Trump announces ‘historic peace agreement’ between Israel and the United Arab Emirates

This is indeed historic, and shows a weakening of the lockstep and Islam-based hatred of Israel that has dominated the Arab and Muslim states’ response to the Jewish state up to now, with very few exceptions. Netanyahu and the Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan thank Trump for his “dedication to peace in the region” and “the pragmatic and unique approach he has taken to achieve it.”

The key word there is “pragmatic.” The jihad against Israel remains as a theoretical religious obligation, but Trump has apparently compelled the UAE to understand that to maintain hostility to Israel in light of today’s political realities is imprudent. He deserves congratulations and gratitude for achieving, at least in part, what a succession of Presidents has tried and failed to achieve.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1293922936609546240?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1293922936609546240%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jihadwatch.org%2F2020%2F08%2Ftrump-announces-historic-peace-agreement-between-israel-and-the-united-arab-emirates

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1293922803419353088?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1293922803419353088%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jihadwatch.org%2F2020%2F08%2Ftrump-announces-historic-peace-agreement-between-israel-and-the-united-arab-emirates

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

Here’s Why Sen. Kamala Harris Held Up An Attempt To Rescue A Struggling Catholic Hospital

  • A California judge granted Sen. Kamala Harris qualified immunity in 2017 after a healthcare company sued her for allegedly holding up its acquisition of a financially struggling hospital network. Qualified immunity is a legal doctrine shielding public officials from liability if they violate citizens’ rights. 
  • The lawsuit came years before Harris introduced a resolution in June alongside other Senate Democrats to eliminate the legal protection from law enforcement officers. 
  • Former Vice-President Joe Biden selected Harris as his running mate as he prepares for a bruising general election fight with President Donald Trump. 

A judge once gave Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris qualified immunity after a healthcare company sued the former California attorney general for allegedly blocking the company’s attempt to purchase a financially struggling Catholic hospital.

Prime Healthcare Services sued Harris for supposedly imposing strict conditions on the sale of the Daughters of Charity Health System in exchange for millions of dollars in contributions.

Prime scuttled the deal and claimed in the 2015 lawsuit that executives at Daughters told the company that Harris would block the sale if Prime did not agree to unionize Daughter’s network of six hospitals. The lawsuit alleges Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW) in return promised to support Harris with $25 million in contributions.

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board reported on the lawsuit in a post Wednesday, noting also that Judge Gonzalo Curiel in San Diego rejected Prime’s claim in 2017 and gave her qualified immunity.

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden selected Harris as his running mate Tuesday as he prepares for what will likely be an intense general election.

Qualified immunity is a legal doctrine that shields public officials from liability for violating citizen’s constitutional liberties. Harris, a former California prosecutor, introduced a Senate resolution in June alongside Sens. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Cory Booker of New Jersey to eliminate qualified immunity for law enforcement officers.

Their bill came amid protests following the death of George Floyd, a black man who died in May after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for several minutes, video of the incident shows.

Harris “abused her constitutional authority by placing her need for political financial support over the health-care needs of the people,” Troy Schell, general counsel for Prime, said in a 2015 statement. Prime alleged that Harris effectively “forced the company to withdraw its offer for the DCHS hospitals, jeopardizing health care in these underserved communities.”

Daughter’s board of directors selected Prime to take over the hospitals in 2014, HealthCare Finance reported in 2015. Prime’s $843 million offer far exceeded all other proposals and allowed Daughters Charity’s healthcare mission to continue. The deal also would have protected the unfunded pensions of the hospital network’s then-17,000 staff, according to HealthCare’s report.

Harris imposed several “poison pills” to the deal, The WSJ Editorial Board noted in the Wednesday report. These included a condition forcing Prime to continue hospital operations unchanged for 10 years — the “requirement that would have made it impossible to save the hospitals,” according to Prime’s lawsuit.

Harris, who at the time was responsible for approving such acquisitions, also required Prime to maintain 24-hour nursing at the hospital, as well as surgery, anesthesia, laboratory, radiology and pharmacies for five years. In addition, she mandated that hospitals offer 12 to 18 services such as orthopedics for 10 years. “These conditions were unprecedented,” The WSJ Editorial Board noted.

Integrity Healthcare took over the hospitals in July 2015 before going bankrupt in 2018 due in part to the expense of managing the network, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2018. Verity Health, which is managed by Integrity, had more than $1 billion of debt from bonds and unfunded pension liabilities as a result of taking on Daughters.

Santa Clara County, California bought two of the six hospitals in 2019, according to Mercury News. Prime Healthcare purchased another hospital in April, with California hospital operator AHMC Healthcare buying the remaining two in March, media reports show. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, Harris’s successor, approved both the AHMC and Prime deals in July.

Harris has not responded to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment about the lawsuit and Prime’s claims.

COLUMN BY

CHRIS WHITE

Tech reporter.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

VIDEOS: Biden’s VP Pick Targeted Pro-Lifers, Covered Up Sex Abuse

WASHINGTON (ChurchMilitant.com) – Joe Biden’s running mate has a history of targeting Catholics and pro-lifers.

Senator Kamala Harris is Biden’s vice-presidential candidate, the Biden campaign announced Tuesday.

Previously, Harris ran against Biden in the primaries, until she dropped out of the race Dec. 3.

Harris, much like “fake Catholic” Biden, supports abortion and same-sex “marriage.”

When she was California’s attorney general (2011–2017), Harris helped prosecute David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), whose undercover videos exposed the abortion industry’s practice of selling aborted babies’ body parts.

Daleiden has undergone years of legal battle since releasing the undercover videos in 2015.

In May, Daleiden filed suit against Harris and Planned Parenthood, alleging Harris was part of an effort to target CMP for political reasons.

The lawsuit stated, “This complaint seeks justice for a brazen, unprecedented and ongoing conspiracy to selectively use California’s video recording laws as a political weapon to silence disfavored speech.”

Kristan Hawkins, president of pro-life group Students for Life of America, commented on Harris’ nomination, “She wants to force all private insurances and employers to cover abortion and contraception, even over people’s moral objections, such as the nuns in the Little Sisters of the Poor, who twice had to fight for their conscience rights before the Supreme Court.”

Hawkins also stated, “As a California attorney general who took campaign funds from Planned Parenthood, Sen. Harris arranged for an armed raid on the home of pro-life journalist David Daleiden, who had dared to document the abortion Goliath’s illegal trafficking of aborted infants.”

Abuse victim Joey Piscitelli says Harris ‘did nothing’ as the district attorney of San Francisco after he wrote to her about his molestation at the hands of a local priest.  Tweet

In addition to bias against pro-lifers, Sen. Harris has also been accused of bias against faithful Catholics.

She grilled a judicial nominee in December 2018 for his involvement in the Knights of Columbus — a Catholic men’s fraternal group.

In questions submitted to Brian Buescher for his judicial nomination, Harris called the Knights of Columbus “an all-male society,” slamming the organization for maintaining Catholic teachings on the definition of marriage and the sanctity of human life.

Throughout her political career, Harris has touted her record of prosecuting sex crimes in San Francisco, where she was district attorney (DA) in 2003–2011.

But victims of Catholic clerical sex abuse say Harris neglected to follow through with their abuse allegations, despite an abundance of evidence gathered by the previous DA, Terence Hallinan.

Abuse victim Joey Piscitelli, for example, says Harris “did nothing” as the district attorney of San Francisco after he wrote to her about his molestation at the hands of a local priest.

Five years later, Piscitelli wrote to Harris, again urging her to assist alleged sexual assault victims by releasing records of their abuse lawsuits that had been compiled by Hallinan.

But Harris again failed to respond. Her refusal to release the records was seen as significant, as Hallinan’s team was gathering evidence as part of a wider investigation into clerical sex abuse. His inquiry lapsed when Harris became the new DA.

In June 2019, the Intercept released a graphic video detailing Harris’ dubious record on clerical sex abuse.

In a 2010 letter to then-DA Harris, one abuse victim stated:

Don’t you feel a sense of responsibility?

Many members of the press have asked you to release the documents and the names, and you refuse. We all know you are not refusing to list the names and documents because you are protecting children. We all know you can redact the names of the children from the documents. What is vital is that you help to make those names of child sex offenders transparent, because Bp. [Hugh] Niederauer of San Francisco, and Cdl. [William] Levada, certainly are not being transparent.

While Harris is accused of dropping the ball on clerical sex abuse, she has also been accused of being overly rigorous about prosecuting marijuana offenses.

In the Democratic primary debates, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard said of Harris, “She put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana.”

This was referencing an interview Harris had given to a hip-hop radio show, where she seemingly claimed to smoke marijuana in her college years while listening to Tupac and Snoop Dogg — even though Harris graduated college in 1986, years before either of those rappers released any albums.

According to government records, Harris oversaw about 1,900 marijuana convictions in San Francisco — but those defending Harris point out few of those convicted were put in prison.

In an opinion piece, CNN political commentator David Axelrod called Harris “the ‘do no harm’ candidate, unlikely to thrill or outrage many.”

Axelrod, formerly a campaign strategist for President Barack Obama, went on to write, “She may not seem the most comfortable fit as a governing partner, a quality Biden said he was seeking, but Harris was viewed as the safest pick to win in November.”

COLUMN BY

David Nussman

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

VIDEO: The Vortex — Civil War! Getting Closer and Closer!

TRANSCRIPT

An increasing number of Americans believe the likelihood of a civil war is growing. Over the past two years, the number saying they think a civil is anywhere from possible to likely has increased to 31%, with 40% of Republicans agreeing.

There is no doubt there is a massive polarization in the country, and it’s not going away, regardless of who wins the election. That’s why so many are now starting to look beyond the election and are speculating on what a civil war would look like.

Unlike the first one, where there was a clear geographical divide (i.e., the North and the South), this time, not so much. In ’16, Trump won 30 states; Hillary won 20. But within the states that each candidate won, there were still sizable numbers of people who voted for the loser. So a lot of Hillary supporters live in Trump states, and a lot of Trump supporters live in Hillary states.

So looking at some kind of armed conflict based strictly on geography is more than a little murky. The United States of America are, straight up, no longer united in the most meaningful ways — philosophically and politically. Trump states and Hillary states simply hold two vastly different worldviews, and they vote accordingly.

The problem for the Trump states is that every time they try to enact their worldview about, say, abortion, the courts step in and kill it. This is because of one simple reason: The Marxists quietly seized the courts decades ago and have enshrined child slaughter and, now, sodomy-marriage (as well as a host of other evils) in law.

But enormous numbers of Americans — huge swaths of the population — vehemently disagree with these rulings, as well as many others, and do not want to live under these dictates from judges. They do not want their children indoctrinated with Marxist ideology in government schools; they do not want them to be taught homosexuality is normal, that killing the pre-born is right, that their tax dollars can be exploited by criminal career politicians and so forth.

Trump captured 46% of the national vote to Hillary’s 48% — neither obtained a majority. And the final count is so close that many are wondering how the Marxist ideology is advancing across the country so fast (as if they had won some kind of massive majority). So a discussion is arising — and it bears some deep thought — about the United States splitting up, the red states forming their own nation, and the blue states their own.

Balkanization it’s called, referring to the Balkans (countries of southeastern Europe) being split up. And this is just one possibility on the table because, whatever happens, the current situation is unsustainable. The Left has control of every institution in the country. The control is firm. So it is hardly surprising that the question of how to secure safety, peace and morality for families has arisen.

That’s why a meaningful number of voters are looking down the road and worrying about civil war. In some ways, the preparatory work for this is already starting: Political conservatives are now taking a long, hard look at the long-term benefit of remaining in and raising a family in a blue state — especially a deep blue state, where even though they are a sizable minority, they are beaten down every time.

So why stay? Some have already begun the migration process, in fact. But as long as the federal government institutions — especially the courts — retain their current stranglehold, exactly how much freedom will such political migrants have once they land in their new red state?

The answer: Not much, because the Marxist Left continues to use the federal courts and the media to defeat anything that political conservatives wish to do. If we shift this same paradigm to the Church, the same phenomenon is happening. Theological migrants, sick to death of the homoclergy crowd threatening the souls of their families, are also on the move.

They are deserting Church of Nice parishes, more and more reverting to homeschooling and swelling the pews of parishes and oratories with reverent (mostly Latin) Masses. Some drive hours every Sunday to such Masses, blowing right past Church of Nice parishes — parishes that cram social-justice, pro-gay, illegal-immigration, fake-climate-change messaging down people’s throats.

They’ve had it. And they are doing what they can in the immediate moment to escape. And for the record, the political division present in the country, the wildly opposing worldviews — one expressing belief in God, the other material atheism — were set loose on the nation by the Marxist invasion of the Catholic clergy, which cleared the way for the Church to give up the social battle, the culture war.

Looking down the road (and perhaps not that far), it seems inevitable that a mass migration will take place within the United States. Hopefully, it won’t be violent, but that possibility is absolutely not off the table because things have gotten that bad. The red-state crowd will fill up their states with like-minded citizens and separate from the blue-state crowd. America was always only a great social experiment anyway, and so now we face the reality, or at least possibility, that the experiment failed.

The evil-minded, anti-God crowd first used the system and then usurped the system and now is a few short steps away from full tyrannical control. If you are a politically conservative type, you will be considered an enemy of the State and there will be retribution.

That’s already here to a degree.  How many people have lost their jobs because of their views? How many have been censored or de-platformed by “tech giants” for their views? No crimes have been committed, just views expressed — but that’s enough. So before it gets too impossible to recover from, the red state nation seems like a possibility on the table, which is why some are wondering about it.

These folks would have to get together and compose their own constitution — one that sews up the loopholes in the original one that the Marxists have been able to exploit. This constitution would define family correctly, forbid abortion expressly, bring an end to any and all government schools, reject any commercial enterprise from operating within the borders that promoted pornography, contraception, active homosexuality and so forth.

Your political ideology would absolutely matter. Liberals and Marxists would be arrested and imprisoned, just as conservatives would be in “Blue Nation” (as we already see with some pro-lifers). Marxists already caused the collapse of one civilization. This one, the theory goes, would be formed to prevent that from ever happening again.

Kids would be safe, not exploited and brainwashed. In short, a nation built on morality where the family is the central focus — Western civilization reborn. And in the blue-state hell that would remain, it would take less than a generation for the entire rotten mess to disintegrate. America’s big cities today are little less than giant cesspools supported by federal tax dollars robbed from the hardworking middle class. Let them rot.

They use concentrated power to overwhelm simple people wanting to earn a living for their families and not deal with drug addiction, skyrocketing teen pregnancy and all those evils. And how would the Church fare in these two new nations? In Red America, there would be no more loopholes for wicked bishops to hide their dastardly deeds. They would be subject to the same levels of financial transparency as any other enterprise.

No more hiding behind the phony separation of Church and State for anything — child rape, cover-up, misdirecting hundreds of millions (or even billions of dollars) from their intended use. In Blue America, since it would be completely run by anti-God Marxists, they wouldn’t last long, as every civilization which rejects God and natural law is doomed.

Bishops’ property would be confiscated, and they would be imprisoned — or at least the handful who would not have converted to the communist side, which some have already done, as we know. Two official Americas would actually be more honest because it’s what we currently have now, in practice, and the one is ripping the other to shreds.

The truth is, we are already living in something of this construct now, depending on where you are. So why not just formalize it, the thinking goes. Make the break, and then sit back and see which side prospers. Who will prevail? The side that has children or the side that kills them? The country that fosters racism and violence or the country that has no need of that? The country that secures one vote for each citizen or the country that fundamentally perverts the electoral process? The nation that forbids Marxist propaganda from filling its airwaves or the nation that feasts on it? The side that values police and law enforcement or the side that attacks it?

Of course, there are a billion details that would have to be worked out: There always are when you are building a nation, but that doesn’t mean the nation shouldn’t be built. If the details of all this prove too insurmountable, then on to some other approach, the thinking goes. But this is what the Founders did in 1776 (and even said so in the first words of the Declaration of Independence):

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

For clarity, this is not an official position of Church Militant, but that these sorts of things are even coming up in discussions suggests that we have reached a whole new precipice in America. If something like this were to happen, what North America would look like moving forward would be America 2.0 (just buttoned up and more the wiser) and the Soviet Union 2.0.

The Church would thrive in one and be destroyed in the other. But the current situation is reaching the point of no longer being sustainable.

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

The Democrats’ abandonment of the Jews

In 1984, David S. Wyman, a professor of history at Amherst College, published The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941–1945, in which he documented the degree to which leftist icons like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt were presented with irrefutable evidence of Jewish genocide and did nothing to stop the mass murder of six-million Jews in Hitler’s Europe.

Jewish leaders who were given an “audience” with FDR implored him, beseeched him to intervene in this unprecedented annihilation, and showed him graphic evidence of:

  • Jews being herded into asphyxiating cattle cars on their way to concentration camps,
  • Jewish infants and children being ripped from the arms of their parents,
  • Jews clawing at the walls of gas chambers until their last-gasp deaths.

But FDR did nothing! If there is blood on the hands of any politician in the last thousand years, it is on the hands of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

And yet, leftist American Jews––to this day––celebrate his presidency.

Now we know why, thanks to a few honest historians, among them Rafael Medoff, who wrote The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust and The Deafening Silence: American Jewish Leaders and the Holocaust, and Lucy Dawidowicz, who wrote The War Against the Jews: 1933-1945.

Why? Because to leftists like FDR and his toadying adherents, nothing on earth took precedence over actualizing their political agenda, which was––and remains to this day––total government control over the immensely stupid masses, the deplorables, the people who don’t understand the imperative of handing over their destinies to the Regressive powers-that-be.

Many of the Jews who survived the Holocaust and ended up in America had already been physically, mentally, and emotionally destroyed and wanted desperately to be in the good graces of anyone who promised to protect them––a sentiment that savvy leftist politicians like FDR were quick to exploit.

Aiding and abetting Roosevelt––and every Democrat regime to this day––were the left-wing media, the same media that covered for the socialist phony FDR, concealed his racism, and camouflaged his anti-Semitism.

Today these media whores are doing the exact same thing in covering for the Obama-Biden regime that we now know are mobilizing their virulently anti-Semitic minions––including the Jew haters in Black Lives Matter and Antifa––to demonize Jews and Israel relentlessly and ruthlessly every day in every way.

A BRIEF RESPITE

After the Holocaust, American Jews still suffered from the vicious quotas imposed on them by major universities like Harvard and Yale and many other institutions of “higher” learning. Also by medical schools that wouldn’t accept them and law firms that wouldn’t hire them––the reason why so many major medical institutions and powerful law practices in America were established by Jews. But for the most part, florid anti-Semitism went underground because the growing awareness of Hitler’s genocide silenced even the most fanatical Jew haters.

Even though Jews had arrived on America’s shores centuries ago–– since colonial times––and loved and embraced the freedom that America promised and contributed mightily to the betterment of our country, the metastatic virus of Jew Hatred followed them.

In response, Jewish community leaders established organizations to combat the hatred, to provide crucial and illuminating information to the uninformed, and to support political figures who enacted legislation against Jew haters and other racists.

HELP IS ON THE WAY

Jewish advocacy organizations functioned with tremendous efficacy, many for over a century, before they were contaminated and compromised––starting in the 1960s––by leftist Jews who replaced Judaism with their new-found religion of “social justice.”

Today, most of those once-powerful organizations are wholly-owned and controlled by leftist billionaires with a fetish for multiculturalism––the notion that Jews who build symphonies and medical centers in Israel are equal to “Palestinians” who strap homicide bombs onto their three-year-olds.

They also subscribe to political correctness––the idea that organized anti-Semitic groups on college campuses throughout our country can express their hatred for Jews and Israel at will under the rubric of Free Speech, but that Jewish students who protest these assaults can be physically and verbally attacked with total impunity because of cowardly college presidents who are either anti-Semites themselves or have been handsomely paid off by leftist moneybags or Arab money.

A particularly egregious case is that of college student Louis Shenker––chillingly documented by writer Victor Rosenthal––whose time spent at UMass made him the triple victim of the hate-conservatives/hate-Jews/hate-Trump students and its faculty, who relentlessly harassed, tortured and expelled him on false grounds. Shenker’s lawyers are now asking for $27 million in penalties for the school’s violence against him.

FAKE ADVOCATES

Dozens of Jewish organizations have prostituted themselves by throwing their lot into the leftist realm, foolishly believing, against a 5,000-year history, that they––and not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob––will prevail in determining the future of Judaism. Because of space limitations, I can only mention a few.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), founded in 1913, aggressively and successfully fulfilled its mission to “stop the defamation of the Jewish people” until 102 years after its founding, when in 2015, Jonathan Greenblatt became the ADL’s national director and CEO. Greenblatt worked for three far-left regimes antagonistic to Israel—the Clinton administration, the Obama fiasco, and the George Soros-funded far-left Aspen Institute. Now Mr. Greenblatt sounds deranged when he states that “only a small number” of the Black Lives Matter anarchy group don’t like Jews, when he knows full well that it is one of the most rabidly Jew- and Israel-loathing groups in the world!

According to Rabbi Aryeh Spero, president of the Conference of Jewish Affairs title, “…the ADL has made its focus the destruction of political conservatism and President Trump. Worse, under Mr. Greenblatt, it has betrayed its original mission of fighting anti-Semites by forging a new partnership with one of America’s most notorious anti-Semites, Al Sharpton…. he has made the ADL a defamation.”

The ADL is not worth ten cents of any sane Jew’s contribution.

The Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations (CoP), founded in 1956, was, as writer Jonathan S. Tobin thoroughly documents, “the central address for American-Jewish political interests.” But today, many of its 53 member groups are neither “major” nor “influential—let alone representative of American Jewry,” Tobin says.

In fact, in 2020, the CoP elected Dianne Lob, the former head of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), a Jewish group whose purpose was to facilitate absorption of immigrants and refugees, but whose mission today is to help refugees from Muslim and other countries. According to the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), Ms. Lob has also “collaborated with anti-Israel organizations like J Street and IfNotNow and supported noted anti-Semite Linda Sarsour.”

The CoP is not worth ten cents of any sane Jew’s contribution.

AIPAC (The American Israel Public Affairs Committee) was founded in 1951 to promote the alliance between the United States and Israel to the Senate and House of Representatives––the U.S. Congress.

For decades, AIPAC sponsored conferences in Washington, D.C., featuring prominent pro-Israel American politicians and other luminaries. I personally attended a couple of these conferences and was immensely encouraged by AIPAC’s unwavering support for always-besieged Israel.

That ended the day I saw with my own eyes all the bigwigs at AIPAC give a standing ovation to the Oval Office occupant Barack Obama––who loathed Israel, spat in the face of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and gave Israel’s mortal enemy Iran over a billion dollars in cash to make the nukes they promised every day––to this very day––would destroy Israel forever.

AIPAC is not worth ten cents of any sane Jew’s contribution.

THE DEMOCRAT PARTY OF JEW HATE

Today, less than three months from a presidential election, the Democrat Party––long hailed as a stalwart friend of Israel and the Jewish people––has gone full-bore anti-Semitic.

All Congressional Democrats take their marching orders from Senate Minority Speaker Chuck Schumer and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who has done the following:

  • Thrown her full support behind “the squad” of outspoken Jew haters Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Rep Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex (D-NY), et al.
  • Funneled $14,000 to Ilhan Omar’s campaign as well as endorsed both Omar and Tlaib against moderates running against them.
  • Had not one word of objection when Ocasio-Cortez, the leader of the anti-Israel campaign, threatened to cut off military aid to Israel.

As writers Jeff Ballabon and Bruce Abramson describe in repulsive detail, in “The Democrats Declare a Jew Ban,” Biden’s 2020 presidential platform treats “Jews and Israel as pariahs, uniquely worthy of discriminatory treatment. It makes a mockery of Israel as a sovereign state and an American ally. It directly aligns the Biden campaign—and the entire Party—with Israel’s mortal enemies.”

The writers continue: “Outgoing Secretary of State Kerry announced that when Democrats were back in power they would punish Israel for its stubborn refusal to be bullied into suicidal positions ‘for the sake of peace.’ Biden’s platform delivers on that threat.”

JEWISH POLITICAL STUPIDITY EXPLAINED

In a tour-de-force article in which she lists dozens of anti-Semitic actions taken by Democrat Party elected officials and supporters, writer Valerie Sobel spells out why a “resounding 72-74% majority of the 5.4-million American Jews have backed the Party since the sun has risen in the East.”

“We get it,” Sobel elaborates, “you’re for minority rights because you will forever identify as a minority. You’re forever for JFK even though his brand of liberalism is long gone and has actually morphed into modern conservatism. You’re forever for FDR, even though it was the Republican Ronald Reagan who delivered approximately 3,000,000 Soviet Jews from bondage of anti-Semitic leftist oppression. The Democratic Party of the 1950s was the party of the underdog, and you’re forever the underdog, in your mind….”

Alluding to the upcoming vote in November, Sobel says that it’s not the 1950s anymore, and “after the devastating failure of your Party to stand with Jews unequivocally against the rabid Nazi-era anti-Semitism of Democrat Congresswoman [Ilhan] Omar, you stand in the final hour of a critical decision, depleted of all excuses for your political loyalty. And you know it.”

Yoo Hoo, Jewish Democrats, it is long overdue for you to wake up and smell the now-contaminated coffee. A vote for Joe Biden is a full-on endorsement of the poisonous Jew hatred that has commandeered the Democrat Party and told you––meaning all Jews, including left-wingers––that they hate you personally and they hate Israel so much that they share the identical mission of the mullahs in Iran to literally exterminate the only Jewish state in existence.

Your choice.

© Joan Swirsky

The Politics of Heaven and Hell

Robert Royal: Heaven is in Heaven and the New Jerusalem cannot be brought to Earth by our efforts; only God will bring perfect justice at the Second Coming.


Shortly after I arrived in Washington years ago, I reviewed a book with the same title as this column. A friend warned about reviewing books by that particular author – our late lamented colleague James V. Schall, S.J. – because if you start, he said, you won’t have time for anything else. And that was before the supernova of titles that Schall the Great turned out in his seventies, eighties, and even nineties.

Ignatius Press is republishing The Politics of Heaven and Hell this fall with an introduction by another incisive and prolific writer, Robert Reilly. A good thing, too, because in our current chaos, when it seems almost impossible to get sure footing about anything, this relatively neglected volume not only uncovers sure foundations. It explains the ways by which we’ve mixed up eternal and temporal things – and put the times out of joint.

Schall’s central insight is that our central traditions of both faith and reason agree that politics is an important, but circumscribed realm. If we were the highest beings, politics would be the highest science, said Aristotle. That wise pagan – Dante calls him “the master of those who know” – knew that we are not the highest beings. There’s God, for starters, and His Creation, to which we owe deference. Ignore them, and the inevitable result is chaos, suffering, servitude, tyranny, and death.

The ancient Hebrews learned this well before Aristotle. Schall notes how little attention political theorists pay to the Old Testament, the history of a small and obscure nation – Israel – that survived, improbably, down to our own time, with incalculable influence on the history of the whole world. It did so not because of any special policies or virtues: Jewish history is a record of graces given and refused, of return and consequent flourishing, of many rounds of ignoring God, decline, and renewal through Him.

The overall lesson: nations are great not because they accumulate power or wealth. Power and wealth come and go. And aren’t all they seem anyway. Nations are made great, however insignificant they may be in earthly terms, because God makes them so and they conform themselves to God.

Christianity, of course, limited politics in a special way, beginning with Jesus’ famous distinction between the things that are Caesar’s – the arrangements necessary to human flourishing (even, sadly, taxes) – and the things that are God’s. Those few words had immense, cascading effects in the Christian tradition.

And not only in thinkers like Augustine, Aquinas, Suárez, Bellarmine, etc. Countries historically touched by Christianity still mostly protect beliefs about ultimate things from control by politics – indeed, believe that right can and should challenge might. That separation is absent from Muslim societies, ideological regimes like China, or traditional societies where the ruler is regarded as a kind of mortal god.

But it’s not only on high intellectual or social planes that these truths prove themselves. As we’ve seen only too clearly in modern times, when politics becomes the “highest science” men become not philosopher kings, but beasts. The totalizing political systems of Communism, Nazism, and Fascism were killing machines on an unprecedented scale.

And recent decades have given birth to what the Polish philosopher Ryszard Legutko calls the “demon in democracy,” a new totalitarian temptation wherein everything is defined by political ideology. We worry over “polarization,” but there’s a deep geological fault in our politics, far more radical than that. The absence of religion in the public square, with its moderating effects, is a large factor in this development, since once the true God departs the false god of the state arrives.

Even good public impulses then become poisonous – and unlimited. For example, we’ve just seen what can happen when a proper effort to right racism, a historic wrong, is made the measure of everything. Everything becomes “racist” that is not explicitly “anti-racist” – according to someone’s definition, which may differ from someone else’s. Not surprisingly, demands for absolute political justice then turn into “canceling” and anathematizing people who show the slightest deviation from an ideological line – i.e., injustice.

Historic racial inequities need to be fixed, but does injustice only involve race – with occasional bows to gender and class? Andrew Sullivan, a brilliant writer, recently resigned from New York magazine because it couldn’t bear his criticism of “cancel culture,” despite his being gay and liberal on some issues, conservative on others (and somehow also aspiring to be Catholic).

He pointed out that it’s places like the New York Times that really don’t understand a just “diversity.” The Times seems poised to cave in to employee demands that staff reflect the racial makeup of New York City: 24 percent black and more than half “people of color.” And there must be “sensitivity training” – i.e., ideological indoctrination – for everyone.

Sullivan notes that there are other underrepresented groups at the Times. Only 37 percent of New Yorkers, for example, are college graduates – who are overrepresented in the newsroom – as are Asians and Jews. Should some of them resign?  If you wanted fairer proportions of New Yorkers, 10 percent of staff would have to be Republicans, 6 percent Hasidic Jews, and 33 percent Catholic.

It may be a long wait for that because ideologues only care about certain “facts” and rarely have a sense of irony – or humor.

Which takes us back to the politics of Heaven and Hell. Heaven is in Heaven and the New Jerusalem cannot be brought to Earth by our efforts; only God will bring perfect justice at the Second Coming. The road to human hells, however, always lies wide open.

The larger perspective that religion affords us – including elements like human imperfection, sin, forgiveness, tolerance, the limits of earthly politics – does not mean that we need to be any less passionate in pursuing justice and fairness. But it does mean we have to be vigilant and measured about our own motives and the results of our actions. We have on good authority: “Therefore take heed that the light which is in you is not darkness.” (Lk. 11:3)

Robert Royal

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

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

Twitter censors video supporting Ayodhya Hindu temple, allows photo from Islamic protest against Hindu shrine

Twitter is evil, in support of the jihad force and in support of the Marxist destroyers who are trying to sow chaos and foment revolution in the U.S. today. No one should be fooled into thinking it is a neutral platform. But what is mystifying is that so few people seem to care that half of the American body politic is being deprived of an opportunity to enunciate and defend its views on the primary means of social communication today. Anything that one does not value can be easily lost, and among those things in the U.S. now is the freedom of speech.

“Twitter censors Ram temple tweet, but allows Muslim protest tweet,” WebIndia123, August 6, 2020 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

Twitter has censored a video showing a display of Lord Ram and the temple being built in Ayodhya as “potentially sensitive content”, while allowing without any caution a photo from a protest against Hindu shrine by an Islamic group with offensive slogans.

Jagdish Sewhani, the chairman of the Ram Janma Bhoomi Shilanyas Celebrations Committee of USA tweeted a nine-second video of a display in New York’s Times Square.

“I was so proud to see our Ram Mandir and Ramji in Times Square today. Let’s celebrate this once in a lifetime event tonight at 7.30 p.m.,” he said in a following tweet.

Twitter blanked out the video with the message: “The following media includes potentially sensitive content.”

The video display on Times Square had been turned off after being shown for a few hours on Wednesday morning following protests from Islamic groups and others.

However, Twitter allowed without any cautionary statement a tweet from the Indian American Muslim Council showing their protest in Times Square on Wednesday even though the image in it contained offensive words.

The counter protest was against a celebration held in Times Square for the laying of the foundation stone for the temple in Ayodhya at the site where Lord Ram is said to have been born.

Twitter has been accused of following ideological double standards favouring the liberals and the left, while censoring those on the right.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had himself posed with a poster with the incendiary communal message, “Smash Brahminical patriarchy”, while on a visit to India in 2018….

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

The Decline of Christianity Since the Reformation

David Carlin: The decline of Christianity is found not just in those who claim no Christian faith, but also in those who claim to be liberal Christians.


Modern history (by which I mean the history of the western world since about the year 1500) tells many stories.  I suspect that these many stories are subplots in one big story, and for years I’ve been trying to guess what this one big story may be.  My guess (but it’s only a guess) is that the one big story is the story of how the western world has been trying to get rid of Christianity.

The story begins with the Protestant Reformation.  None of the reformers intended to do away with Christianity.  Just the opposite.  Regardless of anybody’s intentions, however, a divided Christianity would be easier to destroy than a united Christianity.

This divided Christianity led in the 16th and 17th centuries to the rise of skepticism, especially in France.  But skepticism, while it continues even to the present day to erode Christianity, is too purely negative a thing to replace the old faith.  And a replacement is needed.  You can’t just get rid of Christianity and leave the world with nothing to believe in.

Skepticism was succeeded by a more positive thing in the 18th century, Deism, which professed to hold on to the good elements of Christianity (afterlife, morality, etc.) while getting rid of its bad elements.  But Deism was too “thin” a thing to replace Christianity.  Besides, it stopped well short of the ultimate aim of anti-Christianity, namely the complete eradication of the old religion.

Deism helped bring about the French Revolution, which showed for the first time that a powerful state could be used as a tremendous anti-Christianity machine.

In the second half of the 19th century, there was a great intellectual movement on behalf of agnosticism.  But agnosticism was simply another name for the old skepticism, still too negative a thing to get the anti-Christianity job done.

In the 20th century, two gigantic anti-Christianity movements took the stage, and each of them came to control an enormously powerful state: Nazism and Communism.  The former intended to get rid of Christianity while thinly disguising its intention; it deceived many Christians who wanted to be deceived.  The latter didn’t stoop to disguise; it was quite frank about its intention.  Both of them did great damage to Christianity, and when they failed (Nazism in 1945, Russian Communism in 1991) they left behind them a Christianity that had been greatly weakened.

In the postwar period (1945-present) the western liberal democracies (U.S.A., U.K., France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, the Scandinavian countries, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Ireland, Spain [after Franco], Portugal [after Salazar]) have been subject to a non-statist kind of anti-Christianity.  These countries all experienced, some of them sooner, some of them later, the growth of an anti-Christianity public sentiment.

These countries all experienced the gradual asphyxiation of Christianity by the gradual growth of anti-Christian feelings.  For decades the state played little or no part in this smothering process – though this has changed recently.

This liberal-democratic, anti-Christianity got a tremendous boost beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the coming of the sexual revolution.  This “revolution” was about sex – but it was about much more than sex.  Sexual restraint and even downright chastity had been an essential element of Christianity from its beginning in the first century AD.  Get rid of Christian sex morality, and you’re well on your way to getting rid of Christianity altogether.

Once the average person decides that Christianity has been wrong about fornication, adultery, homosexuality, abortion, etc. for almost 2,000 years, it will be relatively easy for that person to believe that Christianity has also been wrong about many other things – including all the articles of the Nicene Creed.

Many would-be Christians – I have in mind “liberal” Catholics and Protestants – believe it is possible to have a “new and improved” Christianity that embraces and endorses the values of the sexual revolution.  They are mistaken – as certain a priori considerations should have persuaded them decades ago, and as experience has abundantly demonstrated over the last fifty years.

Throughout the western world (the world that used to be called Christendom), including the United States, Christianity is in steep decline today.  Evidence of this decline is found not just in those who claim no Christian faith (the “Nones”).  It is also found in those who claim to be liberal Christians – which means that they have dropped most of Christianity’s orthodox “baggage.”  And it is also found in those who, while claiming to be orthodox, really don’t take their orthodoxy seriously.

Two questions:

  1. Does one have to be an atheist to be anti-Christianity? Strictly speaking, no. For instance, the Deists of the 18th century were anti-Christianity without being atheists.  But if you want to get rid of Christianity, it helps to be an atheist.  A lot, because atheism is the most thoroughgoing kind of anti-Christianity.  If you want to get rid of the old religion, why not go all the way?  Why not destroy the very foundation of Christianity?
  2. Does one have to be a supporter of abortion to be counted among the haters of Christianity? Yes. For the right to abortion – and not just the legal right but the moral right as well – is essential to the sexual revolution.  If we don’t have abortion as a back-up when mistakes are made or accidents happen, how can we have a moral regime of sexual freedom?

Practically speaking, we can’t.  Think about it.  If abortion were to be banned throughout America, the next thing you know we’d have people recommending chastity.  And once people recommend chastity, guess what? – they’ll start recommending Christianity.

Well, we can’t have that, can we?  And therefore we must make sure that abortion is legal and is considered to be morally unobjectionable.  Indeed we must make it a praiseworthy thing – the kind of thing which, like public education and police and fire protection, everybody who needs it should have free of charge.

For what it’s worth, that’s my reading of the last 500 years.

David Carlin

David Carlin is a retired professor of sociology and philosophy at the Community College of Rhode Island, and the author of The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America.

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

Hezbollah Hoarded Ammonium Nitrate That Blew Up Beirut, Planned to Use it Against Israel in ‘Nuclear’ Style Attack

The Democrats recently gutted anti-Hezbollah legislation. Think about that.

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Hezbollah Hoarded Fertilizer That Blew Up Beirut, Planned to Use it Against Israel in ‘Nuclear’ Style Attack

By Town Hall, August 5, 2020

Yesterday a massive explosion devastated Beirut, killing at least 100 and injuring thousands. Lebanese officials said the blast came from a 2750 ton stockpile of ammonium nitrate that was stored in the port.

Hezbollah, the Iran backed terrorist organization that has taken over Lebanon, has a history of stockpiling the chemical in different European locations.

Hezbollah kept three metric tons of ammonium nitrate, the explosive thought to be behind the mega blast in Beirut this week, in a storehouse in London, until MI5 and the London Metropolitan Police found it in 2015.

The Lebanese terrorist group also stored hundreds of kilograms of ammonium nitrate in southern Germany, which were uncovered earlier this year.

The Iran-backed terrorists kept the explosive in thousands of ice packs in four properties in northwest London, according to a report in The Telegraph last year. The ice pack deception tactic was used in Germany, as well.

Further, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah once explained how it could be used to blow up ports in Israel.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah threatened in the past to destroy Israel by causing a massive explosion in the port of Haifa using ammonia tanks that he said would be like a “nuclear” explosion. In addition Hezbollah allegedly sought to acquire ammonium nitrate via Syria since 2009 and tried to infiltrate the agriculture ministry in Lebanon to do so, according to leaked diplomatic cables.

In February 16, 2016 Nasrallah also said that ammonia is stored in Haifa and that there are 15,000 tonnes of gas Haifa and that explosions there might cause the deaths of tens of thousands of people. “the expert added that this is exactly like a nuclear bomb. In other words Lebanon has a nuclear bomb. This is not an exaggeration.” Nasrallah laughs as he says this in the video, noting that Hezbollah refrained from striking the ammonia in the 2006 war.

Nasrallah told his audience that with several missiles his terror group could set off the ammonia with the same impact of a nuclear weapon. He said he had consulted experts and that 800,000 people would be affects and tens of thousands killed. In February 2017 he made another speech mentioning ammonia stored in Haifa.


HAVE A TIP WE SHOULD KNOW? YOUR ANONYMITY IS NEVER COMPROMISED. EMAIL TIPS@THEGELLERREPORT.COM.


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PHILADELPHIA: NAACP Chief’s Mosque calls Jews ‘Satan,’ says Muslims should ‘pick up a stone’ when Jews are spotted

The bit about “you are not a Jew…you are Satan” is adapted from the New Testament: “I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.” (Revelation 2:9)

The stone of truth that is thrown is reminiscent of Allah’s boast in the Qur’an: “We dash the truth against falsehood, and it destroys it, and thereupon it departs.” (Qur’an 21:18)

The stone here is identified as “the stone of Truth,” but there is also the notorious genocidal hadith states: “Abu Huraira reported Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.” (Sahih Muslim 6985)

Anyway, here yet again we see the close alignment between Leftist and Islamic supremacist perspectives and goals.

“Philadelphia NAACP head apologizes for anti-Semitic image, not his mosque’s anti-Semitic Facebook page,” by Stewart Ain, Forward, July 30, 2020 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

The Philadelphia president of the NACCP will not be resigning—at least for now.

Despite calls for the resignation of Rodney Muhammad for posting an anti-Semitic meme on Facebook, the national NAACP said it has decided with him to “meet with community leaders and faith leaders to open a dialogue” and to also launch “national conversations to further understanding.”

Meanwhile, the Facebook page of the mosque where Muhammed is minister is still filled with anti-Semitic posts.

“Those of you who say that you are Jews, I will not give you the honor of calling you a Jew; you are not a Jew! You’re So-Called [a Jew], you are Satan and it is my job now to pull the cover off of Satan so that every Muslim, when he sees Satan, [will/should] pick up a stone,” reads a recent post of Muhammed’s Mosque No. 12 in Philadelphia.

In its statement, the national NAACP did not address these additional posts. It said that when Muhammad posted the meme last Friday, he was unaware that it “has a history of anti-Semitic propaganda. Upon realizing his mistake, he immediately took down the post, as well as the associated caption. He also acknowledged and apologized for his error in judgment.”

The meme is a drawing of an anti-Semitic caricature – a smiling, bearded Jewish man wearing a yarmulke – rubbing his hands together while a large hand below him presses down on several people huddled together. Above it are color photos of rapper and actor Ice Cube, Philadelphia Eagles player DeSean Jackson and actor and television host Nick Cannon. All three men are prominent African Americans who have come under heavy criticism for recent anti-Semitic comments or sharing anti-Semitic social media posts.

The cartoon also included the caption, “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” It was attributed to the French philosopher Voltaire, but it actually is said to have been uttered by a neo-Nazi white supremacist. The Anti-Defamation League said the drawing itself is the favorite anti-Semitic meme of white supremacists, who it said have created a nearly endless series of images and variants featuring what is called the “Happy Merchant.”…

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

American Flag, Bibles Reportedly Burned In Portland Riots


Rioters in Portland were caught on camera putting bibles and an American flag into a fire outside of the federal courthouse, which has been a focal point in the protests that have been ongoing for more than a month and a half, numerous sources reported.

Peaceful protests during the day reportedly transitioned into fires being set Friday night, largely without the presence of police or federal officers, according to KOIN.

A Ruptly video shows someone with a “Black Lives Matter” sign beside them adding objects to a fire, where a Bible is seen amid the flames.

What appears to be a separate bible is seen charred in the streets, still burning.

Less than a week prior, protesters in Portland were setting fire to a Trump flag that was hanging on the fence of the federal courthouse, cheering as it fell to the ground.

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler attended the protests and was hit with tear gas after rioters reportedly set the courthouse on fire.

The courthouse has been set on fire several times during the riots, which were prompted by the May 25 death of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody.

Gabriel Agard-Berryhill, 18, was charged with arson for allegedly setting the courthouse on fire Tuesday.

COLUMN BY

MARLO SAFI

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Facebook Bans Page that Shared Videos of ex-Muslims Discussing How they were Persecuted for Leaving Islam

As the US becomes increasingly totalitarian, only one point of view is allowed in the public square, and that point of view is warmly positive toward Islam, with no criticism allowed. Criticism of Islam is also banned in Sharia.

“Facebook de-platforms page that shared videos of ex-Muslims talking about how they were persecuted after they left Islam,” OpIndia, July 28, 2020:

ExMuslim TV has been de-platformed with misplaced accusations of inciting violence and hate when all they do is post short videos of ex-Muslims narrating the persecution they face. It is unfathomable that individuals talking about how they are being threatened and shunned could ‘incite violence’ by any means, however, Facebook decided to de-platform them simply because they were talking about issues the Left prefers not being talked about.

Facebook, on the 27th of July 2020, unpublished a page on the social media platform called ExMuslim TV, that merely shared short videos of ex-Muslims and the persecution they faced by the community after they had left Islam. ExMuslim TV took to Twitter on Monday to talk about how Facebook was being unjust in banning their page.

Appealing to Facebook to reconsider their decision of banning the page, the Twitter page of ExMuslim TV said, “Our primary purpose is HUMANITARIAN. Most exMuslims who appear here are/were in danger. They either speak to ask for help or to bring hope to others like them”.

In the screenshots shared by the ExMuslim TV Twitter handle, it would appear that Facebook decided to unpublish the page because supposedly, the page went against their ‘incitement and violence’ standards. However, the page is only known the share videos of ex-Muslims who talk about their own ordeal in the videos. In most of the videos shared by the page, Muslims who had left Islam spoke about how they were hounded, persecuted and shunned by the Muslim community after their decision to leave the faith of Islam.

This is the message the Facebook page received before it was unpublished:

Facebook believed that ex-Muslims who had left the faith of Islam talking about their own persecution and appealing for help and understanding somehow posed a ‘genuine risk of physical harm or indirect threat to public safety’.

Further, Facebook informed the page that due to COVID, they have fewer reviewers onboard and hence, may not be able to cater to the appeal by the Facebook page. Essentially, this would mean that ExMuslim TV might not be able to appeal to the decision to unpublish the page by Facebook because the social media giant has fewer reviewers working due to the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic.

Facebook has long been accused of harbouring a bias against anything that goes against the tenets of Liberalism and the Left. In fact, one must recall that recently, they had also released an ‘anti-conservative bias’ report that had made clear that Facebook indeed is biased against anything that goes against the Left and is seen to be remotely ‘conservative’.

With Social Media becoming an ideological battleground, it has often been noticed that platforms selectively target right-leaning platforms in an ad-hoc fashion. Not too long ago, Twitter CEO had “fully admitted“, the platforms “left-leaning” bias.

Facebook has too hugely limited the reach of several pages, many of which are right-leaning. The page owners strongly suspect that their reach is being limited because of the inherent left-bias of these platforms….

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

VIDEO: Karen Bass, A Potential Biden VP Pick, Praised Scientology At Church Opening In 2010

  • A top contender for Joe Biden’s vice presidential pick appeared at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for a Scientology church in 2010, The Daily Caller News Foundation has found.
  • Rep. Karen Bass praised the Church of Scientology for its “commitment…to make a difference” at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a massive Scientology church in Los Angeles. 
  • The church has been at the center of numerous scandals in its 66-year history. Former Scientologists have accused it of operating as a cult, while others have detailed rampant sexual abuse and a culture of intimidation. 

California Rep. Karen Bass, who has emerged as a leading contender to be Joe Biden’s running mate, praised the Church of Scientology during a 2010 ribbon-cutting ceremony for one of the controversial group’s facilities in Los Angeles.

Bass, 66, served in the California General Assembly when she spoke at the event, held on April 24, 2010.

“This day and this new Church of Scientology is an exciting moment because I know your goal and your commitment is truly to make a difference,” Bass told the 6,000 attendees at the ceremony, which was led by Scientology president David Miscavige.

“The Church of Scientology I know has made a difference, because your creed is a universal creed and one that speaks to all people everywhere,” continued Bass, who went on to praise Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.

“The words are exciting of your founder, L. Ron Hubbard, in The Creed of the Church of Scientology: that all people of whatever race, color or creed, are created with equal rights,” she said.

“It’s a remarkable credit to your church that this is part of your creed,” Bass said.

Other speakers at the event included Lee Baca, who served as sheriff of Los Angeles County through 2014. Baca pleaded guilty in 2016 to lying to the FBI about inmate abuse at county jails during his tenure. Paul Koretz, a Los Angeles city councilman also spoke at the event.

Bass has praised the church as a U.S. congresswoman as well. In November 2011, she submitted a letter read at the opening of a Scientology center in South Los Angeles. According to reports of the event, Bass praised the church for its “many humanitarian initiatives and social betterment programs for the benefit of South Los Angeles.”

While scrutiny of Scientology has increased in recent years, it was under consistent criticism at the time Bass praised the organization. Former Scientologists have said that church operates as a cult, and that members face pressure to disassociate themselves from non-Scientologists.

The church’s leadership has long been known for dealing aggressively with its critics.

One infamous Scientology document is a memo from 1966 in which L. Ron Hubbard suggested investigating critics or feeding blackmail material on them to the media.

“Start investigating them promptly for FELONIES or worse,” Hubbard wrote in the memo. He also suggested that the church respond to its attackers by “feeding lurid, blood sex crime actual evidence on the attackers to the press.”

WATCH:

The church and Miscavige have come under additional scrutiny in recent years amid allegations of rampant sexual abuse within the organization.

The church settled a lawsuit in July 2018 with a woman who claimed she was forced to have an abortion and prevented from leaving the church.

Last year, four women who accused actor and Scientologist Danny Masterson of raping them sued the church, its president, Miscavige, and Masterson. The Huffington Post reported that the women accused the church and Masterson of stalking them and invading their privacy in order to keep them from coming forward about the rape allegations.

Bass, who is the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, is considered one of three or four women on Biden’s list of potential vice presidential nominees.

According to CNN, her star has risen due to an intense lobbying campaign on her behalf by California Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Biden has committed to choosing a woman as his running mate. He has also faced growing pressure to choose a woman of color, due in large part to the protests that have erupted in the wake of the death of George Floyd, a black man killed by a Minneapolis police officer in May.

Other leading contenders to be on the Biden ticket are California Sen. Kamala Harris and former National Security Adviser Susan Rice.

Bass’s office was reached for comment but did not immediately offer a response.

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

COLUMN BY

CHUCK ROSS

Investigative reporter.

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2020 Catholic Voters Guide — Saving Civilization

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE CHURCH MILITANT 2020 CATHOLIC VOTERS GUIDE

Flannery O’Connor Was Not a Racist

Lorraine C. Murray: One of our greatest Southern writers knew we can’t pass laws requiring people to love each other as Christ loves them.


Flannery O’Connor is the latest cultural figure to be canceled. The very title of Paul Elie’s recent article in The New Yorker, “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?” assumes her guilt. Jumping upon the cancellation bandwagon, the Jesuit president of Loyola University Maryland has announced that her name will be removed from a dormitory.

But this is the woman who wrote a story poignantly revealing the suffering of black people in the South. This is the woman whose spiritual director was a Jesuit priest, James McCown, who was known as a strong proponent of integration. And this is also the woman who said, after an upsetting experience involving a bus driver’s cruel remark toward black passengers, “I became an integrationist.”

True, O’Connor sometimes used the “n” word in her letters and stories, as well as the term “white trash,” but this was not shocking for someone born in 1925 in Georgia.

Indeed, some of O’Connor’s best stories reveal the ugly underbelly of racism among white Southerners, while also showing how God’s grace can convert hearts. In “Revelation,” a poor white woman sitting in a doctor’s waiting room talks aloud of sending blacks back to Africa. Mrs. Turpin, who prides herself on being a landowner rather than “white trash,” shares her own racist thoughts until a quietly seething college girl hurls a book at Mrs. Turpin and whispers, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.”

This is the moment of grace for Mrs. Turpin, who later has a vision of people processing into heaven, blacks entering first and white landowners at the end.

Paul Elie cited an incident in 1959 where black author James Baldwin was traveling to Georgia and a New York friend suggested O’Connor should meet him. O’Connor set her friend straight about the manners of the Deep South: “In New York it would be nice to meet him; here it would not.” Such a meeting, she added, would cause “the greatest trouble and disturbance and disunion” in a Southern town.

Elie claims this refusal is proof of O’Connor’s racism: “O’Connor-lovers have been downplaying those remarks ever since. But they are not hot-mike moments or loose talk. They were written at the same desk where O’Connor wrote her fiction and are found in the same lode of correspondence that has brought about the rise in her stature.”

But William Sessions, a lifelong friend, said O’Connor expressed “considerable anguish” about being unable to receive Baldwin in her home, and that when O’Connor became close friends with a black woman during her graduate-school days in Iowa, her mother, Regina, protested that interracial contacts were dangerous. The young O’Connor had held her ground, saying her “friendships would not be fettered by racial considerations.” The thirty-two-year-old O’Connor was suffering from lupus and was extremely dependent on her mother – and thus more inclined to follow her rules.

Nelson has never seen a black man, and Mr. Head assures him he won’t like Atlanta because it’s “full of n*****s.” After they get lost, the grandfather decides to show how important he is to the boy by pretending to leave him behind. Nelson becomes so terrified that he plows into a crowd, knocking down an elderly woman. The police show up and want Mr. Head to assume responsibility for the boy’s behavior, but the old man does the unthinkable by denying the child is his kin.O’Connor’s 1955 short story “The Artificial Nigger” caused great controversy then and still does today, but it reveals her sympathy for the suffering of Southern blacks perhaps better than anything else she ever wrote. Backwoods Mr. Head wants to take Nelson, his 10-year-old grandson, to visit Atlanta, so the boy can witness the bleakness of the big city and be content to stay at home in their small town.

After this terrible moment of betrayal, the two come across the plaster figure of a black man. The statue is unsteady, cracked, chipped, and holds a brown watermelon. They can’t tell the age of the artificial man, since it looks “too miserable” to be young or old.

As they stand to gaze at it, they see it as “the monument to another’s victory” and feel it “dissolving their differences like an action of mercy.” The broken-down statue awakens in Mr. Head the first feelings of sympathy for what blacks have endured in the South. O’Connor later said nothing encapsulated the tragedy of the South so much as these statues.

In a letter, O’Connor described an experience that had brought her face to face with the real-life suffering endured by blacks. A personal revelation had taken place on a bus. The driver told the rear occupants, who were black, “All right, all you stove-pipe blonds, git on back there.” O’Connor’s reaction? “I became an integrationist.”

O’Connor favored slow, rather than dramatic, social changes, largely because of her concern about backlash from the KKK.  In tiny Milledgeville, Georgia, they burned crosses and threatened lives whenever there were sit-ins and frightened some black people into leaving town.

In 1963, O’Connor reported that some blacks in Milledgeville had petitioned the city council to integrate the schools, restaurants, and library. Unbeknownst to them, however, the library had been quietly integrated the year before. For O’Connor, that exemplified change coming about quietly, without publicity – and without trouble.

She believed the problems in the South wouldn’t be entirely solved by passing laws, but instead required a change in behavior and culture. The South had to evolve “a way of life in which the two races [could] live together with mutual forbearance.” This would require “considerable grace” and a code of manners based on mutual charity.

She would no doubt agree that we can legislate the ways people receive education, the places they can go, and the things they are allowed to do. But we can’t pass laws requiring people of different races to see each other as neighbors. We can’t require them to love each other as Christ loves them. This change of heart, above all else, requires God’s powerful intervention in the hearts of men.

As O’Connor remarked, the South “still believes that man has fallen and that he is only perfectible by God’s grace, not by his own unaided efforts.” In short, some people need to be clipped on the head by a book, like Mrs. Turpin was, before they see the light of truth.

Lorraine V. Murray

Lorraine Murray is the author of The Abbess of Andalusia: Flannery O’Connor’s Spiritual Journey. She is a columnist with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Georgia Bulletin. She lives in Decatur, Georgia.

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