


This article was originally posted at Accuracy in Media.




Islam, Revolution, and Black Lives Matter

Written by William Kilpatrick

In a speech delivered to the Annual MAS-ICNA (Muslim American Society and Islamic Circle of North America) Convention in December 2015, Nihad Awad, the Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), urged Muslim Americans to take up the cause of Black Lives Matter. “Black Lives Matter is our matter,” he said; “Black Lives Matter is our campaign.”

At the same conference, Khalilah Sabra, another activist, told the Muslim audience, “Basically you are the new black people of America… We are the “community that staged a revolution across the world. If we could do that, why can’t we have that revolution in America?” “That revolution” is apparently a reference to the “Arab Spring” revolutions which were inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood and which brought death and destruction to wide swaths of the Middle East and North Africa.

Do CAIR and other activist groups merely want to support Black Lives Matter, or do they hope to recruit blacks to their own cause? In 2014, ISIS used the protests and clashes in Ferguson, Missouri as an opportunity to attempt to recruit blacks to radical Islam. But ISIS is a known terrorist organization while CAIR, despite its shady history, is considered by many to be a moderate, mainstream Muslim organization. Thus, if it wanted to convert blacks, it would presumably want to convert them to a moderate version of Islam.

Or would it? According to Paul Sperry and David Gaubatz, the authors of Muslim Mafia, the supposedly moderate CAIR acts like an underworld cospiracy. In fact, it (along with numerous other prominent Muslim groups) was named by a U.S. court as an unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorist funding case. In addition, CAIR has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates. Moreover, CAIR is a direct outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is also listed as a terrorist group by the UAE, as well as by Egypt and Saudi Arabia. That’s the same Muslim Brotherhood that fomented the “Arab Spring” revolutions, the likes of which Khalilah Sabra wants to bring to America.

The move to bring black Americans into the Islamic fold actually predates CAIR and ISIS by quite a few generations. Black Muslim organizations such as Louis Farrakhan’s The Nation of Islam have been recruiting blacks to their unorthodox brand of Islam for decades. The vast majority of blacks have resisted the temptation to join, perhaps because of NOI’s overt racism, its anti-Semitism, and its criticism of Christianity. In any event, it seems that the Black Muslim movement is being gradually displaced by traditional Sunni Islam. That’s because Sunni Islam has a much better claim to legitimacy—it being a worldwide religion that traces its roots back not to a 1930s Detroit preacher named Wallace Fard Muhammad, but to a seventh century prophet named Muhammad.

Will Islam catch on with black Americans? A great many blacks in America have a strong commitment to Christianity, which serves to act as a buffer against conversion to Islam. Still, it’s likely that Islam will make more inroads into the black community than it has in the past. For one thing, traditional Islam doesn’t have the “kook” factor which keeps most blacks at a distance from The Nation of Islam. The NOI belief system includes giant space ships, an evil scientist who created a race of “white devils,” and, most recently, an embrace of Dianetics.

By contrast, traditional Islam looks much more like … well, like a traditional religion. Indeed, when approaching Christians, Islamic apologists like to play up the similarities between the two religions. Each year around Christmastime, Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR’s Public Relations Director, sends out a Christmas letter with the message, “We have more in common than you think.”

One of the common elements is Jesus, who is honored as a great prophet in Islam. The self-proclaimed leader of the Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas on July 7, 2016 once wrote of feeling called to follow Jesus into Islam. In November 2015, the Reverend Jeff Hood, a white leftist pastor, wrote:

I have no question that Jesus is so intimately incarnated with and connected to our Muslim friends that he has become one. If we want to walk with Jesus in this moment of extreme oppression and marginalization, we will too.

Islam is an equal-opportunity recruiter. It is open to white leftists and black boxers alike. But Islamic proselytizers may see the present moment as an opportune time to concentrate on blacks. Why is that? Perhaps mainly because our educational system has managed to convince both black and white students that America is a racist society that was built on the back of slavery. Almost all students have been indoctrinated in the narrative that America has a shameful history and heritage. For blacks, however, this version of American history is more plausible because their ancestors actually did suffer from the ravages of slavery and the humiliation of Jim Crow laws.

Nevertheless, during the Civil Rights era and afterwards, both blacks and whites worked hard to heal racial divisions. Racism—both black and white—seemed to be dying a natural death until leftists, with the aid of the media and the Obama administration, managed to resuscitate it. Despite the two-time election of a black president and the appointment or election of black Attorney Generals, black Secretaries of State, black U.S. Supreme Court justices, a black chief of Homeland Security, black mayors, and black police chiefs, a number of blacks seem convinced that white racism is the number one factor that is keeping them down.

Enter CAIR and other Muslim “civil rights” groups that are only too happy to reinforce this narrative. They profess to understand the plight of American blacks because they claim to be victims of a similar oppression—victims of colonialism, racism, and Islamophobia. Part of their pitch is that there is no discrimination in Islam. That might seem a hard sell if you’re familiar with the history of the Arab slave trade or with Islam’s own version of Jim Crow, the dhimmi system. The trouble is, those items have been dropped down the memory hole. The same teachers and textbooks that excoriate the Christian West tend to present Islam as though it were the font of all science and learning.

It might be hoped that blacks who convert will choose some milder form of Islam—something like the Sufi version practiced by Muhammad Ali after he left The Nation of Islam. Unfortunately, that’s not likely because CAIR, ISNA, and similar Islamist groups are practically the only game in town. They have successfully managed to present themselves as the official face of Islam in America, and ISNA, along with the Muslim Brotherhood-linked North American Islamic Trust, controls a majority of the major mosques.

In backing Black Lives Matter, CAIR and company run the risk that their own radicalism will be revealed. Apparently, they don’t consider that to be much of a risk. They know that the court eunuchs in the media will do their best to mainstream Black Lives Matter as a peaceful movement, just as the media has accepted the premise that CAIR itself is a mainstream, moderate organization.

CAIR can also count on President Obama to take the side of Black Lives Matter. Recently, he went so far as to compare it to the Abolitionist Movement against slavery. CAIR is no doubt confident that Obama has its back too. After all, the president made it clear from the start of his administration that he supported the Muslim Brotherhood—the “Mothership” (to borrow an NOI term) out of which CAIR sprang.

At the MSA-ICNA Convention, CAIR and associates felt safe to reveal their revolutionary side. They understand that Obama has a penchant for revolutionary causes—provided that they are leftist (the Castro brothers in Cuba) or Islamist (the “Arab Spring” revolutions) in nature. Before his first election, Obama promised a fundamental transformation of American society. CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood are also interested in a fundamental transformation. Indeed, the chief theorists of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, were heavily influenced by Lenin and by communist revolutionary thought. So was Maulana Maududi, the founder of Jamaat-e-Islami, the Asian equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood. “Islam,” wrote Maududi, “is a revolutionary ideology and programme which seeks to alter the social order of the whole world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals.” He added, “‘Muslim’ is the title of that International Revolutionary Party organized by Islam to carry into effect its revolutionary program.”

That statement has to rank fairly high on the fundamental-transformation scale, and it bears a striking resemblance to the tear-it-down-to-build-it-up leftist school of thought to which Obama belongs. Whether or not the fundamental transformation that Obama desires is the same as that sought by Islamists, he does seem anxious to effect one before his term in office runs out.

The emerging confluence of interests between radical Muslim groups, radical black groups, and a leftist president bent on a radical transformation of America should give us more than pause; it should alarm us. Does Obama intend to speed up the leftward movement of American society during his remaining months in office? Does he hope to accelerate the Islamization of America through a coalition of radical black, leftist, and Islamist groups? Or does he even care what the change is, as long as it’s revolutionary in nature?

Most Americans tend to assume that we are still operating under the same rules that have governed our society since its founding. They have not come to terms with the possibility that some of our leaders are operating under a completely different set of rules—what leftist activist Saul Alinsky called “rules for radicals.”

Read more about Jeff Hood HERE.

Read more about Black Lives Matter HERE.


This article was originally posted at Crisis Magazine.

William Kilpatrick taught for many years at Boston College. He is the author of several books about cultural and religious issues, includingPsychological Seduction; Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right From Wrong; and Christianity, Islam and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West and the forthcoming The Politically Incorrect Guide to Jihad.  For more on his work and writings, visit his website, turningpointproject.com




Islam—Facts or Dreams?

by Andrew C. McCarthy

In 1993 I was a seasoned federal prosecutor, but I only knew as much about Islam as the average American with a reasonably good education—which is to say, not much. Consequently, when I was assigned to lead the prosecution of a terrorist cell that had bombed the World Trade Center and was plotting an even more devastating strike—simultaneous attacks on the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the United Nations complex on the East River, and the FBI’s lower Manhattan headquarters—I had no trouble believing what our government was saying: that we should read nothing into the fact that all the men in this terrorist cell were Muslims; that their actions were not representative of any religion or belief system; and that to the extent they were explaining their atrocities by citing Islamic scripture, they were twisting and perverting one of the world’s great religions, a religion that encourages peace.

Unlike commentators and government press secretaries, I had to examine these claims. Prosecutors don’t get to base their cases on assertions. They have to prove things to commonsense Americans who must be satisfied about not only what happened but why it happened before they will convict people of serious crimes. And in examining the claims, I found them false.

One of the first things I learned concerned the leader of the terror cell, Omar Abdel Rahman, infamously known as the Blind Sheikh. Our government was portraying him as a wanton killer who was lying about Islam by preaching that it summoned Muslims to jihad or holy war. Far from a lunatic, however, he turned out to be a globally renowned scholar—a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence who graduated from al-Azhar University in Cairo, the seat of Sunni Islamic learning for over a millennium. His area of academic expertise was sharia—Islamic law.

I immediately began to wonder why American officials from President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno on down, officials who had no background in Muslim doctrine and culture, believed they knew more about Islam than the Blind Sheikh. Then something else dawned on me: the Blind Sheikh was not only blind; he was beset by several other medical handicaps. That seemed relevant. After all, terrorism is hard work. Here was a man incapable of doing anything that would be useful to a terrorist organization—he couldn’t build a bomb, hijack a plane, or carry out an assassination. Yet he was the unquestioned leader of the terror cell. Was this because there was more to his interpretation of Islamic doctrine than our government was conceding?

Defendants do not have to testify at criminal trials, but they have a right to testify if they choose to—so I had to prepare for the possibility. Raised an Irish Catholic in the Bronx, I was not foolish enough to believe I could win an argument over Muslim theology with a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence. But I did think that if what we were saying as a government was true—that he was perverting Islam—then there must be two or three places where I could nail him by saying, “You told your followers X, but the doctrine clearly says Y.” So my colleagues and I pored over the Blind Sheikh’s many writings. And what we found was alarming: whenever he quoted the Koran or other sources of Islamic scripture, he quoted them accurately.

Now, you might be able to argue that he took scripture out of context or gave an incomplete account of it. In my subsequent years of studying Islam, I’ve learned that this is not a particularly persuasive argument. But even if one concedes for the purposes of discussion that it’s a colorable claim, the inconvenient fact remains: Abdel Rahman was not lying about Islam.

When he said the scriptures command that Muslims strike terror into the hearts of Islam’s enemies, the scriptures backed him up.

When he said Allah enjoined all Muslims to wage jihad until Islamic law was established throughout the world, the scriptures backed him up.

When he said Islam directed Muslims not to take Jews and Christians as their friends, the scriptures backed him up.

You could counter that there are other ways of construing the scriptures. You could contend that these exhortations to violence and hatred should be “contextualized”—i.e., that they were only meant for their time and place in the seventh century.  Again, I would caution that there are compelling arguments against this manner of interpreting Islamic scripture. The point, however, is that what you’d be arguing is an interpretation.

The fact that there are multiple ways of construing Islam hardly makes the Blind Sheikh’s literal construction wrong. The blunt fact of the matter is that, in this contest of competing interpretations, it is the jihadists who seem to be making sense because they have the words of scripture on their side—it is the others who seem to be dancing on the head of a pin. For our present purposes, however, the fact is that the Blind Sheikh’s summons to jihad was rooted in a coherent interpretation of Islamic doctrine. He was not perverting Islam—he was, if anything, shining a light on the need to reform it.

Another point, obvious but inconvenient, is that Islam is not a religion of peace. There are ways of interpreting Islam that could make it something other than a call to war. But even these benign constructions do not make it a call to peace. Verses such as “Fight those who believe not in Allah,” and “Fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war,” are not peaceful injunctions, no matter how one contextualizes.

Another disturbing aspect of the trial against the Blind Sheikh and his fellow jihadists was the character witnesses who testified for the defense. Most of these people were moderate, peaceful Muslim Americans who would no more commit terrorist acts than the rest of us. But when questions about Islamic doctrine would come up—“What does jihad mean?” “What is sharia?” “How might sharia apply to a certain situation?”—these moderate, peaceful Muslims explained that they were not competent to say. In other words, for the answers, you’d have to turn to Islamic scholars like the Blind Sheikh.

Now, understand: there was no doubt what the Blind Sheikh was on trial for. And there was no doubt that he was a terrorist—after all, he bragged about it. But that did not disqualify him, in the minds of these moderate, peaceful Muslims, from rendering authoritative opinions on the meaning of the core tenets of their religion. No one was saying that they would follow the Blind Sheikh into terrorism—but no one was discrediting his status either.

Although this came as a revelation to me, it should not have. After all, it is not as if Western civilization had no experience dealing with Islamic supremacism—what today we call “Islamist” ideology, the belief that sharia must govern society. Winston Churchill, for one, had encountered it as a young man serving in the British army, both in the border region between modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan and in the Sudan—places that are still cauldrons of Islamist terror. Ever the perceptive observer, Churchill wrote:

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. . . . Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property—either as a child, a wife, or a concubine—must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

Habitually, I distinguish between Islam and Muslims. It is objectively important to do so, but I also have a personal reason: when I began working on national security cases, the Muslims I first encountered were not terrorists. To the contrary, they were pro-American patriots who helped us infiltrate terror cells, disrupt mass-murder plots, and gather the evidence needed to convict jihadists. We have an obligation to our national security to understand our enemies; but we also have an obligation to our principles not to convict by association—not to confound our Islamist enemies with our Muslim allies and fellow citizens. Churchill appreciated this distinction. “Individual Moslems,” he stressed, “may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen.” The problem was not the people, he concluded. It was the doctrine.

What about Islamic law? On this topic, it is useful to turn to Robert Jackson, a giant figure in American law and politics—FDR’s attorney general, justice of the Supreme Court, and chief prosecutor of the war crimes trials at Nuremberg. In 1955, Justice Jackson penned the foreword to a book called Law in the Middle East. Unlike today’s government officials, Justice Jackson thought sharia was a subject worthy of close study.  And here is what he concluded:

In any broad sense, Islamic law offers the American lawyer a study in dramatic contrasts. Even casual acquaintance and superficial knowledge—all that most of us at bench or bar will be able to acquire—reveal that its striking features relative to our law are not likenesses but inconsistencies, not similarities but contrarieties. In its source, its scope and its sanctions, the law of the Middle East is the antithesis of Western law.

Contrast this with the constitution that the U.S. government helped write for post-Taliban Afghanistan, which showed no awareness of the opposition of Islamic and Western law. That constitution contains soaring tropes about human rights, yet it makes Islam the state religion and sharia a principal source of law—and under it, Muslim converts to Christianity have been subjected to capital trials for apostasy.

Sharia rejects freedom of speech as much as freedom of religion. It rejects the idea of equal rights between men and women as much as between Muslim and non-Muslim. It brooks no separation between spiritual life and civil society. It is a comprehensive framework for human life, dictating matters of government, economy, and combat, along with personal behavior such as contact between the sexes and personal hygiene. Sharia aims to rule both believers and non-believers, and it affirmatively sanctions jihad in order to do so.

Even if this is not the only construction of Islam, it is absurd to claim—as President Barack Obama did during his recent visit to a mosque in Baltimore—that it is not a mainstream interpretation. In fact, it is the mainstream interpretation in many parts of the world. Last year, Americans were horrified by the beheadings of three Western journalists by ISIS. American and European politicians could not get to microphones fast enough to insist that these decapitations had nothing to do with Islam. Yet within the same time frame, the government of Saudi Arabia beheaded eight people for various violations of sharia—the law that governs Saudi Arabia.

Three weeks before Christmas, a jihadist couple—an American citizen, the son of Pakistani immigrants, and his Pakistani wife who had been welcomed into our country on a fiancée visa—carried out a jihadist attack in San Bernardino, California, killing 14 people. Our government, as with the case in Fort Hood—where a jihadist who had infiltrated the Army killed 13 innocents, mostly fellow soldiers—resisted calling the atrocity a “terrorist attack.” Why? Our investigators are good at what they do, and our top officials may be ideological, but they are not stupid. Why is it that they can’t say two plus two equals four when Islam is involved?

The reason is simple: stubbornly unwilling to deal with the reality of Islam, our leaders have constructed an Islam of their very own. This triumph of willful blindness and political correctness over common sense was best illustrated by former British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith when she described terrorism as “anti-Islamic activity.” In other words, the savagery is not merely unrelated to Islam; it becomes, by dint of its being inconsistent with a “religion of peace,”contrary to Islam. This explains our government’s handwringing over “radicalization”: we are supposed to wonder why young Muslims spontaneously become violent radicals—as if there is no belief system involved.

This is political correctness on steroids, and it has dangerous policy implications. Consider the inability of government officials to call a mass-murder attack by Muslims a terrorist attack unless and until the police uncover evidence proving that the mass murderers have some tie to a designated terrorist group, such as ISIS or al Qaeda. It is rare for such evidence to be uncovered early in an investigation—and as a matter of fact, such evidence often does not exist. Terrorist recruits already share the same ideology as these groups: the goal of imposing sharia. All they need in order to execute terrorist attacks is paramilitary training, which is readily available in more places than just Syria.

The dangerous flipside to our government’s insistence on making up its own version of Islam is that anyone who is publicly associated with Islam must be deemed peaceful. This is how we fall into the trap of allowing the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s most influential Islamic supremacist organization, to infiltrate policy-making organs of the U.S. government, not to mention our schools, our prisons, and other institutions. The federal government, particularly under the Obama administration, acknowledges the Brotherhood as an Islamic organization—notwithstanding the ham-handed attempt by the intelligence community a few years back to rebrand it as “largely secular”—thereby giving it a clean bill of health. This despite the fact that Hamas is the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, that the Brotherhood has a long history of terrorist violence, and that major Brotherhood figures have gone on to play leading roles in terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda.

To quote Churchill again:  “Facts are better than dreams.” In the real world, we must deal with the facts of Islamic supremacism, because its jihadist legions have every intention of dealing with us. But we can only defeat them if we resolve to see them for what they are.


This article was originally posted at Imprimis.hillsdale.edu, and was adapted from a speech delivered on February 24, 2016, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.

Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. A graduate of Columbia College, he received his J.D. at New York Law School. For 18 years, he was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, and from 1993-95 he led the terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 others in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a plot to bomb New York City landmarks. Following the 9/11 attacks, he supervised the Justice Department’s command post near Ground Zero. He has also served as a Special Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense and an adjunct professor at Fordham University’s School of Law and New York Law School. He writes widely for newspapers and journals including National Review, PJ Media, and The New Criterion, and is the author of several books, including Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad and Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotages America.




ISIS Attacks in Paris

Friday’s attack in Paris, when ISIS terrorists attacked a concert hall, a soccer stadium, and a neighborhood known for its cafes, killing at least 129 people and wounding another 350, was the second wave of terror launched against the City of Light just this year. Back in January, terrorists attacked the offices of the magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket, killing a dozen people.

According to French president Francois Hollande, ISIS has “declared war” on France and that France’s response will be “pitiless.”

And the most common reaction here in the States, besides pity for the victims, is fear… that what happened there could happen here, wherever “here” might be for you. So let’s start by making one thing clear: for the Christian, the fear of God casts out all other fear. Yes, it’s reasonable to be concerned about personal and public safety, but we’re commanded throughout scripture to not be afraid. That’s because in the death and resurrection of Jesus, God has definitively dealt with evil.

daily_commentary_11_17_15Now it may not look that way after Friday. But as the author of Hebrews wrote, “At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him,” that is, Jesus Christ. Christianity acknowledges the fact of evil and suffering. A Christian worldview isn’t about sticking our heads in the sand and seeing the world in a Pollyannaish sort of way.

But other worldviews aren’t able to call evil, “evil.” In an article in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, residents of the neighborhood that was attacked on Friday described the perpetrators as “victims.” One person said that the terrorists were “victims of a system that excluded them from society . . . who live here in alienation, and we are all to blame for this alienation.”

Another added that “These are people the government gave up on, and you have to ask why.” As Haaretz put it, “No one wanted to talk about Islamists or the Islamic State, even after it took responsibility for the attacks and French President Francois Hollande announced that the group was behind them.”

Secular liberalism simply can’t wrap its mind around the kind of unadulterated evil that ISIS represents, in large part because it can’t understand what motivates ISIS and its supporters.

That motivation, as the March 2015 issue of The Atlantic told readers is a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately bringing about the apocalypse.

Actually, a better word than “apocalypse” would be “eschaton,” the end of the present age and the ushering in of what they consider to be the reign of Allah.

Since it no longer believes in the Christian eschaton, the West cannot even begin to understand an Islamic one. So it treats ISIS like it does the rest of our broken world: something that we can master, provided we bring the correct tools, politically correct language, public policy, and techniques to bear.

Never mind that this kind of utopian approach has a lousy track record even when dealing with much smaller evils than ISIS. Never mind that it’s absurd to “declare war” on an evil when many of your people can’t bring themselves to call it “evil.”

That’s sticking your head in the sand.

But there’s more to that verse from Hebrews. The author goes on to write, “But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.”

Christ has triumphed! And while events might tempt us to fear and even doubt, like the original recipients of the letter to the Hebrews, we are called to look past events and see what is ultimately true and real.

So as Christians our work is to continue to participate in God’s work to restore all things under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. And neither ISIS nor any event in Paris should change that.


This article was originally posted at BreakPoint.org.

 




Dhimmitude in America?

Written by Joseph Backholm

You may not know what dhimmitude is and hopefully you never experience it.

But you’ve probably heard of ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and you’re almost surely aware of what Christians are.

Dhimmitude is an Islamic system that governs non-Muslims who have been conquered through Jihad by folks like ISIS.

If you surrender to Muslim control – though not Muslim – you are referred to as dhimmi.

Sounds fun, right?

If ISIS took over the town you live in, they might move door to door and give you three options: “convert to Islam, pay the jizya, or die.”

The jizya is a tax for not being Muslim.

It doesn’t apply to everyone, but paying it is seen as proof of your subjection to the Jihadist state and its laws. In return, non-Muslim subjects are permitted to practice their faith, to enjoy a measure of communal autonomy, to be entitled to the Muslim state’s protection from outside aggression.

Acknowledging the difference, there are parallels between the way Jihadists treat those who are in dhimmitude and the way the new sexual revolution in America seeks to treat those who disagree with their (religious?) beliefs about sexuality and marriage.

Once they have political power, they are giving businesses three options “convert, pay a fine, or die” (economically, not physically).

After Arlene’s Flowers was sued for declining to decorate for a same-sex wedding, Attorney General Bob Ferguson offered to settle (demanded the jizya) for $2,000 on the condition that she would “convert,” or agree to make business decisions according to the state’s new values.

Only a few days ago, a judge in Oregon fined a bakery $135,000 because they attempted to run their business according to their Christian beliefs about sexuality rather than the government’s. When they rejected the government’s demands that they convert or pay the jizya, the government opted for what amounts to the economic death penalty.

“Nonsense,” you argue. “They broke the law. Having penalties for breaking the law isn’t exactly innovative. Nor is it jihadist.”

Fair enough.

But the left’s new found impulse to be sticklers for the letter of the law misses the larger point.

The left is proposing a regime change that fundamentally alters freedoms that have been taken for granted for in America for centuries.

Christians, Jews, Muslims and others have been not participating in same-sex “weddings” for millennia.

But under the new regime, doing what has always been done is illegal.

Your choice. Convert, pay a fine if you refuse to convert and then convert, or experience economic death.

Like the jizya, the non-discrimination law discriminates.  It protects one person’s right to decline to participate in an activity they disagree with, but denies that right to others. 

The good news is that if you accept the terms of the new regime, you will still be allowed a measure of communal autonomy, and be entitled to other benefits from the state.

Imagine a new law compelling church attendance or pork consumption on the grounds that refusing to participate is discriminatory. (Which, of course, it is. But that’s the kind of discrimination lefties still like.)

Being indignant with the atheist who objects to compulsory church attendance would be stupid since he’s simply doing what atheists have always done.

“But it’s the law,” you say, self-righteously.

“But it shouldn’t be the law, and you should know better,” he says in response.

And of course he’s right.

The way non-discrimination laws are being interpreted right now is not a modification to the building code that frustrates some builders or a change in the speed law that catches unsuspecting drivers.

It is a regime change that seeks to fundamentally alter the way Americans have always lived. It seeks to create the kind of conformity that America was created in opposition to.

America doesn’t and shouldn’t have conquered peoples. We make room for the atheists, Christians, Muslims, or Jew to be who they are, not just in their preferred place of worship, but in the rest of their life as well. We respect the right for people to be who they are, even if we think they’re silly and ignorant. We understand that we’re different and we make room for that.

Dhimmitude is for jihadists, not for Americans.


This article was originally posted on the blog of the Family Policy Institute of Washington.




How Should Christians Respond to ISIS?

Written by Johnnie Moore

It seems that every day is met with a new atrocity stemming from the Islamic State. We’ve lost track of the executions, the crimes against women and children are incalculable and unconscionable, and it seems that every drop of innocent blood feeds a thirst for more.

Their particular taste for Christian blood is most alarming to many of us who’ve watched from afar at their unrelenting advance on ancient Christian communities that have –until now- thrived in Iraq and Syria for nearly two thousand years.

ISIS has displaced tens-of-thousands and burned their churches, targeted their pastors, sold their children as slaves, and murdered countless among them. One particular account I’ve documented in my book Defying ISIS describes how the terror group arrived in one Christian town along the Nineveh Plain waving daggers and swords as they screamed, “shall we start beheading women and children or start with the old and the disabled? … we will behead all of you unless you convert.”

Christianity was born in the east, not the west, and we are witnessing a once-in-a-thousand-year attempt at destroying it in the place of its birth; so, how should we as Christians in the west respond to the threat of ISIS against Christians in the east?

Educate Ourselves

A global lack of concern isn’t for a lack of information. Nearly every major news organization in the United States, and abroad, has given significant coverage to the threat of ISIS against Christians and other religious minorities. It’s time we pay attention to the news, and pay particular attention to those outlets based in Europe (like France 24, BBC, and Sky News) and in the Middle East (like Al Jazeera, and Rudaw). Follow reporters like Jane Arraf on twitter who are covering the situation from within the region, and follow non-profit organizations that give particular attention to the threats against religious minorities (like the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, and The Institute for Global Engagement.).

When you know what’s happening, and know the stories of those in harm’s way, it gives you empathy, inspires you to action, and prepares you to rally others to the cause. It also helps prevent you from underestimating or oversimplifying this crisis. I wrote Defying ISIS precisely to serve as an introduction to the issue for those who want to know more. Thankfully, Harper Collins Christian Publishing made the remarkable decision to release the eBook early because of their own corporate concern for endangered Christians.

Read it and recommend it to others.

Churches and Christians Must Pray As Never Before

We are witnessing one of the most severe and unrelenting attempts at Christian persecution in church history. It’s happening in our time – in our modern era – and on our watch. This isn’t a time for churches to dedicate a Sunday a year to praying for the persecuted church, but a time when every single Christian church in every single place ought to be praying without pause for our brothers and sisters in Christ who sit in the path of ISIS. There should not be a single Sunday or a single church where this isn’t a topic of focused prayer every day. This type of crisis happens once in a millennium, and it demands that we pray as we never have before, and that we pray as we hope others would pray for us.

Churches must also do as the early church in Antioch did when the church in Judea was suffering through a famine. They generously gave to help their brothers and sisters survive. Churches in the west ought to be collecting tens of millions of dollars to help those in the east who’ve been displaced and who are under threat. The humanitarian crisis caused by ISIS in Iraq and Syria has been deemed the “worst of our time” by the United Nations.

Every act of love on behalf of those whom ISIS hates is a dagger in the heart of ISIS. If those who’ve fled ISIS die for lack of food, medicine or shelter then ISIS wins anyhow. We mustn’t allow this to happen.

There are many wonderful organizations who are working at preserving and rebuilding these broken lives, organizations like: The Cradle Fund, World Help, Open Doors, the Preemptive Love Coalition, The Assyrian Aid Society, Samaritan’s Purse, Focus on the Family, and the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East.

In a world of two billion Christians, surely we can do more good.

Let Us Be Known for Our Love

It has never been more important for the best of faith to shine brightly in the face of the worst of religion. There should not be a Muslim or mosque in any country in the world that hasn’t been subject to the exuberant, generous, and abundant love of the Christian community. They mustn’t know us by our religion or by our politics, by our prejudice or by our power. They must – as Jesus told us so clearly so long ago – “know us by our love.”

We ought to rush into the communities in our countries that have the potential to incubate extremism, and we must lavish them in Christian love and kindness. One of the great tragedies of our time is that despite living in an enormously diverse world, we rarely know the names, stories and beliefs of those who are different than us. This lack of relationship makes it easier to come to false and unhelpful conclusions about one another. It makes it easier for every Christian to think that every Muslim is a jihadist and for every Muslim to think that every Christian is a crusader. These are laughable conclusions, but the fact is that most Christians in the west haven’t a clue about Islam and they don’t know a single Muslim, and many Muslims in the west live their lives separate form the Christians in their communities.

Ironically, most of my own work in the Middle East on behalf of Christians started because kindhearted Muslims in the region invited me into their own concern about their persecuted, Christian neighbors.

Christians and Muslims must work together to defeat ISIS, and Christianity must be known around the world for our love, especially for Muslims.

We Must Not be Silent

This is not the time to sit idly by. This is a time to insist that people of influence and of affluence, people in politics and in places of power, feel unrelenting pressure to protect those who might be massacred and to utterly and thoroughly destroy ISIS as quickly as possible.

The fact is that the people who have the power to end this crisis often only react when they feel pressure from others. So, we must keep the pressure on.

Just the other morning, I received an email from deep within Syria just before the sun was rising in America. The email said that ISIS was moving towards another group of Assyrian, Christian villages along the Khabour River in Syria. Immediately, a small group of us who are involved in this issue started notifying congressmen, the press and the military. We insisted on a decisive response and a strong one. Within a few hours, we learned that coalition forces reacted with airstrikes, pushing ISIS back, and saving those Assyrian Christians who might have been kidnapped or killed.

We don’t know whether we made THE difference or not, but we do know that our voices mattered and we suspect that they applied the right pressure in the right places at the right time.

We must raise our voices every single day until this crisis ends. In so doing we will literally save lives.

Use #DefyingISIS when you do, and in turn we shall show the world that we care too much to quiet down. We will force leaders to act or shame them for their indifference.

Soon enough – if we do – I believe that “The God of peace will crush Satan under his feet” [Romans 1:16].

May it happen quickly, and may our brothers and sisters in Christ know they haven’t been forgotten.

Originally posted at ChristianPost.com.


 

Islam in America: A Christian Response

with Dr. Erwin Lutzer of Moody Church

May 7th, 2015

Medinah Baptist Church

More Information HERE




Calling Things By Their Proper Names

Written by Stan Guthrie

Confucius once said, “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name.” When it comes to radical Islam, it’s clear that too many people have chosen foolishness over wisdom. The question is, in these dangerous times, are there enough of us willing to embrace wisdom?

Our answer will go a long way toward determining whether the West, founded upon Judeo-Christian principles, will prevail over radical Islam. For, as Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said recently, “You cannot remedy a problem if you will not name it and define it.”

The Obama administration’s verbal contortions over the nature of our self-avowed enemies would be comical if they weren’t so seriously misguided. After a recent atrocity by the Islamic State (also called ISIS or ISIL), the president opined, “ISIL is not ‘Islamic.’ No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim.” Following the Charlie Hebdo attacks, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean offered this: “I think ISIS is a cult. Not an Islamic cult. I think it’s a cult.” These statements bring to mind the odd Bush administration mantra after 9/11: “Islam is a religion of peace.”

Then there’s the absurd statement by one of the current president’s spokesmen. He asserted that the Taliban—which murdered nearly 3,000 Americans on 9/11 and which saw one of its affiliates slaughter 132 schoolchildren and nine staff in Pakistan—isn’t a terrorist group. No, it’s merely an “armed insurgency.” Cut from the same cloth is the refusal by Al Jazeera’s English service to use words such as “terrorist,” “jihad,” and “Islamist” when describing Al-Qaeda and ISIS. As one executive at the network said, “One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.”

Contrast this kind of politically correct denial with the growing realization in Europe that things must be called by their proper names. The massive march in Paris after the Charlie Hebdo massacres is one sign. Another is the willingness of growing numbers to speak up.

“Europe has tacitly accepted that from now on the freedom of satire is valid for everything but Islam,” writes Angelo Panebianco in Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper. “Now [Islamists] are aiming for a more ambitious objective to strike at the religious heart of the West, forcing us to accept that not even the pope is free to reflect aloud on the specificity of Christianity or that which differs from Islam.”

Czech President Miloš Zeman warns that the world faces a challenge similar to the Nazis. “We have to ask ourselves if a repeat of the Holocaust could happen,” Zemen said in a recent speech in Prague marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. “This time it would not comprise 6 million Jews, but rather members of countless faiths as well as atheists—and even Muslims. Which is why I would like to welcome the fact that moderate Arab countries recently joined in the battle against Islamic State.”

Another president, Egypt’s Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, says it is time for a fresh start for Islam, which he avows is a tolerant religion. “The terrible terrorist attacks which we have seen and this terrible image of Muslims is what led us to think that we must stop and think and change the religious discourse,” he said, “and remove from it things that have led to violence and extremism. We need a new discourse that will be adapted to a new world and will remove some of the misconceptions.”

Removing those things won’t be easy. In an editorial, National Review acknowledges that most Muslims worldwide seek to live peacefully with their non-Muslim neighbors. But that does not end the discussion about whether Islam is a tolerant faith or ISIS killers are “true” Muslims.

The editorial notes “a large minority of Muslims—maybe hundreds of millions worldwide—who cleave to interpretations of their faith that enjoin murder, rape, torture, and cruelty as pious, even mandatory, acts. They take their diabolic faith seriously, and the result is what we saw in Paris. . . .

“Thus, there are in practical terms two Islams—a religion, if not of peace, then of peaceful accommodation, and a religion of death.”

That is so for several reasons that cannot be dismissed lightly. First, there appear to be two basic approaches to interpreting the Qur’an and how to make sense of verses that call for violence, side by side with those that call for peace and tolerance.

The older, classical school of interpretation, the one followed by the Islamists, endorses what is called the “law of abrogation.” This law, actually a hermeneutical principle, says that earlier verses in the career of Muhammad must be interpreted in light of later ones. If there is an apparent contradiction, they say the later ones must hold sway. Defending this approach, they point to verses such as 2:106: “When we cancel a message, or throw it into oblivion, we replace it with one better or one similar. Do you not know that God has power over all things?”

The problem for those who insist that “Islam is a religion of peace” is that the later verses reflect the more warlike stance of Muhammad and the Muslim community, when the movement was strong and aggressive. So the oft-cited verse, “There is no compulsion in religion” (2:256), has been abrogated in the minds of Islamists. They point to later verses, such as 9:5: “Kill the polytheists wherever you find them and capture them and besiege them and sit in wait for them at every place of ambush.” They say the later, more violent verses are controlling.

Of course, so-called “moderate Muslims,” such as El-Sissi, disagree. They point out that the law of abrogation implies that the Qur’an has errors, which they do not believe. It is an ongoing theological debate among Muslims worldwide.

There is a second reason we cannot dismiss the fact that there are at least two Islams around the globe. Simply put, there is no interpretative authority that all Muslims recognize. There is no “pope” or modern-day prophet to resolve all the theological disputes within Islam. Not only are there two main branches of Islam—Sunni and Shi’a—there are multiple religious leaders, each with varying levels of influence. While all Muslims revere the Qur’an and Muhammad and seek to follow the Five Pillars, they do not agree on all the particulars of the religion. Whatever you or I might think of the “true” DNA of Islam, if this global faith of 1.6 billion people is ever going to settle on a peaceful vision, it won’t be non-Muslims who talk them into it.

That’s why pronouncements from the White House or various media quarters about what constitutes “true Islam” are ludicrous. These self-appointed experts about Islam might as well declaim on whether all Christians must come under the authority of the pope.

Islam, in practical terms, is however Muslims themselves practice it—peacefully and violently. Let us pray for and encourage the former, knowing also that God is drawing many Muslims to Christ these days. But let’s also recognize that simply wishing for something doesn’t make it so.

We can start by calling things by their proper names.


This article was originally posted at the BreakPoint.org website.



 Islam in America
A Christian Response 

featuring Dr. Erwin Lutzer

May 7, 2015
CLICK HERE for Details




U.S. Senator Ted Cruz Files Bill to Ban U.S.-Based Islamic State Jihadis From Returning to the U.S.

This is simple common sense. By going to Iraq and Syria to join the Islamic State’s jihad, these Muslims have joined an entity that has declared war against the United States. They have committed treason. They have forfeited the rights and privileges of citizenship. But it will be interesting to see who opposes this, and on what grounds.

“Cruz Files Bill to Ban American Islamic State Fighters from Returning to U.S.,” by Adam KredoWashington Free Beacon, January 23, 2015 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) will file legislation on Friday to ban American citizens who fight alongside the Islamic State (IS) and other terror groups from returning to the United States, where they pose a significant terror threat, according to sources in the senator’s office.

Cruz, who first proposed the legislation last year, seeks to strip those Americans who travel abroad to fight with IS (also known as ISIL or ISIS) of their U.S. citizenship rights and stop them from coming back stateside.

The bill, known as the Expatriate Terrorist Act (E.T.A.), tightens and updates existing regulations by which a U.S. citizen effectively renounces his or her citizenship.

Cruz said that he is filing the bill partly in response to President Obama’s Tuesday State of the Union address, which he described as “detached from reality” on the foreign policy front.

“President Obama’s approach to foreign policy refuses to acknowledge the threats our enemies pose to our national security—it is detached from reality and making the world a more dangerous place,” said Cruz, who also is releasing a new video that takes aim at Obama for misleading the nation about these threats in his annual address.

Cruz said stripping American IS fighters of their citizenship is a step toward securing the country and restoring the country’s image.

“We’ve seen the grave consequence of the Obama-Clinton-Kerry foreign policy unravel with respect to Iran, Russia, and now Yemen,” Cruz said. “These consequences are not confined to faraway lands. They directly threaten America and our allies.”

“That is why this week, I am re-filing the Expatriate Terrorist Act, which prevents Americans who have fought abroad for designated terrorist groups from returning to the United States,” he said. “I look forward to working with senators on both sides of the aisle on this and additional measures to secure our nation and restore America’s leadership in the world.”…

Take ACTION: Click HERE to contact Illinois’ U.S. Senators Dick Durbin and Mark Kirk to ask them to support S. 247, known as the Expatriate Terrorist Act.  American citizens who take an oath to a foreign terrorist organization should have their citizenship revoked.




Experts: Islam Must Be Confronted, Not Coddled

Written by Chad Groening

In the wake of Wednesday’s horrific murder of 12 people at a Paris newspaper office, liberals – including President Barack Obama – have once again refused to acknowledge that the attack was “Islamic terrorism.” Obama just referred to the attack as “terrorism” – which J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department attorney, finds perplexing.

“The perpetrators say they’re doing it in the name of Islam,” Adams points out. “So you have to confront the Islamic component one way or another because the murderers themselves are saying that it is Islam and they’re muttering Islamic prayers as they’re doing the murders.

“So let’s figure out why Islam seems to be the trademark for so many murderers around the world.”

Adams, who now serves as legal editor for PJ Media, also finds it ridiculous that former Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean said the Paris terrorist killers were not Muslim, but members of some kind of cult.

“Folks like Howard Dean and the president have a seriously difficult time identifying evil. I think they’re actually uncomfortable with the entire notion,” he suggests. “It’s [the terrorists themselves] who are saying I’m doing this in the name of Islam – it’s not conservatives accusing them of that. They’re confessing as they do these things, so obviously there’s a problem. How it gets resolved remains to be seen.”

Adams says the barbarians who believe they are acting consistent with Islamic teaching are a threat to civilization now and in the foreseeable future.

European backlash against ‘Islamisation’

In the days before the attack in France, rallies were taking place in neighboring Germany by thousands of citizens frustrated with the way the Islamic influence has been allowed to grow in the country. While Chancellor Angela Merkel denounced the protests in her own country as “racist,” she described the Paris attack as “an attack against the values we all hold dear, values by which we stand, values of freedom of the press, freedom in general, and the dignity of man.”

National defense analyst Robert Maginnis believes the terrorist attack in Paris is just the latest example of why there is a growing backlash against the Islamisation of Europe. The senior fellow for national security at the Family Research Council points to a major undercurrent throughout Western Europe against the failure of the Muslim populations to integrate into the culture.

“So as a result you get these Islamic ghettos that are all over Western Europe that don’t allow the policemen [to come in], don’t use the language, don’t allow the culture – and there is a backlash,” he tells OneNewsNow. “It’s been brewing for the last two decades, and I think it’s intensifying even now.”

Maginnis admits he’s worried about the Islamic problem growing worse in the United States with Barack Obama in the White House for two more years.

“We’re at the mercy of Mr. Obama and his appointees, who have purposely turned a blind eye to the threat that is growing within our borders due to certain immigrants [as well as] the threat that is outside our borders – [specifically] his tepid response to ISIL in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he states.


This article was originally posted at the OneNewsNow.com website.


Islam in America:
A Christian Response

featuring Dr. Erwin Lutzer
May 7, 2015

CLICK HERE for Details