VIDEO: Pompeo on Biden’s ‘America is back’ — ‘Does he mean back to when ISIS controlled a caliphate the size of Britain?’

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Whether or not that’s what Old Joe meant, that is exactly what Biden’s handlers are getting us into.

“Biden Claims ‘America Is Back’ Then Pompeo Shreds Him with Just 1 Mic-Dropping Line,”

by Kipp Jones, Western Journal, February 5, 2021:

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo shredded President Joe Biden on Fox News on Thursday in response to Biden’s claim earlier that day that “America is back.”

Biden, delivering remarks at the U.S. State Department on Thursday during his first foreign policy address, portrayed the country as having faltered somehow during the four years of President Donald Trump’s leadership. Biden, in an (at-times) cringeworthy address filled with verbal miscues and his trademark problems with basic syntax, droned on for what felt like an eternity.

One line, however, stood out among others.

“And so — so is the message I want the world to hear today: America is back. America is back. Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy,” Biden said in his address, alongside current Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Appearing on Fox News with former Republican congressman and new “Primetime” host Trey Gowdy, Pompeo — who held Blinken’s post from April of 2018 until Biden’s inauguration in January — hit the new president with a memorable one-liner that makes you wonder if Pompeo himself might not be planning a quiet retirement while Democrats eat at the Trump administration’s legacy like termites under a discarded railroad tie.

“Does he mean back to when ISIS controlled a caliphate in Syria that was the size of Britain? I hope not,” Pompeo said….

“President Trump and our team took that down,” Pompeo said of the now-former Islamic State caliphate.

The former head of the State Department continued hitting Biden over his posturing teleprompter speech. He nailed the Democrat over the mess left behind by the Obama administration, which Pompeo and Trump put a lot of effort into cleaning up.

“When he says ‘back,’ when America is back, does he mean back to letting China walk all over us, destroying millions of jobs in places like Kansas and South Carolina, that we know so well?” Pompeo said. “I hope that’s not what he means by back.

“[Biden] talked about allies. When he said go back, does he mean back to dissing allies and friends like Israel and treating the terrorists in Iran like friends by giving them $150 billion in pallets of cash?

“I don’t think the American people can afford to go back to eight more years of Barack Obama’s foreign policy. I hope they’ll move forward with a foreign policy look much more like our America first foreign policy,” Pompeo said….

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

The Misadventures of a Pro-life Senator

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Hadley Arkes on Sen. Ben Sasse, who champions pro-life bills by promising Democrats they won’t affect abortion access, an appeal that fools no one.  

In the British comic Review in the 1960s, Beyond the Fringe, a commanding officer in the Royal Air Force sought to persuade a pilot to go on a kamikaze mission.  “Smedley,” he said, “we need someone at this moment to make a [Grand] Futile Gesture.”

Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska has made his career with Grand Futile Gestures, not because his policies have been wanting in merit, but because he has shown little interest in doing the grinding work of a legislator in working out bills in committee and persuading his colleagues.

When he landed in the Senate in 2015, he quickly took hold of the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act.  That is the sequel to our Born-Alive Infants’ Protection Act (2002), the bill that sought to protect the child who survived an abortion.  The new bill would restore the serious penalties that had been stripped from the original Act.

Sasse rushed to be the sponsor of the bill, which would pass by hefty margins in a Republican-controlled House in 2015 and 2018.   But Sasse never seemed able to do the work that would bring the bill to the floor of the Senate for a vote.   He was finally able to get the bill to the floor in February 2020, when the Democrats had control of the House, and there was no chance of passing it.  The bill gathered 56 votes in favor of bringing it to the floor, but under the rules of a filibuster,  60 votes were needed to put the bill on the floor for the decisive vote.

Sasse had made a fine, impassioned speech in favor of the bill,  which he knew would be mainly a flying of the flag.  His object was just to preserve the awareness of the bill as an ongoing part of our public business.  Over the past several years some of us have made attempts to sharpen and improve that bill, but our friends among other senators have been reluctant to make any move without the consent of the sponsor of the bill.  And yet that sponsor was not to be found.  He was usually elsewhere, giving speeches.

Sasse’s persistence then has been offset by his inattentiveness, but that persistence still deserves praise.  He introduced the bill anew on January 26th, with the Republicans no longer in control of the Senate.   He was forced, then, to bring the bill forth in the mayhem of the Vote-a-Rama:  The Democrats were trying to pass a massive budget as a matter of “budgetary reconciliation,” requiring only a majority vote (no need to get 60).

The occasion triggered a host of amendments on all kinds of subjects, as senators sought to tack their own pet measures on a bill bound to pass.  But amendments could be ruled out if they were thought to have only a tenuous connection to the budget.  And Sasse’s amendment was indeed ruled out; it could not come to a vote.

Sasse made once again a moving case for the bill. “Infanticide,” he said, “is what the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act is actually about. Are we a country that protects babies that are alive, born outside the womb after having survived a botched abortion?”

Sasse put his accent there by appealing to people on the other side that this bill was simply about “protecting babies that have already been born and are outside the womb.”  But in making that appeal he went overboard and gave an account of the bill that was at odds with the purpose that had brought forth the bill.  And so Sasse found himself insisting to his colleagues that “this bill has nothing to do with abortion itself. Nothing in this bill changes the slightest letter of Roe v. Wade. Nothing touches abortion access in this bill.”

But that appeal to the other side fools no one.  The Democrats understand that this modest bill is of course about abortion.  The strategy of the first Born-Alive Act in 2002 was to lure people from the other side by showing the reach of that right to abortion, a reach that makes even pro-choicers recoil.

And from there we might start rolling back that practice of abortion step by step.  We would ask: What was different about that child five minutes before it was born – or five days, five weeks, five months?  The other side understood that their position could come unraveled.  On that point they were never fooled, and we had never sought to fool them.

But our deeper purpose was to establish that this matter was not the sole business of the courts.  We sought to remind people of the constitutional grounds on which Congress may indeed legislate on this matter and act directly to protect unborn children.  We invoked a key line from Chief Justice Marshall in the classic case of Cohens v. Virginia (1822), when he remarked that any question arising under the Constitution and laws of the United States may rightly come within the reach of the judicial branch of the federal government.

And we then asserted the corollary:

If the Supreme Court can articulate new “rights” under the Constitution, the legislative branch must be able to vindicate the same rights under the same Clause in the Constitution where the Court claims to have found them.  And in filling out those rights, the Congress, at the same time, may mark their limits.  The one thing that should not be tenable under this Constitution is that the Court may articulate new rights – and then assign to itself a monopoly of the legislative power in shaping those rights.

A pro-life Republican Congress will not summon the conviction to legislate directly to protect babies in wombs until the members of Congress understand again that they do, in fact, bear the authority to do precisely that.  The score:  Ben Sasse fools no one on the other side, while he distracts his colleagues, and even the pro-lifers, from what they need to know in getting on with their work.

COLUMN BY

Hadley Arkes

Hadley Arkes is the Ney Professor of Jurisprudence Emeritus at Amherst College and the Founder/Director of the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights & the American Founding. His most recent book is Constitutional Illusions & Anchoring Truths: The Touchstone of the Natural Law. Volume II of his audio lectures from The Modern Scholar, First Principles and Natural Law is now available for download.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2021 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

VIDEO: The Vortex — The Marxist-Inspired Evil. It’s all about sex.

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TRANSCRIPT

Many patriots, Catholics, and others of goodwill are looking around the country and scratching their heads saying, “How did the commies seize power in the United States?”

Overcoming America did not happen in a day or even a couple of decades. It was, as the commies correctly note, the result of a “long march through the institutions.” It was a coordinated attack against foundational principles, through the foundational institutions, with the destruction of the family as the goal.

The family is the building block of any civilization, and without it, nothing else can long endure. So institutions that helped form family, support family, advance family had to be eaten away at — slowly at first, but gradually picking up speed. There are many dynamics we can talk about here — the taking over of the media, education, the courts and so forth.

One we would like to concentrate on here is the invasion of Christian morality, first through Protestant denominations and eventually Catholicism. The Christian faith had served as a kind of moral cement since the nation’s founding, keeping passions relatively in check and allowing for the family to flourish, at least relative to the miserable situation family life finds itself in today.

At the heart of the attack against Christianity was the eugenicist movement of the late 19th and early 20th century. The rich global-minded elites wanted to control the world and limit population growth among the peasant classes, who were seen as undesirable. The central group going after the family was, oddly enough, the family of the Rockefellers, long time believers in controlling the world population.

With their billions, they funded the burgeoning birth control movement spearheaded by Marie Stopes in the United Kingdom and Margaret Sanger here in the United States. Both women, but especially Sanger, were massive racists; so much, in fact, that the woke culture finally caught up to Planned Parenthood, forcing them to rename their highest award, dropping the name Sanger from it.

The movement targeted Christianity in general, but specifically the Church of England, the Anglicans, to get them to accept birth control as moral. Two attempts failed in 1910 and again in 1920. But in 1930, at the Lambeth Conference, Anglican leaders finally caved in and declared that contraception in some limited form was moral and could be permitted.

This marked the first time in 2,000 years that any Christian group had accepted the moral evil of contraception. Even Martin Luther had virulently condemned birth control. It provoked an almost immediate response from the Vatican, one declaring that Christian morality has held from the very beginnings that birth control is always a grave evil, the only Christian faith that still teaches this truth.

One by one, Protestant congregations gave in and accepted birth control as compatible with the teachings of Christ — which it is not. This was a major victory for the Marxists. The Christian faith, which held society together, had now been dramatically weakened, especially since America was a predominantly Protestant nation.

It was not long after religious principles weakened that other institutions began to become unsettled. Various mainline Protestant denominations across the board began to become unmoored from Scripture, and since many of them ran or were strongly aligned with the nation’s most prestigious colleges, they too began a leftward lurch.

Those universities produced the next generation of cultural and political leaders, who, having been formed in an anti-religious environment, began dismantling morality up and down the country. They got into law schools and made their way onto the courts, and, in the late 1960s, made contraception a “constitutional right,” based on a manufactured right to privacy (which then went on to become the basis for wholesale abortion and, eventually, homosexual marriage).

In the midst of all this, however, there was still the Catholic opposition to contraception, and Church Militant covered all this in an investigation we produced over 10 years ago called “Contraception Deception.”

The major force behind attacking the Catholic Church and trying to subvert her was Saul Alinsky, who wormed his way into influential Church circles over the issue of social justice — in essence, class warfare. That was the topic of another investigation we did years ago as well.

As things turned more Marxist in the United States as well as the Church, it became clear that communism was ascendant, especially with the silence of duplicitous bishops who were covering up their own sins of child rape of thousand of altar boys by homosexual priests and bishops.

These men sat silent as the political winds were shifting furiously and offered next to no aid at all, allowing their flocks to be overrun and ground up in the machinery of the Culture of Death as lay Catholics by the tens of millions succumbed to the propaganda of the Marxist Democrats, demonstrated by the overwhelming support they showed the child-killer-in-chief, Obama.

Obama was able to actually put together a coalition of so-called Catholics who aggressively campaigned for him and who attacked faithful Catholics as racists for opposing his anti-Catholic policies. If you haven’t heard all this before, or have only heard only bits and pieces of it, that’s what Church Militant is here for: to help you connect the dots and understand the war we are in right now, theologically as well as politically.

This is just a small sample of the wisdom of the Church you will find here on Church Militant as a Premium member. The world is in its current condition because of the lack of conviction of Catholics as well as the ignorance of men of goodwill who have never encountered the fullness of Christ in His Catholic Church.

Please sign up today and become a Premium member here at Church Militant. Channel the justified anger you have at the current political and cultural scene to shoring up your spirituality and theological knowledge. Church Militant Premium is only $10 a month, and it not only goes to the Premium work we do but also helps defray the cost of every other program you get for free, like this Vortex episode, for example.

Vortex and other things here at Church Militant are free to you, but they aren’t free to produce. Church Militant has thousands of episodes of our Premium programming, and we are hoping you sign up and watch them. And if you are a Premium member, then watch them again in light of the new world we find ourselves in.

There is a great cultural war raging, and at its heart is a spiritual conflict, the war for souls launched in Eden and existing in every single man’s heart. No man can win that war without being grounded in truth as a first priority. So, please, sign up today. Help us help you while you help us to evangelize the world.

EDITORS NOTE: This Church Militant video is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Biden’s Meetings With Iran Serve No Useful Purpose

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Assertions by the new Biden-Harris administration about their intention to negotiate with the mullahs and re-join the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) do not seem to be having a positive effect on Tehran’s leadership.

And at the same time, the Biden team’s outreach to the Iranian regime is stirring grave concerns in Israel.

Even before the inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021, officials expected to be named to the Biden administration were holding secret talks with Iran about a return to the 2015 nuclear agreement, according to Israeli media reporting.

Without adding any details, Israel Channel 12 reported on Jan. 16, 2021 that Israel had been updated on those conversations.

Israeli concerns about how far the Biden team may be willing to go in granting concessions to Iran are evident in the assembly by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of a senior-level team, including representatives from the Foreign Ministry, Defense Ministry, Mossad, and the Atomic Energy Commission, to strategize for discussions with the new American administration.

Defense Minister Benny Gantz went even further, issuing a statement saying that “Israel needs to have a military option on the table.”

With many of the new Biden appointees having served previously in the Obama-Biden administrations (2008-2016), there is good reason for concern.

Figures like William Burns (slated for the CIA), Jake Sullivan as National Security Advisor, Anthony Blinken and Wendy Sherman at State Department, and possibly Robert Malley to serve as Special Envoy to Iran, were all closely involved in negotiating the first Iran deal.

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s prescient warning in his speech to the U.S. Congress in 2015 that the agreement “paves Iran’s path to the bomb” is now borne out by Iran’s brazen and serial violations of the JCPOA. No wonder there is trepidation in Israel about where round two might go.

To be sure, the revelations about the extent of Iran’s nuclear weapons program after the Mossad’s daring 2016 heist of Tehran’s nuclear archives were not known in 2015, but there’s scant evidence the naive U.S. team has matured significantly since then.

Nevertheless, Biden’s negotiating team will now have to deal with all the JCPOA provisions regarding limits on amounts of enriched uranium, levels of enrichment, heavy water stockpiles, and limits on installation of advanced centrifuges, all of which Iran has long since blown past as Peter Schweizer put in a recent article.

Schweizer went on to note that it is hardly likely that the Iranian regime would be willing to recommit to provisions violated with so little international resistance — and especially as it would entail disposing of uranium stockpiles, now being enriched to 20% by advanced centrifuges at sites like Fordow, where they never were supposed to be in the first place.

Is the world to believe the Islamic Republic’s word this time will be any more credible than the first time?

This is all in addition to such issues as American hostages, ballistic missiles, and support for Islamic terror groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, Yemeni Houthis, and Iraq’s Shi’ite militias that weren’t even mentioned in the initial nuclear deal.

And, although it was hardly a major revelation having been detailed in the 2011 Havlish, et al. v. bin Laden, et al. legal case — and the Lopez-Tefft affidavit — when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo first spoke about the Iran-Al-Qa’eda alliance in mid-January 2021, it may have seemed to be.

Naturally, none of all this was mentioned during the original Iran nuclear negotiations either — but it certainly should be this time.

The Trump policy of maximum pressure bought the world some time.

Knowing full well the demands, tactics, and strategies the Iranians used in 2015, the Biden team (as well as our European partners) would do well to make maximum use of the respite Trump’s aggressive stance bought for us.

If there are to be new talks, we must commit to ensuring that whatever terms are discussed ensure that Iran is banned from further work on advanced centrifuges, uranium enrichment, creating uranium metal for the hemispheres of nuclear warheads, and the ballistic missiles to carry them.

American hostages held by the regime must also be front and center in any such talks, along with a demand for an end to Tehran’s support for terrorism.

Absent such provisions and the means to verify them, no sanctions, whether nuclear or terrorism related, should be lifted, especially not as a pre-condition to merely opening talks again.

No more billions for the mullahs’ coffers.

Nor can simply talking for the sake of talking be a substitute for exerting the leverage the U.S. now has over the debilitated Iranian economy.

Finally, the U.S. team must not go wobbly in the face of predictable Iranian threats about there being only a “very limited” window for new JCPOA talks.

Instead, let us urge the new Biden-Harris team to approach the Iranian regime with the commitment, skill, and determination it will take to emerge with American, regional, and global security objectives intact.

©Clare Lopez. All rights reserved. Receive the latest by email: subscribe to Clare M. Lopez’s free mailing list.

Biden Surrenders to Iran’s ‘Death to America’ Jihadis in Yemen Who Attacked USS Mason

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Not exactly a surprise.

The Biden foreign policy team is crawling with Obama’s pro-Iranian echo chamber foreign policy trolls and the Iran Lobby was among his biggest bundlers.

Iran’s expansion into Yemen via the Houthis, a Jihadist group whose motto is “Death to America, Death to Israel,  A Curse the Jews, Victory to Islam”, has been backed by the media and the foreign policy establishment which falsely kept blaming the Saudi campaign against the Houthis for the famine when in fact it was the Houthis who had caused the famine by stealing humanitarian aid. This didn’t stop Islamists and the media from keeping the famine lie going anyway.

Or the Biden campaign from adopting it as a talking point.

The Houthis had meanwhile fired on the USS Mason (“Death to America” is right in their motto) and were ethnically cleansing Yemen’s Jewish population.

Despite all that, the Biden administration is now very predictably dropping support for the Saudi campaign against the Houthis, calling for a diplomatic solution, and dispatching a special emissary.

In other words, they’re surrendering to Iran and the Houthis.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, had pushed a terrorist designation for the Houthis on the way out the door, leading to outrage from the Democrats, their media, and even some Republicans. The Biden team is going the other way by rolling over for the, “Death to America” Jihadis leading to another of Obama’s “Victories for Islam”.

The Yemen mess spilled over due to Obama’s Arab Spring. Just wait for the Biden Islamist Winter.

COLUMN BY

DANIEL GREENFIELD

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

Joe Biden’s Abortion Imperialism

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“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” – Nelson Mandela

Over 80 percent of Americans don’t believe that they should pay for abortions in developing countries.

During her first press conference, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked about President Joe Biden’s stance on certain abortion policies.

“I will just take the opportunity to remind all of you that he is a devout Catholic and somebody who attends church regularly,” Psaki responded. “He started his day attending church with his family this morning but I don’t have anything more for you on that.”

Two days later, on the 48th anniversary of Roe v Wade, Joe Biden and his VP Kamala Harris released a statement affirming their unequivocal support of abortion, including their intention to have Roe v Wade codified in US law so that it cannot be overturned by a future Supreme Court ruling.

A week on, Biden signed an executive order rescinding the Mexico City Policy. Introduced by President Reagan in 1985, this policy prohibits NGOs from receiving US taxpayer funding if they promote or perform abortions overseas.

Some 83 percent of Americans have expressed support of the Mexico City Policy, believing that it isn’t the role of Americans to pay for abortions elsewhere. It is a law that has reliably flip-flopped with each incoming administration since then—favoured by Democrat lawmakers and rejected by Republicans. Trump even managed to expand the policy under his watch to cover government agencies engaged in healthcare abroad. Under Biden, it is no longer.

Two other changes on abortion are soon expected under the Biden administration. First, Biden has asked the Department of Health and Human Services to review a similar policy known as the Hyde Amendment, which prevents federal funds from being used to fund abortions for low-income Americans.

Second, the new president is expected to disavow the United States’ endorsement of the Geneva Consensus. This is a non-binding but landmark charter launched by Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last year which was co-signed by over 30 nations. The charter’s aims include promoting better health for women, preserving human life, and strengthening the family as the foundational unit of society.

The response of many Catholics to these rapid developments under Biden has been strong, and understandably so.

“The fact that President Biden identifies himself as a devout Catholic, while working to preserve and expand legalised abortion, even using tax dollars to fund abortion, presents a unique challenge to the Bishops of the United States,” explained Kansas City Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann during an interview this week.

The Archbishop said that Biden’s actions are “confusing Catholics and non-Catholics regarding the Church’s teaching on the evil of abortion.”

The Archbishop of Los Angeles, José H. Gomez, is also the President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Aware of Biden’s stance ahead of time, Archbishop Gomez penned a public statement on the day of Biden’s inauguration calling on him to reconsider his pro-abortion views. The letter was signed by over a dozen US bishops.

“I am in full agreement with Archbishop Gomez,” Naumann said in his interview, referring to the letter. “We must continue to speak to President Biden, as well as all Catholics, and even all Americans, about the truth of what abortion is. Abortion is not something to be celebrated, and it is not healthcare. It is the intentional killing of a child. To participate in abortion or to promote abortion is a grave evil.”

If this was the response from within America, that from abroad was stronger still.

Culture of Life Africa, a Catholic agency defending the sanctity and dignity of life in Africa, released a video last week entitled A Message for President Biden: The Unified Voices of Africa. It was a direct response to Biden’s repeal of the Mexico City Policy, and its pleas were earnest.

“We appeal to Joe Biden, please do not sponsor abortion in Africa,” says Ujunwa, a university lecturer who appears in the video.

“I do not want the United States of America and this present government to fund abortions in Africa. We’ve never needed abortions and we do not want them,” adds a doctor named Ursula.

“In my culture, we support life from the beginning till the end,” says Ellen, a student. “I’m against abortion because abortion is about killing innocent babies in the womb of their mothers,” adding that she’s “against funding of abortion in Africa by any foreign country.”

Obianuju Ekeocha is the founder of Culture of Life Africa and a Nigerian-born human rights activist. Following the video’s release.

She is horrified by the desire of Western leaders to push abortion on the developing world. “I see this as a form of ideological supremacy whereby our pro-life, pro-family, and pro-faith cultures are considered inferior to the western ‘progressive’ ideologies especially on issues related to human sexuality and sexual morality,” Ekeocha explained in an interview.

Ekeocha is well aware of the consequences of Biden’s decision to repeal the Mexico City Policy: abortion providers active in Africa such as International Planned Parenthood Federation, Marie Stopes International, and DKT International will now receive funding to—in Ekeocha’s words—help “eliminate” Africans.

“Africa is the most vulnerable region where [there is] widespread poverty and the unfortunate reality of the African nations’ aid dependency,” Ekeocha added. “We are the lowest hanging fruit, the easy conquests for Western leaders like Biden to impose their world view and their ideology, even when they are very much opposed to our own way of life.”

“This means the elimination of my people,” said Ekeocha in the interview. “This means the death and killing of the most innocent of the African unborn babies.”

In the video, Ekeocha explained that, when it comes to foreign aid, the simple plea of African people to leaders like Joe Biden is, “help us, don’t kill us.”

The question that remains is, will Biden heed these appeals from Africa and the concerns of 83 percent of Americans—or will he continue his pursuit of abortion imperialism?

COLUMN BY

Kurt Mahlburg

Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate… 

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New York Times writer arrested as Iran agent, accused of writing ‘propaganda’ pieces

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This is the “gold standard” of American journalism.

New York Times opinion writer arrested as alleged Iran agent, accused of writing ‘propaganda’ pieces

By: Annaliese Levy, Sara Carter, Jan 28, 2021

A New York Times opinion writer was arrested and charged with acting as an unregistered foreign agent of the Iranian government last week, The Algemeiner reported.

Kaveh Afrasiabi, a former political science professor and former adviser to Iran’s nuclear negotiation team, has been accused of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

According to a press release from the Department of Justice, “Afrasiabi allegedly sought to influence the American public and American policymakers for the benefit of his employer, the Iranian government, by disguising propaganda as objective policy analysis and expertise,” Acting U.S. Attorney DuCharme said.

The press release states that Afrasiabi has a PhD and frequently publishes books and articles. He also appears on American television programs discussing foreign relations matters, particularly Iran’s relations with the United States.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office now accuses him of pushing propaganda.

Afrasiabi was allegedly paid, directed and controlled by the Government of Iran to lobby U.S. government officials and to create and disseminate information favorable to the Iranian government for over a decade.

“For over a decade, Kaveh Afrasiabi pitched himself to Congress, journalists, and the American public as a neutral and objective expert on Iran,” stated Assistant Attorney General Demers.

“However, all the while, Afrasiabi was actually a secret employee of the Government of Iran and the Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations (IMUN) who was being paid to spread their propaganda. In doing so, he intentionally avoided registering with Department of Justice as the Foreign Agents Registration Act required.”

The Times published an opinion article co-written by Afrasiabi in 2018 that called for a meeting between former President Trump and President Hassan Rouhani of Iran.

“Mr. Trump and Mr. Rouhani should listen to reason and take the opportunity this month to sit down for a face-to-face conversation. It would be the truly bold thing to do,” the article states.

In 2012, The Times published an article by Afrasiabi which claimed world leaders gathering in Tehran for a summit would “elevate Iran as the movement’s new president for three years and enhance Tehran’s regional and international clout” but “unfortunately, the United States … adopted a purely negative approach toward the Tehran summit.”

In a statement to The Algemeiner, Afrasiabi called the government’s claim that he was a secret Iranian agent “absurd” and “wild.”

“Whatever I did was perfectly legal and fully transparent,” Afrasiabi said.

“My conscience is clear, and if the U.S. government had an iota of sense of appreciation, they would thank me for all my tireless activities for the cause of detente, non-proliferation, human rights, inter-religious dialogue and understanding.”

Afrasiabi acknowledged that he was paid by the Iranian mission at the United Nations.

“I received checks from the Mission’s UN account and it never occurred to me that I was doing anything illegal,” he said.

Afrasiabi said that he was not lobbying America on behalf of Iran, but rather lobbying Iran on behalf of America.

Afrasiabi was ordered released Friday, on the condition that he have no contact with any known, current, or former members of the Iranian government unless in the presence of his lawyer. He was also required to post a $250,000 unsecured bond, and family members posted an additional $325,000 in unsecured bonds.

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Quick note: Tech giants are snuffing us out. You know this. Facebook, Twitter, Google et al have shadowbanned, suspended and in some cases deleted us from your news feeds. They are disappearing us. But we are here. Subscribe to Geller Report newsletter here— it’s free and it’s critical NOW more than ever.

Political “Unity” vs. Christian Unity

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Rev. Jerry J. Pokorsky: We are not Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, even Americans first. We are Catholics, knowing the difference between good and evil.

Divisive politics seems to poison every aspect of contemporary life.  So there is an urgent need to reconsider what it would mean if what we were to seek is not an illusory political “unity,” but what true public harmony depends upon: Christian brotherhood.

When we say brother, the immediate, literal meaning usually comes to mind: He is my brother, by blood. If we are thinking about the brotherhood of mankind, our thoughts are typically more abstract, often sentimental aspirations. What do we mean when we, as Christians, refer to one another as brothers in Christ?

The sin of Adam and Eve mortally wounded human nature.  The world became subject to the divisive influence of the Devil, the “Prince of this world.” Unity gave way to disunity. Adam blamed Eve for his sin. Cain murdered his brother Abel. In His justice, God sent a flood to destroy the wicked, sparing the righteous Noah and his family.

Following the Great Flood, the divide separating God and man widened. Presuming they did not need God’s grace and could reach the heavens without God, the people constructed the infamous Tower of Babel. But God punished their arrogance, scattering the peoples and confounding their speech so that they could no longer understand each other.

In various ways, groupings of families and tribes have clustered around ethnic language groups. Their sinful pride institutionalized the social disunity that comes with differences in language. The tribes were necessary not only for survival and self-defense, but also for warfare and conquest.

Still, in the plan of God, tribes would play an essential part in the history of salvation. The twelve tribes that emerged in ancient Israel served the unity of the Israelites. Each tribe had its essential purpose. The tribe of Levi, for example, was a tribe dedicated to offering sacrificial worship. The priesthood was the destiny of men born into this tribe.

The tribalism of ancient Israel had many benefits, including the loyalty of family and extended family ties. Tribes had important military purposes, conquering Canaan and protecting their homeland. In battle, members of the tribes fought and died for their brothers. The bonds of blood unified them. The tribes of the Chosen People prepared an ethnic cradle for the coming of the Messiah.

But tribal differences also presented many difficulties in ancient Israel – as they do today. Tribal and family bonds often spark useless blood feuds and wars. We see the damage tribalism has inflicted, particularly in the Middle East and Africa. The Kingdom of Israel and Judah split into two kingdoms because of tribal quarrels. The mutual tribal hatreds of the Judeans and Samaritans remain evident in the Gospels. And even American folklore records family feuds, most famously the Hatfields and the McCoys.

But the Old Testament already points to ways of transcending and overcoming the evils of tribalism. God sends Jonah, the reluctant prophet, to the Ninevites, the archenemies of the Jews. He preaches repentance, and lo and behold, the enemies of the Jews repent! The message is loud and clear. Israel’s enemies are not necessarily members of a hostile tribe, only those unrepentant and in league with Satan.

The real enemy of the Jews is sin, evil, and the Devil himself. Beyond all previous expectation, after repenting of their sins, the Ninevites became their brothers – which forced the Jews to rethink what Jewish exceptionalism meant.

Jesus continues to teach repentance as the fundamental requirement of brotherhood. He begins His ministry in continuity with the teaching of John the Baptist: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel.” (Mark 1:15) Before we can be members of the tribe of Jesus – the kingdom of God – we must first renounce sin and reform our lives. He continues His saving ministry by enlisting the Twelve.

The number was significant to attentive Jews. They must have sensed the connection to the twelve tribes of Israel. Indeed, Jesus replaced the twelve tribes with a brotherhood that transcends all tribes in His new and everlasting Covenant.

The renunciation of sin followed by the obedience of faith forms the foundation of the tribe of Jesus. As Christians, when we call each other brother, we are not referring to the bonds of blood in a family or a tribe. We are brothers in the Lord, members of the Mystical Body of Christ. The blood that we share and have in common is the Precious Blood of Jesus. So the brotherhood of Jesus Christ extends beyond national boundaries. The brotherhood of Christ is properly called universal – i.e., Catholic.

So we must not first think of ourselves as Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, even Americans. We are Catholics. Our world view is Catholic, knowing the difference between good and evil.

We must struggle to see the world as Catholics with the unity that comes with repentance and faith.

The Blessed Eucharist, the source and summit of the Christian life, is the sign of our tribal unity in Jesus. But when clerics distribute Communion to those who publicly, manifestly, and obdurately oppose the Church’s faith and morals, they violate Church unity and introduce ideological tribalism.

We are no longer Catholics, brothers in Jesus. We find it necessary to self-identify as “conservative” or “liberal,” blurring the distinction between membership in the tribe of Jesus and membership in diabolical tribes of ideology. Indeed, the Devil prefers a politicized Catholic enemy to a far more formidable authentically Catholic enemy.

Traditional faith and morals form the cornerstone of our unity. But the restoration of Christian brotherhood is not painless. Breaking sinful patterns of ideological impositions on our religion requires the work of repentance. Jesus does not sugarcoat the difficulties: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” (Matthew 10:34)

Now is the time to transcend divisive politics with Christian brotherhood and Catholic unity, even if it first requires the sword of division.

COLUMN BY

Rev. Jerry J. Pokorsky

Father Jerry J. Pokorsky is a priest of the Diocese of Arlington. He is pastor of St. Catherine of Siena parish in Great Falls, Virginia.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2021 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

“Quo Vadis?” – Always a Good Question

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Michael Pakaluk on a lesson from early Christians: If I am not putting away everything else to move quickly towards Christ, I am going away from him.

By chance, I picked up Henryk Sienkewicz’s novel Quo Vadis from the family bookshelf last week, when I was looking for a next book to read for enjoyment.  (How desperately we all need such reading now!)

But it wasn’t really by chance. I asked my guardian angel to guide me, as I often do, and nothing happens by chance anyway. Everything is under God’s providence. So, I thought, I’ll write something about this providential book.

I confess that I chose it against my inclination because, well, it has sold tens of millions of copies; movies have been based on it; and my children have been assigned it in school.  Someone might think these are all good reasons to read it.  But my personal inclination runs against the common and obvious. Maybe yours are against this book too, for other reasons?

Even after selecting it, I needed a couple of good rationalizations to get me started. And I found them: “Any book you have not yet read is the same as a book that has just been published” (Samuel Johnson).  And, “As the grandson of peasants from a village outside Warsaw, you ought to learn more about Polish things whenever you can.”

Sienkewicz was a Nobel-prize winning author of a great trilogy of Polish historical novels. But Quo Vadis, as you probably know, is about Rome in the time of Nero.  It tells a story of widespread, underground conversion to Christianity, from the viewpoint of the decadent and powerful pagans in control.

Sienkewicz researched ancient Rome extensively for the book, down to the smallest details of daily life.  With a writer’s eye he weaves these details into his narrative, so that the book, while telling a great story, deftly imparts historical instruction about Rome, too.  You might recommend Quo Vadis for pilgrims planning a visit to Rome; it makes the ancient city come alive.

But you can recommend it above all for Christians in the West who feel that some kind of insidious, post-Christian ideology is growing in power and threatens to oppress and persecute us.  I do not mean merely that the book offers us consolation. Yes, Nero did dress as a bride in drag to marry a man, Pythagoras, in a big public ceremony (which Sienkewicz does not neglect to mention).  But for all their corruption, the ideologues of our own Babylon the Great are not yet Nero.

I mean, rather, that the book gives us a picture of early Christians, whom we would do well to imitate. Let me draw attention to three notes.

First is the passion of those early converts. To become a Christian at the time of Nero was to fall in love with Christ so completely as to identify with him and prefer to die “with him” rather than to fail to live in his commandments.  Sienkewicz conveys this passion ingeniously, by making a love-affair between a Roman patrician, Vicinius, and a Christian convert, Lygia, the central story of the novel.

How to convey what the love of Christ was for these first Christians?   Tell a story of a man who would give up the whole world to possess a woman, and make that man’s love for that woman, and his love of Christ, one and the same.  We need to love Christ, and one another, especially our spouses, in the same way.

Second is what I want to call the “self-sufficiency” of Christian fellowship and life for those early converts.  For them, as Vicinius tells his pagan mentor Patronius, it’s as if Rome and Nero do not exist.  All their thoughts are Christ, who is their sole Lord.  They have discovered a path of life in Christ, and they live in the way Christ commands, and this gives them joy and is enough.

By contrast might, today we might affirm theoretically that “the Church is a perfect society” but – how much we still complain! How much we speak as if we cannot be happy unless the times were other than they are! We do not seem overjoyed and fully satisfied that the love of Christ is already ours.  (Yes, we should want to improve the world too – but as a sharing of what we already have been fully given.)

Third is the sense that the Christian life is de novo (“starting anew”) wherever it is found.  What I mean is this.  Perhaps some of us suppose unconsciously that things must get worse because we think of Christianity as akin to physical transmission, where each copy loses something of its original. A photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, etc., eventually loses its information.  But part of the miracle of baptism and the Eucharist is that the life of Christ is entirely, fully, and perfectly conveyed to any convert at any time.

In Quo Vadis you see that the Roman Christians have exactly the same devotion as the disciples did in the Holy Land, 2500 miles away. Take any saint, say, Angela Merici, whose memorial we celebrated last week – a humble girl called in the 15th century to love the Lord, as if out of nowhere, in a small town on the shores of Lake Garda. This is the life de novo of an alter Christus (“another Christ”).

Remember what St John Paul II insisted on conveying to the Church at the turn of the millennium: Iesus Christus heri et hodie ipse et in saecula, “Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and tomorrow.” (Heb. 13:8).  These words still stand and always will.

Quo vadis as a Latin phrase is usually rendered “where are you going?” But the verb has the sense “rushing to.”  And the phrase emphasizes the end point, not the motion. Am I agitated, distracted, working frenetically, or putting off work?  Whatever I am doing: the end of all my activity, what is it?  The novel suggests: If I am not putting away everything else to move quickly towards Christ, I am going away from him.

COLUMN BY

Michael Pakaluk

Michael Pakaluk, an Aristotle scholar and Ordinarius of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, is a professor in the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America. He lives in Hyattsville, MD with his wife Catherine, also a professor at the Busch School, and their eight children. His acclaimed book on the Gospel of Mark is The Memoirs of St Peter. His next book, Mary’s Voice in the Gospel of John: A New Translation with Commentary, forthcoming in February, 2021 from Regnery, is now available for pre-order.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2021 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

How the Biden Administration Will Impact Israel and the Middle East

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Anthony Blinken is the incoming US Secretary of State. The State Department executes American foreign policy.

Blinken was Obama’s Deputy Secretary of State.  Out of office, he founded a strategic consultancy firm called West Exec Advisors. They represented global corporations, foreign governments, gain access to the White House and top Government officials. His website boasted that “West Exec conveys our shared commitment to our country, to each other, and to our clients.”

Anthony Blinken reflects what Trump euphemistically called “the Washington Swamp.”

In office, Blinken made human rights a cornerstone in formulating foreign policy. Let’s see how that worked out;

Libya. Under Hillary Clinton and Obama and Biden in the White House, a decision was made to remove Muammar Gaddafi from power and let the Libyan people set their own destiny. This, despite the fact that Gaddafi had renounced his nuclear ambitions and was reaching out to the West.  In 2011, The United States led a NATO military attack against Libya on the pretext of “protecting civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack.”

The result was a disaster. Gaddafi was deposed and killed, Libya descended into a warring hellhole of rival Islamist and nationalist groups, and Ambassador Stephens was murdered at the Benghazi US Consulate. The State Department failed to rescue the ambassador and his security team. When news of their fate was released, Blinken’s State Department employed a fake human rights story to cover up their fatal failure by blaming the assault on a bunch of protester angry at an amateur video that insulted Islam. And the person who went on TV to sell that fabrication, Susan Rice, has been rewarded with a White House appointment running domestic policy.

The “Arab Spring.” As protests spread across the Muslim world against corrupt leaders, the State Department celebrated it as a positive expression of human rights. They called it the Arab Spring. In Israel, strategic experts, who understand the undercurrents of the Muslim world, told American and European diplomats, “You’ve got your seasons wrong. This is the start of the Islamic Winter.”

As protests grew in Egypt, Blinken, then Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, and others urged Obama to get “on the right side of history” by supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Muslim Brotherhood had hijacked students’ peaceful protests and violently targeted the police and government institutions that eventually toppled Mubarak’s regime. They imprisoned thousands and, in less than two years, had ruined Egypt’s economy driving millions into poverty.

The Obama Administration and State Department failed to feel the mood of the Egyptian people. One month after Mohamed Morsi, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood leader, was sworn in as Egyptian President, protesters pelted Clinton’s motorcade with tomatoes during her July 2012 visit to Cairo.

The army, under General al-Sisi, staged a popular coup. They arrested the Muslim Brotherhood leadership, restored law and order, and begin to forge a more stable Egypt.

This did not sit well with Obama who said of America’s response to Sisi’s popular victory, “We can’t be seen as aiding and abetting actions we think run contrary to our values and ideals.”

US military aid to Egypt was stopped. It led to a divide between the White House, the State Department and a Defense Department that advocated maintaining US aid to Egypt.

By 2015, General Sisi had reached out to Russia for a large military aid program to be paid by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Egypt’s allies in the region. Obama’s team wilted and renewed US military aid to Egypt. Sisi celebrated by flying the first delivery of American F-16s over Cairo. A triumphant gesture perceived in Egypt as Sisi’s victory over Obama.

Syria. By the fall of 2013, Syria had plunged into a sectarian civil war and Assad was slaughtering his people with chemical weapons.  Obama threatened Assad against using such weapons. A deal was struck to remove chemical reserves from Syria.

Blinken, as Deputy Secretary of State under John Kerry, said, “Imagine what Syria would look like without that deal. It would be awash in chemical weapons, which would fall into the hands of ISIS, Al Nusra or other groups.”

He may have been right, but that did not stop the devious Assad from inflicting a sarin attack, killing an estimated 80 civilians. Obama was tested but failed to respond.

“We always knew we had not gotten everything,”Blinken admitted.

It took President Trump to punish Assad when he launched combined attacks in 2016 and 2017 destroying Syria’s chemical weapon facilities. Obama blinked. Trump acted.

Iran. If human rights were a cornerstone of the Obama Administration, it was sadly missing when it came to Iran. When mass protests erupted across Iran, Obama kept silent. The State Department in which Blinken served failed to stand affirmatively with the Iranian protesters. The opposition Green Movement was brutally crushed and has never been reconstituted. Instead, they bent over backward to appease the Tehran leadership with a highly criticized nuclear deal cemented by the delivery of $150 Billion that enabled the Republic Guard to brutally advance Iranian hegemony across the Middle East and down into Yemen.

This issue is the most consequential one for Israel with Iran spreading its hegemony and forward bases throughout the Middle East. In 2020 alone, Israel launched over 500 attacks against Iranian bases and weapon storage facilities in Syria.

Israel insists that the new Administration keep the chokehold on the Iranian economy but this is hardly likely after Biden selected Wendy Sherman to be his Deputy Secretary of State. She waso ne of the principle architects of the disastrous 2015 nuclear deal.

There is nothing that gives us hope that Blinken will maintain Trump’s tough stance on Tehran.

Israel and the Palestinian Problem. Donald Trump has been the most pro-Israel president since Harry Truman. His achievements have been many and Trump’s Abraham Accord initiative is sufficient reason to reward him with a Nobel Peace Prize. That is a hard act to follow and it is doubtful that Blinken can help Biden achieve that status, not with Biden’s declared aim of refunding an unapologetic Palestinian Authority that continues to promote their ‘Pay to Slay” policy which rewards their killers. This despite the Taylor Force Act, named after an American stabbed to death by a rampaging Palestinian on Tel Aviv’s beachfront, a bill introduced by President Trump to disincentivize the PA from this heinous policy.

The Democrat Manifesto also declared it would reopen the PA Washington bureau and the US consulate in Jerusalem to serve Palestinians, despite having a new Embassy there, thanks to Trump. All this with no demand for the Palestinians to desist from promoting terror and instead recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Former Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, said of Biden, “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” 

By default, one can say the same about Anthony Blinken. Policy meetings took place in the White House Situation Room in which Anthony Blinken participated. The results were poor.

Blinken, as US Secretary of State, must insist that Iran removes its powerful precision missiles from Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.  A nuclear Iran poses an existential threat to the existence of Israel, but the presence of these lethal weapons pose an immediate danger to Israeli civilian centers and vital infrastructure.

Perhaps Blinken can spend the next four years trying to convince the Palestinian leadership to change its behavior and ideology, and recognize and normalize their relationship with Israel, as moderate Arab and Muslim states have done, rather than push Israel into a corner, because peace with the Palestinians is impossible without it.

Foreign Policy for America is an influential policy advocacy group in Washington. They push their foreign policy proposals into Congress and the White House. They have some disturbing perspectives on Israel.

Avril Haines, Biden’s CIA Chief, and others signed a public letter earlier in 2020 urging the Democratic Party to adopt a more pro-Palestinian language in its platform. By pro-Palestinian Haines did not clarify if the language should be that of the PLO, Hamas, or Islamic Jihad in Gaza. If she means the language of the Palestinian Authority, it is an aggressive anti-Israel language back by violence and shared by other malevolent Palestinian factions.

Equally troubling is that Jeremy Ben Ami, the founder of JStreet, a Jewish group with the overriding policy of creating a Palestinian state on unacceptable (for Israel) 1967 borders, sits on the FPA board of directors to impose his views onto Israel.  He sees Israel as the obstacle to peace, not PA rejectionism, nor Hamas denial of the right of Israel to exist.

The Foreign Policy for America section on the ‘Israel-Palestinian Conflict’ is copy-paste drawn from JStreet literature. It includes tips on how to persuade Congress to be more sympathetic to the Palestinians, and angry against the Israeli Government.

FPA published a history of the conflict. According to them it began in 1949. They conveniently forgot that Arabs have been murdering Jews since the 1920s.

The Oslo Accords was ruined, they say, “by growing settlements in the West Bank, continued Israeli military presence, and a blockage on Gaza.”No mention of decades of Palestinian terrorism, rockets and suicide attacks. Nor does it mention incessant anti-Semitic rhetoric and incitement, and a stubborn refusal to accept a Jewish presence in Judea & Samaria or in the Jewish state anywhere.

FPA avoids mention of the ultimate Palestinian ambition of a state “from the River to the Sea” as if it doesn’t exist. And their top personnel are moving into decisive positions in the Biden Administration.

Democrat anti-Israel activists have seeped into the Biden White House.

Reema Dodin has been an apologist for Palestinian suicide bombers. She is the Deputy Director of the White House Office for Legislative Affairs. She is alleged to have blamed the 9/11 attacks on US support for Israel, and she supported the anti-Israel BDS Movement.

Karen Jean-Pierre was selected to be the White House Deputy Press Secretary. She was the national spokesperson for the George Soros-sponsored anti-Israel MoveOn.org. She has accused Israel of “war crimes,” called AIPAC “severely racist” for supporting Israel against Palestinian terrorism, and praised Democrats who wimped out of attending the last AIPAC annual conference.

Jeremy Ben Ami tweeted this is “Exactly the type of leadership this country deserves.”

As their agenda unfolds, Israel must be prepared for cold winds to blow in our direction under such a Biden Administration.

©Barry Shaw. All rights reserved.

Chilling: Democrat Cynthia McKinney Discusses ‘Jewish Problem’ With White Supremacists

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Watch. Your blood will run cold.

Chilling: Cynthia McKinney Discusses Jewish Problem With White Supremacists

As someone who monitors Jew-hatred on an almost daily basis, I thought I’d seen everything.

By David Lange, Israelly Cool, January 29, 2021:

Then I watched this video.

In it, former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney – an African American – pow-wows with some White supremacists (including the detestable Angelo John Gage) about the Jewish problem.

I’ve distilled the worst parts out of the hour long video in to about ten minutes. What you’ll see, amongst other things, is:

  • The Black McKinney speaking about the need for Blacks to unite with the KKK to defeat the Jewish enemy
  • McKinney calling the Jews “really evil people,” “Khazarians,” and “bloody”
  • McKinney claiming the Jews used the Civil Rights movement solely as a tool for their own advancement
  • McKinney lamenting you “can’t wipe [the Jews] out”
  • McKinney alleging Covid is a bio weapon invented by the Jews

This is truly Kafkaesque, but goes to show how the immense power of Jew hatred leads to the strangest bedfellows.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Quick note: Tech giants are snuffing us out. You know this. Facebook, Twitter, Google et al have shadowbanned, suspended and in some cases deleted us from your news feeds. They are disappearing us. But we are here. Subscribe to Geller Report newsletter here— it’s free and it’s critical NOW more than ever.

VIDEO: Georgetown Professor — Islamic Slavery is Freedom?

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“Slavery cannot be intrinsically evil in Islamic law,” Georgetown University professor Jonathan Brown stated during a July 20, 2020 webinar. This disturbing assessment came during a 2019-2020 series of presentations on his 2019 book, Slavery & Islam, whose theses have hardly improved upon this Muslim convert’s past scandalous comments on slavery.

On February 7, 2017, Brown had caused furor while presenting a paper on slavery and Islam at the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). Thereby he noted the traditional Islamic doctrine expressed in Quran 33:21 that Islam’s prophet Muhammad is an “excellent pattern” of behavior. Therefore this example sanctified the slavery practiced by him and his companions, including sex slavery, a doctrine that had justified slavery throughout Islamic history.

Once public, such views completely negated Brown’s disclaimer at the presentation’s beginning. “I always make some hyperbolic statement that really makes sense in the context,” he noted, such that he would face accusations of “calling for slavery.” Given such concern over criticism, he expelled this author from the presentation before it started.

Brown’s elaboration of his views during his subsequent book tour has been hardly more reassuring, for slavery is “simply a fact of life in the Quran” and perhaps even “part of the DNA of Islam.” “Every area of Islamic law is permeated by slavery,” something that “sharia, without exception until the 20th-century, validated.” Muslim scholars have even speculated about a “time when the laws of slavery will actually be needed again,” such as in a post-apocalyptic Mad Max-like world, he has noted.

For centuries, “Muslims were neck-deep in the trade of slaves,” Brown has observed. As others have estimated, this trade included 17 million black Africans, more than the 12 million taken to the Western Hemisphere in the transatlantic slave trade. As the Ghanaian historian John Azumah has noted, while the transatlantic trade enslaved mostly men for labor, Muslim slavers favored seizing women for use as sex slave concubines.

In this regard, Brown has unsettlingly reprised his 2017 comments on sex slavery. Thus any norm that sex be consensual “is fairly unusual in world history.” This corresponds to Islamic doctrine’s proprietary understanding of female sexuality, which, he has noted, denies any recognition of rape in marriage.

Slavery in Islam is faith-based, Brown has explained. Under sharia the “only way that someone can lose their freedom is if they are a non-Muslim who lives outside the Muslim state and is then captured by Muslims.” Slavery therefore “is a reduction in legal status that is caused by unbelief,” whose “vestigial effect” can remain even for an enslaved convert to Islam or a child born into slavery.

Yet Brown has argued that Islam is “obsessed with emancipation.” Islamic doctrine’s numerous biases towards freeing slaves, such as a means to expiate sin, means that Islam “does not have an equal in any religious or philosophical tradition” from the premodern world. “The Quran and Sunna are unprecedently adamant about emancipation.”

However this emancipation should not help a slave return to unbelief in Islam. “Freedom is not the most important thing in Islamic law,” Brown has noted, although Muslim scholars have historically argued that “slavery is intrinsically harmful.” Rather, true freedom comes from submission to Islam, an “emancipatory force.” Seventh-century Arab Muslim conquerors, for example, before subjugating the Persians, announced that they would be free only as “slaves of God alone.”

Correspondingly, Brown has described Islamic civilization as a “vacuum cleaner, just sucking in people.” Muslim scholars have historically advocated enslavement of non-Muslims as a means of introducing them to Islam. Then “Muslims are always manumitting slaves, which means they need new slaves,” in an “emancipation turbine.”

Brown has correctly described how Christians led the revolutionary movement against a once universal acceptance of slavery to create the “abolitionist consensus that is held worldwide today.” “Muslims talking about the issue of slavery and abolition of slavery doesn’t happen until they encounter essentially Western abolitionism,” a development true of the Westerners themselves. In his assessment, Christians had in the process to “desacralize scripture” in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament with its numerous references to forms of servitude.

Jewish rabbis and scholars would beg to differ with Brown, for as McGill University Professor David Aberbach has written, “Judaism is intrinsically an abolitionist religion.” “In Jewish belief, every human life matters.” Contrary to superficial readings, Rabbi Dov Linzer has noted, the “Torah only accepts slavery as a deeply entrenched societal institution.”

The late Jewish sage Rabbi Jonathan Sacks delved into this deeper understanding of the Torah’s position of slavery. God’s intends “slavery is to be abolished, but it is a fundamental principle of God’s relationship with us that he does not force us to change faster than we are able to do so of our own free will.” Nonetheless, in the “Torah’s value system the exercise of power by one person over another, without their consent, is a fundamental assault against human dignity.”

This analysis requires that non-Jews such as Brown properly understand Jewish scripture. “Jews have always read the Torah through a rabbinic interpretive lens and not simply on the plain meaning of its words,” the website My Jewish Learning has observed. Thus Jews cannot “read every mitzvah as an ideal” that allows for no further development, Linzer has cautioned.

Accordingly, in various stipulations the “Torah indeed sees slavery as a problematic phenomenon,” Shmuel Rabinowitz, rabbi of Jerusalem’s Western Wall and holy sites has noted. “Although it sanctions the institution of slavery, biblical law begins the process toward abolition,” University of Waterloo Professor James A. Diamond has observed. “Rules limiting slavery challenged the way society was built and prompted Jews to question an institution perhaps so natural it was invisible,” Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner has confirmed.

The Torah’s restrictive regulation of slavery indeed manifested a Jewish “light to the Gentiles” in the ancient slave-holding world. As the Chabad-Lubavitch organization has noted:

At a time when Romans had literally thousands of slaves per citizen, even the wealthiest Jews held very modest numbers of servants. And those servants, the Talmud tells us, were treated better by their masters than foreign kings would treat their own subjects.

Particularly the Bible’s Exodus narrative of Jews escaping bondage in Egypt imprints upon Jewish consciousness emancipation’s value. Diamond has noted that the Passover “commemorates the exodus, anchoring the relationship between God and Israel as Liberator and slave.” As Sacks commented, “Jews were the people commanded never to forget the bitter taste of slavery so that they would never take freedom for granted.”

Tellingly, Brown has noted that Islamic tradition rejects the Torah’s narrative of a gracious God emancipating Jews in ancient Egypt and equates them with Muhammad’s early Muslim followers in pagan Mecca. “The Muslims in Mecca are like the Jews in Egypt, but they are not slaves, they are oppressed.” Thus the Israelite exodus “is not a story of emancipation, it’s a story of victory over oppression,” symbolizing Islam’s triumph.

The contrast between beliefs held by Muslims such as Brown and the Judeo-Christian tradition clearly indicates why Muslims have struggled to reject slavery. Confronted with this moral evil, Muslim reformers have argued that slavery is an artifact of jihadist doctrines inapplicable in modernity, or that rulers have discretionary power to prohibit human bondage. Nonetheless, Brown has recalled that jihadists going to Muslims’ defense during Bosnia’s 1990s sectarian carnage had asked Saudi clerics about taking slaves, only to hear warnings that this would create bad publicity.

These Islamic realities reflect Brown’s moral relativism. Although the Ottoman Empire’s slave trade “was undeniably brutal,” he has argued that slavery and other often onerous labor relations such as indentured servitude have widely varied across human history. Following therefore his dubious claim that slavery is not really objectively definable, any slavery-induced “disgust is a cultural construct” and “just custom; it’s just urf.” By analogy, he has noted that China’s brutal dog meat trade horrifies many non-Chinese, although increasing domestic opposition to dog meat consumption undermines his cultural relativism arguments.

Despite grappling with slavery’s moral problems for Islam’s legitimacy, Brown has failed to find a solution. In recent years Islamic State jihadists in their mercifully brief caliphate have “really caused a crisis for young Muslims” by piously invoking Islamic canons to justify the enslavement of Mesopotamia’s non-Muslims. But as the foregoing analysis has proven, he is wrong to claim in Islam’s tu quoque defense that slavery’s abolition “is not indigenous to any religion or any philosophy.”

Contrary to traditional Islamic understandings of an aloof, arbitrary Allah, the biblical God’s natural law ultimately revealed slavery’s injustice to Jews, Christians, and the wider world. Church historian John B. Carpenter has noted as much in the relationship of America’s famed escaped slave and 19th-century abolitionist Frederick Douglas to the Jew Jesus Christ:

Christianity’s commitment to freedom was so pronounced that Frederick Douglass, who decried the hypocrisy of slave-holding religion vividly, did not convert to Islam and become “Frederick X,” but professed, “I love the religion of our blessed Savior.”

While Brown’s exculpation for slavery in Islamic doctrine is unconvincing, he has nonetheless provided valuable insight into this previously “taboo subject.” As Azumah has written, a “critical approach is reserved for the Christian past but forbidden for the Muslim past.” However inadvertently and awkwardly, Brown has helped uncover Islam’s dark slavery legacy.

COLUMN BY

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

QUESTION: Who First Told You About Jesus?

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I first learned about Jesus from my mother and father.  It is important that everyone everywhere learn about Jesus. The question is who will tell them?

The group GlobalDisciples.org is working to tell all of the 2.6 billion people who don’t know about Jesus the truth about Him.

Watch Within Reach:

GlobalDisciples.org notes:

A Third of Our World has not yet heard the Good News of Jesus

We live in a time where many of those are within reach of a local church. Through our simple and effective strategy of training and coaching, believers share the Gospel in their own nations and cultures.

We understand it’s impossible to accomplish alone.

That’s why we partner with 1,600 groups of churches in 62 nations.

Learn more at GlobalDisciples.org about how to reach out to the world to tell them about the glory of Jesus.

ABOUT GLOBAL DISCIPLES

In November 1995, leaders from several discipleship and mission training programs met for a day of prayer and fasting. Drawn together by a common mission, each also shared a common desire: to respond to the need expressed by clusters of churches worldwide to provide discipleship-mission training for their own young people.

As the Holy Spirit moved, these leaders began to see that the barriers separating them and their ministries from each other had fostered competition and pride instead of collaboration. Through confession, brokenness and prayer, God birthed Global Disciples and the initial training model now known as Global Disciple Training (GDT). Since then, Global Disciples has added training for trainers in small business development (SBD) and leadership development (LEAD).

Today, Global Disciples has grown to serve in partnership with over 928 church organizations, fellowships, or denominations in 46 countries, providing training which enables them to equip and send out their own mission workers to multiply Christ-like believers and plant new, locally-sustainable fellowships and churches. The global nature of our ministry is also reflected in the 26 nationalities represented in our facilitators, trainers, and support staff.

As Global Disciples,

  • OUR VISION is to see every person have an opportunity to choose and follow Jesus Christ.
  • OUR PRAYER is that disciples of Jesus Christ, from many nations and vocations, will embrace this vision and do their part.
  • OUR MISSION is to make it possible for clusters of churches to multiply Christ-like disciples and locally-sustainable fellowships among least-reached people.
  • OUR CENTRAL FOCUS is to equip leaders selected by their churches to multiply Christ-like disciples, who multiply churches among least-reached people.
  • OUR PHILOSOPHY is that local expressions of the Body of Christ in close proximity to least-reached people are best able to reach them—and we all can help.

OUR CORE VALUES

  • Intimacy with Jesus. Who we are and what we do flows from our relationship with Christ.
  • Trusting Relationships. Building trust with our co-workers, partners, and donors is essential.
  • Risk-taking Obedience. Obeying Christ requires the courage to risk all for our God-given mission.
  • Unwavering Integrity. Being authentic, accountable, and truthful in our words and actions.
  • Serving with Humility. Modeling the way of Jesus is our goal, living selflessly for God’s glory.
  • Transforming by Prayer. We want our work to be conceived, birthed, and carried out in prayer.

OUR PLEDGE

I am a global disciple of Jesus.

My allegiance is to Jesus Christ. He is the Living Word of God, as revealed by the Holy Spirit and through the Bible.

I want to do my part so everyone has the opportunity to hear the Good News of Jesus and to choose if they will believe and follow Him.  My desire is to see each person experience the transforming love of Jesus, live in the fullness of the Spirit and enjoy God forever.

As a participant in a local expression of the global Body of Christ, I am united in heart and purpose with sisters and brothers of many nations, ethnic groups, languages and churches to glorify God and to make Him known.

I believe my part as a global disciple of Jesus Christ is to:

  • Pursue Intimacy with God as my Creator, Provider and Father, through Jesus my Savior, Lord and Friend.    
  • Love others as Jesus loves them, relating and serving as witnesses in word and deed, loving even enemies.
  • Pray diligently for people who do not yet know Christ, especially those unreached with the Good News.
  • Live generously as a steward of all God has entrusted to me, being an ambassador of our generous Master.     
  • Rely on the Holy Spirit and the Bible to lead, guide and empower me to live, love and serve for God’s glory.

©GlobalDisciples.org. All rights reserved.

Hamas-linked CAIR sues U.S. government, claiming terrorism watchlist is unconstitutional

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“They said many Americans experience such delays during travel, often at random.”

Yes, and often not at random: American Airlines, for one, is far more hostile to foes of jihad terror than to Sharia supremacists and advocates of Sharia-based oppression of women and others.

Anyway, this case has a good chance of succeeding given today’s political climate, but the Terrorism Screening Database is unlikely to be scrapped altogether; it will just be filled up with opponents of Biden’s handlers’ regime.

“Is the Terrorism Watchlist Legal? Appeals Court Hears Virginia Case,” Associated Press, January 27, 2021 (thanks to Henry):

FALLS CHURCH — On Tuesday, a panel of federal appellate judges expressed concerns about ordering wholesale changes to a government terrorism watchlist. A lower court previously found the list of roughly 1 million individuals was constitutionally flawed.

The 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond heard arguments Tuesday on the constitutionality of the watchlist, also known as the Terrorism Screening Database.

Government lawyers urged the judges not to intervene in the executive branch’s administration of the list and its national security judgments.

Fundamentally, they said the problems encountered by those on the list, like enhanced screening at airports and delays at border crossings, were too insignificant to merit intervention on constitutional grounds. They said many Americans experience such delays during travel, often at random.

‘Far From Insignificant’
Gadeir Abbas, a lawyer with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which brought the suit on behalf of roughly two dozen Muslim clients, said the burden faced by those on the list is far from insignificant. He cited accounts from plaintiffs of being shackled and having guns pointed at them in front of their children at border crossings when agents encountered their names in the database.

“They are not just inconveniences,” Abbas said.

But J. Harvie Wilkinson, one of three judges who heard the case, said that while some plaintiffs experienced significant issues, others experienced only minor problems. He suggested it might be better for individual plaintiffs to file suits based on their own experiences, rather than just attacking the watchlist as a whole.

He also questioned whether the judiciary branch was able or qualified to require revisions to a program that the government insists is vital to national security….

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

VIDEO: Vatican Fails to Override Bishop’s Biden Statement — Prelates say Biden’s policies advance ‘moral evils’

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“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” – Nelson Mandela

The Biden administration supports codifying abortion on demand into federal law.

VATICAN CITY (ChurchMilitant.com) –  The Vatican was unsuccessful in softening the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB’s) statement that spotlights heretical positions of self-identifying Catholic Joe Biden.

Interference from two pro-LGBT American cardinals, Joseph Tobin of Newark and Blase Cupich of Chicago, triggered the Holy See to attempt changes to the USCCB’s statement penned by its president, Abp. José Gomez of Los Angeles.

The involvement coming from outside the USCCB was reported by three sources close to the USCCB, according to The Pillar, an outlet covering Catholic news. In addition to Tobin and Cupich, the sources added other unnamed bishops were involved in the meddling.

Slated for release at 9 a.m. Wednesday morning, the statement clarified points of contradiction between perennial Catholic teaching and some of Biden’s policies. Though the Vatican succeeded in delaying the timing, the statement remained intact and has been published on the USCCB website.

Sources revealed the statement was debated on Tuesday evening, with various bishops objecting it was overly critical of the incoming administration. But it was the Vatican that ultimately caused the delay of its release.

Our new president has pledged to pursue certain policies that would advance moral evils and threaten human life and dignity.Tweet

The “USCCB Statement on the Inauguration of Joseph R. Biden” states:

[A]s pastors, the nation’s bishops are given the duty of proclaiming the gospel in all its truth and power, in season and out of season, even when that teaching is inconvenient or when the gospel’s truths run contrary to the directions of the wider society and culture. So, I must point out that our new president has pledged to pursue certain policies that would advance moral evils and threaten human life and dignity, most seriously in the areas of abortion, contraception, marriage and gender. Of deep concern is the liberty of the Church and the freedom of believers to live according to their consciences.

Gomez’s statement also addresses abortion:

We have deep concerns about many threats to human life and dignity in our society. But as Pope Francis teaches, we cannot stay silent when nearly a million unborn lives are being cast aside in our country year after year through abortion.

Abortion is a direct attack on life that also wounds the woman and undermines the family. It is not only a private matter, it raises troubling and fundamental questions of fraternity, solidarity and inclusion in the human community. It is also a matter of social justice. We cannot ignore the reality that abortion rates are much higher among the poor and minorities and that the procedure is regularly used to eliminate children who would be born with disabilities.

Gomez Does ‘Not Go Far Enough’

Under condition of anonymity, one priest told Church Militant this Vatican intervention is unsurprising.

“The Vatican has been compromised for decades,” he said. “They’re allied with the worst elements in the USA.”

Asked if he thinks Pope Francis is supportive of Biden and wanted him to be president, Father answered, “Of course. They’re all of the same globalist ilk.”

Both of these cardinals should be down on their knees praying that this scourge against the unborn in our nation is brought to an end.Tweet

Another priest, who also asked to remain anonymous in comments to Church Militant, said:

At this point in time the United States is near to having aborted 70 million babies, and frankly, Abp. Gomez’s statement does not go far enough to address Biden’s and the Democrats’ unflagging support of this grave evil. At this moment in our history as a nation, the number of dead by abortion exceeds every and all of the wars ever fought.

As to the two American cardinals involved, Father said, “Cdls. Cupich and Tobin are concerned about ruffling the Biden administrations’ feathers! What rot! Both of these cardinals should be down on their knees praying that this scourge against the unborn in our nation is brought to an end and not concerned about kissing up to the new administration.”

He explained the interest in playing nice with the Biden administration is financial.

“As a priest, I am all in for cutting off all federal funding to so-called Catholic charities,” Father said. “U.S. taxpayers paying for so-called social programs is not a good thing for the country when the funds go towards subverting and circumventing the gospel.”

COLUMN BY

William Mahoney, Ph.D.

©ChurchMilitant.com. All rights reserved.