We have commented on the trials of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff in Austria, both of whom are being prosecuted for telling the truth about Islam. (See our post, Civilization on trial, October 10, 2010.)

Throughout Europe it has become a crime to say anything about Muslims and Islam that Muslims do not like. It makes no difference if what is said is provably true. This means that not only is speaking the truth in this regard a crime, but free speech itself is a heresy.

We wrote that what is really on trial is our civilization. The Western world owes its greatness to the Enlightenment. Now the values with which the Enlightenment endowed us, chief among them freedom and truth – the freedom to search for truth and declare openly what we find –  are under threat. If we are to be returned to the darkness that prevailed in Europe before that dawn of the intellect, to the time when this church or that decided what people were permitted to know and say, and would punish in the cruelest imaginable ways any thinker who challenged the prevailing dogma, our civilization is as surely doomed as was Rome by Christianity.

The darkness is visibly spreading. In Denmark, Lars Hedegaard, President of the Danish Free Press Society, and Jesper Langballe, Member of Parliament, have been charged with committing the same “crime” as Geert Wilders and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff.

With her usual moral clarity, Melanie Phillips writes about this travesty of justice:

A Danish MP, Jesper Langballe, was convicted of hate speech last month for endorsing Hedegaard’s comments about ‘honour’ violence and sexual abuse within Muslim families. In his statement in court … Langballe wrote about the Orwellian Danish legal rules which effectively convicted him in advance of his trial, causing him to choose to ‘confess’ rather than participate in such a totalitarian ‘circus’.

Now Lars Hedegaard faces a similar circus. Later this month, he is to stand trial for ‘racism’ after he stated about Muslim ‘honour’ violence within families: “They rape their own children.”

In vain did Hedegaard explain the following day that obviously he had not meant by this that all Muslims engage in such practices, any more than saying ‘Americans make good films’ means that all Americans make good films; in vain did he adduce copious evidence of concern — including from Muslim victims themselves — about the amount of sexual and ‘honour’ violence, including rape and incest, within Muslim families. None of this made any difference. Hedegaard is about to be burned at the Danish legal stake for his heresy. …

As far as I can see, these developments in Denmark have been totally ignored in the English-speaking media. So much for the liberals’ fetish of free speech — so noisily defended whenever Christianity [MP’s one blind spot, in our view, is her defense of religion- JB], America, Israel or the west are being demonised and libelled; so much for the feminists’ professed concern for the rights of women and the obscenity of rape and sexual abuse. Two men who actually stand up for these principles are being persecuted for doing so, while the so-called progressive world is either helping pile up the faggots for their fire or looking the other way.

It’s not just Hedegaard or Langballe who are being consumed by these flames, however, but Europe’s own freedom.

The immoral ideology of Islam is not just tolerated in the West, it is actively and even passionately encouraged, by Western leaders, to spread and gain privilege and power. Yet the noisy, persistent, lying myth is propagated that Muslim populations in the West – particularly in the US – are victims of “hate crimes”, or what is called “Islamophobia”.

In stark contrast, Christians in Islamic states are continually persecuted. Massacres of Christians by Muslims are increasing in number and ferocity. The absurd morality that their religion teaches them not only prevents Christians from complaining too loudly or too often about this state of affairs, it encourages them never to retaliate but proudly to consider themselves heroic martyrs; which simply means that Islamic evil triumphs.

From Creeping Sharia, January 9, 2011, quoting Christian Newswire:

Despite Communist North Korea topping the annual Open Doors World Watch List (WWL) for the ninth consecutive year, the most dangerous countries in which to practice Christianity are overwhelmingly Islamic ones. … Of the top 10 countries on the 2011 WWL, eight have Islamic majorities.

Notably, one of the Islamic-majority countries where Christians are in extreme danger, is Iraq. What then has the US and its coalition partners won, what has it poured out blood and treasure for through 8 years of war in that incorrigible country? Was it not to make it “democratic” and consequently peaceful and tolerant?

The country that saw the greatest deterioration of Christian religious freedom in the reporting period from Nov. 1, 2009, through Oct. 31, 2010, was Iraq … The country has seen a Christian exodus in recent years, with an estimated 334,000 Christians remaining in this ancient cradle of Christianity, a drop of more than 50 percent since the 2003 toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The main reason why Christians are fleeing is organized violence by an extremist militia, especially in the northern city of Mosul and in the capital Baghdad, in an attempt to cleanse these areas of its Christian presence. At least 90 Christians were martyred last year in Iraq while hundreds more were injured in bomb and gun attacks. More killings have taken place in the past two weeks. …

The country with the largest Christian community on the WWL’s top 15 is Pakistan with more than 5 million believers. Pakistani Christians also faced a sharp erosion of their religious liberty … Twenty-nine Christians were martyred in the reporting period with at least one killing occurring every month. …

Egypt … could be a focus of persecution this year as 21 Christians were killed in a bomb blast on New Year’s Day outside the Church of Two Saints in Alexandria. [Latest reports say more than 30 were killed, about 100 injured – see our post immediately below, J’accuse.]

In the light of that information, now contemplate this report concerning religion-inspired aggression in the US, also from the very useful site Creeping Sharia, December 29, 2010:

Without serious debate or examination, the Los Angeles City Council recently passed a resolution that opposes “Islamophobia” and “repudiates” random acts of violence against Muslims.

This …  resolution apparently accepts the premise that residents of the city commit acts of hate against Muslims so often that it warrants an official resolution from city leaders condemning and repudiating these acts. Is this really the case?

According to the latest hate crime report from the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations, 88 percent of all religiously based hate crimes in 2009 were against Jews. [Most of which – suspicion has it not unreasonably – were committed by Muslims, though no official report says so or gives the identity and numbers of the perpetrators – JB.] Hate crimes that targeted Muslims (3 percent) ranked slightly above those directed at Scientologists (1 percent). In fact, the commission found that attacks against Christians (8 percent) outnumbered attacks against Muslims.

In any case, the actual number of reported hate crimes based on religion is quite small. In a county that has more than 10 million highly diverse residents, only a total of 131 crimes based on religion took place in all of 2009. … [Against atheists for being atheists? Figures hard to come by. Total of 6 recorded in 2007 – JB.]

Since only 3 percent of 131 hate crimes during 2009 was directed against Muslims, it’s difficult to understand why city leaders would pass a resolution that zeroes in on the category that has the next-to-lowest numbers recorded by the County’s Human Relations Commission.

Is it really difficult to understand? We could suggest a few probable causes: cowardice; ignorance; gullibility; Leftist ideology; Christian pusillanimity …

Again we have true stories to tell about the intense hatred, cruelty, and injustice inspired by religious beliefs and prejudices. One of them happened more than a hundred years ago; the second earlier this month.

In 1894, a French army officer of Alsatian Jewish descent, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, was falsely accused of selling military secrets to Germany. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in the penal colony on Devil’s Island, where he was kept in solitary confinement.

In 1896 new evidence came to light that should have exonerated him. It identified another officer, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, as the real traitor. But the evidence was suppressed and Esterhazy was never formally indicted. Dreyfus’s conviction was confirmed after forged documents were suddenly produced, but not everyone believed he was guilty. Chief among those who claimed there had been a miscarriage of justice was the writer Emile Zola, who published an open letter in a Paris newspaper on January 13, 1898, addresssed to the President of France, headed J’accuse – I accuse.

It was a brave thing that Zola did. For accusing the government of acting out of anti-Semitism and unlawfully imprisoning Dreyfus, he himself was sentenced to a term in jail, which he escaped by fleeing to England. But his efforts helped to bring Dreyfus back eventually from Devil’s Island, to receive a pardon in 1906 for the crime he had not committed. The French army took over a hundred years to admit it had been wrong. It did, however, reinstate Dreyfus, who earned promotion, and served his country throughout the First World War. Esterhazy got away with his treason, went to live in England, and there spent the rest of his life publishing anti-Semitic fulminations.

Now another letter has appeared in a newspaper headed J’accuse. It is written by a brave Egyptian journalist accusing the Egyptian government among others in the matter of the persecution of Coptic Christians, following the bombing of one of their churches in Alexandria early in the morning of January 1. More than thirty Copts were killed, and about a hundred others were injured. The most likely perpetrators were al-Qaeda terrorists.

This is what the journalist Hani Shukrallah wrote on January 1, 2011, the day of the massacre:

J’accuse

Hypocrisy and good intentions will not stop the next massacre. Only a good hard look at ourselves and sufficient resolve to face up to the ugliness in our midst will do so.

We are to join in a chorus of condemnation. Jointly, Muslims and Christians, government and opposition, Church and Mosque, clerics and laypeople – all of us are going to stand up and with a single voice declare unequivocal denunciation of al-Qaeda, Islamist militants, and Muslim fanatics of every shade, hue and color; some of us will even go the extra mile to denounce Salafi Islam, Islamic fundamentalism as a whole, and the Wahabi Islam which, presumably, is a Saudi import wholly alien to our Egyptian national culture.

And once again we’re going to declare the eternal unity of “the twin elements of the nation”, and hearken back the Revolution of 1919, with its hoisted banner showing the crescent embracing the cross, and giving symbolic expression to that unbreakable bond.

Much of it will be sheer hypocrisy; a great deal of it will be variously nuanced so as keep, just below the surface, the heaps of narrow-minded prejudice, flagrant double standard and, indeed, bigotry that holds in its grip so many of the participants in the condemnations.

All of it will be to no avail. We’ve been here before; we’ve done exactly that, yet the massacres continue, each more horrible than the one before it, and the bigotry and intolerance spread deeper and wider into every nook and cranny of our society. It is not easy to empty Egypt of its Christians; they’ve been here for as long as there has been Christianity in the world. Close to a millennium and half of Muslim rule did not eradicate the nation’s Christian community, rather it maintained it sufficiently strong and sufficiently vigorous so as to play a crucial role in shaping the national, political and cultural identity of modern Egypt.

Yet now, two centuries after the birth of the modern Egyptian nation state, and as we embark on the second decade of the 21stcentury, the previously unheard of seems no longer beyond imagining: a Christian-free Egypt, one where the cross will have slipped out of the crescent’s embrace, and off the flag symbolizing our modern national identity. I hope that if and when that day comes I will have been long dead, but dead or alive, this will be an Egypt which I do not recognize and to which I have no desire to belong.

I am no Zola, but I too can accuse. And it’s not the blood thirsty criminals of al-Qaeda or whatever other gang of hoodlums involved in the horror of Alexandria that I am concerned with.

I accuse a government that seems to think that by outbidding the Islamists it will also outflank them.

I accuse the host of MPs and government officials who cannot help but take their own personal bigotries along to the parliament, or to the multitude of government bodies, national and local, from which they exercise unchecked, brutal yet at the same time hopelessly inept authority.

I accuse those state bodies who believe that by bolstering the Salafi trend they are undermining the Muslim Brotherhood, and who like to occasionally play to bigoted anti-Coptic sentiments, presumably as an excellent distraction from other more serious issues of government.

But most of all, I accuse the millions of supposedly moderate Muslims among us; those who’ve been growing more and more prejudiced, inclusive and narrow minded with every passing year.

I accuse those among us who would rise up in fury over a decision to halt construction of a Muslim Center near ground zero in New York, but applaud the Egyptian police when they halt the construction of a staircase in a Coptic church in the Omranya district of Greater Cairo.

I’ve been around, and I have heard you speak, in your offices, in your clubs, at your dinner parties: “The Copts must be taught a lesson,” “the Copts are growing more arrogant,” “the Copts are holding secret conversions of Muslims”, and in the same breath, “the Copts are preventing Christian women from converting to Islam, kidnapping them, and locking them up in monasteries.”

I accuse you all, because in your bigoted blindness you cannot even see the violence to logic and sheer common sense that you commit; that you dare accuse the whole world of using a double standard against us, and are, at the same time, wholly incapable of showing a minimum awareness of your own blatant double standard.

And finally, I accuse the liberal intellectuals, both Muslim and Christian who, whether complicit, afraid, or simply unwilling to do or say anything that may displease “the masses”, have stood aside, finding it sufficient to join in one futile chorus of denunciation following another, even as the massacres spread wider, and grow more horrifying.

In the remainder of the letter there are interesting indications of how Egyptians – or at least some of them – see the United States as a sort of big brother, to be appealed to for rescue when Egyptians are overwhelmed by their own political-religious conflicts:

A few years ago I wrote in the Arabic daily Al-Hayat, commenting on a columnist in one of the Egyptian papers. The columnist, whose name I’ve since forgotten, wrote lauding the patriotism of an Egyptian Copt who had himself written saying that he would rather be killed at the hands of his Muslim brethren than seek American intervention to save him.

Addressing myself to the patriotic Copt, I simply asked him the question: where does his willingness for self-sacrifice for the sake of the nation stop. Giving his own life may be quite a noble, even laudable endeavor, but is he also willing to give up the lives of his children, wife, mother? How many Egyptian Christians, I asked him, are you willing to sacrifice before you call upon outside intervention, a million, two, three, all of them?

Yet Shakrallah himself would like his people to outgrow the need to appeal to Uncle Sam:

Our options, I said then and continue to say today are not so impoverished and lacking in imagination and resolve that we are obliged to choose between having Egyptian Copts killed, individually or en masse, or run to Uncle Sam. Is it really so difficult to conceive of ourselves as rational human beings with a minimum of backbone so as to act to determine our fate, the fate of our nation?

That, indeed, is the only option we have before us, and we better grasp it, before it’s too late.

It’s a fine clarion-call of a letter. But will it change anything?

We are strongly in favor of second-amendment rights. We believe that a citizenry is safer for being armed.

Tom Hinkson, a member of the National Rifle Association, has this to say about the anti-gun reaction of left-wing pundits to the shooting yesterday of Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, by a psychopath named Jared Lee Loughner.

Within hours of the horrific attack in Tuscan, Arizona yesterday, liberal pundits are attacking our civil liberties. As has been the norm for the last 30 years, the leftists are blaming the violence on rhetoric, guns, and of course, racism. It seems that they will take every opportunity to attack our first and second Amendment rights in the name of “stopping the violence”.

No doubt, by the time this article reaches your eyes, there will be several more examples of what I am talking about, but they all follow the same formula. Here are some examples from this most recent tragedy.

The most egregious so far is this statement by the Pima County Sheriff, Clarence Dupnik: “When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government -. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous, and unfortunately, Arizona I think has become sort of the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.” What a way to take advantage of a situation! There was no racial component whatsoever to this shooting. Dupnik further states that “free speech… is not without consequences”, as if we should re-think our First Amendment protections or take the chance of getting shot and killed in a random act of violence.

Further attacks on our Constitutional rights stemming from this incident come from people like Gary Hart and Josh Sugarmann, who both wrote articles published by the Huffington Post.

Hart states that, “So long as we all tolerate this kind of irresponsible and dangerous rhetoric or, in the case of some commentators, treat it with delight, reward it, and consider it cute, so long will we place all those in public life, whom the provocateurs dislike, in the crosshairs of danger.” So, because some commentator didn’t like a political position, this shooting was destined to happen?

Sugarmann, a gun-control activist, writes that, “Congress should act immediately to reinstate an effective ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines and move quickly to pass an effective assault weapons ban.” Ah, the “guns create violence” argument never gets old does it? But Sugarmann also goes one step further by taking a quote from the NRA’s Executive Vice President, Wayne LaPierre out of context. LaPierre stated, years ago that, “The guys with the guns make the rules… if the only guys with guns are the bad guys, we’re screwed!”. Sugarmann threw the “guys with the guns make the rules” part back at LaPierre without context, by stating that “one more guy with a gun made the rules”. Sugarmann’s solution of course is to take away everyone’s guns.

The shooting at the Safeway in Tuscan, AZ was a horrific act, perpetrated by a mentally deranged lone gunman. In the aftermath of this tragedy, as with any other, the enemies of liberty and freedom claim that we must make a choice between our rights and freedoms and our safety. This is no choice because if we give up our freedoms, we will be at the mercy of people in power, whether they be politicians, terrorists, the lone gunman, the thief in the dark alley, or foreign governments. Benjamin Franklin wisely stated, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

I am on the side of Benjamin Franklin. I believe that tragedies like this most recent one in Tuscan illustrate the need for more people to exercise their freedoms as Americans. The claim that one political pundit or another is somehow responsible for this shooting is false and irresponsible. We should put the blame squarely where it belongs: on the head of the perpetrator of the violence. To the gun-banners, I say that there are no gun-free zones, only good-guy-gun-free zones – as in Tucson, where apparently only the bad guy had a gun. If someone has malicious intent, a simple law adding one more crime to murder, armed robbery, or any other violent act is not going to be a deterrent. I say criminalize the acts of violence, not the preparation for self-defense or the defense of others.

So far, 6 people have died, and 13 people are reported injured from this shooting in Arizona. The gunman was subdued as he was reloading his only gun, by two people who tackled him. Ask yourself how different this could have been had there been legally armed citizens in attendance. I do not claim that there would have been no death or violence, but I firmly believe that fewer innocent people would have been killed or injured. I commend the two heroes who subdued the assailant, but had they been armed, wouldn’t this situation have been ended more quickly and much more safely?

Aside from the appalling cost of life on 1/8/11, the cost to the taxpayers for the legal process that is going to begin will be enormous. Incarceration costs alone, which vary from prison to prison, average about $50,000 per year. Justice would have been served much more quickly and a whole lot more cheaply if an armed citizen had simply shot back. Do not be fooled into giving up your freedoms. Instead, exercise your freedoms, and if the opportunity presents itself, make a positive difference.

We invite more readers to let us know their opinions on this subject.

Here is a real-life drama, of the tragic type, illustrating how the greatest impediment to moral behavior is religion.

Act One:

In November 2010, a Christian woman in Pakistan, Asia Bibi (also called Asiya Noreen in some reports), was sentenced to death for the crime of blasphemy.

She is 45 years old and has five children according to some news sources, three according to others. Whatever its size, hers is the only Christian family in the village of Ittan Wala. She was working in the fields on a hot summer’s day in 2009 when she was asked by the other women working with her to fetch water, which she did. But when she brought it some of the women refused to accept it on the grounds that she was a Christian, so by carrying the water to them with her infidel hands, she polluted it.

A few days later she was attacked by a mob, beaten and gang-raped. The police were called, and they took her, at first, into protective custody. Then, pressed by her accusers who said she had “insulted the Prophet Muhammad”, they charged her with blasphemy. She and  her defenders, who included Shahbaz Bhatti, the minorities minister, denied the charge.

She was kept in isolation for more than a year. Finally brought to trial, she was sentenced to be hanged.

Act Two:

On January 4, 2011, the governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, was shot dead by one of his own bodyguards because he had spoken in defense of Asia Bibi, visited her in prison, and advocated reform of the blasphemy laws.

Taseer had openly supported Sherry Rehman, a politician who’d sought to effect such reform. The mere attempt had brought tens of thousands of protestors on to the streets of Pakistan’s cities in December, 2010. The crowds were incited both by  the “fundamentalist” Deoband movement and the “tolerant” Barelvi sect.

The government wilted before the religious frenzy of the mob. Babar Awan, the justice minister, hurriedly promised that there would be no reform of the sacred laws of blasphemy  – for which cowardice Salman Taseer bravely criticized him and the government as a whole.

A few days later Taseer was murdered.

The bodyguard-assassin, Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, declared on being arrested that Taseer was a blasphemer and the punishment for blasphemy was death. Far from being a criminal in his own eyes, he had virtuously carried out what his religion and the law of the land required him to do. Pakistan’s law is based constitutionally on sharia, and prescribes death for blasphemers.

Qadri instantly became a hero. Islamic scholars defend him. He has thousands of followers on Facebook.

Chances are this killer will live a long life, honored and esteemed by his compatriots and his co-religionists.

Chances are Asia Bibi, the bearer of water to the thirsty, will be hanged. Her husband tried to shelter her two youngest children from knowledge of the verdict. They will know it soon if they don’t already, and their religion will tell them to condone the injustice.

Ahmed Ghailani, the al-Qaeda terrorist who participated in the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, will be sentenced this month, perhaps to life imprisonment, but perhaps to as little as 20 years.

Ghailani was transported from Guantanamo Bay to New York City to await trial in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in June 2009. When the case came to trial, the judge disallowed the testimony of a key witness. On November 17, 2010, a jury found him guilty of one count of conspiracy, but acquitted him of 284 other charges including all murder counts. Critics of the Obama administration said the verdict proves civilian courts cannot be trusted to prosecute terrorists because it shows a jury might acquit such a defendant entirely. Supporters of the trial have said that the conviction and the stiff sentencing prove that the federal justice system works.

Not if he gets only 20 years.

Last month the House banned funding to bring Guantanamo prisoners to the US to be tried as criminals in federal courts.

Predictably, this elicited howls of protest from those who hold the strange opinion that prisoners of war should be tried individually like civilian citizens; the pro-Islam sentimentalists (such as President Obama and Attorney-General Eric Holder) who want “Gitmo” closed, pretending that it’s a tough penal institution rather than the holiday-camp safety-pen it actually is.

Prisoners of war should be kept until the war is over. If trials must be held, they should be conducted by military tribunals, and death sentences should be carried out promptly with guns.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the planner of 9/11, Richard Reid the shoe-bomber, Nidal Malik Hasan the Fort Hood mass-murderer, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab the underwear-bomber, Faisal Shahzad the Times Square car-bomber, and all Muslim terrorists waging jihad against the non-Muslim world should be brought before military tribunals.

This is not what is happening. But if jihadists apprehended on American soil are to be tried as criminals, their sentences should be as harsh as the law allows.

Richard Reid was tried as a criminal and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Judge William Young made a most eloquent case for trying terrorists individually as criminals. He declared in his ruling, delivered January 30, 2003:

You are not an enemy combatant. You are a terrorist. You are not a soldier in any war. You are a terrorist. To give you that reference, to call you a soldier, gives you far too much stature. Whether it is the officers of government who do it or your attorney who does it, or that happens to be your view, you are a terrorist … And we do not negotiate with terrorists. We do not treat with terrorists. We do not sign documents with terrorists. We hunt them down one by one and bring them to justice. ..

It is because we prize individual freedom so much that you are here in this beautiful courtroom. So that everyone can see, truly see, that justice is administered fairly, individually, and discretely. It is for freedom’s sake that your lawyers are striving so vigorously on your behalf and have filed appeals, will go on in their representation of you before other judges.

We are about it. Because we all know that the way we treat you, Mr. Reid, is the measure of our own liberties. Make no mistake though. It is yet true that we will bare any burden, pay any price, to preserve our freedoms. Look around this courtroom. Mark it well. The world is not going to long remember what you or I say here. Day after tomorrow, it will be forgotten, but this, however, will long endure. Here in this courtroom and courtrooms all across America, the American people will gather to see that justice, individual justice, justice, not war, individual justice is in fact being done.

We agree that Reid was not a soldier, and that he is a terrorist. But he tried to blow up a civil aircraft in flight as a Muslim carrying out his duty to wage Holy War, the war that America went to fight in Afghanistan.

On that point we disagree with Judge William Young. But some words of his we think are worth recalling in opposition to those whose hearts bleed for the inmates of Guantanamo :

It seems to me you hate the one thing that is most precious. You hate our freedom. Our individual freedom. Our individual freedom to live as we choose, to come and go as we choose, to believe or not believe as we individually choose. Here, in this society, the very winds carry freedom. They carry it everywhere from sea to shining sea.

And long may they do so, however hard the Obama administration tries to bring them under government control.

But such winds should not fan the cheeks of Islam’s Holy Warriors.

We  believe that the Framers of the United States Constitution intended to found a secular nation, not “a Christian nation” as so many conservative pundits assert. We have looked for informed opinion about it, and found this one, given to us by Tom Hinkson, who is “a  life-long atheist”. He was, he says, “not brought up with any religion”, though both his parents “believe in a Christian deity”. He served his country in the Navy as a Nuclear Reactor Operator for seven years. In the last election cycle he joined the campaign for Marco Rubio. He is a  life member of both the National Rifle Association (NRA) and Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW).

Here is his opinion. It is his and not ours, but the information he provides confirms our own.

2011 is supposed to be the year of the Constitutional Conservative, but is it really? The Tea Party has helped  the Republican Party gain a majority in the House of Representatives, and near parity in the Senate, so things in the US have to get better – right? Not so fast! It seems that we as a nation have traded one evil for a possibly lesser evil, but another evil nonetheless. Have you noticed who is at the helm of the Tea Party? Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich … the list goes on. You might ask, “Well aren’t they better than Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Joe Biden?” The answer is yes, of course they are. But too many of the Tea Party figureheads represent that “silent majority” of biblical literalist Christians who, instead of wanting to turn the United States into a socialist utopia as Obama and the Democrats do, want to turn it into a kind of theocracy.

Since the rise of the Tea Party, there has been a movement to re-learn our American history, mainly fueled by Glenn Beck. This would be a very good thing, if he told the whole story. History is usually told with huge gaps to reinforce the tellers’ point of view. The so-called Christian conservatives bend history one way, and the Progressives would rather ignore history altogether.

If you have watched Glenn Beck for any appreciable length of time, you have seen him bring several people on to argue that we are a Christian nation, that nearly everything in the Constitution has a biblical foundation, and the proof for these claims lies in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence. He and they make a compelling argument – at least to those who don’t know history.

It is true that the preamble of the Declaration of Independence refers to a divine power:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The  Constitution, however, created a very explicitly secular government, and those that would argue otherwise try to re-write history to hide the transition from a government that derives its power from a higher power to one that derives its power from the consent of the governed.

Glenn Beck and the “Christian Conservatives” would have everyone believe that the Declaration of Independence founded our nation, and that the Constitution was written with the Declaration as sort of a foundation. The question is, are they right? Let’s look at some history that they won’t tell us.

The Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4th, 1776, formally declaring the independence of the 13 colonies from Great Britain, but did it create the United States of America? The answer is no, the United States of America was created by the Articles of Confederation, which created a binding agreement of government between the 13 original colonies. The Articles of Confederation were not ratified until March, 1781. Until the Articles of Confederation were ratified, the United States of America was just an idea. But wait a minute, why doesn’t anyone mention the Articles of Confederation? Probably because the Articles of Confederation created a government that failed in short order. The Constitution that we have today was originally ratified on September 17th, 1787, creating our current form of government.

The “Christian Conservatives” would have everyone believe that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written virtually side-by-side; in fact they are frequently published this way. The question is why would they want to ignore the 11-year gap? The answer is that the Constitution is a secular document. But, if we can be convinced that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written side-by-side, then an argument can be made to declare the United States of America a “Christian nation”, which opens the door for a biblical lens to view the Constitution through; even though the separation of church and state is an undeniable concept that is spelled out in the Constitution, and further explained by Thomas Jefferson in his letters to two separate Baptist organizations (see here and here).

Christians will argue that the intent of the founders was to create a Christian nation because Christianity was (and still is) the major religion present in the United States. But, if that was their intent, why not spell it out? Why would the founders specifically state that there will be “no religious test for office” (Article 6, paragraph 3 of the Constitution), or that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” (1st Amendment)? The answer is obvious: the founders wanted to create a secular government. Not only did they not state that there was a federal religion, they specifically banned it! In fact they went even further than that, and banned congress from making any law that RESPECTED the establishment of a religion, meaning that not only would the government not create a religion, or declare a national religion, but that the government would not even formally recognize religions.

Of course, the secular argument has a few problems: for instance, it is traditional for congress to open with a prayer, which would seem to contradict the Constitution itself, and honestly, it does. So, how can this be explained? Hypocrisy, plain and simple. If there is one constant in the history of this nation, then hypocrisy is it. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were both outspoken critics of slavery, yet both owned dozens of slaves. No one today will argue in favor of slavery, even though several of the founders owned them. Yet, there are many who would argue for legislation based upon the bible or other religious texts rather than the Constitution simply because most of our founders identified themselves as Christians.

In the Declaration of Independence, there are three mentions of a higher power, they are: “Nature’s God”, “Creator”, and “Divine Providence”. None of these three terms are innately Christian, and the use of the terms is as an authority to separate from Great Britain. The United States of America is mentioned at the end of the document, but as I stated earlier, this was an idea; the United States of America was not formally established until the Articles of Confederation were ratified. Independence from Great Britain, and thus international recognition as a nation was not achieved until the end of the Revolutionary War by the signing of the Treaty of Paris on September 3rd, 1783.

In the Articles of Confederation, there are three references to a deity. Two of those references are “in the Year of Our Lord”, which was the common language for stating a date, not a reference to any divine inspiration for the government being created. The third reference is found in Article 13, the first sentence of the second paragraph states: “And Whereas it hath pleased the Great Governor of the World to incline the hearts of the legislatures we respectively represent in congress, to approve of, and to authorize us to ratify the said articles of confederation and perpetual union.” “Great Governor of the World” is an obvious allusion to a higher power, but not specifically to a Christian deity.

Nonetheless, the “Great Governor of the World” is the authority that is used to create the government under the Articles of Confederation. So if  the United States of America were still governed by the Articles of Confederation, the Christians would have some proof that we were founded as a “Christian Nation”. But as The Articles of Confederation created a very weak and very flawed government which soon failed, it can be stated that the government formed as a direct result of the Declaration of Independence was a failure. The founders of our current government knew that several changes needed to be made.

Within the Constitution, there is only one reference to any higher power, and that reference is in the date, which as stated above, was the common way of declaring a date “in the Year of Our Lord”. That reference is at the end of the Constitution, just before the signatures. There are several very important differences between the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Articles of Confederation.

The first, and largest difference, is that the Constitution does not claim any authority from a higher power, whereas both the Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation did. Instead, the Constitution boldly proclaims “We the People” as the authority to create the government and all that comes with it. This runs in direct contradiction to the “Christian Conservative” claim that our rights are not given to us by the government, but by the Christian God (which was not specifically mentioned in any founding document). This puts a large hole in the “Christian Conservative” argument, but the Constitution does not stop there.

Within the Constitution, there are three specific bans on the co-mingling of religion and government. These bans are found in Article 6, paragraph 3, and in the 1st Amendment. The Constitution clearly states that there shall be “no religious test for office”, at either the federal or state levels, and that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This suggests very strongly that one of the many lessons that the founders learned from the Articles of Confederation was that the mixing of religion and government does not work.

So while in principle I agree with “restoring America” as the Tea Partiers and Glenn Beck advocate, I say let’s restore it to a government run by the laws set forth by the Constitution. While we’re at it, let’s restore the Pledge of Allegiance to how it was before 1954, when the words “under God” were added. We can also take the words “In God We Trust” off of our currency. Those words were added first to coinage in 1864, on the two-cent coin, long after the founders died. Paper money wasn’t tainted with those words until 1957. Our national motto “In God We Trust” wasn’t adopted until 1956. All of the laws ordering these changes are unconstitutional because they all respect the establishment of religion. Let us abide by the Constitution, and restore the secular nation that the Founders intended.

Anyone for death?

A website named Compassion and Choices – deceptively, since it should accurately be named Pitilessness and Compulsion –  says this:

New Medicare regulations to take effect January 1 will include a provision physicians, social workers and families pushed for. The New York Times reports:

“Under the new policy, outlined in a Medicare regulation, the government will pay doctors who advise patients on options for end-of-life care, which may include advance directives to forgo aggressive life-sustaining treatment.”

In truth, the consultation is not about forgoing treatment, as advance directives are equally suited to requesting life-sustaining treatment. Thus, this Medicare enhancement simply encourages communication, promotes choice, compensates doctors for important care and empowers patients.

Let’s examine this. Compassion and Choices is a leading pro-euthanasia organization. It is only sweet-talking about “life-sustaining” treatments. The NYT – which obviously agrees with Compassion and Choices – sneaks the word “aggressive” in front of the phrase, to warn you against opting for treatment if you’re old and in the way.

There are good arguments for euthanasia, provided it is always the choice of the euthanased (to coin a word). All sane adults can make that choice like any other – in advance if they want to, though doing so commits them to suffer action by others that they might not really want when the critical moment comes and communication may be difficult or impossible. One visualizes the possibility of desperation and panic in a struggle to cancel instructions given when death was not staring one in the face. Yeeow!

Why is it necessary for doctors to inform people that they can forgo treatment if they want to? And to be paid a special fee for doing so? This is statist thinking. The view from the left. Anti-free  as always.

Compassion and Choices goes on: “this Medicare enhancement [ah, an enhancement!] simply [“openly”, “innocently”] encourages communication, promotes choice, compensates doctors for important care and empowers patients.

So much good! Who can possibly object?

But why do people need to be encouraged to communicate? Are most Americans tongue-tied?

Does choice need to be promoted? The choice, remember, is between life and death. Who is unaware that as long as you live the choice of death is yours?

Why should doctors need “compensation” for telling people what they already know? Without being exceptionally sensitive, one can feel a creepy implication here!  Maybe because what doctor’s are really being urged to do is advise sick people to choose death? And maybe doctors are not usually willing to do that, so they need a little extra inducement, aka a bribe?

Finally, this program of nudging to death is said to “empower patients”. Watch that word empower – it stands out in bold capitals in the lexicon of the left. But no patient gains any more power by being told he or she can choose death than he or she has always had, so nothing changes … unless ….

Unless all this talk by Compassion and Choices is preparing a way to legal murder; a seeking for wording that could be interpreted as allowing something far worse than a death panel – a Law of Life-Limitation; the state claiming the right to raise a sign saying “Come In Number X, Your Time Is Up “.

What is sickening about these ever-so-compassionate choosers is their unresisted desire to meddle in the lives of the rest of us. Through a meddlesome state. All for our own good, of course, as always. They know best how we should live, and how and when we should die.

Like it or not, the old are to be routinely badgered to grant permission for their lives to be cut short as “this improvement to Medicare” is implemented pronto this month. Compassion and Choice are cock-a-hoop about it. It’s “a long-awaited response to those families who didn’t know their loved ones’ preferences when confronted with difficult decisions in an emergency”. Families have been begging, you see, for the state to make grannies and grandpas tell them to switch that thing off, and at last a reluctant state has acceded to the popular clamor.

With the coming of the New Year, Medicare will begin empowering seniors to consider the care that is right for them when they face the end of life, and better ensure their wishes control the care they receive.

Sure, they’ve only to lie there wishing and they’ll stay in control.

For all their openness and innocence, behind all the smiles, the Apostles of Death scratch at a little itchy spot of guilt.

So we learn from LifeNews, which brings us this information:

The Democrat who started the latest national debate over the inclusion of so-called “death panels” by the Obama administration into federal regulations now regrets doing so.

The office of Representative Earl Blumenauer, an assisted suicide advocate from Oregon who works closely with pro-euthanasia groups like Compassion and Choices, alerted supporters of the change the Obama administration implemented and worked to ask them to keep the news quiet.

“We would ask that you not broadcast this accomplishment out to any of your lists e-mails can too easily be forwarded,” his staff wrote. “Thus far, it seems that no press or blogs have discovered it but we will be keeping a close watch and may be calling on you if we need a rapid, targeted response. The longer this [regulation] goes unnoticed, the better our chances of keeping it.”

The memo talked of a “quiet” victory and had the congressman worrying about how Republican leaders would “use this small provision to perpetuate the ‘death panel’ myth.”

But LifeNews.com reported on the new regulations and, weeks later, the New York Times got a copy of the memo Blumenauer wrote and the national dustup began.

Now, Blumenauer told The Hill that he regrets [not the program of murder, but] the secretive language used in the email, which he says he did not see beforehand. …

Still, he defended the controversial new regulation. …

Tom McClusky of the Family Research Council commented on the memo and said pro-life people need to understand the importance of Blumenauer’s role in the debate.

“Blumenauer is very important to this tale for it is with him that the legislative origins of the assisted suicide language begin,” he said. “The origins of the language are extremely important when you think about the motivation of the people behind it.”

“The original bill language would provide Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements to doctors who direct people to take their own lives instead of seek treatment and was written by a group called Compassion & Choices, an offshoot of a group from the 1980′s that called itself the Hemlock Society, the nation’s leading advocate for assisted suicide,” McClusky explained. “Ultimately the language was not in the final passed bill, though many other factors leading to rationing were included.”

Although the advanced directives apparently can’t be used to facilitate an assisted suicide, there is concern physicians will pressure or persuade patients to make decisions that would ration care or withdraw lifesaving medical treatment.

So the language finally adopted does not [yet] allow actual “assisted suicide”; but it allows treatment to be “rationed” – ie withheld – which may amount to the same thing. Or worse – cold-blooded murder.

One of our readers, Frank, points out in a comment on our end-of-year post, A picture for history, that flying terrorists could easily disguise themselves as nuns to avoid (actually non-existent) profiling, and he reminds us of the “Jihad Janes” – two American women who tried (though not in nuns’ habits) to join the Islamic jihad, but were arrested before they could carry out their planned acts of violence.

We re-read the story as told by the Sunday Times on March 14, last year.

Colleen LaRose, a divorced woman of 46, living in Pennsburg, PA, who called herself “Jihad Jane”, flew to Europe with the intention of killing a Swedish man she had never met and who had done her no harm whatsoever.

Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, also a divorced woman, aged 31, living in Leadville, CO, chose to play a part in the same plan. Off she flew to help murder the hapless Swede.

LaRose’s only reported motive was to alleviate her own boredom. She “used her  Twitter social networking account to raise funds for Pakistani militants”, and after her arrest, a message was found on her laptop  announcing, “I’m so bored, I want to scream.”

Paulin-Ramirez was in a similar desperate pickle:

“She never liked who she was,” Christine Holcomb-Mott, her mother, told The Wall Street Journal. “She was always looking for something.”

So she converted to Islam for novelty and excitement, which was greatly enhanced by the opening it gave her to join the jihad. She “communicated [on the internet] with Islamic radicals around the globe.”

[She] changed her Facebook photograph to one depicting her in a hijab with only her eyes showing and told her astounded family she had converted to Islam. …

She began posting messages on Facebook forums with headings such as “Stop calling Muslims terrorists!” and communicating with Islamic radicals around the globe.

The stranger targeted by the two bored women was Lars Vilks, the cartoonist made famous by furious global Muslim protest against his drawings of a dog with “the head of Muhammad”, published in a Swedish newspaper in 2007.

When LaRose reached Europe, she “declared online: ‘Only death will stop me now I am so close to the target.’” But a month later she flew back home, mission unaccomplished, and was arrested on landing and charged with terrorism. Her testimony led to the arrest of Paulin-Ramirez.

There is nothing new, so there should be nothing surprising, about self-indulgent bored women seeking distraction, excitement, and a sense of exceptional virtue and importance in dedicating themselves to someone else’s cause. (See our post, When innocence is vice, September 23, 2010.) Still there is something strikingly low about this pair: their blithe insouciance, their thick-headed ignorance. They’re as silly as they’re vicious.

On the eve of the new year, this is our Picture of the Year 2010.

At a US airport, a Muslim searches a nun for hidden weapons.

Nuns have been attempting to blow up planes.

One tried to light explosive material in her shoe, another in her underwear, while flying to America from Europe.

A nun put a bomb into a plane that blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

Nuns started hijacking aircraft and holding crews and passengers hostage in the late 1970s.

Never forget that 19 nuns hijacked four planes on 9/11, flew two of them into the World Trade Center in New York, one into the Pentagon, and crashed another, killing some 3,000 people, in the name of their Holy Trinity.

And those are only a few examples of a long list of their violent attacks, carried out or planned, in recent years.

Christians in general are waging a holy war against the rest of the world, using the method of terrorism.

Muslims are doing everything they can to defend their fellow human beings from this relentless onslaught.