Democrats Block Resolution Supporting Iranian Protesters

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House Democrats blocked a vote on a resolution proposed by a ranking Republican supporting Iranian protesters against their government.

The resolution condemned the Iranian government for

  • killing 1,500 Iranian citizens who were protesting their government
  • shooting down the Ukraine International Airlines commercial plane
  • repeatedly lying to its people and the world about the plane

The resolution also called on the Iranian government to refrain from violence and grant freedom of expression, assembly and and human rights to the Iranian people.

The move to block the vote supporting the Iranian protesters was seen as a partisan maneuver to prevent the Republicans from taking credit for the resolution. House Democrats say they will propose their own resolution.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who proposed the resolution, tweeted his disapproval at the conduct of the Democrats.

Meanwhile, while Iranian protesters risked their lives on the streets of their country:

  • The Iranian regime weighed in on the upcoming American presidential elections, saying, Bernie Sanders is “wiser than most” American politicians. Iran undoubtedly is pleased with Sanders’ criticism of President Trump’s Iran policy and Sanders’ proposal to take U.S. money earmarked for foreign aid to Israel and give it to Hamas.
  • A group of Senate leaders asked the Trump administration to investigate a non-profit group called the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) for potential violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires groups to disclose their activities on behalf of foreign nations.
    As reported by The Washington Free Beacon, “The council, a pro-Tehran advocacy group with deep ties to the Iranian regime, played a key role in the Obama administration’s pro-Iran ‘echo chamber,’ which misled Congress and the American people about the terms of the landmark 2015 nuclear deal.”
  • Canada is investigating allegations that Iran is harassing families trying to bring back the remains of their loved ones who died in the shooting down of the Ukrainian plane by the Iranian government.
  • As much as Democrat presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has made a name for herself denigrating the policies former President Barack Obama, CNN revealed that almost all of her Middle East policy team formerly worked for the Obama administration.
  • According to an assessment made by the Israeli army’s military intelligence wing, Iran may have enough enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb by this spring. The assessment also stated that it would take another two years for the uranium to be sufficiently weaponized to be placed into a warhead.
  • A well-known Iranian State TV anchor resigned, apologizing “for lying to you on TV for 13 years.”

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EDITORS NOTE: This Clarion Project column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

There Is No Secular Culture

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James Matthew Wilson: To encounter Christ and to abide with him is not just the Good News, it is the only news that stays news, forever.

Simon During has made a dismaying but perceptive argument about the relationship between religion and culture in, of all places, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the flagship of today’s academic world. The secularization of the modern West involved not the abandonment of religion, but its reduction to an optional dimension of human life (an idea borrowed from Charles Taylor’s important book, A Secular Age). The demotion of religion led to a promotion of culture. Culture in the modern age became a new god-term to give coherence to civilization and society – a kind of immanent substitute for the transcendence of Christian faith. As Matthew Arnold contended, culture would save us from anarchy.

This substitution is now being undone, During argues, by a second secularization.  Just as the authority of the Church was eroded by various events that converged on a secular political order, so now, a series of events, from neoliberalism to feminism to identity politics, has led to a rejection of the canons of culture.

You don’t need any longer to have a certain appreciation for Bach’s St. Matthew Passion or Virgil’s Aeneid in order to be thought a decently civilized human being; such knowledge might actually be counted against you.  Better to spend your time studying risk analysis or cybersecurity, say the neoliberal technocrats. Or postcolonial criticism of Virgil or, better still, leave that dead man behind for the lyrical stylings of some feminine vicar of a non-Western people, or an advocate of the “pedagogy of the oppressed.”

The history During offers may not proceed according to iron laws, but it does have its own momentum that would be hard to counteract, even if you don’t much like it. I’d like merely to consider the linkage he sees between religious and cultural secularizations, to raise some doubt about the very idea of culture serving as a “substitute” for religion, and to suggest that great works of culture are powerful expressions of the truth of Christianity.

Early twentieth-century Christian writers, from Henri Massis and Charles Péguy to T.S. Eliot and Christopher Dawson, often seemed to slide between defenses of Christianity and of culture, under that nebulous term, the West – for good reason.  They perceived rightly that Christianity transcends every historical reality, including the culture of the West, and yet they also saw that it would be hard, if not impossible, to have one without the other.

They saw this because, in a very particular way, it is true.  We owe to the best pagan philosophers the most compelling and finely articulated description of what it means to be human.  Human beings are creatures whose souls by nature desire to know the truth for its own sake; creatures who not only desire the truth but need to contemplate it. We are thus fulfilled, made happy, and find our lives transformed, from the vain pursuit of worldly glory to a resting in the eternal glory of all that is, of Being Itself.

This was, in a manner of speaking, a hard-won cultural insight, but it was more fundamentally a religious one.  God’s revelation to Israel and his sending of his Son into the world to proclaim the Gospel brought the world to its predestined fullness of understanding.  We are fulfilled by contemplation of truth, because the Truth is a person who made us to know him and to love him.  To encounter him and to abide with him is not just good news, it is the only news that stays news, forever.

The modern age that During and Taylor describe as secular never fully abandoned these insights, though it truncated them and deprived them of their purpose.  It recognized something distinctive and mysterious about human persons: We are made for transcendence.  The modern age simply stopped stating what kind of transcendence and, in the process, clouded its own vision.

Yes, we have souls, moderns affirm: we do rise above our material existences, at least from time to time, in an act of self-consciousness.  The works of high culture are just what they sound like –from the philosophy of Kant and the painting of Friedrich, to the opera of Wagner or the poetry of Rilke. They remind the forgetful soul that it may rise above, however briefly, nature’s mechanical laws.

Alas, modern culture could affirm this elevation, this ecstasy, but only with a kind of pathos. We have moments of illumination and then sink once more into the flesh. “To toll me back from thee [eternal spirit] to my sole self,” as Keats wrote. People kind of caught on to the gimmick after a while. Why bother with a pointless species of transcendence? It seems much too ethereal in comparison with that more functional transcendence of money, by which we secure for ourselves a miniature immortality. Conversely, cultural elevation seems narcissistic indulgence compared with the transcendence of pursuing political goods that may survive us.

One secularization necessarily follows from the other. The foundation of culture, as Joseph Pieper frequently argued, is the cultus – the cult. Without a clear sense of our ordination to the contemplation of God, all the works of man that seem true, good, and beautiful come to appear, first, as mere distraction, and finally, as deception.

In The Person and the Common Good, Jacques Maritain argues that to be a human person is to be a creature ordered to immediate communion with God, but that personhood also displays a tendency to communion with other beings as well.  The treasury of culture, as he calls it, is simply the irradiation of truth and beauty produced by our natural tendency to join ourselves to God and to others as persons.

If the Truth were not a person whom we encounter, there would be no primordial experience of which culture is a kind of wayward fruit: No human ordination to the sacred, no self-expression in the “secular” order. Conversely, all our encounters with works of culture are hints, reflections, echoes, regarding the nature and destiny of man.  Listen to them.

COLUMN BY

James Matthew Wilson

James Matthew Wilson has published eight books, including, most recently, The Hanging God (Angelico) and The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition (CUA). An associate professor of religion and literature in the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions, at Villanova University, he also serves as poetry editor for Modern Age magazine and as series editor for Colosseum Books, from the Franciscan University at Steubenville Press. His Amazon page is here.

EDITORS NOTE: This Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Trump Administration Takes 3 Steps to Boost Religious Freedom

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“There’s a lot of hostility to religious beliefs,” says Joe Grogan, director of the Domestic Policy Council at the White House.

“These views are protected by the First Amendment and people who are offended by public expressions of faith need to get over it,” he adds.

In this exclusive interview at the White House, Grogan outlines what the Trump administration is doing to ensure Americans remain free to live in accordance with their beliefs. Read the lightly edited transcript, pasted below, or listen to the interview:

Rob Bluey: The Daily Signal is on location at the White House today, just moments after President [Donald] Trump’s Religious Freedom Day announcements. We’re joined by Joe Grogan, director of the Domestic Policy Council at the White House.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

Joe, thanks for talking to The Daily Signal.

Joe Grogan: Thanks for having me.

Bluey: We had some big developments happening in Washington this week. President Trump signed Phase 1 of the trade deal with China, and the U.S. Congress just passed today the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which is headed to the president’s desk now for his signature.

But let’s begin with the Religious Freedom Day announcements. … There are three of them, and let’s take them one at a time. We can start with prayer in school.

Grogan: Sure. I actually just left a meeting in the Oval Office. He had a bunch of students and teachers and a coach in there, all of whom had been discriminated against in public schools for expressing their faith.

The coach had been fired. … There were a group of students that were told they couldn’t pray in the cafeteria for a brother of one of the students who had been in a tractor accident, and … they’d been told, “You have to take this behind a curtain or go outside, out of sight. We can’t have anybody expressing their faith in public.”

What we’re doing is we’re updating a guidance that was supposed to be updated every two years by law and hadn’t been updated since 2003, and making it explicit that students have First Amendment rights, including religious freedoms.

They have the right to express their religious beliefs openly, publicly, and if they are discriminated against or they perceive they are, the education officials in every state need to set up a procedure for them to be able to complain.

And those complaints need to be adjudicated in some way. The education official needs to inform the Department of Education how they adjudicate these claims and what they’re doing to make sure that religious beliefs are protected.

There’s a lot of hostility to religious beliefs. There’s a perception that people who express their religious beliefs somehow may be offending others who don’t have those beliefs, but it’s clearly discriminatory. These views are protected by the First Amendment and people who are offended by public expressions of faith need to get over it.

These students and teachers need to be able to, on their own time, say that they believe in God, whether they be Jewish, or Christian, or Muslim, or whatever faith that they ascribe to.

Bluey: Those personal stories have such an impact. We tend to cover a lot of them at The Daily Signal, and they are often some of our most popular stories, I think, because they don’t get the attention that they deserve in other media outlets.

The second on the list is nine proposed rules that the Trump administration is rolling out to protect religious organizations from unfair and unequal treatment by the federal government. Can you tell us what these rules entail?

Grogan: Yeah. This overturns an Obama-era regulation, which really discriminated against faith-based organizations and treated them as second-class grantees when receiving federal funds.

Basically what it said is anytime somebody goes to a faith-based organization for a service, they need to be presumed to be potentially offended by the religious nature of that organization. The religious organization needs to inform them that if they are offended by the religious nature of the organization, they can, they will find a secular organization for them to get the same service.

There’s no presumption on the part of a secular organization that somebody going there for services may be offended by the secular nature or whatever reason that institution was set up.

It’s patronizing, clearly to citizens, first and foremost, that people should be presumed to be offended by people of faith.

We all interact with people of different faiths on a daily basis and we’re not offended by it as responsible human beings, so why would the government presume this is outrageous. And why would we have this additional burden on religious organizations or people who are called to particular work to help people, out of spiritual belief, is beyond me.

But many of the things are gains of inches. This took a lot of work actually to get nine agencies to work in a collaborative way to get this done. We’re proud to have gotten it done though.

Bluey: It certainly is. The third announcement that was made involved the Supreme Court’s Trinity Lutheran case, a 2017 decision, and the Office of Management and Budget has issued some new guidance regarding grant-making. Tell us about this change.

Grogan: Yes. The Office of Management and Budget is sending out a memo to all federal agencies who give money to states to remind them that it’s up to these agencies to make sure that the states, when they distribute the money, don’t discriminate against religious organizations.

This directly comes out of the Trinity Lutheran Supreme Court decision, where Trinity Lutheran applied for a grant to improve the playground.

There was a program to make playgrounds safer and they were denied the funds. This wasn’t for religious purposes, it was to make kids safer, and yet there the state decided “no,” because they were a religious organization they couldn’t get it.

The Supreme Court said, “Look, that’s not right. This is a secular purpose and they should be able to get access to the fund, same as any other organization.”

So we’re making that explicit, from the Office of Management and Budget, and putting the agencies on notice that they need to police the states.

There are 37 states actually that have Blaine Amendments on their books, in one form or another, which came out of anti-Catholic bias, which is clear from the historical and the legal record. We need to make it clear that those amendments or other regulations or statutes that may be on the book can’t be enforced against religious organizations.

Bluey: We’re talking about these because it is Religious Freedom Day, but this is a president who’s made religious freedom of priority throughout his time in office and throughout his administration. What has it been like working with him on these issues?

Grogan: It’s fantastic. I mean, you don’t have to go in there and argue about the merits of pursuing religious freedom initiatives. You don’t have to say it’s important that we allow religious institutions back into the public square, or people of faith to pray openly.

He does ask questions. He wants to make sure we’re doing it in the right way. He wants to make sure we’ve thought things through. But this isn’t a president who needs a lot of convincing on these issues.

He’s fired up to do it and thinks that religious institutions have a central role to play in America’s civic life and the private lives of Americans, too. So he’s totally aligned.

There’s a whole group of people here across the White House, and in the agencies, many people who are veterans of various fights for religious freedom, who have been drawn to this administration to work on these issues. And to be frank, they’re having a blast in this administration to work on issues like this.

Bluey: Thanks for sharing that.

Now, shifting gears, let’s talk about trade. This week the president signed the Phase One trade deal with China. Obviously, a long initiative that this president has talked about even prior to his election campaign in 2016. I know China is an issue he’s focused on a great deal. Tell our listeners what they need to know about Phase One and where we go from here.

Grogan: Yeah, I think what you’re seeing in the last few weeks is really … everything’s firing on all cylinders for this president. And the entire arc of his first term is being set from going back to the first major legislative achievement, which would be tax reform, and now going where we have the omnibus spending deal right before the end of the year.

We had a number of significant policy wins, removing three Obamacare taxes, in addition to when he had removed the individual mandate. And now we’ve got the China trade deal and the USMCA passing this morning.

Making trade more fair for the United States, having a president who fights for American industries and American workers has been central to his belief system, his messaging, since long before he ran for president.

I remember growing up in upstate New York hearing him talk about this, and attacking the way NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement] was constructed, attacking the way that we had let China come into the World Trade Organization, and he really has achieved a tremendous win with the China trade deal.

And matter of fact, it’s very interesting to watch a number of the president’s critics over the last few weeks belittle when this trade deal was announced to be signed. But when you see the details of it, I think that … the tone has changed.

I know some people just can’t get off their horse, but you see intellectual property protections, you see opening up of financial sectors, huge commitments to buy agricultural products, manufactured goods. It is a huge achievement.

And frankly, the work of the staff that went into it has been extraordinary. The number of meetings that the president has on this issue, he has been so focused on it. He’s inexhaustible. If it was the only issue that he had worked on for the first three years, it would still be an extraordinary achievement, if it was the only trade deal, but of course we’ve got USMCA done.

I think at the heart of it you see a president who is saying, “Look, this is not a fait accompli, that we’re going to lose American jobs, that we’re going to lose American industry, and that American workers are going to be resigned from, to do work that they would rather not do.”

And some of the contempt of the intellectual class over the last couple of decades were people who were involved in manufacturing just need to learn how to code or get used to the service economy. It’s nice to see the president saying, “No, we can still manufacture in the United States.” If we have a president and people around him willing to fight for American workers, we can win. And you see us winning.

Bluey: You mentioned the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Final question for you here. The president has talked about how that’s going to really impact, in a positive way, American businesses and families, particularly in the heartland of this country. What does it mean for them, for those people who might not know the intricate details of the agreement, but want to know how it might change their lives?

Grogan: I think first and foremost, there has been a lot of scaremongering around the fact that the president wanted to pull out of NAFTA. But if you look at the numbers about the impact upon our agricultural sector, but also manufacturing post-NAFTA passing, according to many metrics, it’s not really a pretty picture.

What the president sought to do is to protect American industries, protect American workers, and put them at the forefront of … our trade agreement. And he has achieved that with the USMCA. It’s a total reset of our trade rules, and there’ll be more to come on that front.

The other thing to remember, too, is he signed a trade deal with Japan recently, which people forget, and that is a huge deal as well, with big commitments for purchases from American companies, produced in the United States.

So across the board we’re alleviating uncertainty here, heading into the final year of his first term, and the economy is roaring.

We’ve got record unemployment, record number of Americans at work now. We’ve never had so many Americans working right now. Record unemployment among African Americans, Hispanic Americans, women employment, Asian American unemployment’s at a record low. So everything is setting up beautifully.

The president has gotten attacked for so many of these policies that he was pursuing. Remember when he was running for president, they said if he was going to win, so many of the critics on the left and these brilliant economists said the economy’s in the tank, and today the Dow Jones Industrial Average is over 29,000. I think 29,200, the last I checked. So it’s a tremendous day for the president and it’s great fun to be here right now.

Bluey: Joe Grogan, director of the Domestic Policy Council at the White House. Thanks so much for talking to The Daily Signal.

Grogan: Thank you.

COLUMN BY

Rob Bluey

Rob Bluey is executive editor of The Daily Signal, the multimedia news organization of The Heritage Foundation. Send an email to Rob. Twitter: @RobertBluey.

RELATED ARTICLE: US-China Trade Deal Is a Welcome First Step

A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal Column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Michigan AG Dana Nessel’s Tyrannical Tactics to Suppress Religious Belief in Traditional Marriage

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ANN ARBOR, MI—Watching, listening, tracking, and compiling secret dossiers on dissidents until they are finally accused and prosecuted—these are the police-state tactics one might associate with an authoritarian regime in a World War II movie.

Yet, these are the very methods the Thomas More Law Center (TMLC) has found are being used by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel acting in concert with the Michigan Department of Civil Rights and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

On February 19, 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a notorious and discredited radical left-wing anti-Christian organization, published its annual Hate Map report which listed 31“hate” groups operating in Michigan in 2018.  Listed in that group as “ANTI-LGBT” was Church Militant, a nonprofit Michigan-based religious media organization which advocates traditional Catholic belief that marriage as instituted by God is for one man and one woman.

Three days later, on February 22, 2019, a disturbing joint news release by Attorney General Nessel and the Director of the Michigan Department of Civil Rights was issued referencing and linking to SPLC’s Hate Map. The joint release contained Nessel’s promise to establish a hate-crimes unit to fight against hate crimes and hate groups which have been allowed to proliferate in Michigan.

Nessel’s spokeswoman, Kelly Rossman-McKinney, noted that SPLC is a good place to start when investigating hate and bias.

The Director of the Civil Rights Department told a Detroit News reporter that the Department is creating a database which would document hate and bias incidents that don’t rise to the level of a crime or civil infraction.

Additional damning evidence of AG Nessl’s hostility toward traditional marriage was provided by the findings of Chief Judge Robert Jonker of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan. In a published 2019 legal opinion, Buck v. Gordon, Judge Jonker found that Nessel attempted to stop St. Vincent Catholic Charities from performing adoption and foster placement services because it professed the Catholic belief on marriage. Judge Jonker said that past statements by Nessel “raise a strong inference of hostility toward a religious viewpoint.”

Jonker concluded that “St. Vincent was targeted based on its religious belief, and it was Defendant Nessel who targeted it.”

Concerned that AG Nessel is continuing to weaponize the Attorney General’s Office to suppress religious beliefs in traditional marriage by threats of investigation and prosecution, the Thomas More Law Center, a national nonprofit public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, filed a request for records under the Michigan Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Using sham excuses, Nessel refused to supply crucial records that would shed light on her use of her law enforcement powers to target organizations that opposed her personal ideology supporting same-sex marriage.

TMLC filed a lawsuit in the Michigan Court of Claims on January 9, 2020, against Nessel for her refusal to comply with Michigan’s FOIA.

Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel of TMLC, which represents Church Militant and its Founder and President Michael Voris, commented: “This lawsuit is about the right of the people to know what their public officials are doing. We believe that Attorney General Nessel targeted Church Militant because of its stance on traditional marriage as she had done in the case involving St. Vincent.”

Continued Thompson: “The combination of actions by the Attorney General Nessel, the Department of Civil Rights and the Southern Poverty Law Center have a chilling effect on the freedom of speech and religion not only of Church Militant, but every religious group in Michigan that stands for traditional marriage.”

Astonishingly, Nessel’s office admitted in its response to Thomas More Law Center’s FOIA request that:

  • It had no policies in place to safeguard the constitutional rights of individuals who committed no crime but are being investigated for espousing traditional marriage.
  • It has no clear definitions of “bias incidents” or “hate crimes” against LGBT persons that are backed up by Michigan statutes or court decisions.
  •  The AG’s Office failed in its FOIA response to provide any clear policies or parameters governing the prosecution of hate crimes. Nor does it have a clear definition of what constitutes a “hate group.”

Without policies to adequately guide the actions of the Hate Crime Unit, it is free to roam about launching secret investigations against any organization based solely on the fact that it supports traditional marriage.

Consequently, it was easy for the Attorney General’s Office to claim that Church Militant was under investigation to avoid turning over records and to escape public scrutiny.

“Nessel has single-handedly turned the Attorney General’s Office into an instrument of thought control by intimidation, using its law enforcement powers to police the speech of Michigan residents.

“One of her primary goals is to suppress the religious definition of marriage that does not conform to her opinions on same-sex marriage,” Thompson said.

Church Militant, headquartered in Ferndale, Michigan, reports on current events around the world from a Catholic perspective. Defending the institution of marriage as between one man and one woman has always been a major theme of its video broadcasts and written reports, which are viewed by millions of people throughout the world via its website and YouTube channel.

Click here to read TMLC’s full complaint.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Thomas More Law Center column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Florida: Iranian Muslim found on bridge with knives and $22,000 in cash

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Probably just a circus performer. Relax, you greasy Islamophobe.

“Police release name of Iranian national found with knives on Flagler Memorial Bridge,” WPTV, January 10, 2020 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

PALM BEACH, Fla. — Palm Beach police are investigating after they say a man believed to be an Iranian national was found with several knives on the Flagler Memorial Bridge on Friday.

According to Palm Beach police, a citizen called about a suspicious person in Bradley Park.

Police said the man, later identified as Masoud Yareilzoleh, had no known address and was detained by officers. The police department said he was released from custody later in the day on Friday.

Yareilzoleh’s car was found at Palm Beach International Airport. Authorities said the vehicle was searched and cleared. It’s unknown why his car was at the airport.

In addition to the knives, police said Yareilzoleh had $22,000 in cash on him when he was detained….

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Why America Must Recommit to Religious Freedom

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We celebrate Thursday, Jan. 16, as Religious Freedom Day, the anniversary of the passage in 1786 of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Unfortunately, the percentage of Americans who have heard of the law, or the day that commemorates it, is shockingly small.

Yet Thomas Jefferson, who authored the statute in the Virginia Legislature, listed it on his tombstone as one of his three greatest achievements.

We need to reacquaint ourselves with this fundamental freedom.

President George H.W. Bush first declared Jan. 16 to be Religious Freedom Day in 1993, and each president since has issued a proclamation on religious liberty. In his first one, Bush noted that religious freedom is the “first of all freedoms enumerated in our Bill of Rights.”

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

Bush and his successors as president all said that religious freedom is of the highest importance: “integral to the preservation and development of the United States” (Bush, 1993); a “fundamental human right … without which a democracy cannot survive” (Bill Clinton, 1999); “one of this land’s greatest blessings” (George W. Bush, 2009); a “universal and inalienable right” (Barack Obama, 2017); and “innate to the dignity of every human person” (Donald Trump, 2018).

All of those lofty phrases are true, as far as they go.

But what is the “religious freedom” that presidents of both parties have said is so important? Some have attempted to confine religious freedom narrowly to religious “worship.”

In his 2016 proclamation, for example, Obama referred to the “freedom to worship as we choose.” Yet for Americans, religious freedom always has been much broader than that.

From long before America itself was born, this liberty was referred to as the “exercise of religion.” That’s the phrase that America’s founders used in the First Amendment.

In 2018, Trump framed religious freedom better by describing the “right not just to believe as [Americans] see fit, but to freely exercise their religion.” He called it the “right of the individual conscience and religious exercise.”

In doing so, Trump echoed Clinton, who, in 2000, correctly noted that the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom pledged that no one would “suffer on account of his religious opinions or beliefs.”

Properly understanding religious freedom in America requires fully appreciating both of these dimensions—the importance and the definition of religious freedom. And that understanding has never been more necessary than today.

Clashes between the constitutional right to exercise religion and civil or statutory rights, such as freedom from discrimination based on controversial new categories, are multiplying all over the country. Politicians and political interests are trying to reduce religious freedom to nothing more than an ordinary value or preference and to confine it to personal religious belief or, at most, to religious worship.

In other words, they want to excise religious exercise from American life. Some take it even further, claiming that Americans who exercise their faith are actually a danger, a negative element that should be minimized or shut down entirely.

In 2018, for example, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., introduced legislation, the Do No Harm Act, to exempt large categories of laws from the nation’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, signed into law in 1993 by Clinton, sets a tough standard for government actions, including legislation, to interfere with the exercise of religion. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., introduced the measure, which the House passed unanimously and the Senate passed 97-3.

By contrast, Harris’ legislation, co-sponsored by 31 other Democrats, would exempt laws that relate directly to liberal constituencies, such as labor unions or abortion providers. Neither Congress nor executive branch agencies would have to consider at all the impact on religious freedom of laws or regulations favoring those political interests.

This is a long way from the deep importance and broad definition that America’s Founders placed on religious freedom. It’s in stark contrast even to the most recent presidents’ rhetoric in their annual Religious Freedom Day proclamations.

As a nation, we are at a crossroads and must decide whether this freedom is what our presidents have said it is and, if so, commit again to actions behind these words.

COMMENTARY BY

Thomas Jipping

Thomas Jipping is deputy director of the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Twitter: .

Stephanie Neville

Stephanie Neville is a member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation.

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A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

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PODCAST: Unsettled — The Refugee Question

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“I had a small hope that maybe ISIS would not come,” Thabet says, remembering, as he and the reporter drove the long road toward Mosul. But within hours, everyone he loved and knew had fled. Thirteen thousand Christians vanished, scattered miles from the Nineveh Plain, in hiding. They slept in courtyards, unfinished apartment buildings, churches, camps — while waves of terrorists burned their way through their towns.

In cities like his, the nights often went like this. Priests would climb the sanctuary steps to ring the bells, sounding the alarm that fighters were on their way. Moms and dads shook their kids awake, gathered what they could, and left. It was the last time most of them would ever see their homes again. Even now, after the region was recaptured and secured, the Christians brave enough to stay don’t have an easy life. There’s oppression, isolation, and violence. Families keep their daughters close, worried about rape and abuse.

But leaving, for some, is just as difficult. In the United States, asylum can be hard to come by. After eight years of watching “refugees” stream across our borders unchecked, President Trump is processing these applications with an abundance of caution. Under the previous White House, too many foreigners were gaming the system, slipping into lines where they knew they couldn’t be scrutinized. This administration has been trying to clean up that mess, putting procedures and screenings in place to guarantee that anyone who steps foot on our soil doesn’t pose a threat to the American people.

That new vigilance has paid off. There’s more balance in the faith groups entering the country, for one thing. Under Obama, 97 percent of the Syrian refugees coming to the U.S. were Muslim, while Christians would dribble through one or two at a time. President Trump is trying to give other believers, especially those targeted for persecution, the fair shake the last administration didn’t. Although there’s been a dramatic decrease in the number of refugees, Christians, as of last year, made up 82 percent of them.

But the system isn’t perfect. And that’s one thing evangelicals have struggled with, especially as the global horrors keep growing and pool of victims gets larger. When the White House announced in September that it was cutting its refugee ceiling from 30,000 to almost zero, there were some conservatives who, fed up with Obama’s dangerous policy, thought this was a positive step. Others, like myself, were instantly concerned. As we speak, there’s an unprecedented number of believers — from all faiths — being kicked out of their homelands and displaced. Whether they’re being killed or driven out or put in concentration camps, the survival of entire populations is at stake.

Now, there are some evangelicals who agree with liberals and think America should open its arms to everyone. Obviously, that’s created some friction inside the church and conservative circles — because on one hand, we want to be a place of last resort for the vulnerable. But on the other, we don’t want our country taken advantage of by those who are not interested in being a part of America, rather they want to pull America apart. Ideally, we insisted at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), the administration would never let the number of refugees drop below 30,000 — which is already a historic low.

“So long as refugee numbers are low,” Mark Krikorian pointed out on NRO, “and not drawing disproportionately from the Islamic world, even governors with pretty hawkish constituencies may well feel free to accommodate the… lobby for continued resettlement.”

Senator James Lankford (R-Okla.) agrees and even took some flak for defending his governor, who, like a lot of Republicans, is giving the green light to refugees resettling in his state. On “Washington Watch,” Lankford explained that it all goes back to the core values that created America. “Dating back to the 1700s, our framers decided that our nation was going to be founded on a different kind of principle: that we’re going to honor people of faith to be able to not only have a faith of their choosing — but to be able to live that faith out or to be able to have no faith at all. And many of the refugees that are fleeing from around the world are fleeing religious persecution, in particular, and running from places around the world where they cannot survive based on their faith, whether that be Kurds… Christians, Yazidis, or other faiths. And so America, as a beacon of place where we honor religious liberty, we should continue to be able to practice that as well in receiving refugees, especially those fleeing religious persecution.”

As he and I talked about, these people are looking for a safe haven. And while the Obama administration didn’t do a very good job screening these people, President Trump changed that. These aren’t unvetted terrorist wannabes who want to destroy America. They’re hurting survivors with no place to go. Our faith leads us to be a place of refuge. That doesn’t mean we blindly embrace anyone who shows up at our borders. But it does mean we’ve got to keep the door open for the victims who truly need it.

Tony Perkins’s Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

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EDITORS NOTE: This FRC Action column with podcast is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Democrat Silence on Support for Iranian Protesters

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Days into the brave protests by Iranian citizens against their corrupt and brutal regime, Democrat airwaves were silent.

While protesters began calling out the lies of the Iranian regime over its handling of the downing of a Ukrainian Airlines commercial plane and demanding the resignation of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, until Monday, there were no words of support by high-ranking Democrats or any of the 2020 Democrat presidential contenders.

As journalist Yashar Ali, who is of Iranian decent, tweeted:

Instead, Dems were busy tweeting out their disapproval of President Trump’s hit on Iranian arch-terrorist Qasem Soleimani and sending condolences to the Iranian public – most of whom were celebrating the demise of such an evil influence on the world.

In contrast, President Trump’s tweet in Farsi in support of the Iranian protesters, garnered the most “likes” in the history of Persian Twitter, as noted by  Saeed Ghasseminejad, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

The tweet read: “To the brave, long-suffering people of Iran: I’ve stood with you since the beginning of my Presidency, and my Administration will continue to stand with you. We are following your protests closely, and are inspired by your courage.”

The Democrats’ lack of support for the Iranian protesters did not go unnoticed by the president who retweeted the following meme (causing the likes of CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, to fall into an apoplectic Islamophobia fit).

By Sunday and then on Monday, Democrat radio silence was feebly broken by Joe Biden and Amy Kloucher, respectively, the latter of whom tweeted out weak and vague words of support for the “right to peacefully protest in any country, including Iran.”

Biden mainly used the opportunity to take a dig at Trump and his “reckless policies (that) needlessly endangered our interests in the Middle East.”

While Iranians doing just that were being shot in the streets by the regime security forces, the rest of the 2020 Democrat political contenders remained silent.

It was a shameful response for members of a party which prides itself on being a champion of human rights.

In the meantime, House Minority Leader Republican Kevin McCarthy announced his plans to introduce a resolution in Congress in support of the Iranian protesters:

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EDITORS NOTE: This Clarion Project column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

A Protest of Wills

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If Donald Trump is the problem in Iran, liberal Democrats are the only ones who think so. After days of trying to extract a pound of flesh from the president for killing a terrorist mastermind, the far-Left is surprisingly quiet now that the Iranian people are mobbing the streets shouting “Death!” to something other than America. Turns out, the country’s crusade for freedom isn’t nearly as useful to their 2020 hopes as painting Trump as a universally-hated warmonger — something these weekend demonstrations go a long way to disproving.

They poured out to the streets by the hundreds — all of them risking execution just for the opportunity to speak out. Oppressed and lied to for decades, angry Iranians snapped after the attack and cover-up of the downed commercial airliner. After days of insisting it didn’t shoot down the Ukrainian plane that plunged into the ground near Tehran, killing 176 people, Iran officials finally admitted Saturday that its military was responsible for the accident — prompting a fury of outrage inside — and outside — Tehran. Leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps apologized for mistakenly targeting Flight 752, but it was too late. The country had already erupted.

While Iranians dodged bullets and tear gas to challenge the regime, six thousand miles away, Democrats were dodging something else: public comment. Their silence was a start contrast to the president, who posted a series of messages in Farsi standing in solidarity with the protestors in Tehran. “To the brave, long-suffering people of Iran: I’ve stood with you since the beginning of my Presidency, and my administration will continue to stand with you. We are following your protests closely and are inspired by your courage… To the leaders of Iran — DO NOT KILL YOUR PROTESTERS. Thousands have already been killed or imprisoned by you, and the World is watching. More importantly, the USA is watching.”

For the far-Left, the images of protestors were another significant political blow. As Michael Goodwin announced in the New York Post, all of this proves, once again, “The chicken littles got everything wrong on Trump and Iran.” In a matter of hours, the entire script had flipped, he exclaims, shredding “the claim that the Obama nuke deal was effective and confirm[ing] the wisdom of Trump’s decision to eliminate Soleimani. Contrasts between competing policies don’t get any sharper,” he writes. “Nor does the clarity of the result.” This, he insists was a “disaster for the Dem 2020 candidates. Their knee-jerk criticism of the Soleimani strike and embrace of Obama’s appeasement of Iran is another mark against them.”

As usual, the Democratic party is so focused on beating Trump that they’re missing the big picture of freedom for the Iranian people. While the citizens of Tehran put everything on the line to expose their leaders and get the world’s attention, America’s liberals — like Obama before them — have turned their backs. Journalist Yashar Ali, of Iranian decent, lashed out at the hypocrisy and opportunism in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) ranks, wondering — in a series of viral tweets — where all the Democrats, who had such “deep concern” for the future of Iran, had gone.

“Iranians are being used by certain people on the Left (I didn’t say all) as a tool to attack President Trump. But these same people don’t seem to care to… support their right to protest?” Ali asked. “It seems to me, the protests were inconvenient for some of these [Democrats] today. They were placing the blame on the Iranian leadership — who lied repeatedly about what happened… So it wasn’t worth it to bring attention to [the protestors] or support them?… These aren’t serious individuals… They aren’t interested in providing any semblance of moral clarity. They’re just obsessed with Trump.”

For Pelosi, who continued to insist on the Sunday talk shows that Trump escalated the situation unnecessarily, the optics of her party’s blackout are devastating. On one hand, the world is watching video of Iranians refusing to step on the American and Israeli flags — the ultimate defiance — and on the other, scores of American extremists, sitting on their hands during a democratic movement that could reshape the entire landscape of the Middle East. Where is the so-called “party of women” when the most decorated Iranian female athlete defects to the Netherlands, decrying the “oppression” of women in Iran? What happened to the siren calls for resistance?

Like the people in Tehran, who shout, “They are lying that our enemy is America!” Democrats are lying that our enemy is Trump. The president is the picture of peace through strength. And everyone in the world seems to understand the importance of that — except them.

Tony Perkins’s Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC Action senior writers.

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EDITORS NOTE: This FRC Action column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Iran — University students refuse to walk over US, Israeli flags, boo those who do

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Forty years of anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda, and this is how much Iran’s Islamic regime is hated within Iran.

“Students at Beheshti University of Tehran Refuse to Walk Over U.S., Israel Flags, Boo People Who Do,” MEMRI, January 12, 2020

On January 12, during the second day of protests in Iran following Iran’s acknowledgment of shooting down Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752, students at Beheshti University in Tehran refused to walk over giant American and Israeli flags drawn on the ground. They booed people who did, and shouted at them that they had “no honor.” The video was uploaded to Twitter.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Iranian protesters chant: ‘Our enemy is here, they lie that it’s USA’

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Ilhan Omar and Nancy Pelosi hardest hit.

But the mullahs need not be concerned. Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and the rest will do their level best to keep them in power.

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New York City: Muslim accused of sexually assaulting and killing 92-year-old woman claims his “pants fell off”

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission.

Rome’s Shame in China

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Robert Royal on the Sino-Vatican pact: We hear we must be patient and not give up hope, but facts on the ground show the Church has been had.

China is a large, strange, complex, contradictory thing, even before you get to the large, strange, complex, contradictory, and murderous form of Communism that has come to dominate its various peoples. No one understands it very well. But those closest with a real say – the Hong Kong protesters who know what submission to Beijing means, and Taiwanese voters who roundly resisted mainland pressure in elections this weekend – are united in believing that China is simply not to be trusted.

It’s worth trying to think through why the Vatican seems to have a different view.

Living in Washington, I’ve met any number of sincere and dedicated public figures, as well as many scamps, scalawags, con men, and outright liars. But the few encounters I’ve had with Chinese officials set the gold standard for shameless lying – particularly about religious persecution.

Even secular journalists with little love for religion routinely report these days on China’s increasing outrages against believers. Their reports tend to focus on religious groups Western secularists favor – the 1 million Uighur Muslims in China, for example, who are now being brainwashed in “re-education” camps.

Journalists are much less interested in China’s 100 million Christians (Protestants and Catholics). Or how religious bodies are being brutally “sinicized,” even forced – incredibly – to re-write their scriptures to bring them in line with Communist ideology.

Last week, a Congressional committee on China issued a blistering report, which began: “Observers have described religious persecution in China over the last year to be of an intensity not seen since the Cultural Revolution.” It documented how not only “foreign” religions (i.e., Christianity and Islam) are being squeezed, but even traditional faiths like Buddhism and Hinduism are under a full-court press against religion now.

Just a day earlier, Pope Francis gave his annual address to diplomats, and did not utter a word about Chinese persecution, indeed claimed that the Vatican’s Provisional Agreement with China “is the result of a lengthy and thoughtful institutional dialogue that led to the determination of certain stable elements of cooperation between the Apostolic See and the civil authorities.”

How is such stone-blindness possible?

There’s an answer perhaps in A Hidden Life, Terrence Malick’s moving new film about the martyrdom of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian Catholic whose conscience would not allow him to swear allegiance to Hitler. I’ve had an interest in him since I wrote my book The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century.

A mea culpa: He was one of my very favorites among many modern heroic and holy figures, almost totally ignored by historians. But I had to write about him as a historian myself, with only the broad outline of his personal struggles as he thought about how his wife and children would have to cope without him. How his friends and fellow villagers regarded him as a traitor (they, of course, felt guilty that they had compromised with evil and took it out on him and his family). How, as the Nazis never tired of telling him, his death would change nothing; no one would ever know about it; his stubbornness would only bring suffering to those he loved.

Some have criticized the slow, lengthy treatment of these matters in the film. But how else to convey what it’s really like to live under relentless persecution, day after day, and deal with tortures and doubts to a degree that would drive most of us mad?

But even that was not the worst. Franz’s pastor and bishop (Joseph Fliesser of Linz) nervously suggested he be obedient to public authorities, as St. Paul counseled. (Rom. 13) These men were not monsters, or Nazi shills. They did not intend to destroy the Church, but thought that by passively going along they were actually saving as much of the Church as could be saved, in terrible circumstances. There was also personal cowardice, of course, mixed in with the other motives. They were wrong, massively wrong, as anyone can see today.

Something similar is going on in China right now. The Vatican, by its accord with an evil government, has essentially told Chinese Catholics that they are wrong to remain independent of a regime they see quite clearly is murderous and hell-bent on forcing the Church to be re-defined along lines that will make it harmless to government interests.

Reliable sources say that the same instruments of manipulation officials used so effectively in imposing the “one-child policy” are now carrying out the sinicization of religious bodies.

So where are the bold Catholic voices protesting the intimidation and taming of the Church? We have Emeritus Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, who just issued a heartfelt letter to all the Catholic Cardinals, which ends on a personal note to each of them, “Your Eminence, can we passively witness the murder of the Church in China by those who should protect and defend her from her enemies? Begging on my knees, your brother. . .”

There’s been silence about this letter – to say nothing of the horrors it describes – at the highest levels in the Vatican, i.e., Cardinal Parolin, the Secretary of State, who worked out the Provisional Agreement with China, and Pope Francis himself.

We’ve heard from Parolin that we must be patient and keep up hope, but the facts on the ground are beyond dispute: the Church has been had. The belief that “dialogue” – which like “diplomacy” has become something of an idol in certain internationalist circles – is possible with certain forms of evil will someday be seen, as is clear already to many of us, as a foolish experiment that many Chinese – and not only Chinese Catholics – will pay for with their liberties and lives.

And it won’t stop there because other malefactors around the world are watching. If you have to suffer and perhaps die anyway, better to do so like Franz Jägerstätter – as he told his captors, as a free man, although he was imprisoned – than to accept a false peace, which is, sooner or later, only the peace of the graveyard.

COLUMN BY

Robert Royal

Dr. Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing, and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent book is A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century, published by Ignatius Press. The God That Did Not Fail: How Religion Built and Sustains the West, is now available in paperback from

EDITORS NOTE: This Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2020 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

Islam: A Plague Upon Humanity

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Prior to the 9/11 attacks, most Americans did not have any understanding as to what Islam was. The attacks on September 11, 2001 opened the eyes of many people to the reality that Islam was a widespread plague upon humanity and responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Islam and its variants mean, in practice, bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal actions, forced ‘hijabs,” fatal deportations, extrajudicial executions, show trials, and genocide

This ideology of terror does not allow Muslims to leave Islam. It does not allow people of other faiths to exercise their religions freely, let alone preach them freely. Islam does not recognize equal human rights for those who are not Muslims nor does it recognize equality for women. Islam does not allow freedom of thought let alone freedom of speech.

Currently, Islam is on the march in much of the Western world, and it aims to destroy anything and anyone that stands in its way. Ironically, many Europeans have allowed them to take advantage of democracy without a fight. In addition, Islam apologists call those who warn of the threat of Islam are attacked and stigmatized as hatemongers and Islamophobe, even though a phobia is a baseless irrational fear.

If by now we have not come to the conclusion that Islam is not a religion but a militant, political and violent cult created by one man and is the greatest threat to the human race, there is no hope for humanity to survive.

Recall that it took only 19 of these killers to launch the aerial mass murder of 9/11 that killed almost 3,000 people, shattered our open trusting way of life, and cost us trillions of dollars. Unfortunately, we have not learned anything from the 9/11 attacks but instead, act as if we are suffering from Stockholm syndrome.

What is Islam

Islam is a creed of an ignorant people in a primitive and barbaric Arabian Peninsula. It is fixated in time and place; it harbors the ambition of taking the 21st century world back 14 centuries and ruling it by its dogma of violence, intolerance, injustice and death. Yet, Islam is not only an obsolete vestige of a defunct era, but itself is an infinitely fractured belief that can hardly put its own home in order. The numerous Islamic sects are at each other’s throats; sub-sects and schools despise one another as much as they hate non-Muslims. Hatred, not love, drives Islam.

Every American should be ashamed of any elected officials anywhere when they call Islam a “religion of peace.” Those officials are appeasing, if not an outright lying.  We, the people, elect our leaders, and we hold them accountable to be honorable and faithful to their oath of office.  When the people’s representatives downplay the deadliest threat to everything we cherish, they not only legitimize Islam, but also confuse the rest of the uninformed population with a false belief and information.  Therefore, politicians, while using political correctness to advance their own lofty agenda, expedite the demise of our civilization.

I see America and even Canada, in thirty years or so, becoming a war zone if we do not stop Islamic ideology from advancing and identify it for what it truly is.  If we ignore these warnings, the future of America will not be so bright and ultimately, like Persia, will suffer a slow death.  This is historical fact, not fiction.  I have seen what Islam has done to the country of my birth.

Freedom is fragile.  Anything that protects freedom can also become an Achilles heel for those blessed with freedom.  This is because freedom always entails the unfortunate ability to use one’s rights to destroy the freedoms and rights of others.  People can use the protections afforded them by the Constitution to inflict great harm to those who live within the law.  We know that this is the main argument against the Second Amendment.

Constitution

In the interest of impartiality, the authors of the Constitution did not define what constitutes a religion.  Presently, a plethora of sects, cults, and orders, all claiming to be religion, cover the length and the breadth of the land. So long as these “religions” minister to the legitimate spiritual needs of their congregations without threatening the rights of others, there is no reason for concern.  However, when one or more of these claimants strive to undermine the very Constitution that protects them in order to impose their belief and way of life, serious problems arise and It must be stopped.

© All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Canada — Where Calling Soleimani a Terrorist Can Get You Arrested

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Watch how Canadian police threaten a journalist that if he called assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani a terrorist, he would be arrested. Rebel Media reporter David Menzies was covering the pro- and anti-Soleimani demonstrations in Toronto over the weekend.

The shocking video shows how police — as well as pro-Iranian demonstrators — are virtually willing to deny this polite journalist his right to free speech and press under Canadian law.

Tehran or Toronto? You decide:

Meanwhile in Iraq, the fallout continues from the U.S. hit on arch terrorist Soleimani, who directed the elite Quds force of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps:

  • After the Iraqi parliament voted to expel U.S. troops from Iraq, President Trump said, “We’ve spent a lot of money in Iraq. We have a very extraordinarily expensive air base that’s there. It cost billions of dollars to build. … We’re not leaving unless they pay us back for it.”The decision ultimately falls on the prime minister and his cabinet. But who can make that decision? Current Iraqi PM Adil Abdul-Mahdi al-Muntafiki resigned last November following weeks of protests about the Iranian presence in Iraq as well as governmental corruption and the dire economic situation in Iraq. A replacement has yet to be chosen.Trump continued to warn that such a move would not end well for Iraq. “We will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before ever,” the president said. “It’ll make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame.”
  • Meanwhile in Iraq, demonstrations against the Iranian presence in Iraq continued, as well as demonstrations against all foreign involvement in Iraq.
  • When Fox News reporter Chris Wallace asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo if the impeachment of President Trump has “emboldened enemies like Iran and North Korea — is this president more vulnerable because of the impeachment effort?” Pompeo replied, “You should ask Mr. Soleimani.”
  • On Sunday night, rockets continued to be fired into the “Green Zone,” a supposedly protected area which houses Iraqi government buildings and foreign embassies, including the American embassy. One rocket hit a family home, injuring four people.
  • Iran announced it would no longer honor its commitment to limit its enrichment of uranium as required by the 2015  pact it made with the world powers.In a statement, Iran declared, “The Islamic Republic of Iran, in the fifth step in reducing its commitments, discards the last key component of its operational limitations in the JCPOA, which is the ‘limit on the number of centrifuges.’ As such, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear program no longer faces any operational restrictions, including enrichment capacity, percentage of enrichment, amount of enriched material, and research and development. From here on, Iran’s nuclear program will be developed solely based on its technical needs.”
  • Soleimani’s successor, Esmail Ghaani, 62, who served as Soleimani’s deputy commander of the Quds force since 1979, promised “to continue martyr Soleimani’s path with the same force and the only compensation for us would be to remove America from the region.”

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EDITORS NOTE: This Clarion Project column with video is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Iran publishes film portraying jihad attack on the White House and Capitol, killing Trump, Pompeo and Netanyahu

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Iran didn’t indulge these fantasies when Obama was President, right? Wrong.

Iran: Muslim cleric vows to “raise flag of Islam on White House” February 28, 2015

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.