FBI Director Christopher Wray testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee Dec. 5, 2023 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
The director of the FBI is being accused of hypocrisy for allowing the targeting of concerned parents, Trump supporters, and American Catholics but not “monitoring” pro-Hamas rallies and protests on college campuses.
Director Christopher Wray was asked in an interview on Tuesday about “actively monitoring” the rallies erupting across college and university campuses, which have become the subject of controversy and condemnation from even senior government officials. Wray replied, “We don’t monitor protests.” He added, “But we do share intelligence about specific threats of violence.”
Social media users reacted, accusing Wray of hypocrisy. Conservative podcast host Graham Allen quoted Wray saying, “We don’t monitor protests,” and wrote:
FBI Director Chris Wray: "We don't monitor protests"
They just monitor: Republicans Church Christians Donald Trump supporters Parents who attend a PTA meeting
Author and conservative media commentator Jesse Kelly pointed out the FBI’s failure to investigate the vandalizing and firebombing of pregnancy resource centers, commenting:
“We can’t find who’s bombing pregnancy centers cause they’re doing it at night.” -Merrick Garland
“We don’t monitor protests.”-Chris Wray
The truth is the street animals are protected by the elite. The good people in the middle are attacked from top and bottom. https://t.co/2cvGOJFqxQ
Numerous social media users posted photos of known or suspected FBI agents undercover at pro-Trump rallies, alleged that the FBI embedded undercover agents at the Jan. 6, 2021 rally at the U.S. Capitol building, or noted the FBI’s designation of parents protesting school board meetings or “radical traditionalist Catholics” as potential domestic terror threats. Referring to the infamous memo from the FBI’s Richmond field office, detailing plans to infiltrate and spy on Catholic parishes, one user commented, “I guess they are too busy monitoring Catholic churches.”
The U.S. House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government previously castigated the FBI’s memo for its reliance on biased sources, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, which lists “radical traditionalist Catholics” as a hate group, alongside neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. The controversial memo, leaked early in 2023, labeled American Catholics who attend the Tridentine Mass (the form of the Mass common prior to 1969) as “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists” (RMVEs). The memo’s creation included communication with other FBI field offices, interviews with at least one priest and a choir director, and the approval of senior FBI lawyers. The House Committee warned, “The FBI must be held accountable for its actions. It is not enough for the FBI to investigate itself and remedy its own wrongdoings, especially when it involves law-enforcement overreach involving fundamental religious freedoms.”
But that’s what the FBI appears to have done. Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Inspector General Michael Horowitz submitted a report to Congress absolving the FBI of any wrongdoing in the drafting and circulating of the memo. Horowitz wrote, “Our review did not find evidence that anyone ordered or directed Analyst 1 or 2 to find a link between RMVEs and any specific religion or political affiliation, including Church 1, or that there was any underlying policy direction concerning such a link.” The report added, “Additionally, our review of emails, instant messages, and text messages for Analysts 1 and 2 during the relevant time period did not identify any evidence of discriminatory or inappropriate comments by them about Church 1, or individuals who practiced a particular religious faith or held specific political beliefs.”
Previously, both Wray and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland have stonewalled Congress in response to requests to interview FBI agents and analysts responsible for drafting and circulating the memo.
Arielle Del Turco, director of the Center for Religious Liberty at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand, “The FBI shouldn’t be monitoring most protests, but when massive demonstrations are shutting down higher education institutions that threaten fellow students and incorporate genocidal slogans like ‘From the river to the sea,’ that all should pique the interest of federal law enforcement.”
She continued, “Wray’s comments are yet another hit to the FBI’s credibility after the Department of Justice’s inspector general held last week that the FBI did not commit any wrongdoing when it was looking into ‘racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists’ that they alleged were connected to ‘radical-traditionalist Catholic ideology.’”
Del Turco added, “The FBI’s heightened concern over traditional Catholics appears especially absurd when considering the agency’s total disinterest in protestors who are threatening Jewish students on college campuses.”
Currently, pro-Hamas rallies are taking place at schools such as Ohio State University and the Ivy League Columbia and Yale universities.
Politico reporter Heidi Przybyla claimed on Thursday that Christians who believe rights are derived from God are “Christian nationalists.” Speaking on MSNBC, Przybyla claimed that former President Donald Trump is surrounding himself with an “extremist element” of Christians, whom she identified as “Christian nationalists.”
That’s when things got weird. According to Przybyla, there is one belief that all so-called Christian nationalists share.
“[T]he thing that unites them as Christian nationalists — not Christians, by the way, because Christian nationalist is very different — is that they believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority. They don’t come from Congress. They don’t come to the Supreme Court. They come from God.”
The “problem” with believing that rights come from God, Przybyla claimed, is that “men” misapply “so-called natural law” to oppose progressive issues, like abortion, sex education in schools, IVF, and gay marriage.
MSNBC guest: “The thing that unites them as Christian Nationalists, not Christians by the way, because Christian Nationalist is very different, is that they believe that our rights as Americans don’t come from any earthly authority. They come from God.” pic.twitter.com/oonM2CCPNh
There is an obvious problem with Przybyla’s argument: the Declaration of Independence. Philosophical debates about “rights” aside, the founding document is clear that rights are not derived from man like Przybyla claimed. The Declaration of Independence declares:
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 Founding Fathers, then, were aware of the dangers of a government being empowered to control rights: if the government giveth, then government can taketh. But if fundamental rights are ultimately derived from God, no government can take them.
Przybyla comments went viral on Friday afternoon and triggered an avalanche of mockery:
“Our rights as human beings don’t come from the Constitution, the government, Congress, the president, or the Supreme Court. They are inherent. … This belief that rights precede government—regardless of whether you believe in God—is fundamental to what it means to be an American,” former Rep. Justin Amash said.
“Is someone’s ignorance and religious bigotry showing?” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) asked in response.
“What the state gives the state can take away. What God gives the state takes at its moral peril. Sincerely, The prophets of old,” Jordan Peterson responded.
“Human rights come from God. That’s why all human beings have innate value and no human entity has the authority to strip them of those rights. That belief doesn’t make millions of Christians around the world Christian nationalists,” AND Campaign president Justin Giboney responded.
“We are all Christian Nationalists now,” pastor Tom Ascol responded.
“I guess those truths just aren’t as self-evident as they used to be,” National Review writer Dan McLaughlin mocked.
“This is what secularists want you to believe. If your rights originate from government, then the government is ultimate and statism becomes the dominant belief. But God is ultimate and human rights come from God,” pastor Grant Castleberry pointed out.
“Imagine believing your rights come ‘from Congress,'” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) mocked.
“This is a civics failure, a talent failure, an intelligence failure, a historical failure, an ethics failure…shall I keep going?” professor Andrew Walker pointed out.
“I can only suppose that this is what comes of liberal elites living in a bubble. They speak with supreme confidence only to reveal spectacular ignorance–of history, philosophy, the beliefs of the people they regard as their intellectual and moral inferiors and hold in contempt,” professor Robert George responded.
Przybyla responded to the controversy by gaslighting, claiming she did not say what everyone heard her say. And yet, she somehow also managed to double down.
“While there are different wings of Christian Nationalism, they are bound by their belief that our rights come from God,” she said on social media. “If you are Hindu, Jewish etc, this might help you understand the next part of my point, which is they are using this for a man-made policy agenda.”
The Biden administration is deporting a Christian family from Germany who legitimately fears persecution and should qualify for asylum, while allowing 99 percent of illegal immigrants to stay in the U.S., most of whom likely do not qualify for asylum.
Uwe and Hannelore Romeike reportedly fled Germany in 2008 because they were threatened with prosecution and $9,000 fines for homeschooling their five children. The couple and their family have lived in Tennessee and filed for asylum. The family has thrived in the U.S., including having two children who are American citizens and two other children who married American citizens. Unfortunately, the U.S. authorities denied their asylum claim in 2013. After the Obama administration intervened, the family had been able to stay in the U.S. under an “indefinite deferred action status.”
But last month the Biden administration told the family they must return to Germany. Since Germany hasn’t changed its law regarding homeschooling, the family has legitimate concerns that if they go back to Germany, they will face the same prosecution that drove them away in the first place.
While the Biden administration is determined to deport this Christian family, it has done next to nothing to remove millions of illegal immigrants who came into the U.S. through our nation’s southern border, according to a new report from House Republicans.
The Biden administration and its Democrat allies have insisted for more than two years that the U.S.-Mexico border wasn’t open, there is no border crisis, and the administration has enforced immigration laws. But the data gathered by the House Judiciary Committee paints a very different picture: that the Biden administration has failed to deport, through immigration court proceedings, more than 99 percent of illegal immigrants between Jan. 20, 2021, and March 31, 2023.
After pressure from the committee to release basic statistics, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reported more than 5 million illegal immigrant encounters in that same period (not including unknown numbers of illegal “getaways”). Most of them sought to claim asylum but were disqualified under asylum’s legal definition. Yet fewer than 6,000 illegal immigrants were placed in removal proceedings before an immigration judge and actually removed from the United States during this time.
Meanwhile, nearly half of the 5 million illegal immigrants “had no confirmed departure from the United States.” DHS “released at least 2,148,738 illegal aliens into the United States” during the same period, and only 6 percent of them “were even screened for fear of prosecution for the purpose of asylum.”
An Impeachable Offense?
According to Jeffrey H. Anderson, president of the American Main Street Initiative think tank, U.S. immigration law “requires that those entering the U.S. without proper documentation be continuously detained until their claim can be adjudicated.” The Biden administration has obviously failed to comply with U.S. immigration law, a failure that Anderson regards as President Biden having committed an impeachable offense.
Despite complaints from Democratic mayors, such as New York City’s Eric Adams, about their cities being overwhelmed with illegal immigrants, the Biden administration recently doubled down on its open border policy by granting work permits to close to half a million illegal immigrants from Venezuela without congressional authorization.
The Biden administration’s reluctance to enforce existing laws and its willingness to offer amnesty have created an incentive for even more illegal border crossings. The GOP report estimates 1.2 million illegal migrant encounters between April and September this year. Last month, within 24 hours, more than 10,000 illegal migrants were “encountered” at the U.S.-Mexico border. Unsurprisingly, most came from Venezuela because they regard Biden’s amnesty to Venezuelans as an open invitation to the United States.
Additionally, our nation’s southern border has become a gate for the illicit drug trade, directly contributing to America’s opioid epidemic. The United Nations calls the U.S.-Mexico border “the deadliest land route” for human trafficking, especially the trafficking of children, many of whom have become enslaved workers in the U.S. What’s even more outrageous is that citizen journalists caught U.S. government officials facilitating child trafficking at taxpayers’ expense.
About-Face on Border Wall
In an about-face move, the Biden administration recently announced it would expedite the construction of a border wall, despite calling the wall construction under the Trump administration “just one example of the prior administration’s misplaced priorities and failure to manage migration in a safe, orderly, and humane way.” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tried to justify the administration’s embarrassing policy reversal by insisting Biden hasn’t changed his opposition to a border wall. Still, his DHS “is complying by the law” to build a border wall because “that appropriation came from fiscal year 2019 under the last administration, Republican leadership.”
The Biden administration’s claim of “complying with the law” is rich. The alarming statistics from the House GOP’s report demonstrate that the Biden administration, starting with President Biden, has surrendered one of the government’s most fundamental responsibilities: to enforce laws and keep America safe. Not to mention that the Biden administration’s approach to immigration laws is so upside down and illogical that it insists on deporting a Christian family facing persecution in their home country while welcoming with open arms illegal migrants who are disqualified for asylum.
President Biden certainly believes he deserves another term. American voters, however, should remember the disastrous results of Biden’s policies and never again elect as president someone who refuses to enforce the laws of the United States.
The United States Department of State has just issued its annual watchlist of the world’s worst religious freedom offenders, and strikingly, Nigeria did not make the cut. The country is among the most dangerous in the world to be a Christian, and daily we hear news of abuses imperiling the human rights of all Nigerians. In breaking news: Since at least 2013, the Nigerian military has conducted systematic, wide-scale forced abortions on at least 10,000 women and girls, many of which were kidnapped and raped by Islamist militants.
Yet in spite of clear-cut evidence of mass human rights atrocities, the U.S. government remains silent, failing to designate Nigeria as a “country of particular concern.” Between January 2021 and March 2022, more than 6,000 Christians were targeted and killed in Nigeria. In May of this year, Christian student Deborah Yakubu was stoned to death and her body burned in Sokoto State, Nigeria, after classmates deemed her WhatsApp messages blasphemous. Following this tragedy, Rhoda Ya’u Jatau, a Christian woman from the northeast, is now on trial for blasphemy for sharing a WhatsApp message condemning Deborah’s brutal killing. And earlier this year, humanist Mubarak Bala was sentenced to 24 years in prison for social media posts critical of Islam.
What will it take to break the Biden administration’s silence? Now, Nigeria is garnering international attention as a result of an upcoming case at its Supreme Court challenging a law criminalizing so-called “blasphemous” expression. You can be put to death under Nigerian law for this “crime.” Musician Yahaya Sharif-Aminu, currently imprisoned and facing the death penalty for blasphemy charges, has petitioned the court to protect his fundamental human rights after being convicted under the Sharia Penal Code of Kano State.
In March 2020, Yahaya shared song lyrics via WhatsApp. This simple act would forever change his life. Accused of insulting the Prophet Muhammad for what he shared, his house was burned to the ground by a mob, and he was arrested and charged with blasphemy. Without the support of a lawyer, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced by a local Sharia judge to death by hanging.
Innocent of any crime, Yahaya filed his notice of appeal in November at the Supreme Court, and this potential landmark case could abolish once and for all Northern Nigeria’s Sharia blasphemy law.
Twenty years ago, the 12 states in Northern Nigeria introduced Sharia into their criminal law codes, despite the Nigerian Constitution’s protections for religious freedom. These laws are only supposed to apply to Muslims, but leave little room for theological diversity among Muslims, and could potentially be applied to converts to Christianity or those who have left Islam. It is imperative that the Supreme Court bring justice to Yahaya, saving his life and offering much-needed legal clarity to end the horror of blasphemy laws for all in Nigeria.
International law, including the international treaties to which Nigeria is bound as a party, is unambiguous — the right to religious freedom is for everyone, and nobody should be punished, much less killed, for what they believe. Moreover, Nigeria’s own constitution protects Yahaya’s rights to free expression and religious freedom. Any person of faith or no faith at all can be penalized, and even killed, as a result of a blasphemy accusation. In a country of more than 200 million, split nearly evenly between Christians and Muslims, it is clear that all Nigerians stand to lose under the blasphemy regime.
Blasphemy laws are not unique to Nigeria. Approximately 40 percent of countries in the world have blasphemy laws in some form, and there are currently at least seven countries where a conviction for blasphemy can result in the death penalty. Nigeria has before it a crucial opportunity to step out as an international leader, serving as a model for the abolishment of these dangerous laws.
The world awaits justice for Yahaya. Last week, the U.K. prime minister’s special envoy for freedom of religion or belief, Fiona Bruce, urged “the international human rights community to speak out on behalf of Sharif-Aminu and for Nigeria to repeal its blasphemy laws.” As he fights for his life, let us remember that this is a fight for the human rights of all Nigerians, and stand with him in advocating for the rights of all people to express themselves without fear.
Paul Coleman is the author of Censored and serves as executive director of ADF International overseeing the global, alliance-building legal organization. ADF International is supporting the case of Yahaya Sharif-Aminu at the Supreme Court of Nigeria. Find him on Twitter @Paul_B_Coleman.
Evangelist Franklin Graham is warning Christians that the so-called Respect for Marriage Act, which is set to be voted on by the Senate Monday, is a deceptive smoke-screen that would change the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman while not protecting those who hold a traditional view of marriage.
The Respect for Marriage Act “could impact you, your family, your church, and our nation,” Graham wrote on Facebook during the weekend. “The name is a smoke-screen. Very deceptive.”
He compared it to the Democrats’ so-called Inflation Reduction Act that “did nothing but increase inflation and further hurt our economy.”
“The current version of the Respect for Marriage Act being pushed by Senator Chuck Schumer is designed to provide strong protections for same-sex marriage — but it fails to protect those of us who believe marriage is between a man and a woman,” explained Graham, who heads the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse.
“It is dangerous legislation that would be used against individuals, churches and organizations who honor traditional marriage.”
The bill to enshrine the right to same-sex marriage into federal law cleared a major procedural hurdle in the Senate earlier this month, with critics saying that a religious freedom amendment added to the legislation doesn’t adequately protect those with deeply held beliefs that marriage is between one man and one woman. Graham said Republican Sen. Mike Lee’s proposed amendment “can improve” the legislation and “bring critically-needed protection for religious liberty and rights of conscience.”
He continued, “Many say this is a long shot, but we desperately need senators to demand the Lee Amendment be added to the current version of the Respect for Marriage Act before it is finalized.”
The measure would codify the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges, which established a right to same-sex marriage, into federal law and formally repeal the unenforced Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as a union between one man and one woman at the federal level.
Graham urged Christians to call their senators “as soon as possible and ask them to vote YES for the Lee Amendment — or to vote NO to the Respect for Marriage Act if it doesn’t have this amendment.”
He warned, “Time is short — freedom-loving people have to take action before it’s too late.”
The Respect for Marriage Act previously passed the Democrat-controlled U.S. House of Representatives in July with the support of all Democrats and 47 House Republicans.
The legislation would require all states to give “full faith and credit to any public act, record, or judicial proceeding of any other State pertaining to a marriage between 2 individuals, on the basis of the sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin of those individuals.”
Passage of the bill has become a top priority for congressional Democrats following the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, determining that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t contain a right to abortion. In a concurring opinion in Dobbs, Justice Clarence Thomas described the substantive due process as “legal fiction,” suggesting that the justices should “reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents,” including Obergefell.
In a recent op-ed for The Christian Post, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, also warned that the bill “opens the door to American persecution.”
“As the mainstream culture moves further and further away from a Christian worldview, I’ve witnessed the hostility to moral truth creep closer to our shores,” he wrote. “The West, once the safe haven of free speech and religion, is turning cold to the foundations that made our countries thrive.”
He cited an FRC report released in July, which tracked 99 incidents of government attacks on religious freedom against Christians or Christian institutions across 14 Western countries in the last two years alone.
Joe Scarborough — host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” — said Friday that “Jesus never once talked about abortion” in the New Testament, and he accused pro-life Christians of “heresy,” saying they’re “perverting the gospel of Jesus Christ down to one issue.”
“Morning Joe” ran a video of Republican South Carolina state Sen. Katrina Shealy, who calls herself “pro-life,” speaking against a near-total abortion ban in the state — which was defeated Thursday. In the clip, Shealy said those in favor of an abortion ban without exceptions for rape and incest are “miscommunicating with God — or maybe you’re just not communicating with him at all.”
Scarborough lauded Shealy’s speech and then accused pro-life Christians of “heresy” and suggested that Jesus doesn’t necessarily oppose abortion because the Bible doesn’t record him having said the word.
“As a Southern Baptist, I grew up reading the Bible — maybe a backslidden Baptist, but I still know the Bible. Jesus never once talked about abortion, never once! And it was happening back in ancient times, it was happening during, in his time!” Scarborough said angrily. “Never once mentioned it, and for people perverting the gospel of Jesus Christ down to one issue, it’s heresy.”
He then ripped pro-life Christians again, saying they’re “using” Jesus to force raped children to carry pregnancies to term, noting the recent case of the 10-year-old Ohio rape victim who traveled to Indiana to get an abortion since she couldn’t get one in her home state.
“If you don’t believe me, if that makes you angry, why don’t you do something you haven’t done in a long time?” Scarborough said sarcastically. “Open the Bible, open the New Testament, read the red letters. You won’t see it there. And yet there are people who are using Jesus as a shield to make 10-year-old raped girls go through a living and breathing hell here on Earth. They’ve also conveniently overlooked the parts of the New Testament where Jesus talks about taking care of the needy. Taking care of those who are helpless, who live a hopeless life. Because they believe, these state legislators believe, that life begins at fertilization and ends at childbirth.”
Reproductive Rights Has Galvanized Michigan Voters, Says House Member youtu.be
Former Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, R-Nebraska, has been sentenced to probation for lying to the federal government. But the only things we know for certain are that the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) lied to entrap Fortenberry, and used two men who broke campaign finance laws to betray the congressman in his zeal to help persecuted Christians in the Middle East.
A Los Angeles jury convicted Fortenberry in March on three felony counts of lying to the FBI and scheming to cover it up. The congressman faced a maximum sentence of 15 years — five years for each count. The prosecution had sought a six-month prison sentence. Tuesday, however, U.S. District Judge Stanley Blumenfeld, Jr. sentenced the former congressman to two years of probation, as well as a $25,000 fine and 320 hours of community service.
In handing down his sentence, Blumenfeld said that everyone, including the prosecution witnesses, attests that Fortenberry is “a man of exceptional character.” Fortenberry and his defense team are appealing the convictions.
Under 18 U.S.C. §1001, it is a federal crime to tell a government official or agency a “material” lie. That means a lie that, if the government were to believe it, would have the tendency of affecting an official’s or agency’s course of conduct. Ironically, the FBI and the DOJ are guilty of doing exactly the things with which they charged Fortenberry.
Would I Lie to You?
The case stems from a February 2016 fundraiser in Los Angeles in which Fortenberry participated. Toufic Baaklini, a U.S. citizen, Maronite Catholic, and advocate for Christians in the Middle East, used the fundraiser to channel the money of a Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire, Gilbert Chagoury, to Fortenberry’s campaign. Campaign donations from foreign nationals are illegal.
Baaklini, then a long-time friend of the congressman, testified at Fortenberry’s trial that he knew such conduit donations were illegal, but he misled Fortenberry by having $30,000 of Chagoury’s money divided among a number of people at the fundraiser so no red flags would be raised regarding the contributions.
Dr. Elias Ayoub, another Maronite Catholic who helped organize the L.A. fundraiser, also admitted in court that he has made a number of illegal campaign contributions using Chagoury’s money, including to U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-California, and Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah. In addition, both Baaklini and Ayoub testified that Fortenberry didn’t know the contributions had come from Chagoury, and Baaklini testified that Fortenberry raised that very issue early in the fundraising process.
As KOLN-TV in Lincoln, Nebraska, reported this past March, Baaklini made a stark admission in court to John Littrell, Fortenberry’s lawyer, saying he didn’t want Fortenberry to know about the illegal nature of the contributions, even when the congressman specifically asked if there was anything wrong with the fundraiser.
So why isn’t Baaklini facing possible prison time, as well as Ayoub? Because the FBI and the DOJ wanted a bigger fish—a sitting U.S. congressman—and used Baaklini and Ayoub as witnesses at Fortenberry’s trial.
A Man of Good Character
In serving Nebraska’s first congressional district since January 2005, Fortenberry has distinguished himself as a man of integrity in both his personal and professional life. In sworn testimony, U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-California, a liberal Democrat and Chaldean Catholic who has worked with Fortenberry on aiding Christians in the Middle East, affirmed her Republican colleague’s character.
“I think he brings honor to what he does because of the individual he is,” Eshoo said. “He’s faith-filled, he’s honest. His word is always good, and I can’t say that about all members of Congress, and you find out the hard way.” Eshoo added that Fortenberry had a reputation of being a rule-follower.
Also, Fortenberry had been regularly targeted by opponents in his reelection campaigns, including because of his defense of the unbornand women harmed by abortion, yet he easily won reelection term after term. So, if Fortenberry is known by Democratic colleagues as being honest, and he directly asked Baaklini if the 2016 fundraiser in L.A. was tainted and was told everything was fine, how did the government make their case against the congressman?
Anatomy of an Abusive Prosecution
Even though the DOJ had zero evidence that Fortenberry had committed any crime, they had Ayoub tape a June 2018 conversation with the congressman. After the call, Fortenberry was concerned enough to tell his wife, his chief of staff, and his lawyer that he had renewed concerns about the 2016 fundraiser.
Then, in March 2019, the FBI came to Fortenberry’s home in Nebraska and deliberately lied to him and his wife, saying they were there for a national security issue, not a criminal matter. That lie disarmed Fortenberry, striking him as believable because of his service on a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee whose work deals with U.S. foreign relations.
The FBI agents also quizzed Fortenberry on various matters, and later said Fortenberry lied about not knowing Ayoub. In fact, the congressman didn’t recognize a 10-year-old photo of Ayoub, as it showed him with dyed-black hair and black eyebrows, whereas, Ayoub, now 77, has silver hair and silver eyebrows.
An FBI agent did ask Fortenberry whether he knew that lying to a federal agent was a crime. The congressman responded that he did. His recollections of his unbeknownst-taped conversation with Ayoub the previous June were sketchy, not because he lied, but because of faulty recall and Fortenberry’s tendency to multi-task during fundraising calls, as his wife Celeste testified, because he didn’t enjoy doing them.
In the process, Fortenberry missed Ayoub’s point that Chagoury had likely contributed to the 2016 fundraiser. His failure to recall that was another instance, the DOJ argued, which showed the congressman’s intent to deceive, as well as Fortenberry’s assertion on the same call that he’d be interested in doing another fundraiser with Ayoub.
In a July 2019 interview in Washington, D.C., the FBI also lied to Fortenberry and his attorney, Trey Gowdy, the former Republican congressman from South Carolina. Gowdy specifically asked the FBI agents whether Fortenberry was a target of their investigation. They said he wasn’t.
That wasn’t true, and the FBI and DOJ cobbled together a case, saying that Fortenberry had not only lied but had deliberately tried to deceive the FBI. Part of making their case was that Fortenberry’s former lawyer testified she couldn’t recall the contents of her June 2018 conversation with Fortenberry, but she said she would’ve definitely remembered had he mentioned anything about possible illegal donations.
A Stickler for the Law Who Also Deliberately Deceives?
Never mind that this same attorney testified that Fortenberry was in the habit of calling her a lot—a virtue that affirms Eshoo’s assessment that Fortenberry is committed to adhering to the law. Nevertheless, based on the attorney’s testimony, the DOJ argued that Fortenberry had further willfully withheld self-incriminating evidence about the fundraiser, even though, again, Baaklini had testified that the congressman had directly asked whether the contributions were illegal early in the process and he—Baaklini—had lied to Fortenberry in saying they weren’t.
In addition, Fortenberry’s alleged crimes took place while he was on the phone in his Nebraska home. Nevertheless, because the prosecution argued his actions had relevance to their investigation in California, they succeeded in changing the legal venue to Los Angeles, a well-known leftist region where seating a jury unfavorable to the congressman was much more likely than in Nebraska, Fortenberry’s congressional home.
The venue issue is a likely ground for Fortenberry’s appeal, as is the argument that Fortenberry didn’t materially lie to the FBI.
Lying Is Okay if the Government Does It
Meanwhile, the government’s conduct in this case is very disturbing. An FBI agent admitted at the March trial that he had lied to Fortenberry at his home in March 2019, but he said that is part of the FBI’s normal tactics to extract the truth.
However, the DOJ and the FBI, both agencies of the executive branch of the U.S. government that includes the president as chief executive, had no substantive basis to pursue a criminal investigation of Fortenberry, a sitting congressman who had a sterling reputation for integrity. Instead, even though they knew that Baaklini and Ayoub had clearly violated the law, and despite Baaklini’s admission that the congressman had directly asked him whether the L.A. fundraiser was tainted, they pursued Fortenberry.
In short, they went on a legal fishing expedition to concoct a case against the congressman. Fortenberry’s failure to be attentive during his fundraising calls, and errors in his recall, are evidence of personal imperfections. But they are certainly not the basis of a legitimate criminal prosecution, let alone convictions.
A Disturbing Legal Precedent
Our federal government, based on a system of checks and balances that the founders established almost 250 years ago, presumes that the respective branches—executive, legislative, and judicial—will conduct themselves with integrity in interacting with each other. When trust is undermined, our system of government is jeopardized. By abusively wielding power to intimidate a legislator, the FBI and DOJ threaten that delicate balance.
Unhealthy competition between the branches will consume them and devour any chance that public officials will rise above petty bickering and destructive partisanship to cooperate in the best interests of the country. By enlisting the judiciary to turn that threat of prison into a potential reality, the FBI and DOJ have turned the system on its head. What the founders intended as an aggressive but civil competition is now in danger of becoming a deadly serious game which menaces the civil liberties and freedoms of those who dare to undertake public service.
This episode should be especially disconcerting to all faithful Catholics and other Christians concerned about their place in a society that is increasingly hostile to religion. Indeed, Fortenberry ended up a prosecutorial target precisely because of his work defending the right of Middle Eastern Christians to live and practice their faith. Christians especially must answer the call, and stand up against this most troubling evolution in the DOJ and FBI’s battle with Congress.
Tom Nash is a journalist, theologian, and author who has served the Catholic Church for more than 30 years, including as a theology advisor at the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN). Joseph Cosby is a seasoned attorney with more than 30 years of experience litigating cases in federal court. He practices law in Washington, D.C.
Secular intolerance has a “chilling effect” on Christians who are having to practice “various forms of self-censorship” as they’re finding it difficult to express their faith freely in society, according to a new report detailing accounts from four countries.
“Secular intolerance has a chilling effect on Christians, which directly affects their capacity to express their faith freely in society and is leading to various forms of self-censorship,” says the report, titled “Perceptions on Self-Censorship: Confirming and Understanding the ‘Chilling Effect,’” which includes case studies from France, Germany, Colombia and Mexico.
“Some people do indeed fear being subjected to legal proceedings or being criminally sanctioned on charges of discrimination, while others fear being subjected to disciplinary proceedings in their work or places,” notes the study, compiled by the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe, the Observatory of Religious Freedom in Latin America and the International Institute for Religious Freedom.
“With some exceptions, the majority chose to keep its expressions of faith or its opinions on issues related to life, marriage and the family from a Christian doctrine perspective private because they had witnessed sanctions or prosecutions to which colleagues or peers had been subjected,” it adds.
Many incidents cited in the report might seem insignificant, the authors say, but “these many small things together cause ‘death by a thousand cuts.’”
“A few cuts do not kill you and barely hurt. But continuous small strikes eventually have an impact. We posit that the accumulation of seemingly insignificant incidents creates an environment in which Christians do not feel comfortable — to some degree — to live their faith freely. Indeed, Western Christians experience a ‘chilling effect’ resulting from perceived pressures in their cultural environment, related to widely mediatized court cases.”
Further, the study observes, “Because of the subtle and generally non-physically violent nature of the chilling effect, it is often misunderstood or even ignored and therefore largely remains invisible.”
“This is the main reason why the phenomenon is not recognized in religious freedom datasets such as the Pew Research Center indexes,” the authors add.
The report also warns this form of censorship is not only limiting people’s exercise of religion or their right to manifest their convictions, “but also that these violations to the right to religious freedom can cause the disappearance of religion in a given context.”
Madeleine Enzelberger, executive director of OIDAC Europe, said the study “raises the legitimate question of: how is it possible in a mature, liberal democratic society that stands for tolerance, diversity, and inclusive and open discourse, that people are frightened to freely speak their minds?” according to Christian Today.
Many Christians interviewed as part of the study did not realize they were self-censoring. In some cases, they had self-censored to the extent that they now “stop seeing the characteristics related to self-censorship as a problem.”
As one of its conclusions, the study laments that “the Church has allowed itself to be self-censored … Christian religious leaders have more freedom to express themselves freely (but they do not always take advantage of it).”
To remedy this form of censorship, the authors suggest there’s “an urgent need to educate policymakers, public servants (including the police) and judges about religion to increase their religious literacy.”
“We have seen that a high degree of religious illiteracy leads to misunderstanding of how religion informs behavior in different spheres of society and what the legitimate role of religion in the public domain is. Illiteracy therefore can consequently be the cause of ‘practical intolerance’ against Christians.”
College student Deborah Emmanuel Yakubu was stoned to death in Sokoto, Nigeria on May 12, 2022. | Facebook via Morning Star News
A Muslim cleric in northern Nigeria reportedly defended the murder of a Christian woman over false accusations that she committed blasphemy, which is punishable by death under Islamic law.
Deborah Emmanuel Yakubu was fatally beaten and burned on May 12. She was accused of sending blasphemous messages to a group chat after refusing to date a Muslim boy.
A purported video of her killing showed an angry mob vandalizing cars and other targets while shouting “Allah akbar” as Yakubu’s apparent body is burned underneath a pile of objects.
In response to Yakubu’s murder, Bello Yabo, an Islamic cleric in the Nigerian state of Sokoto, is alleged to have called on Muslims to kill anyone who “insults the prophet,” according to global persecution watchdog International Christian Concern (ICC).
ICC’s report didn’t name the cleric, however, an ICC spokesperson told CP that the group’s field staff stated that Yabo is the cleric who made the comments.
ICC’s translation of Yabo’s comments quotes him as saying:
“A young person in Sokoto insulted Allah’s prophet yesterday. In Sokoto we kill such. We don’t tolerate such idiocy in Sokoto. This is not Kano, which is a commercial center, where someone called the prophet names, including being an adulterer. They have been dragging about it.
“Here we kill. When you touch the prophet we become mad people. No talk of a person being out of his mind. Kill him!
“Anyone who touches the prophet, no punishment. Just kill! Even if the person repents or recants, forgiveness is God’s business. We must kill such. Out of his mind, but buys a device, data, opens social media and insults the prophet? Kill him! Don’t report as a grievance to any authority. Kill him! Even if he is an Islamic teacher, much less a useless rascal.
“Like Shehu Usman Dan Fodio, we are Mujahedeen (holy warriors) and Jihadists.
“No compromise.
“Allah curse whoever touches the prophet. Those of you who displayed your wrath, Allah bless you. Kill and disperse!”
Yakubu was a student at Shehu Shagari College of Education and a member of the Evangelical Church Winning All denomination. She was accused of sending a message to a school WhatsApp group that her classmates interpreted as blasphemous.
“Deborah Emmanuel was complaining in a class WhatsApp group chat, kicking against how they discriminate against Christians in the school in areas of assignments and test in favor of the Muslims,” a local pastor told Morning Star News. “This is what they used as a yardstick to say she insulted Muhammad. She didn’t insult prophet Muhammad, but it was discovered that she turned down a Muslim proposal to date her. That led to him accusing her of insulting prophet Muhammad.”
Yakubu’s father, Emmanuel Garba, told local media outlets his daughter’s violent death was “an act of God.”
Garba said the family is looking for answers after the tragedy.
“We can’t say or do anything, except to take it easy as an act of God. We have left all to God, we have decided to take it like that,” Garba was quoted as saying in an interview with the Nigerian newspaper Daily Post.
He also said he paid the equivalent of nearly $300 to transport his daughter’s corpse back home to the Tungan Magajiya in Rijau local government area of the Niger State so he could bury his daughter.
Her mother, Alheri Emmanuel, told reporters none of the family’s seven surviving children would attend school again to prevent further tragedy.
“What has happened to me is my cross, and I will surely carry it, but none of my seven surviving children will go to school again,” she was quoted as telling Vanguard newspaper.
Police arrested two Muslim men in Yakubu’s death, which sparked riots in Nigeria’s Sokoto state, where a mob of Muslims have vandalized three church buildings and damaged and looted Christian-owned shops.
Holy Family Catholic Cathedral, St. Kevin’s Catholic Church and an Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA) building were attacked on May 14, according to ICC.
“Hundreds of Muslims here in Sokoto this morning converged at various points in the city to protest the arrest of two Muslims who were involved in the killing of Deborah,” area resident Angela Anthony was quoted as telling Morning Star News. “In spite of efforts by the police and other security agencies to prevent them from becoming violent in their protest, these Muslims still succeeded in attacking and destroying.”
The Rev. Christopher Omotosho, the spokesman for Sokoto Diocese, said the protestors also shattered the windows of the diocese’s Bishop Lawton Secretariat and vandalized a bus parked on the premises. Additionally, vandals attacked the diocese’s Bakhita Centre and set a bus on fire.
Residents of Sokoto told Morning Star News that they’re asking for prayer even as church leaders of the ECWA and the Christian Association of Nigeria are demanding justice from the government.
Reverend Joseph Daramola, a leader in the Christian Association of Nigeria, responded to the violence in a statement last Friday.
“It is the failure of the security agencies and the government to rise to such criminalities in the past that gave birth to terrorists and bandits,” he said. “As long as the state fails to bring these beasts and criminals amidst us to book, so also the society will continue to be their killing fields.”
Islamic militants, including radical Fulani herdsmen and the terror groups Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province, routinely target Nigeria’s Christians for kidnapping and even murder.
In 2021, ICC designated Nigeria as one of the world’s “Persecutors of the Year,” calling the African country “one of the deadliest places on Earth for Christians.”
Anywhere from 50,000 to 70,000 Christians have been killed in Nigeria since 2000, according to the ICC report.
Open Doors USA, which monitors persecution in over 60 countries, reported that at least 4,650 Christians were killed between Oct. 1, 2020, and Sept. 30, 2021, an increase from 3,530 the previous year. Additionally, more than 2,500 Christians were kidnapped, up from 990 just one year earlier.
The Cultural Research Center (CRC) is out with a new study comparing the number of American parents of children under age 13 who hold a biblical Christian worldview with those who adhere to competing secular alternatives. The results are a damning indictment of Americans’ rejection of or simple indifference to a biblical worldview.
Across all parents of pre-teens, only 2 percent hold a biblical worldview, which is defined as “consistently interpreting and responding to life situations based on biblical principles and teachings.” Those with a biblical worldview believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God containing all moral truths.
Among all respondents, other measured worldviews (such as secular humanism, nihilism, postmodernism, etc.) garnered even fewer adherents. Fully 94 percent subscribed to “a blending of multiple worldviews in which no single life philosophy is dominant.”
The needle scarcely moves for all self-identified Christians (not just pre-teen parents). Only 6 percent of them look at and interpret the world through a biblical lens; that number rises to 21 percent among those attending evangelical Protestant churches.
The fact that the biblical Christian worldview has become so insignificant in the culture should be of concern to all Americans because our country, including its governing principles and legal system, was based on our founders’ biblical worldview.
All around, we see the results of our abandonment of the biblical worldview. According to CRC research, more than half of the population accepts that truth is subjective.
Without objective truth, there is no way to determine what’s real and no moral absolutes to distinguish right from wrong. So we hear the popular “my truth” refrain as the justification for any idea or behavior depending upon what feels right at the time.
Why Worldview Matters
Professor Mikael Stenmark defines worldview as “beliefs, values, and attitudes that … constitute [people’s] basic understanding of (a) who they are, what the world is like, and what their place in it is, (b) what they should do to live a good and meaningful life, and (c) what they can say, know and rationally believe about these things.”
A dividing line between a secular and a biblical worldview is the belief in how the world came to exist. Secularists hold that reality consists entirely of physical matter and forces, which can only be explained through science. For the secularist, the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution explain how all things came to be.
Those with a biblical worldview believe in an all-encompassing divine mind — i.e., God — who rules over and maintains physical matter and forces. The theistic worldview is founded on the core belief that God exists and is the creator of all things.
It is easy to see why the biblical worldview is all but extinct in the culture. Every living generation — baby boomers, Gen X, millennials, and many of the silent generation (pre-1945) — has been educated predominantly in a secular or naturalistic worldview based on the prevailing science of the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution.
Science Declares God Is Dead
The only “official” science approved to be taught in the primary grades through post-graduate education is the anti-faith naturalistic one. It’s virtually illegal to teach anything that hints at creation science or intelligent design. The National Center for Science Education proudly displays ten major court cases, including a Supreme Court ruling, that essentially ban the teaching of intelligent design.
It’s not just the education system. Mathematician and philosopher William Dembski calls the scientific establishment’s approach to intelligent design a “zero-concession policy.”
For example, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) issued a statement claiming “There is no significant controversy within the scientific community about the validity of the theory of evolution. The current controversy surrounding the teaching of evolution is not a scientific one.”
Scientists and post-graduate students who dare to challenge naturalistic-science orthodoxy are subject to professional ridicule, or loss of jobs or research funds. Peer-review journals reject their submissions, as do scientific conferences and meetings.
It’s not in support of science that the establishment defends its official position so vehemently, but to protect its secular worldview. And the American Civil Liberties Union backs them up with legal firepower a detailed statement about why students must be protected against intelligent design at all costs.
Truth Will Come Out
Not all scientists are so didactic. But the “vital few” in control have effectively kept any serious discussion of intelligent design from the rest of the scientific community. However, when they are presented with evidence supporting intelligent design, many discover truth there.
That includes scientists like astronomer Allan Sandage, who studied under Edwin Hubble and continued his work after Hubble died. Sandage’s study of astronomy and astrophysics led him to conclude there is “evidence for what can only be described as a supernatural event,” or what he called a “creation event.”
Plenty of members in the scientific community see much to challenge in Darwinian doctrine. More than 1,000 academics and scientists have signed the Dissent from Darwinism petition stating, “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”
The number of acclaimed scientists who challenge the establishment’s orthodoxy is growing thanks to the work of places like the Discovery Institute, the research arm of the Center for Science and Culture.
Rekindling the Discussion
The education and scientific establishments have become co-conspirators in propagating their secular worldview and banishing the biblical one. But there is hope. Belief in God “as described in the Bible” is still held by a 54 percent majority of Americans, according to a 2022 poll reported by The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd.
Noting that 72 percent of Americans agree the nation’s moral compass is “pointed in the wrong direction,” she writes, “As generations age and the push for secularism and the erasure of faith continues in American establishments such as public schools, younger people are losing spiritual influence and instruction, and with it their faith.”
That is the ultimate goal of our society’s ruling institutions, including government, education, science, medicine, and business. They are determined to wipe out faith by indoctrinating all into their secular worldview using the Big Bang and evolution as the cudgel.
So far, the scientific establishment has been successful in shutting down discussion that the Bible might be true from beginning to end. But continuing research in intelligent design and more scientists who question science’s naturalistic orthodoxy will arm the public with information to support the biblical worldview and loosen the stranglehold of the secular one on our youth and culture.
“Let there be light,” God said in Genesis 1:3. “And there was light.” Jesus said in John 8:32, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” That day isn’t here yet, but we pray it comes quickly.
Pamela Danziger is a market researcher specializing in the study of consumer behavior and motivation. Author of ten books, she shares insights as a senior contributor on Forbes.com. And as a Christian, she is co-founder of Faith Underground. She holds an M.L.S. from University of Maryland and B.A. in English Literature from Penn State.
Suspected al-Shabaab militants tortured and killed at least six Christians, five of whom were reportedly beheaded, in a terror attack on a village in Kenya’s coastal Lamu region that borders Somalia, according to reports.
“It is an ugly sight of people’s bodies lying dead and houses smoking with fire. This is undeniably an awful terrorist attack,” said Pastor Stephen Sila, who was at the site of the attack in Widhu village in Lamu West on Monday morning, the U.S.-based persecution watchdog International Christian Concern reported.
“I counted seven houses that were torched down, four bodies of people burned beyond recognition inside the houses,” he was quoted as saying. “A body shot dead right outside a burned house and another beheaded body next to it. Other villagers escaped into the dark and the police are still looking for them.”
The attack took place at about 4 a.m. local time while people were still sleeping, Lamu County Commissioner Samson Macharia told local media. Five of the six killed had their hands tied from behind before they were beheaded, reported Kenya’s The Standard newspaper. “All the deceased persons had their hands tied from behind. Also several houses were torched within the locality and property of unknown value burned,” it said, citing a police report.
The pastor who spoke to ICC added: “The residents have gathered and are asking why the security officers were not doing enough to protect the Christians from being attacked by the Somali militants. There is a standoff now, but more police officers are arriving to pick the bodies and also evacuate those who need emergency medical attention.”
Commissioner Macharia also called it a terror attack and said security forces were hunting for the militants in a nearby forest, where they might have disappeared after the attack.
In the country’s northeast, the al-Shabaab terrorist group has been a constant threat. Al-Shabaab has fought for years to overthrow the Somali government. The group has been responsible for attacks on both sides of the Somalia and Kenya border as it has long vowed to retaliate against Kenya for sending in troops to Somalia to fight the group.
In April 2015, al-Shabaab carried out one of its deadliest attacks when it stormed the campus of Garissa University. On that occasion, militants were said to have separated Muslims from non-Muslims and proceeded to execute all non-Muslim students. At least 148 people were killed in the attack.
Kenya was ranked 49th on Christian support organization Open Doors USA’s 2021 World Watch List of countries where it is most difficult to be a Christian. While it’s a Christian-majority country, persecution has spread in Kenya, Open Doors says. “Particularly, Christians with a Muslim background in the northeast and coastal regions live under constant threat of attack — even from their closest relatives. Our research revealed that Christians were attacked and forced to flee their villages, and Islamic extremist group al-Shabaab has infiltrated the local population to monitor the activities of Christians in those areas.”
Organized crime is also a serious problem in the country, Open Doors adds. “Corrupt officials often fail to take measures against persecutors — increasing the potential for further incidents against Christians.”
A church leader overseeing the Lamu West Africa Inland Churches told ICC that believers are still at risk in the country.
“The enemy is still roaming free within our region,” he said. “We are saddened that six Christians have lost their lives and left their families, and the entire body of Christ is hurting. We call upon the government to heighten its commitment to protecting the people of this great nation of Kenya.”
Democrats’ current proposed $3.5 trillion welfare expansion would effectively ban faithful Christians from profiting from federal subsidies for separating infants and toddlers from their families. The current text of Democrats’ massive “Build Back Better” entitlement bill contains provisions that would require religious child-care providers to disavow longstanding theology about sex in order to receive federal child-care funds under a massive new early childhood program.
“The Democrats went out of their way to make sure and prohibit religious care providers from receiving any of these funds, and unanimously rejected an amendment to allow all child-care providers to be eligible for grants, including religious providers,” said Rep. Jackie Walorski, R-Indiana, the ranking member on the House’s subcommittee on Worker and Family Support.
Democrats’ legislation would create a new federally controlled child-care entitlement available to the majority of families in the nation. The legislation authorizes up to $20 billion in the program’s first year, $30 billion in its second, $40 billion in its third, and an unlimited amount after that. The estimated cost of this program over the next ten years is $400 billion.
“Making faith-based providers of child-care and pre-kindergarten into recipients of federal financial assistance triggers federal compliance obligations and non-discrimination provisions,” note the leaders of several religious organizations in an opposition letter to Senate Democrats last week.
This means potentially forcing religious organizations to deny all theology that acknowledges basic truths about human biology and reproduction. Given the state of federal “nondiscrimination” law, this could include forcing religious organizations to allow males into female bathrooms, hire transgender babysitters, and teach small children that men can turn themselves into women and that theologically condemned sex acts are in fact morally good.
Just one-third of American children younger than five are placed in center-based care, according to federal statistics. Sixty-three percent of American kids ages five and younger are cared for by family, and 11 percent by a babysitter or nanny. Most American kids ages 0 to 5 who do have regular childcare are away from their parents only part-time. Among the minority of American families who enroll young children in full-time care, 53 percent currently choose a religious facility, according to a January 2021 survey of parents from the Bipartisan Policy Center. Family care was parents’ top preference for their children, with religious-based care the second-most preferred option in the BPC poll.
Democrats’ bill would also likely dramatically increase the costs of childcare by increasing the licensing requirements for people the government pays to babysit tiny children. Most child care workers have low education levels, but states usually don’t raise their licensing requirements because that would reduce the availability of government-controlled child care.
Numerous studies have found that the quality of language and interaction available to a child in infancy and early childhood is extremely important to that child’s intellectual and social development. Studies have also found that frequent one-on-one interaction between a small child and his parents benefits early language development even if the child’s parents are poorly educated. This effect disappears, however, if that poorly educated mother is employed to care for many tiny children at once instead of one of her own to whom she can fully dedicate her attention and conversation time.
Research also resoundingly finds that living with married parents provides far bigger positive benefits to children for their entire lives than does attending an early childhood program.
Large early childhood programs are of notoriously poor quality. The major existing such program, Head Start, has failed to improve attendees’ education and life prospects in all the quality research done on the program that has spent some $250 billion from taxpayers since it began in 1965. In fact, federal research has found that children who participated in Head Start later learned less in math and behaved worse than peers who didn’t participate.
The research that shows any long-term benefit to children of attending early childhood programs derives such results from small-scale, boutique programs that employed teachers and support staff such as doctors who were much better educated than the typical daycare or preschool employee.
Research also shows mass programs that separate small children from their parents decrease children’s intellectual abilities and increase their aggression, risky behavior, and later likelihood of committing crimes. They also tend to erode parenting skills. The more time a small child spends away from his mother, the worse such negative effects tend to get.
“The amount of hours spent in day care each week during the first four years of life was the key child care predictor of behavioral problems,”writes social scientist Dr. Jenet Erickson in a review of several such studies. “In fact, the statistical effect size of the relationship between day care hours and caregiver reports of behavioral problems at age four and a half was so strong that it was comparable to the effect of poverty. Importantly, these statistical effects did not diminish as children aged.”
High-quality studies found that children who attended Tennessee’s state-run pre-K program had worse behavior and academic outcomes than children who did not. Children who attended Quebec’s universal early childcare program were 22 percent more likely to be convicted of a crime in young adulthood compared to children who did not participate in the program. Children separated from their parents in their youngest years through Quebec’s program also demonstrated greater emotional fragility that lasted into adulthood.
“The left is at war with religion and family-centered things. They think cradle to grave, government knows best,” Walorski said.
Walorski has sponsored legislation that would expand tax-free savings accounts families can use to pay for their own child care, tutoring, enrichment activities such as music lessons and summer camp, and more.
Afghan refugee Faridah visits a course preparing her to convert into christian confession by baptism in Berlin, on October 23, 2016. | CLEMENS BILAN/AFP via Getty Images
Human rights group ADF International has urged the international community to address the “dire plight” of religious minority communities in Afghanistan, including 10,000 Christians who are now “at extreme risk of being targeted with deadly violence.” They, too, need to be evacuated, the group says.
Among the communities at risk are “an estimated ten thousand Christians, many of whom are ‘guilty’ of converting from Islam — a crime punishable by death under Sharia law,” Giorgio Mazzoli, a legal officer representing ADF International at the United Nations, said in a statement. The Vienna-based group said it made an oral statement at the 31st Special Session of the Human Rights Council on the serious human rights concerns and situation in Afghanistan last week.
“As disturbing accounts of killings, harassment and intimidation against them are rapidly emerging, we urge States and the international community to give utmost attention to these persecuted minorities and guarantee the conditions for their prompt and safe exit from the country, irrespective of whether they have valid travel documents.”
Following the drawing down of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the Taliban quickly seized control of much of the country, eventually taking the capital Kabul earlier this month and forcing the government to flee. In response to the unexpected speed at which they retook the nation, tens of thousands of Americans, Afghan allies, and others have desperately tried to leave the country.
Last Thursday, a suicide bombing outside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul killed 10 U.S. Marines, two Army soldiers and one Navy Corpsman, along with as many as 170 civilians, most of whom were awaiting their evacuation. In response, the U.S. military killed two high profile terrorists from ISIS-K — one “planner” and one “facilitator,” in a drone strike in Afghanistan.
As of Saturday, 117,000 people had been evacuated from Afghanistan, the majority of whom are Afghans, Army Maj. Gen. William Taylor said, adding that the number includes 5,400 U.S. citizens, over 300 of whom have been evacuated since the Kabul attack.
As the number of evacuees increases, the U.S. will increase its efforts to provide temporary shelter for Afghans until they’re resettled at various locations across the U.S.
ADF International said it applauds efforts to evacuate and resettle vulnerable persons and it urges all parties to secure their safe passage out of the country. But there’s a need to rescue, evacuate and resettle even those who are now at a higher risk of severe persecution in Afghanistan, it said.
“We join the call on governments to temporarily halt deportations to Afghanistan and reconsider the applications of rejected Afghan asylum seekers fearing persecution because of their faith or beliefs,” Mazzoli said.
Early Rain Covenant Church in China | Facebook/Early Rain Covenant Church
Christians in China are being detained in secretive, mobile “transformation” facilities where they’re subject to brainwashing, torture and beatings to force them to renounce their faith, a new report has revealed.
Li Yuese, a member of an underground “house church” in the southwestern province of Sichuan, told Radio Free Asia he was held in a facility run by the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department for 10 months after a raid on his church in 2018.
“It was a mobile facility, that could just set up in some basement somewhere,” Li recalled. “It was staffed by people from several different government departments. It had its own (CCP) political and legal affairs committee working group, and they mainly target Christians who are members of house churches,” he said.
Li said he was held in a windowless room with no ventilation and prohibited from going outside during the time he was held captive in the facility. There, he was subjected to various forms of torture, from beatings to mental manipulation.
“They threaten, insult and intimidate you. These were United Front officials, men, women, sometimes unidentified, usually in plain clothes. The police turn a blind eye to this,” he said.
“You have to accept the statement they prepare for you. If you refuse, you will be seen as having a bad attitude and they will keep you in detention and keep on beating you.”
Li said most of his fellow inmates were also people who had been released on bail during criminal detention for taking part in church-related activities. Because police couldn’t prosecute them for any particular crimes, they were sent to the so-called “transformation” facilities.
“They were using brainwashing methods on those of us who were on bail from the detention center,” he said. “It was in a secret location, in a basement. There is no time limit for the brainwashing process. I don’t know the longest time anyone has been held there, but I was detained for eight or nine months. You can’t see the sun, so you lose all no concept of time.”
The Christian said suicidal ideation and self-harm were not uncommon in the facility due to the continuous torture inmates endured.
“I couldn’t sleep; after you’ve been in there a week, death starts to look better than staying there,” Li said. “I bashed myself against the wall to self-harm.”
“One time in there, I was groggy and was trying to open my eyes but I couldn’t,” he said. “Four or five of them grabbed me by the arms and legs and pinned me to the ground. They injected me with some drug, and brought me back to consciousness.”
When he was finally released, Li said he was in extremely poor health and remains haunted by the experience.
Another Christian told RFA that similar facilities are being used across China, made specifically for Christians, members of the underground Catholic church, and of the Falun Gong spiritual movement.
A lawyer surnamed Zhang from the northern province of Hebei, who previously represented a number of former detainees who are Catholics, said that instead of pursuing criminal charges against the religious practitioners, the CCP simply “disappeared” them.
“Some were sent back home after five or six years, and that was how people learned about the brainwashing centers — from their accounts,” Zhang said, adding he believes such facilities have been running for a long time around China.
Open Doors ranks China at No. 17 on its World Watch List of 50 countries where Christians are most persecuted.
Churches are being monitored and closed down across the country, whether they are underground or part of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, the officially sanctioned Protestant church in China. The government has also imposed a ban on the online sale of Bibles and uses high-tech surveillance to oppress and monitor believers.
Other crackdowns on Christians have involved ordering Christians to renounce their faith and replace displays of Jesus with portraits of Chairman Mao and President Xi Jinping, as well as the ongoing demolition of churches.
Boyd-MacMillan, director of Strategic Research at Christian charity Open Doors, recently told the Express UK that the CCP is becoming increasingly concerned about the Christian population’s growth and is cracking down on religion as a result.
“We think the evidence as to why the Chinese Church is so targeted, is that the leaders are scared of the size of the Church and the growth of the Church,” Boyd-MacMillan said.
“And if it grows at the rate that it has done since 1980, and that’s about between 7 [percent] and 8 percent a year, then you’re looking at a group of people that will be 300 million strong, nearly by 2030. And, you know, the Chinese leadership, they really do long term planning, I mean, their economic plan goes to 2049, so this bothers them. Because I think if the Church continues to grow like that, then they’ll have to share power.”
Students seen in a high school classroom. | Reuters/Stephane Mahe
Christians must “change their strategy”to keep graphic sex materials out of public schools, an expert has advised, following reports that an Ohio public high school has assigned freshman students to read a slam poetry book about a girl who liberates herself by abandoning her Christian faith and engaging in sexual promiscuity.
According to The Daily Wire, Hilliard Bradley High School, located near Columbus, the state’s capital, has assigned ninth-grade English students to read a poetry book titled, “The Poet X,” in which the main character, named Xiomara, rejects her faith and engages in sexual activities at school as a minor.
Parents of students enrolled at Hilliard Bradley High School must ask their children to “opt-out”of reading the assigned book if they’re opposed to the “graphic content,”DW added.
“In the first two pages of the assigned poetry, the underaged main character Xiomara addresses drug dealers who cat-call her. At one point the drug dealer says that ‘church girls are all freaks.’”
The book also reveals that Xiomara is pressured to send nude photos of herself to boys.
One of the poems in the book, by Elizabeth Acevedo, a National Poetry Slam Champion, is titled, “I Think the Story of Genesis Is Mad Stupid.” The book also features descriptions of graphic sex acts, including a poem titled “Fingers,” which describes masturbation. Another poem, titled “Hands,” describes Xiomara touching her love interest in a classroom setting. Yet another poem describes the main character and her love interest preparing to have sex.
Aaron Baer, president of the Columbus-based Center for Christian Virtue, said Christians and social conservatives who routinely object to this kind of thing have to change their strategy because as soon as they manage to make a school stop doing something objectionable, like teaching sexually explicit content, they’ll find another way to do it.
“The reality is that public schools have no meaningful accountability measures in place to stop the sexualization and harm to children,” Baer said in a phone interview with The Christian Post on Wednesday. “When a public school is failing and ignoring parents, they get more money from the taxpayers and government. So there is no incentive structure to stop schools from doing this level of harm to children.”
This is happening in public schools everywhere — in inner cities, suburbs and rural areas, he stressed. Teachers and administrators have been emboldened to teach such political and sexual curriculum to young people. He believes none of this will stop until universal school choice is a reality nationwide.
“I don’t care how many people launch campaigns to replace the school board or how many outrage campaigns there are … until the parents can say, ‘I don’t like what you’re doing and if you don’t stop, I’m taking my kid out and you’re going to lose the money for them,’ this will not change,” Baer said.
“There are no market forces on public schools to make them change. They have no incentive to listen to parents other than to maybe make them go away. What inevitably happens every single time we have a situation like this is, if we’re able to get the school to stop, within a few years, those parents move on and the school does it again.”
The same Columbus-area school district had, in recent weeks, ordered teachers to have students lobby for a sexual orientation and gender identity bill at the state capitol building. “We got them to stop, and now there’s this [sexually graphic poetry],”Baer added.
“They’re not going to stop because there are so many teachers and so many bureaucrats and so many political forces inside the school that until the parents are able to hold the school accountable, it’s not going to get better. Christians and social conservatives broadly have, for too long, lived in this bubble thinking … ‘Well, if we could only just take over the school board and fight the curriculum, we could stop this.’
“We’ve done that for 50 years, and we’re now teaching that Christianity is evil and that boys can become girls. We have failed. We have to go for universal school choice. Anything else is a cop-out.”
CP reached out to the Hilliard school district’s communications director for comment on this article but did not receive a response by press time.
Donna Senchesak, the director of the Parents for Educational Rights chapter in Ohio and a Hilliard Bradley parent, said in an interview with The Daily Wire that the district’s goal was to provide poetry written by non-white authors, though she was confused why the school opted for the graphic content. She withdrew her daughter from the class that was reading the book and said she will continue pushing back against the district on behalf of other parents and students.
“I am still fighting for these students and parents even though my daughter does not have to read it anymore,” she said.
“I am concerned for kids … that they can’t handle it.”
In 1999, doctors diagnosed Nepali Christian Gita Shakya with a painful, paralyzing spinal growth. Doctors told Gita and her Christian son, Suroj, that her best option for healing was a risky, potentially lethal surgery, Suroj said in a written testimony shared with The Christian Post.
Surgery was also expensive, and Gita’s husband, Babukaji, a Buddhist priest, refused to pay his Christian wife’s expenses. Doctors in Singapore gave 19-year-old Suroj two days to decide whether to let his mother live in terrible pain or risk her death. He prayed, then decided it was best to do the surgery. But he didn’t know what he would tell his family if Gita died, he said.
“At that time, I felt so alone in Singapore because it was my first visit, and I had nobody to share my problems with besides talking with the Lord in prayer,” he added.
Suroj heard a knock at the door. It was a group of local church members who wanted to pray for Gita. After 20 minutes of prayer, a miracle happened, he said. Gita stood up. She kicked out with her left foot, which hadn’t moved for years. She punched out with her left arm. Suddenly, she could move. Gita started to weep and praise God, Suroj recalled.
“There was no pain and sadness, which she had before. Her face was changed into joy and happiness,” he said.
Afterward, Suroj said doctors didn’t believe Gita was the same woman. Babukaji didn’t believe his wife had been healed without surgery until he saw she had no scars. Then along with his son, Suman, he became a Christian.
Such stories happen often in Nepal, said Suroj, who’s now a 41-year-old church elder. Despite persecution and poverty, the Nepalese church has grown incredibly quickly. The South Asian country has one of the fastest-growing Christian populations in the world.
To secular Westerners, it might seem impossible. But the mountains of Nepal have witnessed incredibly fast church growth in part because of miraculous healings. Suroj told CP that he became a Christian at 8 years old after God healed him from food poisoning.
“Firstly, church growth is because of miracles,” Suroj asserted. “[If] people don’t [get healed] from the hospital, they go to the church and ask for prayer from the church leaders. When the church family and church leaders pray for the sick people, they are getting healed.”
To those who see the world from a materialistic viewpoint, reports of miracles might sound impossible or far-fetched. The miraculous break nature’s laws and can’t be replicated. But that alone doesn’t disprove their existence, Wheaton College Intercultural Studies Professor Scott Moreau told CP. Not all of reality can be understood by using scientific methods.
“It’s not that science clashes with religion [when it comes to miracles],” he said. “They have completely different toolkits to get at the understructure of reality. One has testable formulae, but miracles don’t work that way.”
While miracles can’t be explained by natural laws, Moreau said they can be observed or verified.
“You can examine whether the reports of a miracle are consistent with each other,” he said.
People around the world agree that miracles exist, Moreau added. The fastest-growing Christian denominations around the world emphasize the miraculous.
Church growth in Nepal
In 1951, Nepal reported no Christians in its government census. And by 1961, that number increased to just 458. Today, the World Christian Database ranks the country as the 12th fastest-growing Christian population in the world with 1,285,200 believers, said database co-director Gina Zurlo. The real number might be higher.
“In some countries, fast growth rates of Christians are due to migration. In other countries, high birth rates may contribute more. But in Nepal, the main factor for growth is conversion from other religions,” she explained. “We estimate that Nepal is 4.25% Christian.”
Most Nepalese people today practice Hinduism, the world’s third-largest religion. The polytheistic Hindu religion values behavior and community belonging over belief. Until 2008, Nepal was a Hindu kingdom. For Hindu radicals, being Nepali means being culturally Hindu, Pastor Tanka Subedi told CP.
Subedi leads Nepal’s Family of God Church and serves as director of the International Nepal Fellowship. Although most Hindus live in peace with Christians, he said some fiercely oppose the Gospel.
“The prime minister himself says he doesn’t believe in God but is Hindu,” said Subedi. “State media and government officials [say] Christianity is coming to Nepal to destroy our culture. It’s challenging to evangelize people who have that mindset.”
The pressure and violence Christians experience from Hindus places the country at No. 34 on Open Doors USA’s global persecution watch list. Nepal is known for criminalizing actions that lead people to change their religion, International Christian Concern South Asia Regional Manager Will Stark told CP. Hindus fear Christianity because it threatens the Hindu caste system, Stark said. They believe that people get reincarnated based on what they did in their past lives. Bad people are reborn to do degrading or “unclean” jobs. They are “low caste” or “untouchable” because it’s believed that they spiritually pollute other Hindus. Hindus in higher caste positions often treat them with cruelty or contempt.
When Christians preach equality before God, Hinduism crumbles, Stark asserted.
“The Gospel tells you that all people are equal and Jesus cares about you and being your personal Savior,” he detailed. “The caste system is based on dividing out or stratifying the community. Without the bottom of the pyramid, the rest of it doesn’t really exist.”
Nepal’s anti-conversion law says that “‘any act that causes a religious conversion will be punished.” This broad wording gives police the right to punish Christians for even mentioning the name of Jesus in public, Stark noted. Hindu radicals who attack Christians also justify their actions by saying they were enforcing the law.
Bishwa Raj Pokharel, spokesman for the Nepalese National Police, claimed, “One can choose the religion they want to follow,” in a statement to the Global Press Journal in response to a January article about Christians who accused police of targeting them for their faith.
“But one cannot take advantage of a person’s situation and induce them to change their religion. The law says that you can change your religion, but you cannot change someone else’s religion.”
Persecution increasing
Government persecution has increased recently, said Subedi. In 2019, Nepalese authorities threw 73-year-old Christian Cho Yusang in jail for distributing Bibles. Two weeks in prison damaged his health so severely that he had to be admitted to a hospital.
After an orphanage closed this year, Nepalese Pastor Hari Tamang opened his home to shelter children for 10 days. In response to his generosity, police arrested him on false charges of trafficking and attempted religious conversion.
According to Open Doors USA, Christian persecution in Nepal rose during the watchdog organization’s 2020 reporting period as pressure is high for Christians “in every sphere of life.” The group reports that governing authorities in Nepal “make life difficult for followers of Christ.”
China and India both support Nepal’s government in its persecution of Christians, but for different reasons, Subedi said. India wants Nepal to remain Hindu, while China fears that Christians will support political movements to free Tibet, he explained. Despite rising persecution, Christians continue to share their faith, Subedi said, because the government can’t arrest them all.
“We come from a persecuted background. We were never free. We are used to it,” he said. “There’s not necessarily a state apparatus to use [the anti-conversion] law for mass arrests.”
People also feel eager to become Christians because of the reality of the Christian faith, Subedi added. God works visible miracles in churches and traditional healers can’t compete. Christians point to a historical Jesus in contrast to mythical Hindu gods.
“If you go deeper [into Hinduism], you find nothing. They’re just stories from different places with different gods,” the pastor contended. “When you hear about Jesus, it is solid. It is a fact. It happened in history and people can accept it. People are looking for a real God. All the Christians pray for healing and healings happen.”
Suroj stressed that Christianity also changes the lives of believers.
“When a man comes to the church and accepts Jesus, his life will be changed,” he said. “Before coming to the church, he used to take alcohol and smoke. But after coming to the church, he leaves all these things. The people who are not Christian want to come to the church and leave all the negative things in their life. People from other faiths feel excited and amazed that these things happened.”
Subedi noted that so many people become Christians in Nepal that it’s difficult for current believers to teach them all. He estimated that the church grows between 5% and 10% per year.
“The Hindu people are so scared of the Christians,” said Suroj. “They know that the Christian community is growing in very large ways. They are scared that if it happens for a few more years, in Nepal there will be no more Hindu people.”
In an increasingly connected world, many religions have spread far from their original homelands. Buddhism has gained popularity in America over the decades, and ideas from Hinduism influence popular American movies like “Star Wars” and “The Matrix.” In Asia, Christianity has grown more rapidly than ever before. But there’s a difference between the way Western people have sampled Eastern religions and the way Eastern people have believed in Christianity, according to Wheaton College Anthropology Professor Brian Howell.
“They are two really different phenomena. In the West, people are picking up Eastern religious influences in a very piecemeal fashion. They are doing it as self-expression,” he told CP. “With people finding Christianity, they are finding a community and a tradition they can connect to globally.”
Americans want some Eastern religious ideas; Nepalese people want to become Christians, Howell said.
Nepalese believers tend to gather in churches smaller than 100 people, although some churches are far larger, said Suroj. Believers in rural villages want practical teachings on how to live out their faith, while believers in cities want to know more about Christian theology.
“Giving, repentance, all these practical things, we teach in the church. We also teach the theological part of the Bible because the church believers we have in Nepal are about 60% uneducated people,” he said. “They love to learn and hear practical things.”
Church members in Nepal also help and care for each other, he said. They become family.
“The Christian people face many problems from his or her [Hindu] family and community,” Suroj added. “The church helps these Christian brothers and sisters in whatever way the church can. We are staying as one family. We help each other, we care for each other, we teach and we support each other.”
As it grows, the Nepalese church faces many difficulties, said Subedi. Poverty and persecution cause problems, but the biggest need is pastors who can help people fully understand their faith.
“This is one of the biggest challenges, to disciple people,” he said. “A lot of pastors in the villages haven’t gone to school. My organization tries to teach them at home. There is a huge need for training pastors and leaders in the villages.”
New Testament communities
In countries with heavy persecution, small churches grow faster, Moreau explained. House churches split as they grow larger and believers commit to share their faith. Small churches also resemble the New Testament Church.
“If it’s a house gathering, it tends to be more organic. If it’s in buildings, it tends to be more programmatic. The biblical evidence seems to point to the more organic method as the norm,” he said. “In the Muslim world, the organic churches have grown bigger faster simply because when a church becomes visible in the public arena it can get shut down very quickly.”
As Nepal’s church has grown in size and reputation, a small number of people have tried to join for the wrong reasons, Suroj said. Christians in Nepal have a reputation for politeness, hard work and honesty, so people become Christians in an attempt to get a job or visa.
“They think, ‘If I become a Christian, I can easily get a job,’” he said. “One family came to my church office and was asking for a Christian certificate even though they are not Christian, churchgoers or baptized. They offered money to the church and said if the church wants money, we need the baptism certificate.”
In many ways, the church in Nepal resembles the church of the New Testament.
At once hated and admired, it’s a new community that people join even at the cost of their families. It heals the sick, helps the poor and transforms sinners. People want the life the church gives, sometimes even for the wrong reasons. Despite persecution, it multiplies.
“It’s like the time of Jesus for Nepal. Believing in Jesus means you are a second-class citizen. You may be disconnected from your family,” Subedi said. “It’s a big sacrifice to follow Jesus. It was bigger in the past, but it has not changed a lot. We’re still considered second-class citizens, outcasts from many things. It costs you a lot.”
Ethnic Uyghur members of the Communist Party of China carry a flag as they take part in an organized tour on June 30, 2017, in the old town of Kashgar, in the far western Xinjiang province, China. Kashgar has long been considered the cultural heart of Xinjiang for the province’s nearly 10 million Muslim Uyghurs. At an historic crossroads linking China to Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, the city has changed under Chinese rule with government development, unofficial Han Chinese settlement to the western province, and restrictions imposed by the Communist Party. Beijing says it regards Kashgar’s development as an improvement to the local economy, but many Uyghurs consider it a threat that is eroding their language, traditions, and cultural identity. | Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
Women imprisoned in China’s network of internment camps in Xinjiang are subject to horrific torture, systematic rape, and sexual abuse as the country’s Communist leadership seeks to “destroy” those it sees as a threat, a graphic new report has revealed.
A report from the BBC highlights interviews from several former detainees and a guard who shared firsthand accounts of their horrific experiences in China’s internment camps in the Xinjiang region. Estimates suggest that over 1 million to as many as 3 million Uyghur Muslims and other minority groups in Western China have been subject to these internment camps, which are intended to strip Uyghurs and other minorities “of their culture, language and religion, and indoctrinate them into mainstream Chinese culture.”
Tursunay Ziawudun, a woman who spent nine months inside one of these camps before fleeing to the U.S., told the BBC that women were removed from the cells “every night” and raped by one or more masked Chinese men. She said she was tortured and later gang-raped on three occasions, each time by two or three men. She also recalled how police tortured her with electric shocks and, in one instance, violently abused her when she was unsure of her husband’s whereabouts, kicking her with their heavy boots. Because of the severity of the abuse, rape, and torture, Ziawudun said that there were “many people in those cells who lost their minds.”
“Their goal is to destroy everyone,” she said. “And everybody knows it.”
Gulzira Auelkhan, a Kazakh woman from Xinjiang who was detained for 18 months in the camp system, recounted how she was forced to strip Uyghur women naked and handcuff them before leaving them alone with Chinese men.
“My job was to remove their clothes above the waist and handcuff them so they cannot move,” she recalled. “Then I would leave the women in the room and a man would enter — some Chinese man from outside or policeman. I sat silently next to the door, and when the man left the room I took the woman for a shower.”
The Chinese men “would pay money to have their pick of the prettiest young inmates,” she said, stressing that the physical violence she witnessed amounted to “rape.”
Qelbinur Sedik, an Uzbek woman from Xinjiang, who was forced to give language lessons to the detainees, said the women’s camp was “tightly controlled.” She said there were “four kinds of electric shock” women would be subjected to — “the chair, the glove, the helmet, and anal rape with a stick.”
“The screams echoed throughout the building,” she told the BBC.“I could hear them during lunch and sometimes when I was in class.”
Sedik said that one time, she asked a Chinese camp policewoman about the rumors of rape. The women replied, “Yes, the rape has become a culture. It is gang rape and the Chinese police not only rape them but also electrocute them. They are subject to horrific torture.”
Interviewees also shared how they were required to watch propaganda videos praising Chinese President Xi Jinping and sing patriotic songs. They were also forced to undergo medical tests, take pills, and were forcibly injected every 15 days with a “vaccine” that brought on nausea and numbness. Women were also forcibly injected with IUDs or sterilized.
One former prison guard shared how women were forced to memorize books about Xi Jinping. Those who failed to complete the task were punished with food deprivation and beatings.
“I entered those camps. I took detainees into those camps,” he said. “I saw those sick, miserable people. They definitely experienced various types of torture. I am sure about that.”
China has repeatedly denied that it is persecuting ethnic groups in Xinjiang; however, reports reveal it is actually expanding its network of detention facilities.
An earlier report documented how hospitals in Xinjiang were ordered to abort and kill all babies born in excess of China’s mandated family planning limits — including newborns born after being carried to full term. The orders were part of strict family-planning policies intended to restrict Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities to three children.
In January, the former Trump administration officially designated China’s persecution of minorities in western Xinjiang Province as “genocide” and “crimes against humanity.”
“I believe this genocide is ongoing, and that we are witnessing the systematic attempt to destroy Uyghurs by the Chinese party-state,” former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said at the time, adding that the Chinese Communist Party — which he described as a “Marxist-Leninist regime that exerts power over the long-suffering Chinese people through brainwashing and brute force” — is “engaged in the forced assimilation and eventual erasure of a vulnerable ethnic and religious minority group.”
The Biden administration has not stated whether it would maintain the previous administration’s declaration that China is committing genocide against its Uyghur population. White House Press Secretary Psaki told reporters at a press briefing that Biden has “spoken before to the horrific treatment” of Uyghurs, but she will “check”what the Biden administration’s policy will be, RCP previously reported. However, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said that he believes genocide had been committed against the Uyghurs.
Christian leaders have urged Christians in the West to care about the persecution of Uyghur Muslims and other minorities. In September, Southern Baptist ethicist Russell Moore said that the crimes being perpetrated against religious minorities in China and elsewhere rely on invisibility “where the rest of the world doesn’t pay attention” and “tribalism.”
“The way of Jesus Christ says that we pay attention to our neighbor on the side of the road who is persecuted, who is being beaten,” he said. “So let’s pray for the Uyghur [and] for other persecuted peoples. Let’s pray not just individually, but together, and pray for them by name.”
“Let’s be the people who stand up for whoever is being made invisible, whoever is being intimidated and bullied in our own neighborhoods and in our own communities because we’re the people of Jesus Christ.”
So much for peace on earth and goodwill to men. America’s legacy media elites used the Sunday before Christmas for extra Christian-bashing, with white evangelicals the preferred targets.
Writing in The New Yorker, Michael Luo complained that “white evangelical Protestants, once again, overwhelmingly supported President Trump in the election,” and that “churches, particularly conservative ones, fought lockdown orders and rebuffed public-health warnings.”
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof interviewed leftist pastor Jim Wallis, with the conversation quickly turning to accusations that “White evangelicalism has destroyed the ‘evangel.’” At The Dispatch, Time columnist David French concluded that much of the scorn white evangelical Christians receive is deserved. He says the world often “rejects Christians because Christians are cruel.”
Yeah, well, merry Christmas to you too.
To be sure, Christians should humbly accept correction if it is deserved, even when the word of reproof is delivered by pagans. But the above writers’ broad indictments against American evangelicals do not withstand scrutiny. Although each criticism has particular errors, they are united by two shared mistakes. The first is a failure to account for differences of denomination and devotion. Lumping Pentecostals, Presbyterians, and prosperity-gospel preachers together is sloppy, as is neglecting to distinguish between those who are committed churchgoers and those who are only nominally evangelical.
It might be said that these varieties of white evangelicals have in common an overwhelming political support for Donald Trump, but this retort only highlights the second error shared by these writers: the assumption that voting for Trump was necessarily immoral.
It is easy to pick out Trumpian words and deeds that are not compatible with the gospel. It is also easy to do the same with his Democratic opponents and their policies. Asserting that voting for Trump is a moral stain on evangelicals, without weighing the alternatives, presumes what is in question. This error is shared by each writer (and Kristof’s interview subject), but each finds some unique ways to express it.
Luo, for instance, unfavorably compares the response of today’s Christians to the pandemic with Christians’ response to past plagues. But although he is correct that reckless churches should be rebuked, he makes no effort to distinguish between the reckless and those cautiously meeting in person, or to value preserving the gathering of believers. Nor does he quantify how many churches are foregoing precautions, or show how many of these congregations fall under the “white evangelical” category.
He suggests that, to eliminate risk, Christians should forgo all in-person meeting, and he dismisses the religious liberty claims that have been raised against capricious government restrictions on churches. But if the casinos, strip clubs, and abortion clinics are getting better treatment than churches, then anti-Christian discrimination has replaced public health policy.
Furthermore, even from a secular public health perspective, eliminating church services would do more harm than good, as churchgoing seems to have been essential to helping many Americans make it through the difficulties of this year. We are physical beings, not disembodied minds who can live in the cloud indefinitely.
Meanwhile, Kristof and his interview subject Wallis presume that technocratic welfare-statism is the obvious way to care for the poor and oppressed, so they dismiss anyone who disagrees with them as bad Christians. This complacent assumption of moral and political rectitude precludes them from understanding those they condemn.
Thus, although Kristof recently wrote a column of questions about Christians and abortion, he seems to have ignored the manyresponsesexplaining its paramount importance as a political issue for conservative Christians. His indifference is particularly notable at Christmas, because Luke’s advent narrative emphasizes the humanity of both the unborn John the Baptist and of Jesus. And if the unborn are human, then Christians cannot support the party of abortion on demand.
Kristof and Wallis’s reflexive acceptance of the left’s shibboleths of the moment also leads to ridiculous anachronisms such as declaring Jesus a “person of color.” This conceptual colonization of first-century Israel by modern American racial concepts is odious and misleading—“person of color”makes no sense in that context.
It is, indeed, worse than the depictions of a blond, blue-eyed Jesus (are there many of those?) that Wallis complains about. Portrayals of Jesus and other biblical figures in local style and appearance have been a common, if inaccurate, artistic practice across centuries and cultures.
Race is also central to French’s condemnation of his fellow white evangelicals. In his telling, they are guilty of “some outright racism” but perhaps even more of being seduced by a “Christian nationalism” that “will always minimize America’s historic sins and the present legacy (and reality) of American racism.”French is, for instance, upset that more white evangelicals do not believe that racism is an “extremely” or “very serious” threat to “America and America’s future.”
But even if white evangelicals are wrong in their assessment of the depth and danger of America’s racial problems, this is not enough to condemn them as cruel. It is, in fact, precisely the sort of issue on which Christians may reasonably disagree.
Furthermore, the data French cites does not account for crucial factors such as whether respondents are regular churchgoers or merely culturally evangelical. In addition, French ignores education and class in his analysis, even though the study he relies on emphasizes the importance of these factors in understanding the politics of white evangelical subgroups.
French’s article, like the others, is mostly an impressionistic interpretation of white evangelicalism in America. By their reckoning, white evangelicals have become reckless plague-bearers with no regard for the poor and oppressed, and their cruelty rightly earns them the world’s opprobrium.
There may be some individuals who match this grim depiction, but as a general description of tens of millions of evangelicals, it is obviously untrue. Look around the country and evangelical churches are holding services with masks, distancing, and lots of hand sanitizer. Evangelicals, both individually and corporately, are caring for those in need in their communities and around the world, and treating people of all races with dignity and respect.
In this Christmas season, French, Kristof, and Luo should stop building evangelical strawmen to burn in effigy. Instead, they, like all of us, should contemplate and rejoice in the miracle of God become man to save His people from their sins.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Nathanael Blake is a Senior Contributor at The Federalist. He has a PhD in political theory. He lives in Missouri.
Christian mourners at the burial site of the Rev. Alubara Audu who was killed by jihadist herdsmen at Buda, Kajuru in Kaduna state, Nigeria, in September 2020. | Emeka Umeagbalasi
When radical Islamists murder Christians in Nigeria, the government lists their deaths as having other causes, according to new report released by Nigeria’sInternational Society for Civil Liberties & the Rule of Law. The newly-released report indicates that deaths which the Nigerian government describes as random banditry or inter-tribal violence, actually result from radical Islamists attacking Christians, said Intersociety leader and founder Emeka Umeagbalasi.
Since 2009, 34,400 Christians have been murdered by radical Islamists, with 2,200 slain in the last year, the report says. Radical Muslims have also killed an estimated 20,000 moderate Muslims.
” … the most dangerous dimension to radical Islamism in Nigeria is its secret rise and spread and clandestine control of state power through Fulani Jihadism. In other words, the Nigerian Government’s major local and foreign policy direction, in clandestine practice, is ‘Fulani Jihadism’ — a policy pursued with utter alacrity and through different colors and disguises including pro-jihadist or radical Islamic policies and conducts. To cover up these, the present Nigerian government has also created an international machinery of falsehood and propaganda with well-funded or oiled international lobbying campaigns targeted at misinforming and misleading key and strategic international legislative, diplomatic and democratic institutions or bodies especially the EU, U.S., U.K. and Australia and their Parliaments; the Commonwealth and the U.N. and other internationally respected state and non-state actors,” the report states, in part.
“What the government here is doing is mapping out strategies. [It’s] a kind of script that’s given to media, local media and what have you,” Umeagbalasi said.
According to Umeagbalasi, Nigeria’s government tells media that Fulani tribe herdsmen travel south fleeing desertification and kill during conflicts with local farmers. The truth is that Fulani tribesmen travel south because they are radical Islamists looking for Christians to kill.They don’t attack Muslim villages, and traditional cattle-grazing methods don’t support enough cows to justify fatal conflicts with farmers.
The Nigerian government hides these attacks because it supports radical Islamists, Umeagbalasi asserted. President Muhammadu Buhari is a Muslim. He is also a member of the Miyatti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria, which supports radical Islamic tribesmen, he added.
“Buhari sets aside the Constitution. He makes appointments without recourse to the Constitution,” Umeagbalasi continued. “In the Constitution, it is forbidden for the government to have a state religion. The Constitution made it clear that the composition of the armed forces of Nigeria should reflect regional or religious balancing, but the president is not listening to that.”
Instead, Buhari stacks the government with Muslims in positions of high authority, the Intersociety report said. Since Buhari’s 2015 election, Muslims have occupied 32 of the most important 39 positions in politics, security, lawmaking and the judiciary, even though Nigeria has even numbers of Muslims and Christians.
In June, five of Nigeria’s major Islamic groups made an alliance with each other to rise up against Christians. The killings of Christians in Nigeria aren’t random acts of violence, but a calculated attempt to conquer Nigeria for Islam, Umeagbalasi claims.
“The country is being taken over by the caliphate,” he said. “When they are done in the north, they will now come to the south.”
In response to the rise in attacks, Nigeria’s government has done little or nothing, the report says. They consistently under-report casualties of Christians. Sometimes, the government buries murdered Christians using Muslim funeral rites in an attempt to convince the world that Christians aren’t under attack.
“The Government of Nigeria clandestinely will direct the Army Commander or Commissioner of Police in charge of the incident area to organize a press conference denying the killing or linking it falsely to another cause such as ‘attack by bandits’ or ‘rival communal violence’ or ‘killing associated with kingship/chieftaincy/intra communal violence’ or ‘reprisal violence’ or ‘cult-related killing,’ or ‘killing arising from armed robbery and kidnapping,’ or ‘road accidents,’” the report reads.
Rather than sending the military or police to defeat heavily armed terrorists, the Nigerian government orders its forces to stand down and retreat if fired on, said Umeagbalasi. In some cases, the Nigerian Army allegedly participate in the killing of Christians. Some Christians in the Army told him that commanders who tell their soldiers to fight terrorists get transferred to assignments where they can’t make the country safer.
“There is a security code given to Nigerian armies not to shoot or arrest Fulani hitmen,” Umeagbalasi said. “Christian Army leaders drew my attention to it. The soldiers said there was an instruction from the president [that] nobody should shoot. If you are under attack, you should retreat.”
Pastor Rob McCoy speaks at Godspeak Calvary Chapel in California, Aug. 23, 2020. | YouTube/Godspeak Calvary Chapel
A new survey reveals that the American public is much more accepting of churches defying coronavirus lockdowns than they were when the pandemic first broke out in March.
Paul Djupe, an affiliated scholar with the Public Religion Research Institute, and Ryan Burge, a political science professor at Eastern Illinois University, collaborated on a survey asking 1,750 Americans for their views about the coronavirus pandemic in October. They had previously collaborated on a coronavirus-related survey in March, when they spoke to 3,100 Americans.
When asked if they agreed with the statement, “If the government told us to stop gathering in person for worship I would want my congregation to defy the order,”34% of respondents who participated in the October survey agreed (with 16% strongly agreeing). By contrast, 21.8% of Americans surveyed in March said that they agreed (with 10.7% strongly agreeing) with their congregation defying in-person worship restrictions.
Meanwhile, the share of Americans who disagreed with churches’ defiance of worship restrictions dropped significantly from March to October. In October, 39.1% of Americans disagreed (with 25.8% strongly disagreeing) with the defiance compared to 55.6% (with 36.4% strongly disagreeing) in March.
Those who strongly disagreed with churches’ defiance of in-person worship restrictions made up a plurality of the respondents in March but by October, a plurality of respondents (26.9%) said that they neither agreed nor disagreed with defiance of worship restrictions.
The survey also analyzed the responses to the question based on political party affiliation, finding that support for defiance of coronavirus worship restrictions had increased among all party identifiers. “Our data suggest defiance is growing across the board. Even strong Democrats are urging a more defiant stance, though the growth among Republicans is much greater,” Djupe and Burge wrote.
According to Djupe and Burge, another factor explains the increased support for churches defying worship restrictions: adherence to the prosperity gospel, which teaches that “religious belief is a quid pro quo, returning a wide range of benefits for believers, especially health and wealth.”
“Prosperity gospel belief is also linked to opposition to state health orders, and the connection is easy to see: if the church is the instrument of personal health, then shuttering the church is a direct threat to personal safety during a pandemic,” they said.
Data collected by the researchers show that the correlation between adherence to prosperity gospel beliefs and the opinion that churches should defy worship restrictions was even stronger in October than it was in March. They measured adherence to prosperity gospel beliefs using a “three question index.”
They attributed the increased support for lockdown defiance among prosperity gospel believers to “the messaging they are hearing from religious and political sources,” including Republican politicians who “continue to take a freedom-first approach.”
“Agreement with prosperity gospel views has grown about 3 percent since March,” they said.
Other findings show a drop in the percentage of adults who believe “the government should tell churches and houses of worship that they should stop meeting in person to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.” While 66.1% of Americans agreed with that in March, 56% said the same in October.
As the idea that churches should defy in-person worship restrictions has gained ground since March, the idea that “hysteria over the coronavirus is politically motivated” has become less popular. In October, 22.5% of Americans strongly rejected that idea, an increase from the 14% who strongly disagreed with that assessment in March. The share of Americans who either agree or strongly agree with the idea that hysteria over the coronavirus was politically motivated dropped from 42.5% in March to 40% in October.
In their analysis, Djupe and Burge offered two theories to explain Americans’ changes in views about the coronavirus over the past seven months. The first theory contended that “people are responding to an elite messaging that combines with unorthodox Christian beliefs to promote an individualistic, go-it-alone style response,” an idea that they argue is “widespread enough to spell doom to efforts to inspire collective action against the behaviors that are spreading the virus.”
Their other explanation rests on the premise that “Trump’s gross mismanagement of the pandemic soured Americans on Trump as well as on government efforts to curtail the pandemic, which, strangely enough, redounded to the benefit of Republicans opposed to state action.” They concluded that “a bit of both explanations are in play.”
After the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and Agudath Israel of America sued, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 on Wednesday to temporarily block New York’s restrictions on houses of worship, saying that the rules “cannot be viewed as neutral” and appear to violate the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.
On Election Night, I was crowded around the television with a dozen college friends in a tiny apartment above our government professor’s house. The Virginia night air seeping through the window was rescuing the feeble air conditioning unit and someone had propped up the three-legged TV with a handful of textbooks. Everyone watched the colorful maps on TV flip colors and we good-naturedly heckled CNN hosts who had been talking nonstop for the better part of two hours.
When Trump started gaining votes in Pennsylvania, everyone glanced at the three Pennsylvanians in the room. “All the Republicans just got off work,” said one, a pastor’s son from Pittsburgh. We all laughed.
But his joke stuck with me. I imagined that amorphous group of Pennsylvania Republicans going about their days, serving customers, trading smiles, clattering dinner plates in the kitchen. They would vote proudly and then they would move on with their daily responsibilities to the people around them.
I can’t say for sure if those Norman Rockwell-esque voters in rural Pennsylvania exist the way I imagined, but I have been inspired and convicted by their imaginary example following the election. They cheerfully did their civic duty, and they went about their day. They didn’t drop the responsibilities and joys around them to hang all hope of salvation on a presidential candidate.
As Christians, that’s how we should approach the electoral process — both before and after the results are announced. We should be educated and enthusiastically involved in our governing authority. We should surely fight to protect our families, our right to worship, and the rights of those who cannot defend themselves. But at the end of the day, we do all we can and then leave the results in eternal hands.
We preach that Christ alone is the hope of our salvation. But how graciously we handle the results of this election will show those around us whether we mean it.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be rightly concerned about protecting the electoral process where there is evidence of voter fraud. It also doesn’t mean we should give up being politically involved or holding our elected officials accountable for their words and actions. Advocating for liberty and justice in the civic process is a legitimate and necessary calling.
But it does mean we have an excellent opportunity to live out our faith by remembering that we trust in something greater than elections. “Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation,” the psalmist says. “Blessed is he whose hope in is the Lord his God.”
Because our hope is not in this world, we have no reason to be fearful. We may be disappointed and should be aware of policies that threaten our ability to live as we have been called. Yet we have no need to feel afraid, distraught, or betrayed. Any earthly idol would betray our trust.
It is because we hope in an eternal savior that we joyfully continue our daily lives. We don’t need a week off of classes or work to mourn an election. Our daily joys have suffered no loss of meaning. We continue to enjoy fellowship with other members of the body of Christ. We keep going to work and serving those around us. We go on cooking dinner and enjoying it around the family dinner table. And we remain completely fulfilled by the daily grace of God. Because of our faith, we know that politics isn’t everything (and thank God it isn’t). Our lives shouldn’t revolve around who sits in the Oval Office.
After all, the whole concept of government is merely a means to enable people to live well in community with each other. We cannot let the means become the end. Instead, we should continue to live full and fruitful lives with the people placed around us. Furthermore, watching other reactions to election results reminds us how dangerous and disappointing it is to place our trust in fallen human beings.
Avideo of a woman screaming uncontrollably at Trump’s inauguration in 2016 became a meme because it captured the disconsolate reaction to Trump’s victory by some of his opponents. “I’m so sorry to my world,” the woman sobbed. “There’s so much potential for beauty and for devastation in this one moment, it’s just almost incomprehensible that they can exist right now.”
Other Clinton supportersreminisced a full year after Trump’s election about how devastated they were by his victory. “It kind of just hit you,” said Trent Vanegas, explaining how he broke down in tears when the 2016 election results were announced. “One moment, there’s hope and the next moment it’s complete despair.” Another Clinton voter expressed fear that he and his wife would have to raise their newborn child under a Trump presidency.
Even the positive reactions to Biden’s apparent victory show an obsessive and unhealthy faith in political power. Members of the media literally wept on television when they called the race for Biden. “I don’t know why I’m crying so much,” MSNBC contributor and former Democratic senator Claire McCaskill said. “I keep crying, I’m going to cry now.”
“I’m very emotional,” CNN’s Don Lemon said. “So when you ask me how I’m feeling right now, I’m sorry, that’s all I can tell you.” CNN’s Van Jones repeatedly wiped his eyes with a tissue on camera.
And then therewas Stephen Colbert on Thursday night, in what was supposed to be a comedy routine. Because of Trump, “I’m not sitting down yet, I just don’t feel like it yet,” Colbert said. “I’m also dressed for a funeral, because Donald Trump tried really hard to kill something tonight.”
Two minutes into the show and without having told a single joke, Colbert hung his head and just stood awkwardly in silence. “What I didn’t know is that it would hurt so much,” he finally added. “I didn’t expect this to break my heart, for him to cast a dark shadow on our most sacred right.”
Comedian Marc Maron led off hispodcast on Monday — after about 30 seconds straight of profanity — by proclaiming “the weight has been lifted…I don’t know that people really fully understand the power, the symbolic power of the head of state that determines on some level how grounded people feel in the country.”
“We just barely f—ing avoided real fascism, people,” he added, before calling Trump supporters “brainf—ed, brainwashed people or just people who believe that fascism is the way to go.”
Watching these reactions, we should not make a mockery of their joy or sorrow. We should, however, be inspired to share the promise that we have. After all, we are blessed with the confidence that politics is not our final hope. And we are called to live accordingly.
Elle Reynolds is an intern at the Federalist, and a senior at Patrick Henry College studying government and journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.
A video of Christians meeting at Walmart, reportedly in North Versailles, Pennsylvania, has gone viral on the internet. The Christians were banned from meeting at their church thanks to Governor Wolf so they took to Walmart to come together in worship.
Jim Hoft is the founder of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016.
Many local governments made drive-up churches illegal, Pastor’s using loudspeakers while church attendees sat in their cars could put you in jail. However, the mayor of Minneapolis is “going the extra mile” for a local mosque during Ramadan.
Ramadan is the holiest month of the year for followers of Islam and is a time of prayer and fasting. Most prayers happen inside a mosque. “People are standing shoulder to shoulder and in lines, and so the social distancing is always very challenging,”Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council of American-Islamic Relations said.
Ramadan starts on Thursday, so Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey is allowing the Muslim leaders to broadcast by speaker “call to prayer” five times a day in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood.
Coronavirus In Minnesota: Mayor Frey Allows Broadcast Of Muslim Call To Prayer In Cedar-Riverside…
The broadcast will be generated from the Dar Al-Hijrah Mosque and organizers expect it will reach thousands of residents, from sunrise to shortly after sunset.
Funny we haven’t seen local governments bend over backward to help Christians celebrate Easter they were almost eager to arrest them.
“We want to make sure that people can practice their religion, yes, but it can’t conflict with the overarching public health guidelines,” Frey said. “It allows people to stay together even when they’re praying apart, and we want to make sure that we’re doing proper social distancing and physical distancing in particular.”
But Christians don’t you dare meet up in a parking lot with a loudspeaker.
The broadcast will come from the Dar Al-Hijrah Mosque and it will reach thousands of residents, even the ones that don’t practice Islam. So even if you don’t practice Islam you are going to hear the call to prayer in the city of Minneapolis five times a day for a month.
Do you think atheists will sue that this infringes on their rights?
Rep. Ilhan Omar who attacked Christians wanting to celebrate Easter, endorse what Frey has decided.
Dar Al-Hijrah mosque in Cedar-Riverside will broadcast a Call to Prayer during the month of Ramadan. We worked with @CAIRMN to help make it happen. During physical distancing, the Call to Prayer can provide a sense of togetherness when we badly need it.https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2020/04/21/coronavirus-in-minnesota-mayor-frey-allows-broadcast-of-muslim-call-to-prayer-in-cedar-riverside-neighborhood-during-ramadan/ …
A sickening new article published by the New York Times Friday viciously claims the “road to Coronavirus hell” was “paved by Evangelicals” and other religious Americans; directly blaming hundreds of deaths and thousands of infections on people of faith.
“Donald Trump rose to power with the determined assistance of a movement that denies science, bashes government and prioritized loyalty over professional expertise. In the current crisis, we are all reaping what that movement has sown,”writes Katherine Stewart.
“By all accounts, President Trump’s tendency to trust his gut over the experts on issues like vaccines and climate change does not come from any deep-seated religious conviction. But he is perfectly in tune with the religious nationalists who form the core of his base. In his daily briefings from the White House, Mr. Trump actively disdains and contradicts the messages coming from his own experts and touts as yet unproven cures,” adds the author.
“When a strong centralized response is needed from the federal government, it doesn’t help to have an administration that has never believed in a federal government serving the public good. Ordinarily, the consequences of this kind of behavior don’t show up for some time. In the case of a pandemic, the consequences are too obvious to ignore,” Stewart concludes.
The Religious Right’s Hostility to Science Is Crippling Our Coronavirus Response
Written By Katherine Stewart |
URL of the original posting site: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/opinion/coronavirus-trump-evangelicals.html?auth=link-dismiss-google1tap
Ms. Stewart is the author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.”
Donald Trump rose to power with the determined assistance of a movement that denies science, bashes government and prioritized loyalty over professional expertise. In the current crisis, we are all reaping what that movement has sown.
At least since the 19th century, when the proslavery theologian Robert Lewis Dabney attacked the physical sciences as “theories of unbelief,” hostility to science has characterized the more extreme forms of religious nationalism in the United States. Today, the hard core of climate deniers is concentrated among people who identify as religiously conservative Republicans. And some leaders of the Christian nationalist movement, like those allied with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which has denounced environmental science as a “Cult of the Green Dragon,” cast environmentalism as an alternative — and false — theology.
This denial of science and critical thinking among religious ultraconservatives now haunts the American response to the coronavirus crisis. On March 15, Guillermo Maldonado, who calls himself an “apostle” and hosted Mr. Trump earlier this year at a campaign event at his Miami megachurch, urged his congregants to show up for worship services in person. “Do you believe God would bring his people to his house to be contagious with the virus? Of course not,” he said.
Rodney Howard-Browne of The River at Tampa Bay Church in Florida mocked people concerned about the disease as “pansies” and insisted he would only shutter the doors to his packed church “when the rapture is taking place.” In a sermon that was live-streamed on Facebook, Tony Spell, a pastor in Louisiana, said, “We’re also going to pass out anointed handkerchiefs to people who may have a fear, who may have a sickness and we believe that when those anointed handkerchiefs go, that healing virtue is going to go on them as well.”
By all accounts, President Trump’s tendency to trust his gut over the experts on issues like vaccines and climate change does not come from any deep-seated religious conviction. But he is perfectly in tune with the religious nationalists who form the core of his base. In his daily briefings from the White House, Mr. Trump actively disdains and contradicts the messages coming from his own experts and touts as yet unproven cures.
Not every pastor is behaving recklessly, of course, and not every churchgoer in these uncertain times is showing up for services out of disregard for the scientific evidence. Far from it. Yet none of the benign uses of religion in this time of crisis have anything to do with Mr. Trump’s expressed hope that the country would be “opened up and just raring to go by Easter.” He could, of course, have said, “by mid-April.” But Mr. Trump did not invoke Easter by accident, and many of his evangelical allies were pleased by his vision of “packed churches all over our country.”
Religious nationalism has brought to American politics the conviction that our political differences are a battle between absolute evil and absolute good. When you’re engaged in a struggle between the “party of life” and the “party of death,” as some religious nationalists now frame our political divisions, you don’t need to worry about crafting careful policy based on expert opinion and analysis. Only a heroic leader, free from the scruples of political correctness, can save the righteous from the damned. Fealty to the cause is everything; fidelity to the facts means nothing. Perhaps this is why many Christian nationalist leaders greeted the news of the coronavirus as an insult to their chosen leader.
In an interview on March 13 on “Fox & Friends,” Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, called the response to Coronavirus “hype” and “overreacting.” “You know, impeachment didn’t work, and the Mueller report didn’t work, and Article 25 didn’t work, and so maybe now this is their next, ah, their next attempt to get Trump,” he said.
When Rev. Spell in Louisiana defied an order from Gov. John Bel Edwards and hosted in-person services for over 1,000 congregants, he asserted the ban was “politically motivated.” Figures like the anti-L.G.B.T. activist Steve Hotze added to the chorus, denouncing the concern as — you guessed it — “fake news.”
One of the first casualties of fact-free hyper-partisanship is competence in government. The incompetence of the Trump administration in grappling with this crisis is by now well known, at least among those who receive actual news. February 2020 will go down in history as the month in which the United States, in painful contrast with countries like South Korea and Germany, failed to develop the mass testing capability that might have saved many lives. Less well known is the contribution of the Christian nationalist movement in ensuring that our government is in the hands of people who appear to be incapable of running it well.
Consider the case of Alex Azar, who as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services has had a prominent role in mismanaging the crisis. It seems likely at this point that Mr. Azar’s signature achievement will have been to rebrand his department as the “Department of Life.” Or maybe he will be remembered for establishing a division of Conscience and Religious Freedom, designed to permit health care providers to deny legal and often medically indicated health care services to certain patients as a matter of religious conscience.
Amid a public uproar at a North Carolina school board meeting over far-left “equity training” for government-school teachers, allegations were made by furious parents that a teacher forced white and Christian students to stand up in class and apologize for their “privilege.”
According to local parent Farren Wilkinson, who testified at the Rockingham School Board on May 8, a teacher in the district, later identified as Tarsha Clarke, bullied and publicly humiliated students in her class.
“I just want to share light on a situation that happened at Western Rockingham Middle School where a teacher caused some of her students to stand up and apologize to other students based on their unequal opportunities of education,” said the mom.
Other parents quoted in media reports said white children were forced to apologize in front of the class for their “white privilege.”
“So I would like to know how our schools can allow an educator to humiliate, bully and degrade students,”Wilkinson added, noting the obvious fact that “children are not responsible or accountable for any inequalities that are believed to be present within the school system.”
“This is not a matter of race but a matter of a teacher using fear and the embarrassment of children to satisfy her own personal anger or beliefs,” continued Wilkinson.
“The actions of this educator do not provide safe, nurturing, dynamic, and integrative learning,” Wilkinson said after referring to the school district’s Orwellian mission statement.
Outraged parents who called the school were apparently informed by administrators that the scandal had been “taken care of,”Wilkinson said. “But how was it taken care of? What did happen? What was her training? What were the consequences for her actions?”
She also noted that scandals such as this one is why parents were seeking a way out of government schools and why enrollment in government schools continues to decline. “They’ve lost faith in the public school system,”Wilkinson said, drawing loud applause from attendees at the meeting.
After Wilkinson’s testimony, another parent, Robert Jeremy, who said he had a 9-year-old son, expressed outrage to the school board because of the racism, bigotry, and hate expressed by the teacher against the young child based on his “race,” Christian views, and heterosexuality.
“When did it become a good idea to attack a child at a school because they were white, or they were black, or they were straight, or they were Christian?” asked the outraged dad. “Or because they believed in something moral that they were taught at home?” “You see I teach my child and my two older daughters family values, Christian values,” he continued. “I teach not to judge somebody by the color of their skin but by the color of their heart. And my child will not be insulted, reprimanded, corrected because he has a good moral fiber.”
The scandal, first reported by the American Lens before being picked up more widely, comes as parents and taxpayers nationwide become increasingly outraged over the racist indoctrination being pushed on children in government schools.
In a false statement riddled with spelling and grammar errors, school officials essentially accused the outraged parents of lying. “In regard to your additional requests, I can not [sic] speak on any individual, however any allegations brought to our attention are investigated thoroughly and proper disciplinary action is taken if needed,”said Stephanie Wray, principal at the school involved. “Again, I can not speak regarding specific individuals due to personnel law, however the particular incident you asked about was unfounded to happen at our school.”
U.S. Parents Involved in Education (USPIE), a non-profit grassroots organization of parents, released a statement slamming the broader environment.
“This story is an example of a teacher clearly acting contradictory to the interests of the parents, apparently with support of the school leadership,”said Michigan PIE Chapter President Melanie Kurdys, who is also a member of the USPIE Rapid Response Team. “We support the teaching profession, but we are concerned that teacher preparation programs, conferences and selected curriculum condone and encourage a particular political ideology.”
“It appears some teachers believe they are empowered to indoctrinate children by whatever means necessary,”Kurdys continued. “Our public schools should focus on teaching academics free of political bias. If public school leadership does not respond quickly and engage parents of all perspectives, enrollment will continue to decline. Parents will not allow their children to be bullied by the very people entrusted to educate them. USPIE stands with parents and all public school employees who fight back to protect our children.”
Far from being an isolated phenomenon, this sort of hate, extremism, and indoctrination of children in the classroom is occurring across America. Parents must protect their children from it.
The number of Christians in the birthplace of their faith, the greater Middle East, continues to plummet months after the Islamic State, which waged a genocidal campaign against Christians, lost its “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria, Breitbart News learned from various experts, including an archbishop.
“Unfortunately, it can be stated that the Islamic State group’s anti-Christian campaign was very successful in Iraq, and to a certain extent, successful in Syria,”John Hajjar, the co-chair of the American Mideast Coalition for Democracy (AMCD) and co-director of the Middle East Christian Committee (MECHRIC), told Breitbart News.
“I think we have no more hope,”Archbishop Vicken Aykazian, the diocesan legate in America’s capital and ecumenical director for the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Orthodox Church of America, also told Breitbart News, referring to the future of Christianity in its Middle East cradle. “Middle East Christians have no nation that protects them openly.”
The number of Christians in Middle East-North Africa (MENA), as a component of the overall Muslim-majority population, has dropped substantially — from about ten percent in 1900 to between two and four percent now.
There are different estimates for the overall number of Christians that vary from about 12 million in the Middle East alone to about 20 million in MENA, Breitbart News learned from the experts and data from U.S. government and independentsources.
“The future for Christians right now is terrible — a Middle East without Christians. We are going to have churches without Christians as museums for tourists. There will be no Christians left,” the archbishop warned, echoing other analysts who have constantly cautioned that Christianity is on the verge of extinction in the Middle East.
“The number of Christians in the Middle East has already dropped extensively,” he further declared, accusing church leaders of inflating the actual numbers of Christ followers in the region to minimize the fact that Christianity is on the brink of extinction.
The bishop urged U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration to do even more to help Middle East Christians.
Contradicting assertions by the Trump administration, the Church leader said, “People are not coming back. I can assure you that nobody will go back.”
The Trump administration has disbursed billions in funding to help victims of ISIS genocide, namely Christians and Yazidis, but the bishop told Breitbart News it is “not enough.”
“Trump is going to be a hero for the Christians in the Middle East if he takes more action,” he said.
Addressing President Trump, Archbishop Aykazian added, “Please help the Christians. They need your help and once you move one of your fingers the entire Arabic world will thank you. If he does such a thing, it is going to change everything. If he doesn’t, they will suffer.”
“The ball is in Trump’s court,”he further said.
In Iraq, which experts say has experienced the most dramatic drop in Christians due to jihadis and Iran-allied groups, Aykazian told Breitbart News that number has decreased from 1.6 million to less than 100,000, marking a drop of more than 90 percent.
“A similar situation is taking place in Syria’s Aleppo where there has also been a drop of more than 90 percent in Christians, from 360,000 to about 25,000 now,”he said, noting, “The church leaders don’t want to say those statements because they fear their followers will be disillusioned.”
ISIS’s genocide campaign targeted religious minorities in Iraq and Syria, primarily Christians and Yazidis, killing tens of thousands of them and taking some hostages as sex slaves.
“They [Christians] realized just how insecure they are,” Nina Shea, a religious freedom expert at the Hudson Institute, told Breitbart News. “Their own governments fail to protect them, and ISIS gained popular support within some neighboring major Sunni areas, like Mosul.”
Archbishop Aykazian said Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi “so far has been the best leader in the Middle East for defending Christians.”he said, adding, “The biggest Christian majorities are in Egypt.”
Shea pointed out, “Egypt retains ten million Coptic Christians. That is the only place where I see a certain future for them [Christians].”
“In a generation, Egypt may be the only remaining country with a robust Christian community that traces its roots to the earliest Christian church,”Shea added. “Elsewhere in the Middle East, only remnants of these ancient communities may survive.”
Nevertheless, Shea and the bishop acknowledged that, even in Egypt, Christians are confronting the spread of Sunni extremism and anti-Christian bigotry. The ongoing war against Islamic terrorism continues to kill, wound, and push Christians out of their historical homelands in the greater Middle East, even in Egypt.
“More recently, after the Arab Spring and with the rise of ISIS, tens of thousands of Christians were killed in Iraq and Syria,” Hajjar said. “Close to 1 million Christians in the region have gone into exile.”
“Following multiple terrorist attacks in Egypt against the Copts, many Christian Egyptians also emigrated from their country,” Hajjar continued. “We can estimate that more than 25-30 percent of Christians in the Middle East have been affected by the recent wars and conflicts.”
The experts also attributed the ongoing demise of Christianity in the Middle East to certain governments’ disdain towards followers of Christianity and their refusal to protect them.
In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has reportedly designated Christians as “enemies of the state.”In Iraq, the country that experienced the sharpest drop in the number of Christ followers in recent years, Baghdad-sanctioned Iran-allied Shiite militias have reportedly taken Christian lands and are harassing them.
Referring to the countries that have experienced the largest decline in Christians, Hajjar named Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Lebanon. Similar to Hajjar’s list, the bishop said, “Iraq is number one, Lebanon is number two, and Syria is number three.”
The experts conceded that the Trump administration had done more to help Middle East Christians than his predecessor, but they argued that Christians are far from protected and more can be done.
Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann, who was lambasted after smiling in a viral video at a Native American activist, went on the “Today” show Wednesday to defend his reputation. (Photo: “Today” show)
If you’re Christian, shut up. That’s been the unmistakable message of our current culture in recent weeks.
Karen Pence has been lambasted for her decision to teach at a Christian school. Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, after asking a judicial nominee about his membership in the Catholic Knights of Columbus, has tied the organization to the “alt right.”
And a group of teenage Catholic schoolboys waiting for a bus at the March for Life, who didn’t know the mob-approved way to handle a Native American activist walking up to them, are fighting for their reputations.
Of course, this isn’t really about Karen Pence, or judicial nominee Brian Buescher, or the Covington Catholic High boys. It’s about intimidating everyone else.
It’s telling the husband or wife of an up-and-coming lawmaker that if they want to teach at a school, it’s probably better they choose a non-Christian one, unless they want their spouse someday ensnared in a media cycle over LGBT discrimination.
It’s telling the law student who dreams of someday becoming a judge that no matter how appealing he finds joining a Catholic charitable organization, it’s probably better for his career ambitions if he doesn’t.
And it’s telling schools and students and parents that no matter if they are willing to deal with the expense and trouble of hauling dozens or hundreds of students to Washington, D.C., on buses and having them sleep on gym floors, it still might not be a good idea—because the students’ future reputations, careers, and college prospects could all be gone with one viral video.
No, that wouldn’t happen if the students came to Washington to fight for gun control or raise awareness of climate change.
Just if they’re there to speak up for the babies who can’t.
When President Donald Trump was elected—in a shock for conventional D.C. wisdom—it become obvious that there were plenty of silent Americans who, in the privacy of the ballot box, dared to defy the politically correct, woke cultural leaders of our time. But it’s not enough to vote.
I’m glad Karen Pence, the vice president’s wife, isn’t backing down and resigning. I’m thrilled Brian Buescher is remaining a member of the Knights of Columbus, and that Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., introduced a resolution saying there’s nothing wrong with a judge being in the Knights. I’m heartened that the Covington students are fighting back, and saying they did nothing wrong.
But they can’t do this all on their own.
About 70 percent of Americans are Christian, according to the Pew Research Center. They—and everyone who believes in religious freedom—need to start speaking up.
You don’t have to agree with Buescher’s judicial philosophy to say that in the United States, there should be no religious test for judges.
You don’t have to have attended a Catholic school or be pro-life to say that a group of teen boys being awkward around an activist—an activist who later that weekend tried to bring a group of protesters todisrupt a Catholic Mass at the basilica in D.C.—should not be a news story, much less a reputation destroyer.
You don’t have to agree with Immanuel Christian School’s faith tenets to defend Karen Pence’s right to choose the school where she wants to teach.
You know what breeds intolerance? Silence. It’s easy for someone to kvetch about the Covington boys or mock the second lady as a bigot at the water cooler if he has no reason to believe any other colleague will speak up. We need to take a lesson from the left’s playbook.
Here’s what liberals do really well: They share their stories. And they make it personal. We need to do the same.
Did your son or daughter go to the March for Life? Talk about it. Share how proud you were that they cared enough about the lives of unborn babies to be on a bus for 20 hours and sleep on a crowded gym floor.
And share how scared you are that they, too, could become targets of social media activists and mainstream media because they didn’t know the appropriate public relations strategy to deal with a protest.
Does it make you feel like an alien in your own country that what you hear from the pews on Sunday could make you ineligible to do certain jobs in our system? Express that anxiety. Tell the truth about how you don’t like being treated like a second-class citizen in your own nation.
Are you appalled that your mom’s job at a Christian school could get her branded as a bigot? Say that. Share the facts: Plenty of Christian denominations adhere to 2,000 years of sexual morality, and demand no sex outside of marriage—whether you’re straight or LGBT.
If we keep talking, things will change.
Because people know that if their colleague Kelly is pro-life, or their hair stylist Melissa is Christian, or their neighbor Bob teaches at a Christian school, they will think twice. That doesn’t mean they will agree with Kelly or Melissa or Bob. But it does mean they will realize it’s unfair to assume all pro-lifers hate women, or that all Christians hate LGBT people. They will realize it’s more complex than the woke leaders of social media say it is. And then we can have real discussions and real dialogues, person to person.
I get that it’s hard. I’m often more of a coward than I’d like to be—even with the job security of working at a conservative news outlet. It’s hard to speak up sometimes, especially if you’re scared people will judge you or there will be hidden consequences—promotions that never occur, networking that abruptly stops.
But we don’t have a choice.
Right now, thought leaders in the United States are working overtime to make it clear: Stand up for your Christian beliefs, your pro-life beliefs—and you will pay.
But we can rise up, too.
If there’s one thing we should have learned in this era of Trump, it’s that standing up to bullies works. And we need to—because there’s nothing American about a future where holding certain religious beliefs makes you a second-class citizen.
Leaders of the Democratic Party keep talking down to Christian voters even while claiming they want to reach them and earn their vote.
At a gathering of far-left activists, DNC chairman Tom Perez complained that pastors’ conservative sermons are one reason Democrats’ message doesn’t resonate with churchgoers.
“Their principle sources of information are Fox News, their NRA newsletter, and the pulpit on Sunday,”Perez complained to the gathering of Demand Justice, which formed this year to fight for “progressive change” in the federal courts.
Are you surprised a Dem leader is blaming pastors for pushing a conservative message?
Yes, must not know many pastorsYes, maybe actually visit a churchYes, somebody was thinking out loud again, huh?No, conservatives get blamed for everythingNo, the Church is the far left’s newest enemyNo, but it’s good to be reminded of their beliefs
“And it should come as a surprise to no one,” he added, “that our message doesn’t penetrate.”
Perez’s rant singled out the abortion issue, when he complained that the churchgoers are told to focus on Roe v Wade but ignore other issues. Kristin Day of Democrats for Life tells OneNewsNow there is not a single leading Democrat who understands the pro-life right.
“With the Democratic candidates for president who have been named,” she says, “I don’t see one that can really bring the party together so far: Cory Booker, Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren.”
It’s not new to hear Democratic leaders suggest conservative voters are brainless, hateful and racist, but many of those voters have good memories, too.
“So it’s not surprising then,”Barack Obama told a San Francisco fund-raiser in 2008, “that they get bitter, and they cling to guns, or religion, or antipathy towards people who aren’t like them.”
Then-Democratic primary opponent Hillary Clinton said at the time she was “taken aback by the demeaning remarks,” but it wasn’t too long until the presidential nominee was describing a “basket of deplorables” to a similar audience.
“The racists, sexists, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic,”Clinton said. “You name it.”
Day says Democrats would be wise to get over the “fear” of pro-life people, suggesting that the far-left party would be wise to embrace a pro-life politician such as Louisiana’s governor, John Bel Edwards. But the far-left Democratic Party doesn’t seem to be listening to that suggestion.
It’s true that CNN and the New YorkTimes, among other liberal outlets, have rightly been called out for their failure to report accurately on the protests in Iran. But there’s something that not even the conservative media is telling you today, an important backstory that might be playing a role in this rising protest movement.
As for the leftwing media, Caroline Glick noted in her article in the Jerusalem Post that, “Given the earth shattering potential of the protests it is extraordinary to see the liberal media in the US and Europe struggle to downplay their significance.” And here in the US, “the US, former members of the Obama administration and the liberal media have determinedly downplayed the importance of the protests.”
Similarly, writing for the Daily Wire, Ryan Saavedra stated that, “The media initially ignored what was going on in Iran, likely because it reflected negatively on former President Barack Obama, whose Iran nuclear deal was supposed to help Iran’s economy, and because the Trump administration’s response was night-and-day better than Obama’s response in 2009.
“CNN and The New York Times did a terrible job of covering the protests, while ABC News’ Matthew Dowd declared that the U.S. did not have the moral authority to talk about Iran because ‘we’ don’t talk about Russia.”
So, again, the liberal media has been taken to task for its unfair coverage of the Iranian protests, and rightly so. In fact, it would be hard to find a greater contrast than that between the courageous protesters and the cowardly media. But there’s something else going on in Iran that could well be playing an important role in the rising Iranian discontent. It’s something that has been building and growing under the surface and behind closed doors. And it remains one of the best-kept secrets in the world, despite occasional media reports in the last few years: Iranian Muslims are converting to Christianity at an unprecedented pace, perhaps by the thousands every day.
I’ve heard this firsthand from Iranian converts. I’ve heard it firsthand from Christian leaders who have worked with these converts inside and outside of Iran. And I’ve heard it from missiologists whose job it is to track such things.
And it’s reminiscent of the conversion of tens of millions of Chinese behind the cover of the Bamboo Curtain. Missiologists were reporting it for years before the rest of the world found out about it. Now, it is an open secret, leading to headlines like this, from April 14, 2014, in the UK Telegraph: “China on course to become ‘world’s most Christian nation’ within 15 years. The number of Christians in Communist China is growing so steadily that it by 2030 it could have more churchgoers than America.”
The website of Safa, himself a former Iranian, Shiite Muslim but now an evangelical pastor, declares, “Despite severe persecution by the Iranian government against underground churches, God’s Word is spreading like a wildfire all over Iran. Pastor Safa believes that Iran will be the first Islamic nation to convert to Christianity.”
This may sound like a pipe dream, but consider that a 2012 Pew Research report claimed that, “The share of the population that is Christian in sub-Saharan Africa climbed from 9% in 1910 to 63% in 2010.”And much of this growth occurred in the midst of Muslim-majority populations.
The same thing is happening throughout the Muslim world, confirming an article on the National CatholicRegister which claims that, “Muslims Are Converting to Christianity in Record Numbers.” This too has been an open secret for many years now.
When it comes to Iran, the article repeats the claim that there are now three million Iranian Christians, which would mean a massive jump from the numbers posted in the respected prayer guide, Operation World. It claimed a total of 384,897 Christians from all backgrounds in Iran (compared to 74,054,491 Muslims), with just 117,678 listed as evangelicals. Getting from here to three million is extraordinary.
That’s why Mohabat News (the Iranian Christian News Agency), reported in August, 2017, that, “Christianity has been growing at an exponential rate in the last couple of decades in Iran, causing the Islamic government a great deal of concern. In a most recent expression of their distress, one of the high profile Islamic seminary officials, Ayatollah Alavi Boroujerdi, stated ‘accurate reports indicate that the youth are becoming Christians in Qom and attending house churches’.”
And, the article continues, “this is not a new development. Earlier reports had also shown a surprising rise in the number of Iranians turning away from Islam and converting to Christianity.”
That’s why Fox News could report in 2016 that, “The number of Muslim converts who are risking prison or death by secretly worshipping as Christians in Iran’s house church movement has grown to as many as 1 million people, according to watchdog groups.” Something powerful is happening in Iran, despite the intense persecution Christians are facing.
My sources have been telling me that:
1) it’s only a matter of time before the number of these conversions reaches a critical mass, allowing these new Christians to emerge from the underground into the public eye; and
2) it is the Iranian regime that is our enemy, not the Iranian people, many of whom love America and hate what the radical Islamic leadership has done to their country.
We should pray for these courageous Christians, and, more broadly, stand with these Iranian protesters. It could well be that there are many secret converts among them. And we should applaud our government for letting Iran know that we are watching them carefully right now. It could be time for this great, hidden story to be known to the whole world.
Almost 90% of the people in Poland identify as some denomination of “Christian” with about 87% of the population claiming to be Roman Catholic. So when more than 1 million Polish citizens gathered at the nation’s borders to pray for the future of their country, they were mostly praying as Christians.
Today, the nations of Poland, Hungary, Czechia, and Slovakia are all united against the rest of the European Union (EU). These 4 Eastern European nations argue that the immigration policies of the EU are threatening to destroy the continents political and economic stability. These nations see the flood of immigrants as a real threat to their future, and so the people gathered to pray – not against immigration, but for salvation from the possible calamity that lies ahead for Europe.
Sadly, that’s not what the mainstream media sees. Instead of recognizing an amazing moment of Polish solidarity and hope for peace and prosperity, what the media saw was a massive case of Islamophobia.
Here’s what the so-called unbiased, mainstream media had to say about the prayer gathering:
The AP warned that Saturday’s national event, which was endorsed by Polish church authorities, had “anti-Muslim overtones.”
Citing an “expert on xenophobia,” the AP said that the border prayer event “reinforces the ethno-religious, xenophobic model of national identity,” and represents a “problematic expression of Islamophobia” in the country.
The AP wasn’t the only mainstream media outlet to take issue with the overtly Christian commemoration, which was openly supported by Poland’s prime minister, Beata Szydło.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) called the rosary prayer “controversial,” suggesting that the event could be seen “as support for the government’s refusal to accept Muslim migrants.”
Drawing together these expressions, Newsweek magazine proclaimed that the border prayer was a “controversial event seen as anti-Muslim,” and repeated the AP story that “the prayers seemed like a way to express Islamophobia.”
It’s not Islamophobia.
It’s a survival instinct.
The people of Poland see the dangers of terrorism and they worry that allowing unchecked numbers of immigrants into the continent could lead to a rise in terrorist attacks. (This is exactly what has happened.) They worry that a sudden massive wave of migration could destabilize the Polish culture and wipe away thousands of years of cultural history and tradition. (This is exactly what is happening in other parts of Europe.) They worry that forcing thousands upon thousands of new people into their welfare state could destroy their economy. (This is happening throughout Europe, as the government’s don’t have the money or resources to care for the sudden influx of welfare recipients.)
They worry that if the economy crumbles, if their history is forgotten, if their culture is undone, then their nation could disappear altogether. Why is this concern, grounded as it is in the harsh reality of the world around them, just shrugged off by the media as “Islamophobia?”
The Polish people are right to be worried, and the media is wrong to dismiss their concerns as xenophobia OR Islamophobia.
Politico made a very big mistake on Wednesday when they decided to publish what may be one of the most bigoted, unAmerican, and despicable political cartoons published in recent memory.
Let’s start with the cartoon itself so that you can get a sense of what the liberal media actually thinks about people like us:
That image really has it all, doesn’t it?
This was published by the mainstream “news” publishers at Politicoon a day when people were still getting rescued by the Coast Guard and by their neighbors.
This cartoon ticks all of the leftwing boxes, doesn’t it?
Meanwhile, it ignores the fact that the vast majority of people saved during and after the storm were rescued by friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens. (That’s the small government way, if you’re keeping score.) Then the government actually told those heroic citizens to STOP saving their neighbors. It also ignores the fact that conservatives have never said that there is no place for government in a situation like this, in fact, this is one of the actual functions the government is supposed to take care of. Finally, it ignores the reality of a Sovereign God who “works in mysterious ways” and as the Bible teaches uses believers and non-believers alike to accomplish His Will.
Politico eventually realized their mistake and deleted the Tweet… but they kept the cartoon on their website.
The first problem with the cartoon is it’s crassness. People are still being saved, and it’s making fun of those same people.
The second problem is the stereotypes. It’s almost a caricature of what you’d expect a liberal cartoonist to draw in response to conservative Texans relying upon the government in their time of crisis. The Confederate flag T-shirt. The Gadsden Flag. The reference to being saved by God (which seems extremely dismissive of Christianity). The Texas secession banner. It’s all kind of … predictable? …
But the cartoon suggests that normal people who believe in small government should essentially forfeit government help in their time of need — or, at least, that they should suddenly recognize that their belief in smaller government is wrongheaded. It’s all very smug, and it gives extremely short shrift to very complex issues.
To make matters worse, the cartoon just isn’t very good. It’s ham-fisted and un-nuanced, there is nothing to think about as HotAir’s Ed Morrissey points out.
If you want a good analysis of what is taking place in Texas created by a political cartoonist with actual talent, look no further than Michael Ramirez:
The Philippines has become a home to those affiliated with the Islamic State for some time now. In 2015, 49 police officers were slaughtered entering an Islamic “No-Go” zone. Just two weeks ago, President Duterte declared martial law in the region due to Islamic jihad attacks, and has warned that he may expand it to the rest of the country. Some Islamic State members were seeking out Christians for beheading, but one Muslim man took 64 Christians and hid them in his home and protected them.
RT has the story of what has been taking place in the country this week.
More than 160 people, nearly 50 children among them, were rescued from Marawi on Saturday, the army said. The city has become a key hot spot in the ongoing crackdown on terrorists, affiliated with Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) in the Western Pacific nation.
At least 20 civilians and 38 military died on Saturday, Reuters reported, citing officials, who added that some 120 terrorists had been killed.
With parts of the Philippines now full-blown war zones, civilians have found themselves under threat of being caught in the crossfire. Mass evacuations are underway in battle zones such as Marawi, RT’s Charlotte Dubenskij says, reporting from the city.
On Saturday, following an impromptu ceasefire to let civilians evacuate, fighter jets dropped bombs on the city center.
“We are afraid, sometimes helicopters fire at us, and the jihadists might kill us too,” a local man told RT.
Among those who were rescued this week, there were several Christians who were taken in by a Muslim man who is an Islamic writer and former politician named Noor Lucman.
Apparently, there were some Christians who were doing some repair work just a day ahead of all the fighting that took place, according to Lucman. Since they could not leave the city, he said, “I had to take responsibility in protecting them.”
“The following days, other Christian workers took refuge in my house. There were about 64 of them in my hands and I was very determined that nothing happens to them,”the man said, adding that the people he sheltered would only be revealed to terrorists “over [his] dead body.”
“When ISIS came, they recognized me and they showed respect by just leaving when I told them to leave,”he added. “They didn’t know I was hiding Christians. If they knew that there were Christians in my house, they would all be beheaded and executed.”
When the fighting began this week, the man left and took the Christians out with him because he heard the military was going to bomb the entire city if the Islamic State did not “acceded to the demands of the government.” He was also running out of food.
“I told myself that if I don’t take these people out of the house, they would die of hunger, so we might just try and break through, no matter what. There were a lot of snipers along the way, and we had to hope against hope they would not ask those people if they were Christians or Muslims,”Lucman said, explaining that the militants “ask you to recite a Muslim reading, and if you don’t know it, they kill you.”
Lucman had studied with Osama bin Laden in Saudi Arabia and yet, his actions are vastly different from those who follow the Koran to the letter. I am not opposed to all Muslims, but I am opposed to Islam. There are many Muslims who are thrilled to receive the Gospel of Jesus Christ and become a part of His kingdom and submit to Him because God changes their hearts. It seems to me that God gave these believers favor with this man and I have no doubt they shared the Gospel message with him.
Tim Brown is an author and Editor at FreedomOutpost.com, SonsOfLibertyMedia.com, GunsInTheNews.com and TheWashingtonStandard.com. He is husband to his “more precious than rubies” wife, father of 10 “mighty arrows”, jack of all trades, Christian and lover of liberty. He resides in the U.S. occupied Great State of South Carolina. Tim is also an affiliate for the Joshua Mark 5 AR/AK hybrid semi-automatic rifle.
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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That image really has it all, doesn’t it?
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