The Synod of Bishops comes to a close: Now, we must pray!

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Hope all is well on this “Feast Day of St. Isaac Jogues” as the Extraordinary Synod of Bishops in Rome finally came to a close today, Sunday, October 19th, with the Holy Father, himself, having the honor to conclude it with a very powerful and prayerful speech. It is a nice, heartfelt speech as it basically tells the Catholic Faithful that a lot was accomplished during these quite stressful two weeks in Rome – but, we still have a full year to actually summarize everything that took place during these past 14 days and put it into writing and action. This was just a “practice” – a dress rehearsal. Next October will come the real Game…the Championship Game…I just hope it does not end up like the Notre Dame – Florida State game last night…the Catholics were robbed…Yes, the Irish were short-changed – and, being a former NCAA Basketball Official for many years, I just happened to write the appropriate article in the DrRichSwier.com E-magazine this past Friday – “DO NOT MAKE THE CALL UNTIL YOU SEE THE ENTIRE PLAY“…

Friends: In all honesty and in all due respect, I truly believe that the referees in that Notre Dame-FSU game did NOT see the entire play – and taking that Touchdown back in the last seconds of a game of that caliber with national championship implications – where that touchdown play would have given the Irish the lead and probably the victory…I will just leave it at that and pray that this Synod of Bishops that just finished up, has a better ending than that Notre Dame game – (if you happen to be an Irish fan) – and does not short-change the Catholics…

And, that is what so many Catholics all over the world are fearing right about now – “being short-changed”. Many are confused, disappointed, upset and basically not sure which way the Catholic Church is heading. Rightfully so. Lots to digest, lots to pray about. And, after all of the commotion – all of the discussion on the different takes of what was covered at this Synod – after the differing opinions from some of the more prominent cardinals (Burke, Kasper, Pell, Dolan, etc.) – I honestly feel like we just have to put our Faith into action, trust in the Catholic Church, and have confidence in Pope Francis – that he has the best interest in the direction of the Holy Catholic Church. There is much at stake here, and now that the Synod has come to a close, everybody can take a deep breath, relax a bit, and know that the Catholic Church is NOT “Going Gay”…

We are just “Going to continue to follow the teachings of our Lord & Savior, Jesus Christ” – while trying to be more open-minded and compassionate to everybody – the atheists, the sinners, the homosexuals, the outcast, the poor, the homeless…as we go back to what I spoke and wrote about in the Palm Beach Post over a year ago – Pope Francis’ “Global Open House” – where he has spent the past “576” days inviting all of those who I mentioned above to come see what the Holy Catholic Church is all about. Come follow me…

The Holy Father is trying to show us that we – as One Body in Christ, need to embrace and accept everybody – regardless of their past, their backgrounds, their beliefs, their religious affiliation, their sexual preference, etc. He is trying to teach us that this is exactly what Jesus did 2,000 years ago and that if we claim to be true followers of Christ, we must follow His ways. And, through this humble and loving philosophy, this ever-passionate pontiff has definitely gotten everybody’s “undivided” attention… And, that is the key word here – “undivided”…

Getting everybody’s undivided attention appears to be a pretty manageable task for Pope Francis. He has done a terrific job, so far. The trick to it is that “undivided” word. He has gotten their undivided attention – but, how does he keep them “undivided”, themselves? How does he keep all of those who are listening to him to follow him and the Catholic Church teachings as One Body in Christ – all of them on the same page & book (The Holy Bible) – while keeping them “undivided”? While the Catholic Church seems to be quite “divided” these days – especially after this Extraordinary Synod that has actually pitted several of our prominent cardinals and bishops against one another, as a few of the articles and news flashes that I have received over the past two weeks, would have only added fuel to the fire – so, I decided to keep those “flammable” articles to myself and just pray about these issues. Those derogatory articles and videos would only lend more animosity and uncertainty to our beloved Catholic Church and served to divide it even more.

What we need to do now – beginning this Monday, October 20th – the “Feast Day of St. Paul of the Cross” (Founder of the Passionists) – is to pray relentlessly for these next 365 days – until next year’s Synod of Bishops. We need to try to put everything into perspective, do a little damage control and put to rest all the negative and derogatory misconceptions that we heard from the ruthless, secular media these past 14 days, who are trying to tear our Church apart. We must protect the Integrity of the Holy Catholic Church. We have our work cut out and October, 2015 will be here before we can even say “I believe in One GOD, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth”…Let’s work “Two-gether” – Let’s pray “Two-gether” and put our confidence in GOD.

At the conclusion of the Extraordinary Synod on the Family, Pope Francis addressed the assembled Fathers, thanking them for their efforts and encouraging them to continue to journey. Below, please find Vatican Radio’s provisional translation of Pope Francis’ address to the Synod Fathers:

Dear Eminences, Beatitudes, Excellencies, Brothers and Sisters,

With a heart full of appreciation and gratitude I want to thank, along with you, the Lord who has accompanied and guided us in the past days, with the light of the Holy Spirit.

From the heart I thank Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, Secretary General of the Synod, Bishop Fabio Fabene, under-secretary, and with them I thank the Relators, Cardinal Peter Erdo, who has worked so much in these days of family mourning, and the Special Secretary Bishop Bruno Forte, the three President delegates, the transcribers, the consultors, the translators and the unknown workers, all those who have worked with true fidelity and total dedication behind the scenes and without rest. Thank you so much from the heart.

I thank all of you as well, dear Synod fathers, Fraternal Delegates, Auditors, and Assessors, for your active and fruitful participation. I will keep you in prayer asking the Lord to reward you with the abundance of His gifts of grace!

I can happily say that – with a spirit of collegiality and of synodality – we have truly lived the experience of “Synod,” a path of solidarity, a “journey together.”

And it has been “a journey” – and like every journey there were moments of running fast, as if wanting to conquer time and reach the goal as soon as possible; other moments of fatigue, as if wanting to say “enough”; other moments of enthusiasm and ardour. There were moments of profound consolation listening to the testimony of true pastors, who wisely carry in their hearts the joys and the tears of their faithful people. Moments of consolation and grace and comfort hearing the testimonies of the families who have participated in the Synod and have shared with us the beauty and the joy of their married life. A journey where the stronger feel compelled to help the less strong, where the more experienced are led to serve others, even through confrontations. And since it is a journey of human beings, with the consolations there were also moments of desolation, of tensions and temptations, of which a few possibilities could be mentioned:

– One, a temptation to hostile inflexibility, that is, wanting to close oneself within the written word, (the letter) and not allowing oneself to be surprised by God, by the God of surprises, (the spirit); within the law, within the certitude of what we know and not of what we still need to learn and to achieve. From the time of Christ, it is the temptation of the zealous, of the scrupulous, of the solicitous and of the so-called – today – “traditionalists” and also of the intellectuals.

– The temptation to a destructive tendency to goodness [it. buonismo], that in the name of a deceptive mercy binds the wounds without first curing them and treating them; that treats the symptoms and not the causes and the roots. It is the temptation of the “do-gooders,” of the fearful, and also of the so-called “progressives and liberals.”

– The temptation to transform stones into bread to break the long, heavy, and painful fast (cf. Lk 4:1-4); and also to transform the bread into a stone and cast it against the sinners, the weak, and the sick (cf Jn 8:7), that is, to transform it into unbearable burdens (Lk 11:46).

– The temptation to come down off the Cross, to please the people, and not stay there, in order to fulfil the will of the Father; to bow down to a worldly spirit instead of purifying it and bending it to the Spirit of God.

– The temptation to neglect the “depositum fidei” [the deposit of faith], not thinking of themselves as guardians but as owners or masters [of it]; or, on the other hand, the temptation to neglect reality, making use of meticulous language and a language of smoothing to say so many things and to say nothing! They call them “byzantinisms,” I think, these things…

Dear brothers and sisters, the temptations must not frighten or disconcert us, or even discourage us, because no disciple is greater than his master; so if Jesus Himself was tempted – and even called Beelzebul (cf. Mt 12:24) – His disciples should not expect better treatment.
Personally I would be very worried and saddened if it were not for these temptations and these animated discussions; this movement of the spirits, as St Ignatius called it (Spiritual Exercises, 6), if all were in a state of agreement, or silent in a false and quietist peace. Instead, I have seen and I have heard – with joy and appreciation – speeches and interventions full of faith, of pastoral and doctrinal zeal, of wisdom, of frankness and of courage: and of parresia. And I have felt that what was set before our eyes was the good of the Church, of families, and the “supreme law,” the “good of souls” (cf. Can. 1752). And this always – we have said it here, in the Hall – without ever putting into question the fundamental truths of the Sacrament of marriage: the indissolubility, the unity, the faithfulness, the fruitfulness, that openness to life (cf. Cann. 1055, 1056; and Gaudium et spes, 48).

And this is the Church, the vineyard of the Lord, the fertile Mother and the caring Teacher, who is not afraid to roll up her sleeves to pour oil and wine on people’s wound; who doesn’t see humanity as a house of glass to judge or categorize people. This is the Church, One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic and composed of sinners, needful of God’s mercy. This is the Church, the true bride of Christ, who seeks to be faithful to her spouse and to her doctrine. It is the Church that is not afraid to eat and drink with prostitutes and publicans. The Church that has the doors wide open to receive the needy, the penitent, and not only the just or those who believe they are perfect! The Church that is not ashamed of the fallen brother and pretends not to see him, but on the contrary feels involved and almost obliged to lift him up and to encourage him to take up the journey again and accompany him toward a definitive encounter with her Spouse, in the heavenly Jerusalem.

The is the Church, our Mother! And when the Church, in the variety of her charisms, expresses herself in communion, she cannot err: it is the beauty and the strength of the sensus fidei, of that supernatural sense of the faith which is bestowed by the Holy Spirit so that, together, we can all enter into the heart of the Gospel and learn to follow Jesus in our life. And this should never be seen as a source of confusion and discord.

Many commentators, or people who talk, have imagined that they see a disputatious Church where one part is against the other, doubting even the Holy Spirit, the true promoter and guarantor of the unity and harmony of the Church – the Holy Spirit who throughout history has always guided the barque, through her Ministers, even when the sea was rough and choppy, and the ministers unfaithful and sinners.

And, as I have dared to tell you , [as] I told you from the beginning of the Synod, it was necessary to live through all this with tranquillity, and with interior peace, so that the Synod would take place cum Petro and sub Petro (with Peter and under Peter), and the presence of the Pope is the guarantee of it all.

We will speak a little bit about the Pope, now, in relation to the Bishops [laughing]. So, the duty of the Pope is that of guaranteeing the unity of the Church; it is that of reminding the faithful of their duty to faithfully follow the Gospel of Christ; it is that of reminding the pastors that their first duty is to nourish the flock – to nourish the flock – that the Lord has entrusted to them, and to seek to welcome – with fatherly care and mercy, and without false fears – the lost sheep. I made a mistake here. I said welcome: [rather] to go out and find them.

His duty is to remind everyone that authority in the Church is a service, as Pope Benedict XVI clearly explained, with words I cite verbatim: “The Church is called and commits herself to exercise this kind of authority which is service and exercises it not in her own name, but in the name of Jesus Christ… through the Pastors of the Church, in fact: it is he who guides, protects and corrects them, because he loves them deeply. But the Lord Jesus, the supreme Shepherd of our souls, has willed that the Apostolic College, today the Bishops, in communion with the Successor of Peter… to participate in his mission of taking care of God’s People, of educating them in the faith and of guiding, inspiring and sustaining the Christian community, or, as the Council puts it, ‘to see to it… that each member of the faithful shall be led in the Holy Spirit to the full development of his own vocation in accordance with Gospel preaching, and to sincere and active charity’ and to exercise that liberty with which Christ has set us free (cf. Presbyterorum Ordinis, 6)… and it is through us,” Pope Benedict continues, “that the Lord reaches souls, instructs, guards and guides them. St Augustine, in his Commentary on the Gospel of St John, says: ‘let it therefore be a commitment of love to feed the flock of the Lord’ (cf. 123, 5); this is the supreme rule of conduct for the ministers of God, an unconditional love, like that of the Good Shepherd, full of joy, given to all, attentive to those close to us and solicitous for those who are distant (cf. St Augustine, Discourse 340, 1; Discourse 46, 15), gentle towards the weakest, the little ones, the simple, the sinners, to manifest the infinite mercy of God with the reassuring words of hope (cf. ibid., Epistle, 95, 1).”

So, the Church is Christ’s – she is His bride – and all the bishops, in communion with the Successor of Peter, have the task and the duty of guarding her and serving her, not as masters but as servants. The Pope, in this context, is not the supreme lord but rather the supreme servant – the “servant of the servants of God”; the guarantor of the obedience and the conformity of the Church to the will of God, to the Gospel of Christ, and to the Tradition of the Church, putting aside every personal whim, despite being – by the will of Christ Himself – the “supreme Pastor and Teacher of all the faithful” (Can. 749) and despite enjoying “supreme, full, immediate, and universal ordinary power in the Church” (cf. Cann. 331-334).

Dear brothers and sisters, now we still have one year to mature, with true spiritual discernment, the proposed ideas and to find concrete solutions to so many difficulties and innumerable challenges that families must confront; to give answers to the many discouragements that surround and suffocate families.

One year to work on the “Synodal Relatio” which is the faithful and clear summary of everything that has been said and discussed in this hall and in the small groups. It is presented to the Episcopal Conferences as “lineamenta” [guidelines].

May the Lord accompany us, and guide us in this journey for the glory of His Name, with the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary and of Saint Joseph. And please, do not forget to pray for me! Thank you!

[The hymn Te Deum was sung, and Benediction given.]

Thank you, and rest well, eh?

Kerry: Islamic State not due to Islam, but due to Israel and climate change

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Hostility to Israel, dark warnings about the perils of global warming, and an anxiousness to absolve Islam of any responsibility for the evils done in its name — this single address by John Kerry sums up the Obama Administration’s foreign policy in a nutshell.

“Kerry: Extremism Not Linked to Islam; Factors Include Deprivation, Climate Change,” by Patrick Goodenough, CNS News, October 17, 2014:

(CNSNews.com) – Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday night rejected any link between Islam and extremism practiced by the likes of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS/ISIL/Daesh), pointing instead to factors such as poverty among youthful Mideast populations, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – and climate change.

Addressing a reception at the State Department in honor of the recent Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha, Kerry told an audience of Muslim community representatives, diplomats and others that the world was facing “a very complex time, and there are many currents that are loose out there that have brought us to this moment.”

“The extremism that we see, the radical exploitation of religion which is translated into violence, has no basis in any of the real religions,” he said. “There’s nothing Islamic about what ISIL/Daesh stands for, or is doing to people.”

The situation was “complicated, and for other reasons,” Kerry said. “We’re living at a point in time where there are just more young people demanding what they see the rest of the world having than at any time in modern history.”

He said with large youthful populations in some countries in the Middle East, South-Central Asia and the Horn of Africa, “you are going to have a governance problem unless your governance is really addressing the demands and needs of that part of the population.”

Kerry said extremist violence was just a symptom of underlying causes that needed to be addressed. He spoke in that context of a need for a partnership – to pursue peace, shared prosperity and the ability to get an education and a job, as well as “sustainability of the planet itself.”

“And that brings us to something like climate change, which is profoundly having an impact in various parts of the world, where droughts are occurring not at a 100-year level but at a 500-year level in places that they haven’t occurred, floods of massive proportions, diminishment of water for crops and agriculture at a time where we need to be talking about sustainable food.”

“In many places we see the desert increasingly creeping into East Africa,” he said. “We’re seeing herders and farmers pushed into deadly conflict as a result. We’re seeing the Himalayan glaciers receding, which will affect the water that is critical to rice and to other agriculture on both sides of the Himalayas. These are our challenges.”

‘Humiliation and denial’

Kerry also linked the threat of ISIS-type extremism to the Israeli-Palestinian situation.

“As I went around and met with people in the course of our discussions about the ISIL coalition, the truth is we – there wasn’t a leader I met with in the region who didn’t raise with me spontaneously the need to try to get peace between Israel and the Palestinians,” he said, “because it was a cause of recruitment and of street anger and agitation that they felt – and I see a lot of heads nodding – they had to respond to.”

“And people need to understand the connection of that,” Kerry added. “It has something to do with humiliation and denial and absence of dignity …”…

The 56-page latest edition of its publication, Dabiq, does not refer once to the plight of the Palestinians, although there are numerous hostile references to Jews, “Crusaders” and others.

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Why our inconsistent foreign policy consistently fails

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Western foreign policy avoids the culture factor in its evaluation of friend vs foe.

Yet without a knowledge of national cultures and subcultures, we are constantly blindsided when this or that group turns against us even after we have plied it with arms and money. The West seems to think it can buy friends, even against their moral and religious grain.

Conservatives teach that all Muslims are a danger and threat. The Western ruling class absurdly teaches that none of them are a threat in themselves.

Both sides are dead wrong. They both foolishly ignore cultural features and nuances of the peoples they deal with.

Recently, I was given a tip about the Druze, a group of Middle Eastern people who are hard to define. They are not considered ethnically uniform and their religion varies from Muslim to various others but is generally a mild and tolerant variety of Shia Muslim.

The key, one we are not given by our ‘journalists’ and our ‘geopolitical analysts,’ like Stratfor and other foreign policy sources, is that these people are not Sunni and oppose Sunni terror.

What does that mean for our purposes?

The Sunni religion is the one held by ISIS and al-Qaeda. To put it bluntly, it is the sect of terror.

Where have you read that in the msm? Why is it important? Because the Sunnis are the predominant Muslim sect in the world and also in much of the Middle East, and it is they who wish to conquer all the rest with the sword.

Although Western media and pols have been feeding you the utter rubbish that Saudi Arabia is our friend, the Saudis are mostly mostly Sunni and, despite posturing to the contrary, are sympathetic toward ISIS and other terror organizations. Unfortunately, US presidents have preferentially supported Saudi Arabia while condemning Iran, which belongs mostly to the main minority sect, Shia, and Assad, who is fighting predominantly Sunni terror. The US further supports the mostly Sunni opposition in Syria, whose so-called ‘moderate’ leaders have aided ISIS and Al Qaeda.

So we support the supporter of our most fearsome enemy, the Sunni terrorists like ISIS and Al Qaeda, while aiming our propaganda against its antagonists, Iran and Syria, and this purely for political purposes that are alien and antagonistic to the interests of We the People. That is the essence of why our foreign policy is routinely criticized as being inconsistent and making no sense.

If we based our foreign policy on culture, which would make sense, we could easily rid ourselves of the Sunni ISIS/al-Qaeda threat, by allying ourselves with our natural allies, i.e., allies that do not necessarily need to be bribed to bring them to our side.

Our natural friends in the Muslim world are most of the groups that are threatened by these Sunni marauders, and include:

the Druze, Yazidi, Kurds, Alawites (to which Bashar al-Assad belongs), some Shias, Baha’i, Christians, including the Copts (Egypt) and Assyrians (Iraq). The Jews of Israel are also a natural ally but, to complicate things, have had clashes with some of these groups, including Assad supporters in the Golan Heights. The mostly Shiite Iran is also a problem for Israel. The Sunni opposition to Assad bargained with Israel to “sell ” that country the Golan Heights.

However, instead of analyzing which of these groups can provide more immediate economic or military benefits to the West or Israel at any given time, the most important consideration is whether the cultures of these groups are compatible with Western/Israeli culture. Immediate short term considerations will not necessarily lead to a lasting peace. Cultural closeness and compatibility are a more reliable gauge of potential long term success. For example, the Druze, known for their military skills, have already served with distinction in the Israeli army, as reported here, here and here.

Finally, the West’s main natural ally in the world at large is Russia, which actually wants to be our ally though not our lackey, and for that reason, the Western powers deliberately sully its leadership by carping about its refusal to allow LGBT propaganda, its intervention in the Ukraine conflict — which was ignited by Western oligarchs specifically to provoke Russia buy cutting its trade ties to an important partner, and, hypocritically, its “corruption,” which unlike Western corruption, affects mostly the Russian oligarchs and does not impoverish the middle class as Western corruption does, causing high unemployment and inflation while robbing the middle class to pay for the indiscretions of business and banks (bail-outs, bail-ins) and paying for its profligacy by issuing unbacked currency. Russia has been administered admirably in comparison to the US, with manageable debt, healthy hard currency and gold reserves and no socialist programs to speak of, in contrast to the US government, which operates almost completely on debt, has no reserves and pays the unemployed $1 trillion per year in the most flagrant waste of money the world has ever seen.

As a result, Russia is now able to spear head a dedollarization effort in Asia and Europe, substituting renminbi and rubles for the dollar in international trade.

It didn’t have to be that way. Putin, speaking to reporters in Shanghai last May after his meeting with President Xi Jinping, defended this dedollarization policy saying that the world is forced to protect itself in this way from US hegemony that enables Washington to invade and meddle in sovereign countries. (China speaks more cautiously of its internationalization of the renminbi but its motive is certainly the same).

So what is the solution? How could the US conceivably prevent further damage to the dollar while bringing peace to the Middle East?

Outlandish as it may sound to conventionally minded Westerners, the best solution for peace is for the US to use what is left of its international clout and organize a meeting between world leaders who have sometimes clashed with each other. The key leaders would be Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Bashar al-Assad, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

Saudi Arabia could not be included in the first round because of its support for terror. The first talks would be aimed at showing the Saudis we are changing course.

Later talks could include Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other who are not natural allies but could be brought into line with gentle “persuasion” from Russia and the US.

As long as Obama is occupying the White House, it is hard to conceive of this happening, for at least 2 reasons:

  1. Obama’s intransigent personality (he can hardly be expected to admit his policies were wrong),
  2. Egyptian President el-Sisi has a personal grudge against Obama.

But it is also hard to imagine the party of John McCain backing away from his support for the “moderate” Syrian opposition, even though some of its leaders admitted sympathy for ISIS.

America desperately needs new leadership with the kind of wisdom and statesmanship not seen in Washington for a very long time.

U.S. found chemical weapons in Iraq – many are now in hands of Islamic State

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The Times hastens to assure us that these chemical weapons do not constitute a vindication of the Bush Administration’s claims regarding Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, and that is probably true: if these weapons really did validate the Bush claims, then it would have been suicidal for the Bush Administration to have kept them a secret. On the other hand, policymakers in Washington seem bent on doing so many stupid things these days, you never know.

“The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons,” by C. J. Chivers, New York Times, October 14, 2014:

…From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule.

In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Andrew T. Goldman in North Topsail Beach, N.C. In August 2008, Mr. Goldman was part of a team near Taji, Iraq, that was trying to destroy munitions that could be used in makeshift bombs. While holding a cracked shell, he noticed a strange smell.

The United States had gone to war declaring it must destroy an active weapons of mass destruction program. Instead, American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from the remnants of long-abandoned programs, built in close collaboration with the West.

The New York Times found 17 American service members and seven Iraqi police officers who were exposed to nerve or mustard agents after 2003. American officials said that the actual tally of exposed troops was slightly higher, but that the government’s official count was classified.

The secrecy fit a pattern. Since the outset of the war, the scale of the United States’ encounters with chemical weapons in Iraq was neither publicly shared nor widely circulated within the military. These encounters carry worrisome implications now that the Islamic State, a Qaeda splinter group, controls much of the territory where the weapons were found.

The American government withheld word about its discoveries even from troops it sent into harm’s way and from military doctors. The government’s secrecy, victims and participants said, prevented troops in some of the war’s most dangerous jobs from receiving proper medical care and official recognition of their wounds….

Congress, too, was only partly informed, while troops and officers were instructed to be silent or give deceptive accounts of what they had found. “ ’Nothing of significance’ is what I was ordered to say,” said Jarrod Lampier, a recently retired Army major who was present for the largest chemical weapons discovery of the war: more than 2,400 nerve-agent rockets unearthed in 2006 at a former Republican Guard compound.

Jarrod L. Taylor, a former Army sergeant on hand for the destruction of mustard shells that burned two soldiers in his infantry company, joked of “wounds that never happened” from “that stuff that didn’t exist.” The public, he said, was misled for a decade. “I love it when I hear, ‘Oh there weren’t any chemical weapons in Iraq,’ ” he said. “There were plenty.”

Between 2004 and 2011, American forces in Iraq encountered thousands of chemical munitions. In several cases, troops were exposed to chemical agents….

The discoveries of these chemical weapons did not support the government’s invasion rationale.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Bush insisted that Mr. Hussein was hiding an active weapons of mass destruction program, in defiance of international will and at the world’s risk. United Nations inspectors said they could not find evidence for these claims.

Then, during the long occupation, American troops began encountering old chemical munitions in hidden caches and roadside bombs. Typically 155-millimeter artillery shells or 122-millimeter rockets, they were remnants of an arms program Iraq had rushed into production in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war.

All had been manufactured before 1991, participants said. Filthy, rusty or corroded, a large fraction of them could not be readily identified as chemical weapons at all. Some were empty, though many of them still contained potent mustard agent or residual sarin. Most could not have been used as designed, and when they ruptured dispersed the chemical agents over a limited area, according to those who collected the majority of them.

In case after case, participants said, analysis of these warheads and shells reaffirmed intelligence failures. First, the American government did not find what it had been looking for at the war’s outset, then it failed to prepare its troops and medical corps for the aged weapons it did find.

As Iraq has been shaken anew by violence, and past security gains have collapsed amid Sunni-Shiite bloodletting and the rise of the Islamic State, this long-hidden chronicle illuminates the persistent risks of the country’s abandoned chemical weapons.

Many chemical weapons incidents clustered around the ruins of the Muthanna State Establishment, the center of Iraqi chemical agent production in the 1980s.

Since June, the compound has been held by the Islamic State, the world’s most radical and violent jihadist group. In a letter sent to the United Nations this summer, the Iraqi government said that about 2,500 corroded chemical rockets remained on the grounds, and that Iraqi officials had witnessed intruders looting equipment before militants shut down the surveillance cameras.

Soldiers in chemical protection gear, including Sgt. Eric J. Duling and Specialist Andrew T. Goldman, examining suspected chemical munitions at a site near Camp Taji, Iraq, on Aug. 16, 2008. The New York Times

The United States government says the abandoned weapons no longer pose a threat. But nearly a decade of wartime experience showed that old Iraqi chemical munitions often remained dangerous when repurposed for local attacks in makeshift bombs, as insurgents did starting by 2004….

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Grand Opening: AirEbola Airlines

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Have you ever wanted to see what it feels like to have your body consumed by Ebola? 

Have you ever wanted to fly right to the source of a disease outbreak, so you can suffer alongside the Third World? 

Have you ever thought, “It’s not fair that I don’t have Ebola just because of my white privilege?”

If so, you’re in luck! Don’t wait another 21 days for Ebola to fully infect America. Fly to west Africa and pre-infect yourself, now!

Announcing the all-new AirEbola: Nonstop flights for Ebola tourists are available to Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone from multiple cities in America.

Any privileged white American can sacrifice themselves for the original sin of slavery by flying straight to the source of the outbreak.

Meander with the locals, hang out at the hospital, and get sneezed on by an Ebola victim. Once infected, you are free to fly back to America and bring the disease to your privileged white family. (Just don’t tell customs agents that you have a fever.)

AirEbola is not just the name of the airline: Ebola particles are actually floating through the air on the plane, deposited by previous Ebola tourists. You can quadruple your chances of becoming infected by flying our airline. No cleaning crews are hired by AirEbola, so the plane is extra dirty for your guilty pleasures.

Experience the sophisticated, bumper-sticker-quality insights while flying AirEbola:

– Celebrate Ebola equality!
– Ebola Without Borders: Support free and open spread of pestilence!
– Practice Ebola Tolerance: America’s Ebola is no better than anyone else’s!
– Ebola Amnesty: America should get Ebola too!
– Ebola for All: Now whites can also suffer!
– No Justice, No Cure! Ebola as slavery revenge!
– ☪☯∑Xi∫† with ∑ßΩL∆!

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AirEbola promotes spread of the disease so more people can expire quickly. The existence of fewer people will result in fewer carbon emissions for the planet.

AirEbola is the official airline of the DNC. Vote Democrat to increase the spread of Ebola! Use the hashtag#Dems4Ebola to show your support!

The Objectives and Strategy of Islamic Terror Groups

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I originally wrote this article for American Thinker seven years ago. Al Qaeda is just another name for the Islamic State and the dozens of other Islamic Terror Groups spreading across the Middle East. I republish the column as the principles that applied to Al Qaeda then apply to the Islamic State today.

The Objectives and Strategy of Islamic Terror Groups

Al-Qaeda is not organized legally as a corporation, but like most multinational enterprises, it has objectives and a strategy to realize them. AQ’s primary objectives are:

  1. Spread Islam throughout the world (with or without the consent of the occupants).
  2. Destroy Israel and any country it regards as affiliated with her – specifically the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and even France.

Understanding the objectives does not require the sources of an intelligence officer, speaking Arabic, or even knowing where Iraq is on a map. Al-Qaeda the other Islamic terrorist organizations almost daily states their objectives through both formal and informal leaders.

The strategy of Al-Qaeda is only slightly more difficult to understand. Again, you do not have to be an intelligence officer, but it does help if you study the mindset of Islamic terrorists. This is what I have done for years. With and without their consent.

While in Iraq I had the opportunity to speak with hundreds of Iraqis, many law-abiding and many others who hated America. I preferred to speak with the ones who truly hated America. By doing so they were playing into my hand. People who hate Israel and America provided me information (unwittingly) on what I needed to do to counter “terrorism”.

Iranians, Iraqis, Saudis, Jordanians, Lebanese, Syrians, and people from Pakistan, to name a few, have detailed their strategies to achieve their primary objectives. I want to emphasize there are more good people than bad in any country, but my focus is on the “bad” people. The ones who want to kill your children and my children and destroy your country and my country. These are the people I have devoted my life to locate and then insist our justice system follows through.

Al-Qaeda has four basic strategies in order to reach their ultimate goal of destroying Israel and America. They are:

  1. Strangle the enemy financially
  2. Have the enemy fight amongst themselves
  3. Stretch the enemy thin
  4. Overwhelm the enemy

This strategy involves disrupting the lives of the enemy. Al-Qaeda has achieved this in many ways. Our law enforcement agencies have shifted their priorities from solving homicides, rapes, gang activity, narcotics, and robberies, to working counter-terrorism issues. We now have more officers located in the airports, around high profile locations, and running down many leads which are usually frivolous.

Citizens are now afraid to travel because of the real hassles they will encounter at the airports or while traveling overseas. Many still travel but security is always now in the backs of our minds. The enemy wants our children to understand the terror. That is what terrorism aims for – terrorizing. Our newspapers, television, and video games are filled with scenes of terrorism. My 8 year old daughter knows more about terrorism than I did when I first went into the armed forces.

Most of us knew little about terrorist or terrorism until a few short years ago. Al-Qaeda has made each of us go through each day thinking at one time or another about terror or seeing scenes of terrorism. How many people now in America, Canada, or Britain do not think of terrorism every time they get on an airplane (say, while flying to Disney World), or when getting on the subway (to simply go to work or on vacation in a big city). When we take our children to visit the Washington monument we are reminded of terrorism. Police officers are in every corner. Tourists are searched before entering many of our national treasures. The enemy has achieved Strategy number one.

Strangle the enemy financially

The terrorist organizations want their enemy to spend billions and billions of dollars on security. Since 9/11 we have allocated more than ten times as much money than we did previously on counter-terrorism. States, cities, towns, have spent more money on security than on our health care for senior citizens. Several countries have spent billions in fighting terrorist in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Somalia, and we will most likely be spending billions more fighting terrorists in Iran. The enemy has achieved strategy number two. Strategy number three is the most difficult for me to write about.

Fighting amongst ourselves

This is a major goal of Al-Qaeda. They want Americans to be against Americans, British against British, and so on. They want us to be split. Years ago the majority of Americans voted Republican or Democratic based on what their parents had done and their grandparents had done. Many will not admit it but most Americans 15 years ago could not tell you the major differences between the Republican and Democratic parties. The majority of Americans could not tell you who their Governor was, or their local mayor.

Now we are all experts and we all know how to solve the world’s problems. We are all politicians (God help us all on that one). The intent for Al-Qaeda is to have us fighting over trivial problems instead of having us united and fighting terrorism together. There was a time in our history when a Democrat would still give a Republican President respect, and vice versa. In today’s America there is precious little respect given to our President by many in the opposition.

When I served on active duty I gave 100% to all of the Presidents I served under (Republican and Democrat). I would have and still would give my life for an incumbent of either party. But this is no longer the norm, at least judging from what I see in the media. We now have active duty members who openly disrespect their Commander in Chief. The enemy has achieved Strategy number three. Unfortunately we must move to Strategy number four.

Stretch the enemy thin

The final goal of Al-Qaeda. The terrorists want their enemies to be stretched so thin in their security forces that they can no longer protect themselves internally. They want our law enforcement agencies to be undermanned. They want our military forces to be fighting in many countries. They want our leading scientists and engineers to be allocating their time developing counter-terrorism measures and not utilizing their time in areas such as medicine or finding ways to feed the poor. Why, you might ask, would the enemy want their enemy to devote time and money developing counter-terrorism strategies? Because they know it is extremely difficult to fight terrorists. Terrorists and terrorist organizations are ghosts. Go into any city and point out a terrorist. It is nearly impossible. They know this. Terrorists blend into our society. The terrorists are very close to achieving Strategy number four.

Overwhelm the enemy

Terrorists will strike their most devastating blows when they have achieved all four strategies. This is when they will use their most dangerous weapons. They will use suicide bombers and chemical, biological, and nuclear material when strategy number four is achieved. We can only stop their objectives when we unite, when we stop being scared of being politically correct, when we stop being nice.

This is not the way I was raised and do not want to become this type of person, but I love America and I want our children to not live their lives in fear. “The truth is often unpopular, but it is never wrong”

RELATED ARTICLE: American Military Contractor Shot & Killed in Saudi Arabia by US-born Saudi Muslim

Turks Renege on Air Base, ISIS beheads Hundreds in Kobani while Surrounding Baghdad

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Yesterday, National  Security Adviser Susan E. Rice went on NBC’s “Meet the Press “and glibly announced that Turkey had given permission for use of the Incirlik air base  by the U.S.-led  coalition assaulting ISIS from the air. She  triumphantly  commented, “That’s a new commitment and one that we very much welcome”.

Today, The Washington Post  reported  a senior Turkish official  denied such a claim, saying that talks were still underway, perhaps awaiting a Pentagon military planning team this week in Ankara. Meanwhile, Turkey’s President Erdogan has made it abundantly clear that he wants his priority demand  opening up a front against the Assad Regime. Erdogan’s negotiations tactics lend credence that he is tacitly supporting ISIS’ destruction of the Kurdish YPG fighters in Kobani.

It looks like the same stall tactics his AKP government used back in 2003, when the U.S. Army First Infantry  Division was prevented from off loading in the Mediterranean  port of Iskenderun to  transit of  Turkey and enter Northern Iraq. What is the expression, dog bites man first time, dog’s fault;  dog bites man second time, man’s fault.  Following in the wake of Ms. Rice’s gaffe on Benghazi on Meet the Press October 15, 2012 and now with this episode, she has lost credibility.

But then the Obama policies in the region have failed. 

Whether it is red lines in Syria, supporting a One Iraq policy in the face of disintegration of the Baghdad central government, and his ISIS strategy with a U.S. air assault but no boots on the ground.

Turkey’s stalling on permission  for  the US-led coalition  air contingents use the Incirlik air base less than 100 kilometers from the Turkish – Syrian border has complicated  air operations.  We have argued  that should have been the first orders of business by the Administration. Now US Navy squadrons on board the USS George H. W. Bush in the Red Sea, USAF  squadrons based temporarily at the Al Udeid air base in Qatar carrier and RAF squadrons based in Cyprus have to fly 1,100 mile round trip sorties  making it virtually impossible to engage in round the clock air operations.

We offer the following   suggestions about what to do with a recalcitrant Erdogan in Turkey,. One suggested by Jonathan Schanzer of the Washington, DC-based Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, is that Turkey be temporarily suspended  from the NATO alliance until it agrees to lend meaningful support to the US-led coalition.  The Administration might impose an embargo on sales of US military equipment and spare parts to Turkey, akin to what was done following Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus in 1974, lifted in 1978. The State Department might delist the Turkish Workers Party (PKK) from its designated terrorist list. There is the precedent of the delisting of the Iranian opposition group, the Mojahedin-e-Khalq  (MEK). That act outraged the Iranian Islamic regime. A similar action by the U.S. State Department might cause a diplomatic furor between Washington and Ankara further emboldening Kurdish protests in Turkey and elsewhere.

We have grisly reports from The Daily Mail, today, that hundreds of trapped Kurds in Kobani have been beheaded by ISIS jihadists to the cries of “allahu Akbar”. Rumor has it that a contingent of 200 Kurdish fighters with more modern weapons may be on their way to Kobani. But that may be too little too late to save  the encircled YPG fighters in Kobani.

 Meanwhile a  large column of 10,000 ISIS troops ,equipped with stolen US tanks, artillery and Humvees,  have virtually taken all of Anbar province encircling  Baghdad and threatening  the International airport. The UN reported today that more than 30,000 families, 180,000 persons  fled after the town of Hit was taken.

We had this exchange with a veteran U.S. security contractor in Baghdad.

Gordon:  Thank you for your comment on my Iconoclast post.  Suffice to say all of us pray for the safety of you and all your American colleagues in Iraq. The flight of the Iraqi forces before Mosul in June empowered ISIS with billions in US supplied arms, weapons, tanks and Humvees. ISIS military commanders are former Saddam Ba’athist commanders and quite capable in conducting operations against a corrupt Iraqi national army. ISIS has a friend in Turkey’s Erdogan, allied with the Muslim Brotherhood in the region. Despite the change in government and removal of former Premier Al-Maliki, Iraq remains a satrap of Iran for all intents and purposes. ISIS’ Jihad Qur’anic imperative, to borrow a phrase of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, is “Cry Havoc and let slip the dogs of war” to the cry of “allahu Akbar”.  I trust that you and your colleagues can make it out to Kuwait and home before the Baghdad airport falls into ISIS hands.

Tim:  I agree with what you say. I have been able to see all this happen first hand. I have been over here for a total of five years. I believe that some plan has been made for our evacuation but nothing has been shared. We will see.

Yesterday,  Lisa Benson asked  us to join her, Dr. Sherkoh Abbas, President of the Kurdish National Assembly of Syria (KURDNAS) and the Hon. Karwan Zebari,the Kurdish Regional Government Ambassador in Washington.  Benson, has drawn  attention to the barbaric onslaught of ISIS against the YPG fighters in Kobani, and  the efforts of the KRG Peshmerga forces in Iraq. Benson has also reached out to activists to solicit relief assistance to Kurds, Yazidis and Christians in the KRG. She has told graphically of the escape of Yazidi women and girls from Raqaa who were sold into sex slavery by their ISIS captors and the price they had paid to reach safety and freedom in the KRG. Benson has mounted several twitter rally campaigns with hashtags #ArmPeshmerga and #SaveKobani.

In the discussion on this latest Lisa Benson Radio Show broadcast, we addressed revelations by Senior Iranian officials in contact with the Administration. They suggested  that Israel will be threatened by ISIS if the Assad regime is attacked.  Dr. Abbas, confirmed Iran’s double game strategy facilitating the rampage that emboldened ISIS’ conquest of large swaths of Syria and Iraq virtually destroying the map of the Levant. A map that began with the  British-French Sykes Picot secret agreement of 1916 that led to the French and British Mandates of the League of Nations at the San Remo Conference in 1920. This was followed by  the creation of the Kemalist Republic of Turkey in 1923 with the Treaty of Lausanne.

The big losers  in the Versailles conference in 1919 were the Kurds. They were promised a nation in their ancient homeland in what became modern Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq.

Ambassador Zebari  articulated  the failure of the so-called One Iraq policy propounded by the US Administration  as the basis for the strategy to “degrade and destroy” the Islamic State.  ISIS has become enormously wealthy from looting banks, extortion, and taxation of conquered people and sales of smuggled oil from fields in both Syria and Iraq.  The flood of ISIS fighters from 70 countries have travelled the jihadist highway allowed  by the Islamist regime of President Erdogan’s AKP government in Ankara.  Dozens have been  killed in  riots in Turkey’s predominately  Kurdish  southeast.

Benson fielded a call from a Kurdish American organizer of a hunger strike in support of Kurds in Kobani that will be launched across from the White House this Friday.  Another call, asked the probing question of Dr. Abbas and Ambassador Zebari, “ What could be done to arouse the Administration to alleviate this looming disaster?”  Ambassador Zebari suggested that Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have recognized the failure of the One Iraq policy and the necessity of supporting the Kurds.

Both Dr. Abbas raised the question of why Jewish advocacy groups in the US don’t support this, as they have been noticeably silent?   Benson contrasted the questionable appropriation  of more than $500 million by Congress in response to the President’s request to provide training and arms for  so-called moderate Syrian opposition forces, most of who appear to Islamist. The consensus of the discussions on Sunday’s program was the One Iraq strategy has failed and that the Kurds deserve a nation-state of their own.  Dr. Abbas and Ambassador Zebari  opposed  Secretary of State Kerry continued espousal of the failed One Iraq policy.

Dr. Abbas drew attention to  the US donation of  $212 million announced at the Cairo  Donor conference organized by Norway for reconstruction in Gaza. Over $2.7 billion was raised in pledges from EU and Middle East Muslim nations. There was nary a word about dismantling and verifying Hamas’s terror command and tunnels. Kerry also pushed for renewal of Palestinian – Israeli peace discussions. All while PA President Abbas pushes his campaign for a UN Security Council resolution recognizing a Palestinian State claiming he has 7 of 9 votes in favor.

Ambassador Zebari pointed out that  Israel and the Kurds are objects of scorn and hate by the Muslim Brotherhood, Shia and Sunni, Salafist and Wahhabist Jihadists  in the Middle East.

This should, in his opinion, arouse Americans  during the upcoming Mid-Term November elections to vote for Congressional candidates who support Kurdish nationalism and provide the arms  to fight against ISIS   Meanwhile, we had reports  from Jerusalem today that Israeli police closed down Palestinian rioters  at the Al Aksa Mosque on the Temple Mount. These rioters were  seeking to rain havoc with rocks and Molotov cocktails on Jews at the Kotel below celebrating the Festival of Tabernacles, Sukkoth.

The UN considered such Israeli actions, “provocative”.

RELATED ARTICLE: US “ally” Turkey bombs Kurds opposed to the Islamic State

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.

The Five-Dollar Lady, the GOP and Rob Maness for U.S. Senate

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Six years ago I wrote the song, “American Tea Party Anthem” and was asked to perform my song at rallies across America on a Tea Party Express national bus tour. Back then, I was not politically savvy; clueless about how all this political stuff worked; back room deals, positioning, strategic narratives, optics and so on.

Like millions of my fellow Americans, all I knew was Obama, the Democrats and the MSM were pushing my country down the wrong road; exploiting the occasion of the first black president to force their dreamed socialist/progressive agenda down our throats. Insidiously, all opposition was branded racist. For this reason, I joined the Tea Party.

The hardworking decent patriots across America who attended the rallies, mostly white, mostly Christian, middle-aged and grandparents treated our team (speakers and performers) like rock stars. We were their voice in the national arena, pushing back against Obama’s tyrannical overreaches, fighting for traditional principles and values which they held dear.

They were frustrated and through with voting for soulless politicians on both sides of the isle who said whatever necessary to get elected without really giving a hoot about the desires and best interest of their constituents.

A remarkable unforgettable incident from one of the early bus tours was a whistle-stop. Our team had completed a huge rally in the state and was headed to our next rally in Memphis. Our rally coordinators informed our team that some folks requested that we make a brief unscheduled road side stop before heading to Memphis; supposedly 50 or so people wanted to meet us.

As our Tea Party Express tour bus pulled up to the location off a major highway, a State Trooper was directing traffic. Five hundred or more people greeted our bus cheering and waving U.S. flags. They showered our team with baked goods, hand-knitted patriotic gifts and requests to take pictures with them and their kids. Because it was not supposed to be a rally, the truck with our sound system and staging was on its way to Memphis.

Our team climbed up on the back of a pick-up truck and some guy handed us a bullhorn. After encouraging and thanking the crowd, and spontaneous outbreaks of the crowd chanting, “U-S-A! U-S-A!”, we closed with everyone singing “God Bless America”. There were very few dry eyes in the house (on side of the road). They were extremely grateful because we were their representatives, fighting, speaking out and working for them. They trusted us. We were their heroes.

Fast forward six years. Praise God, I have grown to become Chairman of the Conservative Campaign Committee; much more politically savvy.

Frankly, the GOP establishment candidates with unlimited resources have been kicking most of our true conservative Tea Party candidate’s butts in the primaries. The GOP joined the Democrats in branding the great Americans I met at over 400 tea party rallies on numerous national bus tours, a bunch of extremists and racists for simply expecting candidates to honor the Constitution and stay true to their word.

Having said that, a third party is a loser right now. While the GOP is not perfect, it is the political party closest to supporting our principles and values. Therefore, it is wise to support the GOP while working to infiltrate its ranks with as many conservatives as possible. This means that on occasion we must vote for GOP candidates who may not be as conservative as we would like.

It is crucial that we (Republicans) win the Senate. I get that. After all, I am more mature and politically savvy.

However, there is one last race in which there is a true conservative, Col. Rob Maness (ret.) running for U.S. Senate Louisiana. Folks, tea party groups and people that I respect are understandably supporting Bill Cassidy because he is polling better than Maness against the Democrat and we really need that seat. Fine. But folks, I can not do it.

I thought about the five dollar lady that I met at one of the early rallies. She took my hand and placed a crumpled up five dollar bill in it for gas for the tour bus. With tears in her eyes, she shared how Obama’s policies had caused her to fall upon hard financial times and thanked me for fighting for people like her.

Folks, for me to support Bill Cassidy is a betrayal of the five dollar lady, the patriots at the whistle-stop and the tea party movement.

Bill Cassidy is a liberal whose behavior is an anathema to the Tea Party. He trashed Ronald Reagan and campaigned for Michael Dukakis. Not only did Cassidy contribute to Democrat politicians, he contributed to Mary Landrieu, the same Obama sycophant incumbent Democrat senator he is trying to unseat. How bizarre and politically soulless is that?

Cassidy repeatedly voted to increase the debt limit. He received a failing “F” grade from FreedomWorks and was labeled too liberal by Senate Conservative Fund.

Conservative Rob Maness is an American patriot who served 32 years in the U.S. Air Force. Maness has been a fighter to defund and repeal Obamacare. He has proposed a Constitutional conservative agenda of lower taxes, reducing the size and scope of government, and expanding our personal liberties; in essence, restoring what Obama and company are incrementally taking away.

Rob Maness has received thumbs up from Sarah Palin, Conservative Campaign Committee, Tea Party Express and Gun Owners of America.

All you folks who choose to hold you nose and vote for Cassidy, I get it and do not judge you. You are my patriot brothers and sisters doing what you believe to be best for our country.

I am simply saying that I can not support a RINO when there is a real conservative in the race; not after looking into the eyes of the five dollar lady. For me to go along to get along would feel like a slap in the face betrayal.

The man in my mirror forces me to support conservative Rob Maness for U.S. Senate Louisiana; staying true to my patriot sister, the five dollar lady.

Abandoning Kurds and Jews

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Watching the events affecting the Kurds in Kobani, Syria, under attack from the Islamic State (ISIS), it occurred to me that they have much in common with Zionists, Jews who established Israel in 1948. Turkey’s president Recep Tyyip Erdogan dislikes Kurds and Jews with equal fervor.

The Kurds, estimated to be some 30 million in the Middle East, are spread out between a large enclave in northern Iraq, virtually an autonomous nation, and in northern Syria, and elements of their diaspora in other Mideast nations.

The Turks have regarded them with suspicion since a group of officers led by Mustafa Kemel Ataturk established a modern, secular nation in the wake of World War I and the end of the Ottoman Empire. They dismissed the Kurdish effort to establish themselves as an independent nation and, in more recent times, they accused them of being terrorists.

This explains in part why the Turks have not provided the Kurds any protection just across their border. As for the Israelis, Erdogan allied Turkey with Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist organization, and on one occasion sanctioned an effort to break the Israeli grip on the sea lanes leading to the Gaza strip. The Israelis boarded the ship and forced its return to Turkey. Earlier they had seized a ship filled with military weapons in the same waters.

No doubt the Kurds still hold onto their dream of having their own national homeland. The areas in which they live are generally referred to as Kurdistan, but are largely now under the control of ISIS with the exception of their enclave in northern Iraq. That’s because the Kurd’s armed forces have proven to be the only ones capable of holding off ISIS. Their need for self-defense goes back a long time, including attacks on them by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

Attacks on Jews in the last century can be dated back to a 1903 proclamation in Russia calling for a pogrom—an attack on them—on Easter. The Russian antipathy to the Jews included more than six hundred laws against them in the 1800s. The pogroms were part of life for Jews throughout Russian during which Jews were killed and their homes set afire.

In Kiev, one of the hundreds of towns and city areas where Jews lived and were attacked, lived a little girl, Goldie Mabovitch who would later be known the world as Golda Meir. She was one of the Zionist pioneers who settled in the southern Syrian area that would be called Palestine following WWI and the Versailles Treaty. It was a mandate under the control of Great Britain. Like many thousands of others her family had immigrated to America where they settled in Milwaukee in 1905. A few years later Golda moved to Denver to live with her sister.

At that point Golda had become immersed in a movement begun by Theodore Herzl, Zionism; the belief that Jews must reclaim and reestablish their ancient nation of Israel, based on the fact that no nation was ever going to offer them the protection and rights of other citizens. The exception to this, of course, was America. Still, Zionism was a cause to which Golda would devote her life.

She would later write, “From my earliest youth I believed in two things: one, the need for Jewish sovereignty, so that Jews—and this has become a cliché—can be master in their own fate; and two, a society based on justice and equality, without exploitation.” She knew it would be a struggle.

Before moving to Palestine, she had married and she would have two children, but her family would remain secondary to her belief in the establishment of Israel. She would write “The truth is that I didn’t have exact information (about conditions in Palestine), but I knew very clearly what I wanted. My mind is not so complicated. Once I accepted that there is no other solution for the Jewish problem but a home for the people, I decided to go there.”

The British mandate was bordered by emerging boundaries for Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Jordan. At the time Winston Churchill said, “It is manifestly right that the scattered Jews should have a national center and a national home to be re-united and where else but in Palestine with which for 3,000 years they have been intimately and profoundly associated?”

The British mandate, however, imposed the same controls the Zionists were seeking to escape in Europe and in Russia. Loath to upset the Arabs and risk losing access to oil and the Suez Canal, they stood by as Arabs attacked the Jewish communities and kibbutz. Golda and her husband had joined one and her dedication and speaking skills were quickly recognized when she was selected to represent them at the first kibbutz convention in 1922.

In 1939, the Nazi regime started World War II by invading Poland. In Palestine, the Jews had organized the Histadrut as a governing body and the Haganah as an army to defend Israelis against Arab attacks. A breakaway group, the Irgun, concluded that the British must be attacked to force their withdrawal from the mandate. Their leader, Menachem Begin, would later become an Israeli Prime Minister. For the Histadrut, the most famous of the six members of leadership was David Ben Gurion and Golda Meir, both of whom would serve as Israeli Prime Ministers.

On May 14, 1948, Israel’s independence was declared. Geographically it was less than one percent (1%) of the total Arab area! Their “neighbors” attacked Israel but were defeated, not in small part to the millions Golda Meir had raised from the U.S. Jewish community to purchase the arms necessary for the battles. What followed was between 500,000 and 500,000 Jews in Arab lands who were forced to flee to Israel for their lives.

AA - Golda Meir

Golda Meir.

Here again, the Kurds and Jews shared a common history. No nation has come to their aid when they have been under attack. Both have asked “Where is the world?”

Golda Meir would serve her nation in several capacities. She was its Minister of Labor for seven years and then served as Israel’s Foreign Minister. From the war for Independence in 1948, terrorist attacks throughout the 1950s, the 1956 Suez War, the 1967 Six Day War, and the 1973 Yom Kippur War the tiny nation would fight for its survival. She would serve as Prime Minister from 1969 to 1974. On December 8, 1978, she died.

The Kurds need a Golda Meir, a leader of great skills to achieve their dream of independence. Like the Israelis, they are surrounded by Arabs, along with Turks, and Iranians, all Muslims like themselves who have sought to oppress them. One can hope they will have a Kurdistan that will join the other nations of the world.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

EDITORS NOTE: To learn more, read an excellent biography, “Golda Meir—True Grit” by Ann Atkins, Flash History Press, $14.95, softcover. The featured image is of Bahri Eren Turkish Kurds.

Sarasota School District Scandal: Board members, former superintendent, staff, teachers, union implicated in improper use of email system for political purposes

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As a result of information uncovered by Citizens for Sarasota Schools, multiple emails demonstrate the politicization of the Sarasota County School Board, the Administration, and the school district down to lower level employees. Numerous Sarasota County School District employees and administrators ignore the law and have used public property for political purposes to fund raise, recruit volunteers, campaign and promote the candidacy of one of their own bureaucrats, Ken Marsh, during school hours.

The Sarasota County Schools Information Technology Guidelines and Procedures, page 28, under the heading “Appropriate Use of E-mail” states the following:

Sarasota County Schools guidelines prohibit certain types of e-mail. These include mail that may be perceived as harassment, political campaigning, or commercial solicitation. Chain mail is also prohibited. Violators will be subject to loss of computer access privileges, as well as additional disciplinary action as determined by the Sarasota County Schools disciplinary procedures. Certain types of e-mail, including but not limited to harassing e-mail, may also subject the sender to civil or criminal penalties. [Emphasis added]

Copies of emails obtained by Citizens for Sarasota Schools show Sarasota County School Board members Shirley Brown and Caroline Zucker violated school board policy on use of the email system. Also implicated is former district superintendent Wilma Hamilton. District Director Gary Letterman was implicated in violating the policy by drafting and editing a fundraising letter for the Ken Marsh campaign. Multiple employees of the school system, some union representatives, have repeatedly violated school board policy.

The following are some examples of the improper use of the Sarasota County School District resources for political purposes:

September 9, 2014

Gary Leatherman, the Director of Communications and Community Relations for the Sarasota County School District uses the Sarasota County School District Email System to confirm a commitment to submit a political donation to the Ken Marsh Campaign, as well as to assist in the drafting and editing of a fundraising letter for the Ken Marsh Campaign. Email sent during school hours. (Page 294-302)

September 9, 2014

Gary Leatherman, the Director of Communications and Community Relations for the Sarasota County School District uses the Sarasota County School District Email System, during business hours, to work directly with the Ken Marsh for School Board Campaign to draft and edit a fundraising letter and suggest attacks on School Board Member Bridget Ziegler. His official title & government position appears in the email.
(Page 105-108)

September 10, 2014

Gary Leatherman, the Director of Communications and Community Relations for the Sarasota County School District uses the Sarasota County School District Email System to communicate directly with School Board Candidate Ken Marsh, Ann Hankinson (who appears to be a Ken Marsh campaign volunteer & school district employee) & Gabriel Hament (who we believe is acting as Ken Marsh’s campaign manager & has hosted a fundraising for Ken Marsh). Sent during school hours. (Page 131-133)

September 10, 2014

Gary Leatherman, the Director of Communications and Community Relations for the Sarasota County School District uses the Sarasota County School District Email System, during business hours, to work directly with the Ken Marsh Campaign to draft and edit a fundraising letter and suggest attacks on School Board Member Bridget Ziegler. In the email, he states “Good Job”. His official title & government position appears in the email. (Page 136)

September 21, 2014

Gary Leatherman, the Director of Communications and Community Relations for the Sarasota County School District uses the Sarasota County School District Email System to directly receive a campaign update from the Ken Marsh Campaign. Continues to show pattern of coordination between Gary Leatherman, in his official capacity, working with the Ken Marsh Campaign. (Page 172-173).

Additional abuses (there are numerous other examples).

August 13, 2014

Lisa Saul uses the Sarasota County School District Email System to forward endorsements and attacks on the Tea Party and various candidates. Sent during school hours. (Document 1 Page 76-78)

September 11, 2014

Shari Dembinski (looks to be Union Rep) uses the Sarasota County School District Email System to forward an attack on Bridget Ziegler and a list of contributors to Bridget Ziegler’s campaign. Recipients are encouraging to share with non-union members. (We suspect this is what caused an organized effort to threaten the boycott of businesses supporting the Bridget Ziegler for School Board campaign. Numerous businesses reported receiving countless calls threatening a boycott of their establishment if they did not stop donating and/or displaying a Bridget Ziegler campaign sign. (Document 1 Page 81-82)

September 12, 2014

Shannon Wynne, a School District Employee, uses the Sarasota County School District Email System to falsely attack Bridget Ziegler and one of her contributors. Sent during school hours. (Document 1 Page 98-99)

September 12, 2014

Joette Riggs, a school district employee, uses the Sarasota County School District Email System to attack Bridget Ziegler and a contributor to the Bridget Ziegler Campaign. Sent during school hours. (Document 1 Page 112-114)

And why not? The politics and illegal misuse of taxpayer funded public resources starts at the top.

August 27, 2014

Wilma Hamilton, former Superintendent of the Sarasota County District, uses the Sarasota County School District Email System to book a hotel room for Ken Marsh & his wife Tanice Knopp. Why is she booking them a room? Was this disclosed on his campaign finance report? (Page 47-49)

August 21, 2014

Sarasota County School Board Member Shirley Brown uses the Sarasota County School District Email System in her official capacity as a School Board Member to endorse three Sarasota County School Board Candidates. (Page 56-57)

August 23, 2014

Sarasota County School Board Member Shirley Brown uses the Sarasota County School District Email System in her official capacity as a School Board Member to notify Marie Baia, a School District Employee, about political endorsements received by Ken Marsh, School Board Member Jane Goodwin and herself. (Page 248-249)

August 21, 2014

Sarasota County School Board Member Caroline Zucker uses the Sarasota County School District Email System, in her official capacity as a School Board Member, to endorse political candidate for office.

October 3, 2014

SB Member Caroline Zucker sharing who she voted for in the SB race Goodwin-Brown-Marsh when asked for recommendations (Page 297 – Document 3)

The Sarasota School System has far too long gone unexamined and been poorly managed. This has created a culture where the School Administration and School Board believe it is unaccountable.

For example, the Board regularly takes workshop meetings off video recording, decamps to another building, settles into a much smaller conference room, and in this “shade” conducts public meetings.

The Sarasota School Board does not post and stream complete workshops and Board Meetings — which is regularly done by other government bodies. And yet, they self-congratulate themselves even when close to 22% of students fail to graduate. This is only 3% better than the rest of Florida.

Perhaps it is time they stop politicking and start educating.

EDITORS NOTE: To read the full list of emails click here, here and here.

PUBLISHERS NOTE: I, Dr. Rich Swier, regret having used the term “illegal” in this and any other article to describe actions by Ms. Pat Gardner and the SC/TA.

Special Report: Did ISIS Use Chemical Weapons Against the Kurds in Kobani? by Jonathan Spyer

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WARNING:  This post contains images which some readers may find disturbing.  Caution is advised.  Please scroll down to view these images.

The fate of Kobani city now hangs in the balance, as around 9000 fighters of the Islamic State organization close in on the Kurdish held area. The current IS assault on the Kobani enclave was not the first attempt by the jihadis to destroy the Kurdish-controlled area.

The Kobani enclave, most of which is now in the hands of the IS, at one time extended to Tel Abyad in the east, and Jarabulus in the west.

It constituted a major hindrance to the desire of the jihadis to maintain free passage for their fighters from Raqqa city up to the Turkish border and westwards towards the front lines in Aleppo province. IS has therefore long sought to destroy it.

Prior to the current campaign, the most serious (but unsuccessful) attempt to conquer Kobani came in July 2014, shortly following the dramatic IS advance into Iraq.

It was during this assault on Kobani that evidence emerged which appeared to point to the use by the Islamic State on at least one occasion of some kind of chemical agent against the Kurdish fighters of the YPG (Peoples’ Protection Units).

The July offensive commenced on July 2. According to Kurdish activists, the use of the chemical agent took place on July 12th, in the village of Avdiko, in the eastern part of the Kobani enclave (now in IS hands.)

Nisan Ahmed, health minister of the Kurdish authority in Kobani, established a medical team to examine the incident.

According to Ahmed, the bodies of three Kurdish fighters showed no signs of damage from bullets.

Rather “burns and white spots on the bodies of the dead indicated the use of chemicals, which led to death without any visible wounds or external bleeding.” [ii]

Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA Journal) has acquired exclusive access to photographs of the bodies of these fighters, which appear below for the first time.

According to expert Israeli sources who have seen the pictures, they appear to indicate the use of some form of chemical agent, probably mustard (blister agent), but it is not possible to conclusively confirm this without further investigation.

Where might IS have acquired these agents?

According to a report in the Arabic language Al-Modon website on July 16th, eyewitnesses in Raqqa city assert the existence of a facility close to the city containing chemical agents. [iii] The reliability of the eyewitness quoted has been indicated to MERIA by third parties.

It is possible that these were transferred to Raqqa from Iraq, following the capture of the Muthanna compound 35 miles north-west of Iraq, by IS in June.

Iraq’s ambassador Mohammed Ali Al-Hakim, speaking after the capture of Muthanna by IS, singled out two bunkers at the facility, 13 and 41, as being of particular concern.

According to a UN report compiled after the departure of UN inspectors and quoted by Associated Press, bunker 41 contained “2,000 empty 155mm artillery shells contaminated with the chemical warfare agent mustard, 605 one-tonne mustard containers with residues, and heavily contaminated construction material.

At the time, the US State Department’s Jen Psaki played down the importance of the capture of Muthanna. Psaki suggested that the facility contained “degraded chemical remnants” but that it would be “difficult, if not impossible, to safely use this for military purposes or, frankly, to move it.” [iv]

A CIA report from 2007, however, offers evidence that might challenge Psaki’s apparent absence of concern.

The report notes that “The precursor and agent production area at Al Muthanna was not completely destroyed during Desert Storm. Portions of the mustard (blister agent) production and storage area survived. The VX and Tabun production (nerve agent) facilities were incapacitated.” [v]

The report further observes that “ISG is unable to unambiguously determine the complete fate of old munitions, materials, and chemicals produced and stored there. The matter is further complicated by the looting and razing done by the Iraqis.” [vi]

With regard to the state of al-Muthanna at the time that the report was composed (2007), it observes that Stockpiles of chemical munitions are still stored there. The most dangerous ones have been declared to the UN and are sealed in bunkers. Although declared, the bunkers contents have yet to be confirmed.

Numerous bunkers, including eleven cruciform shaped bunkers were exploited. Some of the bunkers were empty. Some of the bunkers contained large quantities of unfilled chemical munitions. [vii]

So the CIA report confirms that al-Muthanna was used for the production of chemical weaponry including mustard agent. The report also confirms that investigations have been unable to ‘unambiguously determine’ the fate of munitions at the site, and that while stockpiles clearly are stored at the site, the precise nature of these stockpiles remains unconfirmed. There are no indications that this situation has changed in the period since the report.

The evidence appears to support the contention that on at least one occasion, Islamic State forces did employ some form of chemical agent, acquired from somewhere, against the YPG in Kobani.

No further instances have been reported. The evidence also indicates that it is likely that as a result of the capture of the al-Muthanna compound, stockpiles of chemical munitions have come into the group’s possession.

The incident at Avdiko village on July 12th suggests that IS may well have succeeded in making some of this material available for use in combat.

The probable possession by the Islamic State of a CW capability is for obvious reasons a matter of the gravest concern, and should be the urgent subject of further attention and investigation.

10533994_264671567070068_1693396631715008074_n DSC04748 DSC04757 DSC04771 DSC04774 DSC04775 DSC04794 DSC04816 DSC04820 DSC04827 DSC04838 DSC04840 DSC04842 DSC04844 DSC04873 DSC04879 DSC04893 DSC04909 DSC04910

[i] Conversations with Kurdish activists, July, 2014.

[ii] Hadi Salameh, ‘Did ISIS use chemical weapons against the Syrian Kurds,’ July 16th, Al-Modon. (Arabic). http://www.almodon.com

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Associated Press, July 9th, 2014.http://www.theguardian.com

[v] Al Muthanna Chemical Weapons Complex, Iraq’s Chemical Warfare Program – Annex B, April 23, 2007. https://www.cia.gov

[vi] Ibid.

[vii]

ABOUT DR. JONATHAN SPYER

Dr. Jonathan Spyer is a senior research fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs Center in Herzliya, Israel, and a fellow at the Middle East Forum. He is the author of The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict (Continuum, 2010) and a columnist at the Jerusalem Post newspaper. Spyer holds a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics and a Masters’ Degree in Middle East Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. His blog can be followed at: http://jonathanspyer.com/.

A Miracle from GOD: We Saved a Baby at 45th Street yesterday during our “America Needs Fatima Rosary Rally”

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ck chesterton church quoteLet me see…How do I start this story? Where do I begin? For starters, I could not write anything yesterday because I threw out my back yesterday morning and I could not even sit at the computer to write. I tried three times. Too much pain. No pain, no gain – so, I am at it today…only because there was a lot to gain in what transpired yesterday afternoon at our “America Needs Fatima Rosary Rally” across the street from the infamous abortion clinic on 45th Street in West Palm Beach. It all took place between 12:45-1:15 pm yesterday afternoon and it made me totally forget about my horrific back pain.

Friends: Yesterday (October 11th, 2014), was the big day – the day where over 12,500 “America Needs Fatima Rosary Rallies” were to take place all around our entire country. I spent the past month promoting them – especially the ones that took place in the Diocese of Palm Beach. And, as fate would have it, I threw out my back yesterday morning at my house, about 3 hours before they were to take place, and I honestly did not know how I would be able to even drive to 45th Street, let alone, stand and pray for 90 minutes. I popped 2 advils, iced my back for 40 minutes, put heat on for 40 minutes, put a back brace on, popped 2 more advils, and headed over to the Rosary Rally to meet up with Lisa Sheehan and about 33 others. I prayed the entire way over there and I prayed the entire 90 minutes while I was there. And, I prayed for a miracle to happen…I got one. Not for my back – but, for a precious baby that survived the bloody scalpel of a ruthless abortionist.

Right at around 12:45 pm, as we were praying the Holy Rosary. a lady walked from the the parking lot at Presidential Women’s Center across the street to where our group was praying the Glorious Mysteries. She saw the photos of Our Blessed Mother and knew that we may be able to help her. She yelled out for help and was hoping for somebody to soothe her worries. She caught me eye. I caught hers. She was asking for help, for Divine intervention. Our entire group responded as we stopped praying for a brief moment. I grabbed the brochures on abortion that Lisa had in her hands and walked across the street to meet this stressed out lady. You can tell that she was in a world of hurt as she told us that her daughter was in the abortion clinic, ready to have an abortion, and was about to have a nervous breakdown. I signaled my dear friends, Jim Kolar and Deacon Les Loh to come over with me to speak to this lady. I leaned over and asked her for her name and she said her name was Emelda. I told her mine and whispered to her that everything was going to be OK and that we are praying for her beloved daughter. I also told her to please go back in and speak to her daughter (whose name is Melody, 20 years old), and beg her not to have the abortion. Emelda went back into the clinic to speak to her distraught daughter while our group continued praying the Rosary…the pressure was on.

Jim Kolar and Deacon Les stayed on that side of the street when a car pulled out of the parking lot on the other side and Jim chased after it, along with another one of our Pro-Lifers, Gabriella. They saw that it was Emelda, Melody and her boyfriend, Robert, along with one of Melody’s sons, as Jim asked them to drive over to Miracle House, across the street. They did so, Jim and Gabriella followed them and as fate would have it once again – Jim, for no known reason, had left the lights and the music on at the Our Lady of Guadalupe Chapel of Holy Innocents and did not turn on the burglar alarm. I guess it was just meant to be. GOD definitely had His hands in this entire ordeal as Emelda and her grandson walked into that beautiful chapel, she fell to her knees in front of the Blessed Sacrament and began to pray, while Melody and Robert stayed in the car outside of Miracle House.

Jim and Gabriella spoke to Emelda but could not really speak to Melody since she was so distraught and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Emelda left her phone number with Jim Kolar and when I stopped in at Miracle House to speak to Jim to see what finally happened after we finished praying at the Rally, he gave me her number – and since Emelda and I had made that initial connection and knowing that I also speak Spanish, Jim asked me to call her. I thanked Jim for all that he did as we looked at each other and said “This is exactly why we built this Chapel of Holy Innocents over 6 years ago”. I left the Chapel, drove home in serious back pain but had the greatest feeling of hope that we were maybe on the verge of saving a baby on such a significant day…I knew that I had to call Emelda, but I purposely waited until a very significant time.

And, friends, that phone call that I made yesterday afternoon at exactly 3 pm (Divine Mercy hour), to Emelda was one of the most rewarding phone calls I have ever made in my entire life, because that is what it signified – LIFE…the saving of an innocent life.

And, when I told Emelda who I was, she almost broke down crying. She told me that she knew that I was going to call her. We spoke at length all afternoon and night about what transpired yesterday at this incredible Rosary Rally as Emelda told me that she felt GOD speak to her on behalf of her daughter to go and see what us Prayer Warriors were doing across the street from an abortion clinic. Being a former Catholic – but, still a devout Christian – Emelda knew that her hope was in Jesus and she knew that our prayer group was crying out to her and Melody not to go through with the abortion.

This was powerful and what was even more powerful is the mere fact that a Catholic Chapel – Our Lady of Guadalupe – the Chapel of the Holy Innocents – played such a huge role in this entire ordeal. It opened its doors on April 2nd, 2008 and it truly served its purpose yesterday. Reflecting back about 8 years ago when Jim Kolar, myself and several others used to visit this location when it was a closed-down Pizza Hut – and Jim had the vision of building Miracle House, along with a Chapel with the Blessed Sacrament in it for a day like October 11th to come around – it was a prophecy in the making. All those frustrating years paid off and credit goes to all those who fought and toiled and raised funds for several years in order to make this a reality. (GOD Bless the late Dick Caudill). From a closed-down Pizza Hut to a beautiful Catholic Chapel, where over 45 different priests have presided in Masses there on countless Saturdays – including our own Bishop Barbarito – yesterday was one of those ever-rewarding days where us Pro-Lifers saw the fruits of our labor bear “life” right before our very own eyes. And, all of our sacrifices over these past 8 years dealing with Miracle House, finally came to fruition…

To make a long story short, I have been in contact with Emelda for the past two days, talking about how important it is to protect our babies and how hurtful an abortion truly is. We talked about how important it is to abide by GOD’s 5th Commandment and that we had to convince her daughter to keep the baby. She said that Melody was so torn about having an abortion as she is only 20 years old, already has two children, and did not think she could afford to have another baby. Part of her was telling her to have the abortion. Part of her was telling her that it was wrong. She was fighting it the whole way and knew that something was not right. Our Prayer Warriors across the street from the abortion clinic made the difference. I told Emelda all about our vibrant Pro-Life movement here in our Diocese and that we work together as a TEAM praying like she saw us and saving babies’ lives. I also told her that this is what I personally do for a living now, since I no longer work for the diocese. She is now interested in joining our Pro-Life group…The Holy Spirit at work.

We have actually become friends over the weekend and she is as happy and thankful as any mom could be that Melody decided to walk away from that ruthless abortion clinic. She says that yesterday’s events were life-changing for her, Melody, Robert and the 8-week old baby whose life was spared yesterday. I left a couple of voice mails for Melody as well, thanking her for not aborting her precious baby yesterday and to let her know that our entire group is here praying for her. I left her a few prayers on her cell phone. After all our conversations and text messages yesterday and last night, the last text that Emelda sent me late last night, read:

“Mr. Willy, sorry to text you this late but I would like to thank you and your friends 4 ur concern and prayers. My daughter, Melody, decided to have the already blessed baby! Let our divine Father be with us always!”

Friends: That is what I woke up to this morning – this powerful text message from a loving mom who witnessed for herself how powerful prayer is and how powerful it is to pray across the street from an abortion clinic. They have collectively decided to keep the baby as Emelda was so relieved and the entire family feels like they have made the right decision. This is what Pro-Lifers live for. Miracles like yesterday do not happen every day, but it is what we pray for. And, yesterday was a perfect example of what TEAM EFFORT is all about. All “33” of us made a difference! Every single person that was praying at 45th Street yesterday at our Rosary Rally played a huge part in this miracle – the saving of another human being’s life. And, like I always like to remind everybody, “We are all in this Two-Gether” and it’s “one baby at a time”.

In closing, I have asked Emelda and Melody to keep in touch with us and when the time is right, to maybe come over to speak to our “40 Days for Life” group, to let us know how this incredible day has transformed their lives. They said they would love to. I have also asked them to let us know how the baby is progressing and when Melody has the baby – if it is a girl – I have even suggested to her to name her Fatima. Now, that would be an unbelievable story and quite appropriate. (I know our good friends at America Needs Fatima – the Ritchie Family – would be thrilled). The entire story of Fatima is about miracles and when we celebrate on Monday, October 13th, the “Feast Day of Our Lady of Fatima – the Miracle of the Sun” – I will think about this one incredible day that unfolded right here at 45th Street “under the sun” – as I will make one small correction with this Feast Day’s name and call it the “Miracle of the SON”, instead of the sun…as Jesus was the very first miracle worker and part of yesterday’s powerful miracle just happened to take place in a building we call Miracle House.

U.S. State Department: Out of Touch with America, Out of Touch with Reality

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The U.S. State Department once again demonstrates that it fails to grasp the true nature of the threat from Islamic jihad by endorsing a Canadian publication produced by Islamist organizations—even after the Canadian Mounted Police rejected the very same manual.

State Department Endorses Canadian Islamist Manual that Describes Jihad as ‘Noble’

By Andrew C. McCarthy

At the Washington Free Beacon, Adam Kredo reports that the State Department has issued a tweet endorsing a manual that promotes sharia and admonishes investigators not to use terms like “jihad,” which it describes as “a noble concept” in Islam.

The manual, United Against Terrorism, is said by its sponsors – the Islamic Social Services Association (ISSA) and the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) – to combat the radicalization of young Muslims. Yet, after being consulted during the manual’s writing, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police rejected the final product due to its “adversarial tone.”

That’s putting it mildly. Upon reading the book, Toronto Star columnist Anthony Furey observes that it frowns on “liberal values,” forbidding such things as the intermingling of the sexes in civil society and the marriage of a Muslim woman to a non-Muslim, while promoting the treatment of adultery and premarital sex as crimes for which “punishments are harsh.”

The manual admonishes that “Terrorism is not jihad. Jihad is a noble concept in Islam.” It further discourages Muslims from cooperating with law enforcement officials, even if the police are seeking information about Islamic radicals – the very “extremists” the manual ostensibly sets itself against. It also derides investigative measures designed to gather intelligence against terrorists.

Yet, the U.S. State Department lauded the manual yesterday, tweeting: “Canada: handbook to help parents understand extremists, combat recruitment [with a link to the manual.]”

As Mr. Kredo notes, the State Department’s approbation struck some Twitter users as curious. It should not have. The State Department, throughout the tenures of Secretaries Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, has been second only to the White House itself in championing the Muslim Brotherhood, whose promotion of sharia and project to forbid notice of the Islamic doctrinal roots of Islamic terrorism are amply reflected in the manual.

The airbrushing of jihad is also familiar. It is the same spin I discussed here in 2010 when then-White House counterterrorism czar (and now-CIA director) John Brennan claimed that we must not “describe our enemy as ‘jihadists’” because “jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam” that merely means “to purify oneself or one’s community.”

In point of fact, according to the authoritative sharia manual Reliance of the Traveller, which has been endorsed by scholars at al-Azhar University in Cairo (the seat of Sunni scholarship since the tenth century) and by the International Institute of Islamic Thought (the Muslim Brotherhood’s think-tank), “Jihad means to war against non-Muslims.” As Answering Islam’s Yoel Natan has recounted, jihad is referred to in 164 verses of the Koran, almost exclusively in terms of combat.

Moreover, if – even as jihadists are rampaging – you want to indulge the Brennan/Obama administration fantasy that jihad has evolved, Brennan’s anodyne rendering of the concept is hopelessly flawed. I explained why in the 2010 column:

Jihad is, always and everywhere, the mission to implement, spread, or defend sharia, the Islamic legal code. It is not exclusively violent; an army doesn’t need to be violent if its enemies are willing to give ground. But jihad only “means to purify oneself or one’s community” in a very narrow sense. It is not the syrupy quest to become a better person but the command to become a better Muslim; it is not the smiley-face mission to “purify” one’s community of crime but the command to cleanse one’s community of non-Islamic influences.

The inextricable bond between jihad and sharia is also easily explained. In Muslim doctrine, sharia is deemed the necessary precondition for Islamicizing a society. Islam’s designs are hegemonic: Even in its less threatening iterations, it is taken as a given that believers must call all of humanity to the faith. What separates the true moderates from the faux moderates and the terrorists are the lengths to which one is willing to go in carrying out that injunction. That it is an injunction, however, is not open to debate.

Our political leaders can continue to trivialize jihad as if it were some benign struggle to brush after every meal. They can continue to ignore the core tenets that make sharia antithetical to a free, self-determining society. But they can’t do that and do the only job we need them to do: protect our lives and our liberties.

Again, if the State Department, the administration, and the Beltway political class are going to keep looking at Islamists –i.e., Islamic supremacists who promote sharia – as part of the counterterrorism solution rather than a big part of the anti-American, anti-Western liberalism problem, we are never going to get out of our own way.

A Supreme Court, Not Supreme Wisdom

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I am not a lawyer, but I have read the Constitution and I cannot find any indication that the Founding Fathers intended the guarantee of “equal protection of the laws” in the 14th Amendment to include same-sex marriage.

The idea would have been regarded as an abomination to the men who created the Constitution. To many who regard the institution of marriage a sacred bond between a man and a woman, the decisions of lower courts that have facilitated same-sex marriage are deeply offensive

When the Supreme Court decided not to decide upon appeals from seven states regarding lower court rulings that their bans on same-sex marriage were unconstitutional, they essentially endorsed same-sex marriage. It is now legal in 25 states, paving the way for a total of 30 states that recognize it, but only by popular vote in three of them; the rest had it imposed through the courts.

The same can be said of the Supreme Court’s decision in 1973 that permitted abortion as a legal right. Here again, the 14th Amendment was cited. As one source noted, “The Court summarily announced that the ‘Fourteen Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action” includes “a right to personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy and that “this right of privacy…is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.”

As this is being written, there have been more than 57,245,810 fetuses aborted since 1973 and, this year, there have been 840,045. Thus, decisions that the Supreme Court makes can literally result in life or death.

One of the most dramatic decisions of an earlier Supreme Court was the 1857 Dred Scott case that ruled that African Americans, whether slave or free, could not be American citizens and thus had no standing to sue in federal court, nor that the federal government had any power to regulate slavery in the territories acquired after the creation of the nation. The Civil War would follow in 1861 and last until 1865, resulting in more than 600,000 casualties, but finally ending slavery in America. Even some of the Founding Fathers had predicted that conflict.

When the Supreme Court has wandered into the area of social policy and culture, it has made decisions that were contrary to the majority of the population. The decision about slavery was about property—the slave–but many regarded slavery as an institution that must be ended.

The Supreme Court, of course, is not one long list of bad decisions. It has done much good and one man is credited with setting it on its course as a co-equal brand of the federal government. That man was John Marshall. I doubt that his name and deeds are even taught in the schools of America.

Cover - John MarshallAs a brilliant and very entertaining biography by Harlow Giles Unger, “John Marshall: The Chief Justice Who Save the Nation”, reveals, “Marshall’s pronouncements would ensure the integrity and eminence of the Constitution and the federal government and catapult him into the pantheon of American Founding Fathers as the father of the American federal justice system.”

“He would become the longest serving Chief Justice in U.S. history, signing 1,180 decisions and writing 549 of them, or nearly half, himself.” America was fortunate to have a legal scholar, utterly devoted to the Constitution, in its early, formative years. “Case by case he defined, asserted, and when necessary, invented the authority he and the Court needed to render justice, stabilize the federal government, and preserve the Union and the Constitution.”

Chief among Marshall’s achievements was to assert that the Supreme Court had the right and duty to declare federal and state laws to be either constitutional or unconstitutional. With that it became the third equal but separate branch of government.

Marshall had fought in the American Revolution and had had a distinguished career as a lawyer. As Unger says, “Clouds of doom shrouded the nation in 1800. George Washington was dead. For the first time in their twenty-five year struggle to govern themselves, Americans faced a future without the father of their country to lead them. And they lost their way.”

“Absent their commander-in-chief, the men who helped him lead the nation to independence went mad. Chaos engulfed the land as surviving Founding Fathers—Adams, Burr, Hamilton, Jefferson, Monroe, and others—turned on each other as they clawed at Washington’s fallen mantle.” Jefferson as the third President wanted to rule as a virtual tyrant, but Adams’ appointment of Marshall put a brake those ambitions.

The United States is passing thought a period of governance in which the Congress is so locked in partisanship and so divided that it is barely able to function in the national interest. The current President is losing the popularity he enjoyed when first elected and, now into his second term, he is losing the support and confidence of a majority of Americans. Barack Obama has repeatedly expressed his displeasure with a Constitution that places limits on his power as President.

As Unger notes “Nothing in the Constitution gives a President power to issue proclamations or executive orders with the force of law. Only Congress can legislate, yet presidents have issued more than 13,500 proclamations and executive orders since the founding of the Republic, while the Congress has enacted only about 20,000 laws.”

The Constitution remains supreme above the office of President and, in great measure, we can thank the work of Chief Justice John Marshall.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Who really is the Amnesty Party? The answer will shock you!

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In 1986 the first, and what was to be the only, amnesty since our nation was founded in 1778 was passed. Between 1986 and 2000 there were six more amnesties passed by the U.S. Congress.

So which party pushed amnesty?

Here is a list of all amnesties passed and who controlled the U.S. Congress:

  1. In 1986 the amnesty was called Immigration and Reform Control Act (IRCA. A blanket amnesty for some 2.7 million illegal aliens and only 40% ever became Naturalized. Republican Senate and Democrat controlled House. (R/D)
  2. Section 245(i ) Amnesty 1994: A temporary rolling amnesty for 578,000 illegal aliens. Democrat Senate and House. (D/D)
  3. Section 245(1) Extension Amnesty: 1997 An extension of the rolling amnesty created in 1994. Republican Senate and Republican House. (R/R)
  4. Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act (NACARA) Amnesty 1997 An amnesty for close to one million Central Americans. Republican Senate and Republican House. (R/R)
  5. Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act Amnesty (HRIFA) 1998 An amnesty for for 125,000 illegal aliens from Haiti. Republican Senate and Republican House. (R/R)
  6. Late Amnesty 2000: An amnesty for some 400,000 illegal aliens who claimed they should have been under the 1986 amnesty. Republican Senate and Republican House. (R/R)
  7. LIFE Act Amnesty 2000: A reinstatement of the rolling section 245(i) amnesty for an estimated 900,000 illegal aliens. Republican Senate and Republican House. (R/R)

When you add up who was in charge for the seven amnesties it becomes clear: THE AMNESTY PARTY IS THE REPUBLICAN PARTY.

The Republicans completely controlled both houses for 5 of the 7 amnesties, split one and the Democrats controlled both houses only in 1994.

If you have been wondering why the Republicans, the so called Rule-of-Law Party, has not been taking action against Obama’s unconstitutional acts with immigration perhaps these facts will enlighten you.

Is Obama doing their work for them?

WHAT WORKS AND WHAT DOESN’T

You would think with seven amnesties granted from 1986-2000 sponsored overwhelmingly by Republicans granting 5,700,000 amnesties and with 11,000,000 (govt. numbers) illegal aliens currently demanding amnesty a smart bunch would have figured out it doesn’t solve any problems; it just creates bigger ones like the orchestrated kid’s invasion we couldn’t or wouldn’t repel. The amnesty approach satisfies special interest groups and dumps on citizens.

E-VERIFY DOES WORK

The same bunch that rewards illegal actions with legal residency have avoided legislating enforced mandatory E-Verify. Why? Because it works and they aren’t interested in fixing the illegal invasion what with the need for cheap labor and new democrats. They also don’t like to be reminded they promised E-Verify in 1986 along with a border as secure as the Korean border. The E-Verify approach satisfies citizens, especially workers, and requires special interest groups to obey employment laws.