Tag Archive for: Holy Bible

Reclaiming the Biblical Rainbow

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Whether you’re browsing through a clothing aisle of Target or taking a walk through your neighborhood — especially during the month of June — it’s likely you’ll run into a symbol plastered on t-shirts or waving on flags: the rainbow. What do you immediately associate with the bold colors of red, orange, yellow, green, indigo, and violet? Most would likely say LGBTQ Pride. It is easily identifiable due to the infiltration of Pride merchandise in stores, schools, and neighborhoods.

Within the last 50 years, LGBTQ+ culture has adopted the symbol to represent sexual identity, and it has become a staple in the Pride movement. The materialized association we make between the God-ordained rainbow with a so-called “pride” for sexual identity has become normalized as the symbol is often paired with the image of a same-sex couple or phrases like “love is love.”

How did this association come about? Who decided on the counterfeit rainbow as the staple image to represent the LGBTQ community?

The answer lies in the late 1970s when San Francisco artist and drag performer Gilbert Baker was asked to create a symbol representing the gay community. The Department of Mental Health claims that, “Baker collaborated with his friend Lynn Segerblom” to “design” the rainbow flag. The only difference from their design and God’s was two more colors: hot pink and turquoise. Although these two colors have since been removed — and other renditions of the flag continue to occur regularly — the design made its debut at the Gay Freedom Day Parade in San Francisco in 1978.

According to History.com, “The most commonly used image for the burgeoning gay rights movement was the pink triangle,” a symbol that was pinned to people who identified as homosexual during World War II by Nazis. “Using a symbol with such a dark and painful past was never an option for Baker,” so instead he chose the rainbow as it was “meant to represent togetherness.” Each color maintained a significance: hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for magic and art, indigo for serenity, and violet for spirit.

Since his creation of the rainbow Pride flag, Gilbert has been recognized by political leaders and praised for the strides he made in the movement. In 2016, former President Barack Obama presented Baker with a hand-dyed rainbow flag. Baker spent the remainder of his life “push[ing] boundaries and gender norms,” until his death in 2017.

With June being the designated “Pride Month,” the LGBTQ community and supporters push the sale of as much rainbow gear as possible. In preparation for the month, conservative leaders have spoken up, calling people to take the rainbow symbol back.

“The rainbow is and always will be a sign of the covenant God made with his people,” wrote conservative author and influencer David Harris. “The woke mob may try to twist its meaning, but we won’t let their foolishness prevail. It’s time to reclaim the rainbow for His purpose!!”

Similarly, pro-life advocate and author Abby Johnson posted some “reminders” on her social media page, encouraging her followers to remember the rainbow’s true meaning.

“I will not stop enjoying rainbows just because man has decided to attempt to usurp it,” she wrote. “God defines marriage because He created it. We don’t get to argue with Him about it or throw a tantrum. He made marriage, He gets to set the terms. It’s between a man and a woman.”

Why are these conservative leaders calling for people to take the rainbow back? What is so significant about different wavelengths of light striking water droplets, resulting in seven colors forming an arch? Let’s go back to some of the earliest days of creation to answer this question.

In Genesis 6, we are told that as the human population grew, so did their wickedness. Humans were so corrupt, that “every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time” (Genesis 6:5). It says the Lord regretted creating humans. Within just five chapters of creation’s origin story, God went from nodding in approval and calling his people good to feeling remorseful over his creation. When Adam and Eve took a bite of the forbidden fruit, sin entered the world and with it came separation from God: an unbearable consequence that all people deserve.

From the beginning of time, fleshly desires took over the human race and people turned their back on God. So, God sent a great flood in order to “put an end to all people” (Genesis 6:13), except for one family, headed by a man named Noah, who “found favor in the eyes of the Lord” (Genesis 6:8). The fate of the human race fell to the obedience of this one man.

As the story that we learned in Sunday school goes, God ordered Noah to build an ark and spared him and his family from the flood. In Genesis 9:11, He establishes a promise, saying, “Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.” To seal this promise, God explained the significance of the symbol of his covenant.

“I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth” (Genesis 9:13-16).

From these few verses, we learn that in God’s mercy, he decided to give humanity a second chance to live in harmony with him, and he set a reminder in the sky.

If the original meaning of the rainbow was meant to represent God’s promise to never wipe out his people with a flood again, how come it is now associated with sexual orientation and gender fluidity? Doesn’t it seem ironic that a movement rooted in sexual anarchy — which stands in opposition to the Word of God — uses a biblical symbol to represent its anti-biblical ideology?

Baker designed a version of the rainbow as the LGBTQ symbol “because he saw flags as the most powerful symbol of pride.” As Christians, the rainbow represents something completely different and much more sacred: a symbol of hope. Hope of an everlasting life with a Just and Merciful Creator, despite our temporary and wretched state. As author of “God’s Covenant with the Earth” Peter Harris pointed out, “God’s covenant with Noah was a commitment to maintain the inherent relationship between Creator and creation.” Nothing can separate us from his love. There is room for forgiveness, and our nation must fight for a story of redemption.

As Family Research Council’s Senior Fellow for Biblical Worldview and Strategic Engagement Joseph Backholm put it, “It seems significant that the LGBT rainbow is a counterfeit of a real rainbow because everything about the sexual revolution is a counterfeit of good things God created. Satan has always been in the habit of taking good things and modifying them slightly so they have similarities to good things but are not good things.”

As we walk through the month of June, let us heed the instruction Peter wrote to God’s elect and remember to stand firm in our faith and convictions. “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9).

AUTHOR

Abigail Olsson

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

We Have Forgotten God

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It’s a cliché to say that this is the most important election in our lifetime. But I really feel strongly that this is the most important election in our lifetime.

There is so much at stake. Above all is the question of whether we will continue as one nation under God. Will we embrace America as founded or will we completely jettison all pretense of our national motto—In God we Trust?

I think our problems can be traced back to this simple truth: We have forgotten God. That’s why all these bad things are happening to us.

Founding father Patrick Henry warned, “It is when a people forget God, that tyrants forge their chains.”

The late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was the great chronicler of what President Ronald Reagan rightfully called, “The Evil Empire,” i.e., the failed Soviet Union. The Nobel-prize winning author spent about a decade of his life in the Soviet Gulags (for a veiled criticism of Stalin in a private letter).

Solzhenitsyn said, “While I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

As simple as those peasants’ statements were, the great novelist noted that no one diagnosed the problem better than they did. He continued: “Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

Why is America seemingly sinking into the abyss? We have forgotten God. And the results of this rejection we can see on the streets of America:

  • We have strangers shooting strangers because they disagree politically.
  • We have daily riots and looting, with criminals immediately let back on the streets, thanks in many cases to George Soros money.
  • We have mobs chanting, “F*** your Jesus.”
  • We have liberal governors shutting down churches as “non-essential” during the COVID-19 crisis, while encouraging rioting, with or without social distancing or masks.

In America today people have forgotten God, and we’re living out the descent of man, as seen in Romans chapter 1. When people reject God and His righteousness and refuse to thank Him, He turns them over to their own devices.

Dennis Prager of PragerU once told me in a TV interview: “The Supreme Court changed America with the 1962 decision that prayer in school was unconstitutional. That was the decision that began the end of America as we knew it.”

The prayer ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court was this: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessing upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country.”

Prager continued: “It’s as universal a prayer and non-denominational as you could have. And as I often point out, within one generation, kids went from blessing their teachers to cursing their teachers.” [Emphasis added]

Many of our presidents throughout history have called on God and have called on Americans to set aside a time (usually a day) of prayer. For example, FDR, in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack, called for January 2, 1942 to be, “a Day of Prayer, of asking forgiveness for our shortcomings of the past, of consecration to the tasks of the present, of asking God’s help in days to come.”

Today, how much more are we in need of “asking forgiveness for our shortcomings”?

President Harry Truman even systematized the National Day of Prayer as an annual event. Truman declared in his proclamation (June 17, 1952): “From the earliest days of our history our people have been accustomed to turn to Almighty God for help and guidance.”

When there is no God to whom we must give an account, then the state can become god. That is certainly true in the minds of many a totalitarian dictator.

If we continue down this godless path, we will not remain free. How we vote will not change our national make-up. But it will make a difference in pushing away tyranny or rushing toward it.

Reagan once noted, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

©Jerry Newcombe, D.Min. All rights reserved.

‘Infidel’: At Last, a Film That Deals Realistically with Islamic Terrorism

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It is a staple of the Muslim victimhood industry to complain that Hollywood frequently features Muslim terrorist villains, and seldom depicts Muslims as anything other than terrorists. Reality is just the opposite: can you think of even one major motion picture that featured Islamic terrorists as the villains? In a typical instance, Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears, jihadis were the villains, but when the book was made into a movie, the villains were changed to neo-Nazis. Moviemakers routinely shy away from depicting the grim reality of jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women and others. But not Cyrus Nowrasteh.

Nowrasteh, who gave us the eye-opening and heart-rending 2009 film The Stoning of Soraya M., which focused on an honor killing, has written, directed, and produced the new movie Infidel, starring Jim Caviezel, Claudia Karvan, and Hal Ozsan. Infidel is as startling, on many levels, as it is gripping. Caviezel plays a Christian blogger who is kidnapped by a Hizballah cell (headed up by a cheerfully villainous and thoroughly engaging Ozsan) and taken to Iran.

That this is the storyline is in itself remarkable. Were Infidel the production of virtually any director besides Nowrasteh, Caviezel’s Christian character Doug Rawlins would turn out to be stupid, evil, or both, while Ozsan’s Ramzi, even while being a Hizballah kidnapper, would be depicted as wise, noble, or even heroic. Muslims are victims of Islamophobic, racist, redneck American yahoos — that’s the general Hollywood narrative, played out in innumerable films.

Infidel instead opts to be more realistic, recalling actual events that seldom gain Hollywood’s notice, such as the 1987 kidnapping of journalist Charles Glass by Hizballah in Lebanon. Infidel unflinchingly portrays the gleeful brutality and inhumanity of Rawlins’ captors, as well as his own struggles to maintain his Christian faith amid torture and isolation. Amid all this, the film’s realism is thoroughgoing: once the movie’s perspective was established, it was refreshing to see Caviezel portray Rawlins as alternately angry, afraid, and confused, rather than as a plaster saint, above the fray and singing hymns even as he is being beaten and verbally abused.

Nor is that all. Besides being one of the few feature films to portray the reality of jihad terror in a realistic manner, Infidel is also one of the first, if not the first, major motion pictures to depict the pervasive but seldom-noticed reality of secret Christians in majority-Muslim countries, as well as the Sharia death penalty for leaving Islam, honor killings, and even the “Islamophobia” scam. Early in the movie, before Rawlins has left the U.S. and been kidnapped, investigators are searching the home of Javid, a Muslim friend of Rawlins. They find that Javid’s basement is filled with unmistakable evidence that he is a jihad terrorist, or at very least a terrorist sympathizer.  All the while, however, a lawyer does her best to impede the search, proclaiming that it is “Islamophobia” to think that anything is amiss with Javid at all.

That is a recurring reality of life in America today: for years now it has been routine that any honest examination of jihad terror and Sharia oppression, and any effort to impede it, is “Islamophobic” and hence to be eschewed by all decent people. Up to now, the closest movies got to this phenomenon was their producers’ own fear of being tarred with the “Islamophobic” label if they got too close to depicting jihad violence in an accurate manner, or at very least without some kind of assurance to the audience that Islam is really not like that, but gentle, peaceful, and altogether benign. For a film to show how the “Islamophobia” weapon is actually wielded in order to stymie counterterror efforts is nothing short of astonishing.

But Infidel is much more than the sum of the topics that are usually ignored or obfuscated, and that it dares to depict. Infidel is, above all, a terrific story, well-acted and superbly presented – a story of love, of passion, of hatred, of commitment, of self-sacrifice, and much more. I would have written that they don’t make them like this anymore, but clearly, as long as Cyrus Nowrasteh is writing, directing, and producing movies, they still do.

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

Banish Sin, Transform the Church

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David G. Bonagura, Jr.: Detractors say trivializing sin was part of Vatican II’s spirit and is still in the post-conciliar Church. But the perennial problem is really sin itself.

The Second Vatican Council is back in the news lately, with two prominent, tradition-minded bishops revisiting well-known arguments of conciliar interpretation in light two recent Vatican documents, Amoris Laetitia and the Abu Dhabi statement on world religions. Their analyses of the Council, the difficulties in reconciling certain expressions with tradition, and the frightening breakdown of the Church that followed – a breakdown that some even justified under the Council’s nebulous “spirit” – are serious, though faithful Catholics will find their premises and conclusions worthy of debate.

Yet their analyses are now also very familiar. Blaming the Council for the Church’s ills has been a hobbyhorse for 55 years now. At this point, when it comes to arguing about the Council, Ecclesiastes’ tired observation comes to mind: “There is nothing new under the sun.”

Just weeks earlier, as public Masses were resumed after the coronavirus suspension, a little-noticed controversy impressed on me that the problems in the Church today stem from something far more fundamental, and simple, than the formulation of documents that few know about and fewer have read. When the proposal circulated of having Mass without reception of Holy Communion, some faithful and some clergy blanched. Their issue was not solely the deprivation of union with our Lord. It was that they did not see the point of having Mass at all without reception.

Such a thought stems from a profound misunderstanding what the Mass – and the sacrifice that it represents – is for: the salvation of souls. And there is no wonder the goal of salvation has been forgotten, since sin, the tyrannical reality from which we must be saved, has itself been deliberately banished from view, trivialized as a human psychosis, or written off as an obsession of earlier, unenlightened times.

It is the marginalization of sin, more than Vatican II or anything else, that has transformed the life of the Church as we know it in the last half-century. Our entire faith and the structure of the Church rest on three acts: creation, fall, and redemption. By dismissing the fall, and every sin that has come after it, the understanding of redemption necessarily takes on new meaning.

If Jesus did not need to redeem us from sin, then essential doctrines and the sacramental economy have to be reconceived. Consider:

* Jesus Christ ceased to be emphasized as our Savior who sacrificed His life to atone for our sins. Instead, images of “Jesus is my homeboy” became popular. Without a message of salvation, Jesus was reduced to a “great moral teacher” on par with Socrates.

* Shifting the view of the Savior and salvation caused worship to shift as well. Witness how few people today know the phrase “the holy sacrifice of the Mass.” We know from the work of Dr. Lauren Pristas and Father John Zuhlsdorf that, after the Council, the formal prayers of the Mass were deliberately reworked to eliminate references to sin. The turning of the altars to face the people, never mentioned by the Council, heightened a new experience of a community celebrating itself above the sacrifice of Calvary. The general desacralizing of Catholic worship made the Mass seem as it were of no consequence rather than the enduring basis of our salvation.

* Sacramental Confession was abandoned by nearly all the faithful. There is no need to confess if we have not sinned. And if we do not need to confess, then surely there is no need for acts of penitence or reparation. Eight days of the year that still call for abstinence from meat is all that is left of Catholic penitential practice.

* If there is no sin, then everyone goes to Heaven, Catholic or not, virtuous or not. Funerals became canonizations, and Hell was dismissed as a tactic to coerce good behavior. Catholicism became just another world religion on par with the others, since it no longer had anything unique to offer.

* If people do not need to be saved from sin, then there is no need for priests to give up their lives in service of those seeking redemption. The collapse of vocations is a direct result of the banishment of sin.

* Catholic theology, morality, and education all took turns for the worse after this constitutive understanding of sin and redemption was morphed.

Were there other causes of the Church’s post-Conciliar malaise? Yes, of course. But it is not an oversimplification to home in on the trivialization of sin as the root cause of it all. Throughout Church history, lying at the root of heresy is not an intricately woven system, but a misunderstanding of the first principle of revelation. To minimize sin alters the view of God’s entire plan of salvation, from the covenant with Abraham, to the redemption by Christ, to the role of the Church in perpetuating His salvation.

Vatican II’s perpetual detractors will argue that the trivialization of sin was part of the Modernist spirit that infiltrated conciliar documents and the post-conciliar Church. Yet that implies the Council itself is not the definitive problem; the Council and its “spirit” have been invoked to cloak a deeper issue.

It is, therefore, this deeper issue of properly understanding sin and the need to be saved from it that requires our attention above all. For Benedict XVI’s hermeneutic of continuity to have the final word on interpreting the council, sound Catholic doctrines – Creation, Fall, Redemption – must first be restored to their proper place.

COLUMN BY

David G Bonagura, Jr.

David G. Bonagura Jr. teaches at St. Joseph’s Seminary, New York. He is the author of Steadfast in Faith: Catholicism and the Challenges of Secularism (Cluny Media).

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.

The Politics of Heaven and Hell

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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.

American Flag, Bibles Reportedly Burned In Portland Riots

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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

Culture reporter.

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

Catholic and “catholic”

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Fr. Paul D. Scalia: The Church’s children should resemble her. We ought to strive to be catholic (universal) in our zeal, our mercy, and our embrace of Truth.

In today’s Gospel, our Lord likens the Kingdom of heaven to “a net thrown into the sea, which collects fish of every kind.” (Mt 13:44-52) This net, which gathers not just one kind of fish but fish of every kind, serves as a good description of what we confess every Sunday: the Church is catholic.

Now, most people probably think of “Catholic” as the brand name of a particular Christian denomination. Yes, we speak colloquially of the Catholic Church as distinct from the Lutheran, Episcopal, Methodist churches, etc. But that’s a fairly recent designation, only since the Reformation. Before the Church was “Catholic” she was already “catholic.” It’s a truth we find expressed in the Church’s earliest years. The word “catholic” means universal, embracing and bringing all things together into a unity (from the Greek kata holos, “according to the whole).

Now, the distinction and relation of “Catholic” and “catholic” is important: one cannot be Catholic without also being catholic. To be a member of the Church means to share in her catholicity. So, what does that entail?

First, the Church is catholic – universal – in the most obvious sense: for all people. “Here comes everybody” is James Joyce’s famous description of the Church. She welcomes all comers, embraces and incorporates all people – “from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues, all peoples, of every race, nation, and country throughout the world.” (Rev 7:9) She leaves no group or kind of people beyond her mission and solicitude.

Now, catholic in this sense does not mean everyone thrown together willy-nilly, as you might toss all your clothes into the closet. Rather, it means all people brought together as one, as a unified whole. In the United States, we are now witnessing what happens to a society when its various peoples have lost their principle of unity. The Church, however – and, in the end, only the Church – is truly universal because she both embraces all people and makes them one body in Christ.

The implications of this universality should be clear. It means, first, that we welcome all people into the Church. Anyone who repents and believes is welcome regardless of any accidental qualities.  Further, this catholicity requires that we actively seek to bring the Gospel to all peoples, and all peoples to the Church.

Second, the Church is catholic in the sense that she forgives all sins. This is a consequence of her being the continuing presence of Christ Himself in the world.  Our Lord has authorized her to act and speak in His Name. He entrusted to her ministers His own power to forgive, a power limited only by a person’s desire to be forgiven.

Through the ministry of the Church, any of our sins, from the most trivial to the most severe, can be forgiven when we repent and ask forgiveness. Which also means that we should desire the extension of that forgiveness and reconciliation. Indeed, we should participate in the Church’s ministry of reconciliation. As such, our own personal forgiveness should extend as far as the Church’s, from the most trivial slight to the gravest sin against us. As regards forgiveness we can never say, “thus far and no further.”

Throughout her history, from Tertullian to Calvin, the Church has seen plenty of rigorists who would like to shorten the reach of her mercy. Like the slaves in the parable of the wheat and tares (Mt 13:24-43), they want a Church of saints not sinners. In the current “cancel culture,” the mobs of secular rigorists give us a sense of just how brutal a society is that desires pure justice (or what passes for it) and no mercy.

Finally, the Church is catholic in the sense that she possesses all truth. Everything necessary for salvation is found within her doctrine. All religions possess some aspects of the truth. Only Christ’s Church possesses the fullness of the truth.

Notice that the net in the parable brings in “all kinds of fish,” both the desired and the undesired. Similarly, the Church holds both pleasing truths (human dignity, forgiveness, heaven) and hard truths (sin, judgment, hell). To be Catholic means to assent to all that the Church teaches – not just to the parts we like.

The Church’s history is littered with heresies, a word that indicates the choosing of one truth to the exclusion of others (Greek again haerisis, not kata holos). Those who do so cease to be catholic, because they are embracing not the fullness of the truth but only the parts they like. If we call ourselves catholic, we must show ourselves to be truly catholic, embracing all truths — not just the convenient ones.

Mother Church’s children should bear a resemblance to her. So it is that we ought to strive to be catholic in our zeal for souls, in the reach of our mercy, and in our embrace of the truth.

COLUMN BY

Fr. Paul D. Scalia

Fr. Paul Scalia is a priest of the Diocese of Arlington, Va, where he serves as Episcopal Vicar for Clergy. His new book is That Nothing May Be Lost: Reflections on Catholic Doctrine and Devotion.

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.

VIDEO: Pope embraces imam who has endorsed jihad suicide attacks against Jews and wants converts to Christianity killed

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Pope Francis and the Grand Sheikh of al-Azhar, Ahmed el-Tayeb, early this year published “A Document On Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together,” and it’s as filled with falsehoods and wishful thinking as one would expect coming from a practiced deceiver such as el-Tayeb and someone so eager to be deceived as Pope Francis. Here’s one:

Terrorism is deplorable and threatens the security of people, be they in the East or the West, the North or the South, and disseminates panic, terror and pessimism, but this is not due to religion, even when terrorists instrumentalize it. It is due, rather, to an accumulation of incorrect interpretations of religious texts and to policies linked to hunger, poverty, injustice, oppression and pride. This is why it is so necessary to stop supporting terrorist movements fuelled by financing, the provision of weapons and strategy, and by attempts to justify these movements even using the media. All these must be regarded as international crimes that threaten security and world peace. Such terrorism must be condemned in all its forms and expressions…

Terrorism is due to “an accumulation of incorrect interpretations of religious texts and to policies linked to hunger, poverty, injustice, oppression and pride.”

So are the authoritative sources in Sunni Islam, the schools of Sunni jurisprudence (madhahib), all incorrect in their interpretations of the Qur’an and Sunnah? Here is what they say about jihad warfare against non-Muslims:

Shafi’i school: A Shafi’i manual of Islamic law that was certified in 1991 by the clerics at Al-Azhar University, one of the leading authorities in the Islamic world, as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy, stipulates about jihad that “the caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians…until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax.” It adds a comment by Sheikh Nuh Ali Salman, a Jordanian expert on Islamic jurisprudence: the caliph wages this war only “provided that he has first invited [Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians] to enter Islam in faith and practice, and if they will not, then invited them to enter the social order of Islam by paying the non-Muslim poll tax (jizya)…while remaining in their ancestral religions.” (‘Umdat al-Salik, o9.8).

Of course, there is no caliph today, and hence the oft-repeated claim that Osama et al are waging jihad illegitimately, as no state authority has authorized their jihad. But they explain their actions in terms of defensive jihad, which needs no state authority to call it, and becomes “obligatory for everyone” (‘Umdat al-Salik, o9.3) if a Muslim land is attacked. The end of the defensive jihad, however, is not peaceful coexistence with non-Muslims as equals: ‘Umdat al-Salik specifies that the warfare against non-Muslims must continue until “the final descent of Jesus.” After that, “nothing but Islam will be accepted from them, for taking the poll tax is only effective until Jesus’ descent” (o9.8).

Hanafi school: A Hanafi manual of Islamic law repeats the same injunctions. It insists that people must be called to embrace Islam before being fought, “because the Prophet so instructed his commanders, directing them to call the infidels to the faith.” It emphasizes that jihad must not be waged for economic gain, but solely for religious reasons: from the call to Islam “the people will hence perceive that they are attacked for the sake of religion, and not for the sake of taking their property, or making slaves of their children, and on this consideration it is possible that they may be induced to agree to the call, in order to save themselves from the troubles of war.”

However, “if the infidels, upon receiving the call, neither consent to it nor agree to pay capitation tax [jizya], it is then incumbent on the Muslims to call upon God for assistance, and to make war upon them, because God is the assistant of those who serve Him, and the destroyer of His enemies, the infidels, and it is necessary to implore His aid upon every occasion; the Prophet, moreover, commands us so to do.” (Al-Hidayah, II.140)

Maliki school: Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), a pioneering historian and philosopher, was also a Maliki legal theorist. In his renowned Muqaddimah, the first work of historical theory, he notes that “in the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.” In Islam, the person in charge of religious affairs is concerned with “power politics,” because Islam is “under obligation to gain power over other nations.”

Hanbali school: The great medieval theorist of what is commonly known today as radical or fundamentalist Islam, Ibn Taymiyya (Taqi al-Din Ahmad Ibn Taymiyya, 1263-1328), was a Hanbali jurist. He directed that “since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the religion is God’s entirely and God’s word is uppermost, therefore according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought.”

“Leave them; they are blind guides. And if a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.” (Matthew 15:14)

“Pope Embraces Anti-Semitic Imam Who Wants Christian Converts Killed,” by Jules Gomes, Church Militant, November 18, 2019:

Hours before Pope Francis called for the abolition of capital punishment on Friday, he warmly embraced Grand Imam Al-Tayeb, who has expressed his desire that Muslims who convert to Christianity should be executed.

The world’s best-known Muslim leader has also called homosexuality a disease, dismissed the idea of human rights as “ticking time-bombs” and has endorsed suicide attacks against Jewish men, women and children.

Earlier that day in the pontiff’s address to the International Association of Penal Law, Pope Francis compared the rhetoric of conservative politicians who oppose the homosexual agenda to speeches made by Adolf Hitler.

“These are actions that are typical of Nazism, that with its persecution of Jews, gypsies, people with homosexual orientation, represent an excellent model of the throwaway culture and culture of hatred,” he said.

When speaking to al-Tayeb, however, the Holy Father discussed the objectives in the document “Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together,” which he co-signed with the Grand Imam in February.

The two religious leaders engaged in “cordial discussions,” according to the Vatican, talking about the protection of minors in the digital world and goals achieved since Pope Francis’ recent visit to the United Arab Emirates.

In 2016, Al-Tayeb called for “unrepentant apostates” from Islam to be killed. “The four schools of law all concur that apostasy is a crime, that an apostate should be asked to repent, and that if he does not, he should be killed,” he said in an interview in Arabic on television, explaining:

There are two verses in the Quran that clearly mention apostasy, but they did not define a specific punishment. They left the punishment for the Hereafter, for Allah to punish them as He sees fit. But there are two hadiths [on apostasy]. According to the more reliable of the two, a Muslim can only be killed in one of three cases, one of which is abandoning his religion and leaving the community.

Sheikh Al-Tayeb continued:

We must examine these two expressions: “Abandoning religion” is described as “leaving the community.” All the early jurisprudents understood that this applies to someone who leaves his religion, regardless of whether he left and opposed his community or not. All the early jurisprudents said that such a person should be killed, regardless of whether it is a man or a woman — with the exception of the Hanafi School, which says that a female apostate should not be killed.

Asked about the exception for the female apostate, the Muslim theologian responded: “Because it is inconceivable that a woman would rebel against her community.”

The global leader of Sunni Islam, which constitutes the majority of the world’s Muslim population, also dismissed the concept of human rights as “full of ticking time-bombs” and insisted that “the [Islamic and Western] civilizations are different.”

“Our civilization is based on religion and moral values, whereas their [Western] civilization is based more on personal liberties and some moral values,” he told his interviewer.

The Grand Imam’s most severe condemnation was reserved for homosexuality: “My opinion was — and I said this [in the West] — that no Muslim society could ever consider sexual liberty, homosexuality and so on to be a personal right. Muslim societies consider these things to be diseases, which must be fought and treated.”…

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

VIDEO: The Vortex — Francis HATES America! He has drunk all the Kool-Aid.

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TRANSCRIPT

It’s become quite apparent that in his admiration for establishing a one-world government administered by a new world order, America is an object of hate for Pope Francis.

The handwriting was on the wall at least two years ago when yet another article from Eugenio Scalfari revealed that the pontiff has so little regard for the United States that he actually thinks we should simply give up our national sovereignty and submit to a new world order.

Maybe the Dems can nominate Pope Francis for their party’s candidate for president. He can assume presidential powers and then dissolve the U.S.A. After all, it seems like he’s got experience doing the same thing with the Church.

The old atheist Italian journalist says that in 2017, Pope Francis called him shortly after the G-20 summit and demanded to see him at four o’clock that afternoon. According to Scalfari, Francis had become agitated about the United States and other nations commanding such power in the world.

Pope Francis told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica that the United States of America has “a distorted vision of the world,” and Americans must be ruled by a world government as soon as possible, “for their own good.”

Now that’s an incredible statement to make, and as the article continued, the disrespect for the idea of national sovereignty mounted. European nations also came under the papal displeasure: “I also thought many times to this problem and came to the conclusion that, not only but also for this reason, Europe must take as soon as possible a federal structure.”

There is without a doubt an extreme dislike with this pope of anything that strikes of nationalism, meaning national sovereignty. Since America seems to lead the world in the area of national pride, the United States is never passed over in the papal condemnations of national sovereignty.

Somewhere, somehow, he has in his head that the idea of individual nations is bad because that translates into immigrants being mistreated, and among rich nations — the First-World nations — poverty escalates and the poor are taken advantage of.

That’s what he thinks, and so the solution for him is to introduce a one-world government, ruled by a single new world order, so all immigrants can get a fair shake out of life.

Last week the reports came out that Pope Francis thinks national pride, touted by political conservatives, is the beginning of Nazism reappearing. He said to an international group of specialists in penal law: “And I must confess to you that when I hear a speech [by] someone responsible for order or for a government, I think of speeches by Hitler in 1934, 1936,” adding, “They are inadmissible behaviors in the rule of law and generally accompany racist prejudices and contempt for socially marginalized groups.”

“It is no coincidence that in these times, emblems and actions typical of Nazism reappear, which, with its persecutions against Jews, gypsies and people of homosexual orientation, represents the negative model par excellence of a culture of waste and hatred,” he continued.

Pope Francis has drunk the Kool-Aid of the Left.

So there it is, perfectly framed by this pontificate: Immigrants and homosexuals need to be protected classes, and sovereign nations must give way to those who do not respect borders and those who reject natural law. And nations, now bordering on embracing Nazism, must surrender their independence because it is the will of God. For their own good, the nations of the world, especially the powerful ones, must pass out of existence, surrender themselves and abolish their borders for their own good.

When Americans are chanting “USA!” at sporting events or political rallies for Republicans, in Pope Francis’ head, that apparently rings as Sieg Heil!

This is dangerous, dangerous stuff. For the occupant of the throne of Peter to be outwardly demonizing nations — especially the leading nation which defeated the Nazis — as Nazis themselves, a line has been crossed from which there is no coming back.

To then turn around and underscore that part of what makes a person a modern-day Nazi is to not go along with the homosexual agenda and resist the evil, this is beyond the pale and must be called out.

Pope Francis has moved into territory that no pope has ever transgressed. He is transferring the mission of the Church from the salvation of souls to the foundation of a one-world government.

What precisely the role of the Church itself would be in that new world order still seems vague, but one thing is clear. Francis never criticizes Islamic nations. He never tells them to clean up their act and stop throwing homosexuals off roofs. He never has a word of criticism for their brutality of FGM (female gential mutilation) or sponsorship of world terror, or torture or forcing people in their nations to convert or have their heads cut off.

Yet he has no problem with hiding behind the Italian military surrounding the walls of the Vatican, protecting him from that same Muslim threat.

This pontificate is a political disaster, one gone completely off the rails.

Serious questions need to be asked about all this: homosexual men, many of whom are either abusers or covered up abuse placed into powerful posts; the theft of hundreds of millions of euros; constant lies and denials of repeated press reports; and multiple appointments of enemies of Christ to high-visibility positions within the Church. And now hurling accusations at political conservatives that their love of country makes them “Nazis,” and opposing the gay agenda means conservatives want homosexuals marched off to gas chambers.

This is outrageous. Francis hates America because America represents everything his twisted political worldview stands in opposition to.

This increased marxist view has been brewing in the Church for decades, and far from being ascendant is now practically the status quo. Love of the homosexual agenda, illegal immigrants, the abolition of nations and Islam’s “favored son” status is what Francis will be remembered for.

The Vatican has yet to comment on the Scalfari interview about Francis reportedly saying America should willingly surrender itself to a one-world government. And actually, no comment is needed. We’ve heard enough.

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

Video: Robert Spencer speaks at the Sullivan County Republican Party, New Hampshire

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After a great deal of controversy from the fascist Left and viciously biased “journalists” Kevin Landrigan of the New Hampshire Union Leader and John Gregg of Valley News, I spoke for the Sullivan County Republican Party of New Hampshire on Friday evening, October 4. My topic was the controversy itself, and what it reveals for the state of our response to jihad terror and the health of our society in general.

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

Michigan, California, Georgia, Texas, Florida, NJ public schools: Islam glorified, Christianity vilified, U.S. bashed

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There is nothing wrong with students learning about Islam in school, if what they’re taught is accurate. But it isn’t. Because of the overpowering influence of the multiculturalist ethos and fears of charges of “Islamophobia” and “racism,” public school materials on Islam and other religions are for the most part heavily biased, with scarcely a critical word about Islam, Muhammad depicted as a cross between Gandhi and Sheriff Andy Taylor, no mention of jihad or dhimmitude, and harsh criticism of Christianity.

“TMLC Uncovers Tax-Payer Funded Islamic Propaganda Forced On Teachers,” Thomas More Law Center, August 22, 2019 (thanks to R.):

ANN ARBOR, MI – The Thomas More Law Center (TMLC), a national nonprofit public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has uncovered evidence of a well-orchestrated Islamic propaganda campaign aimed at teachers in school systems throughout Michigan and several other states.

Concerned about a two-day mandatory teacher-training seminar on Islam conducted by a Muslim consultant hired by Michigan’s Novi Community Schools District, TMLC filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documents related to the workshop.

Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Law Center, commented on the results of their investigation, “We found that the teachers were subjected to two days of Islamic propaganda, where Islam was glorified, Christianity disparaged, and America bashed—all funded by Novi taxpayers.”

Moreover, during the past five years the school district has presented no teacher-training seminars focusing on Christianity, Judaism or any other religion – only Islam.

The hired Muslim consultant was Huda Essa, a resident of the Dearborn area and of Arab descent. She appeared before the Novi teachers in a hijab, the Muslim headscarf, billing herself as an expert in “cultural competency” and “culturally responsive teaching.”

Most disappointing was the fact that of the more than 400 teachers attending the workshop, not one teacher challenged Essa’s denigration of Christianity or attacks on America.

TMLC inspected dozens of internal school documents, including audio recordings of Essa’s presentation.

The information on Islam she provided to Novi teachers was riddled with falsehoods and errors of omission that were clearly meant to deceive.

Essa provided no truthful information on Sharia law and jihad, two of the most important aspects of Islam. All references to terrorism were dismissed as having nothing to do with Islam. White Christian males, she suggested, are more dangerous than Islamic radicals.

Essa is the face behind Culture Links LLC, a Michigan-based consultancy. She describes herself on the Culture Links website as an advocate of social justice who encourages children to “take pride in their many identities.”

But, as TMLC discovered from the Novi documents, the one identity Essa does not celebrate is that of patriotic Americans who believe in our nation’s exceptionalism.

And her message extends far beyond Novi.

Essa’s client list reveals she has been spreading her “trash America first” philosophy to colleges, universities, schools and professional educator associations throughout Michigan, California, Georgia, Texas, Florida and beyond. In Michigan alone her website lists nine school districts as clients – Oakland County Schools, Ann Arbor Schools, L’Anse Creuse Public Schools, Plymouth-Canton Community Schools, Roseville Community Schools, Farmington Public Schools, Dearborn Public Schools, Birmingham Public Schools and Melvindale Public Schools.

Under the banner of promoting diversity, inclusion and a multicultural approach to education, Essa sets about comparing Islam to Christianity, calling them “mostly similar.” The one big difference, she claims, is that Islam is the world’s “only purely monotheistic religion.”

Islam’s holy book, the Koran, came straight from Allah to the prophet Muhammad and, unlike the Jewish and Christian scriptures, has never been altered or changed, she told the Novi teachers. Significantly, the Koran commands Muslims to “Fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them, take them captive, harass them, lie in wait and ambush them using every stratagem of war.” (Koran 9:5)

Her message was clear: The Koran is superior to the Bible. But she did not address the fact that it calls for the extermination of Christian and Jews.

While quick to indict America as guilty of “cultural genocide,” Essa was silent on the 1400 years of actual genocides, also known as jihads, in which Muslims wiped out Jewish tribes on the Arabian Peninsula, and slaughtered millions of Christians throughout the Middle East, North Africa and the European Continent. Referring to Islam, Winston Churchill wrote, “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.”

Novi’s Islamic teacher-training is just the latest example of professional Islamic indoctrinators infiltrating U.S. public schools even as Christianity has been forced out of the classroom.

“This type of infiltration amounts to an Islamic Trojan horse within our public-school systems,” Thompson said. “No other religion gets this kind of special treatment in our schools.”

Only action by patriotic American parents will put a stop to the indoctrination of teachers and students. They must attend school board meetings and call their board’s attention to the existence of unconstitutional Islamic propaganda whenever they find evidence of it in their children’s schools. And when their board is unresponsive, they must be willing to take legal action to stop it whenever the law permits.

TMLC has several active cases involving public schools bending over backwards to promote Islam while trashing Christianity.

In New Jersey, seventh-grade students at Chatham Middle School were taught “Islam is the true faith,” required to learn the Shahada, or Muslim creed, and forced to watch videos that sought to convert them.

TMLC is representing another student at La Plata High School in Maryland, where pupils in world-history classes were taught that “Most Muslims’ faith is stronger than the average Christian” and “Islam at heart is a peaceful religion.”

Jihad, meanwhile, was introduced to La Plata students as a “personal” spiritual struggle, having nothing to do with using violence to spread the faith. And, like in New Jersey, the Maryland students were forced to learn the Five Pillars of Islam and memorize the Shahada.

A SERIES OF DECEPTIONS

Essa spent a great deal of time in her Novi presentation talking about Muslim women, whom she described as victims of Islamophobia on the part of bigoted Americans.

She said her own mother’s decision to wear the hijab was met with “rage” from random Americans. Other hijab-wearing Muslim women have been spat upon, had hot liquids poured on them, been beaten and even killed because they wear the hijab, Essa said, without giving details of when or where these atrocities supposedly occurred.

Essa presented no statistics on hate crimes to back up her claims. FBI crime stats show that anti-Muslim attacks are relatively rare in America and actually fell by 17 percent in 2017. Anti-Jewish hate crimes that year out-numbered anti-Muslim offenses by nearly four to one.

Globally, Christians are the most persecuted of all religious groups, according to the watchdog Open Doors. Of the top-ten most dangerous countries to be a Christian, all but two of them are Muslim-majority nations, according to Open Doors’ 2019 World Watch List.

But Essa’s attempts to con Novi teachers into accepting her anti-American, pro-Islamic worldview didn’t stop with the idea that Muslims are the most persecuted and victimized people.

She said any poor treatment of women in Islamic countries should be attributed to “cultural” differences, not the religion of Islam.

She failed to mention that Muhammad, Islam’s prophet, is reported to have said that the majority of hell would be populated by women (hadith by Sahih Bukhari Vol. 1:28, 301, Vol. 2:161, Vol. 7:124-126). Also absent from her presentation was the Koranic instruction for husbands to beat a disobedient wife (Sura 4:34).

Exercising the art of deception, Essa said Muslims love Jesus and refer to him as “messiah.”

But the word “messiah” has a different meaning for Muslims than for Christians. When Christians speak of Jesus their Messiah, they are referring to God’s “anointed One,” who has the power to forgive sin and grant salvation.

Muslims confer no such divine authority to their Jesus. Under Islam Jesus was only a man, a lower prophet under Muhammad, not the Son of God, and he did not die on a cross or rise from the dead as documented in the gospels.

Essa hammered Novi teachers with the Islamic teaching that the Jewish and Christian scriptures are not to be trusted. Although once pure, they were gradually “corrupted” by unscrupulous men. Only the Koran contains the final, “pure” words of God, she said.

Essa also schooled teachers in the proper use of the phrase “Allahu Akbar!” or “Allah is greatest!” While this is widely known as battle-cry of Muslim terrorists, Essa said it’s really just a refrain that Muslims use to convey feelings of happiness, sadness, anger, or thankfulness while praising Allah.

Essa said the word “Islam” is an offshoot of the Arabic term “Salaam,” which means peace. This is a common ploy used by Muslim apologists to deceive uninformed Westerners.

“Islam” is more accurately translated as “submission” and good Muslims know they must submit to Allah and his Sharia (Islamic law), above all other systems of law.

Essa noted Islam is the world’s fastest-growing religion without mentioning that Muslims are forbidden from leaving the faith. Considered apostates, those leaving the faith are subject to severe punishment, up to and including death. And forced conversions have been a well-documented fact of history.

The Middle East and North Africa, once overwhelmingly Christian, were Islamized by a series of jihads starting with Muhammad, his successor caliphs and later by the Ottoman Turks.

She completely ignored the jihadi terrorist attacks conducted on U.S. soil: The 9/11 attack that murdered nearly 3,000 people, the Fort Hood massacre of 12 U.S. soldiers, the Pulse Nightclub attack that killed 49 Americans in Orlando, the San Bernardino attack that killed 14 at a Christmas party, the Chattanooga shooting that killed five at a Navy recruitment and reserve center, the Boston Marathon bombing that killed three and left hundreds wounded, and the Chelsea, New York, pipe-bombing that injured 30 innocent Americans. Not to mention the countless terror attacks that have been foiled by the FBI.

Here are some other facts uncovered by TMLC’s Freedom of Information Act requests:

  • Novi school district has no guidelines for the selection of presenters for teacher-training events.
  • The school district did not fully vet Huda Essa before selecting her as a presenter and providing her with data about the school district and its students.
  • Essa was given access to data from student and teacher surveys.
  • The school district said it had no records that would indicate it ever conducted a factual analysis of Essa’s presentation.
  • The school district signed a contract on August 2, 2017, agreeing to pay Essa $5,000 for her two-day seminar on August 28 and 29, 2017.

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

Beware of Politicians who Covet Your Stuff!

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Image may contain: 1 person, suit and text
Image from Facebook.

On Facebook there is a meme (right) based upon what President Donald J. Trump said at his “Choose Greatness” 2019 State of the Union. President Trump said:

America was founded on liberty and independence, and not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free and we will stay free. 

Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country. 

Coveting

When I saw this meme I posted this:

Exodus 20:2-17 NKJV – “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.”

A Facebook friend Randy Rioux asked, “What is that for?”

I responded to Randy with, “Communism and Socialism is based upon the core belief of coveting other peoples things. It is a violation of the Tenth Commandment. At some point Communists and Socialists run out of other peoples things.” Randy replied, “Thanks for clarifying.” I believe Randy got it.

Merriam Webster defines coveting as, “to desire (what belongs to another) inordinately or culpably.”

Synonyms for covet include: ache (for), crave, desiderate, desire, die (for), hanker (for or after), hunger (for), itch (for), jones (for) [slang], long (for), lust (for or after), pant (after), pine (for), repine (for), salivate (for), sigh (for), thirst (for), want, wish (for), yearn (for), yen (for).

The Individual vs. The Collective

Ayn Rand’s 1946 monograph “Textbook of Americanism” explains in the simplest terms possible what made America unique and great.

Rand opens with an explanation of two starkly contrasting ideas.

What Is the Basic Issue in the World Today?

The basic issue in the world today is between two principles: Individualism and Collectivism. Individualism holds that man has inalienable rights which cannot be taken away from him by any other man, nor by any number, group or collective of other men. Therefore, each man exists by his own right and for his own sake, not for the sake of the group.

Collectivism holds that man has no rights; that his work, his body and his personality belong to the group; that the group can do with him as it pleases, in any manner it pleases, for the sake of whatever it decides to be its own welfare. Therefore, each man exists only by the permission of the group and for the sake of the group.

These two principles are the roots of two opposite social systems. The basic issue of the world today is between these two systems.

President Trump clearly threw the gauntlet down against the “collective” when he said, “America was founded on liberty and independence, and not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free and we will stay free.” 

2020 Presidential Primary

This is what every America should be alert for as we enter the 2020 Presidential primaries. There will be dozens of debates as both political parties field candidates at the national, state and local levels.

The defining issue in 2020 will be coveting.

Coveting takes on many forms. Here are some core coveting issues to watch out for:

  1. Coveting other peoples freedom of speech. There are those politicians who hunger for the power to limit free speech. Many social media giants have become gate keepers and salivate over denying some freedom of expression.
  2. Coveting other peoples ability to defend themselves. This ongoing battle will heat up as politicians use tragedies to yearn for the day that all Americans are disarmed and unable to defend themselves from thieves, criminals and the government.
  3. Coveting other peoples religious beliefs. Some politicians will use hatred of Jews to promote their political agenda.
  4. Coveting other peoples wealth. Taxes is the tool of politicians at every level to take what is not theirs and redistribute it as they wish.
  5. Coveting other peoples individualism. The great battle since the beginning of mankind is the struggle between the individual and the collective (government).
  6. Coveting other peoples children. This is perhaps the most dangerous form of coveting. This form of coveting takes on many forms: the brainwashing of children to turn on their parents, the sexual assaults on children to feed a craving (pedophilia and pederasty) and the using of children for personal gain (human trafficking and prostitution).
  7. Coveting another persons life. The law recently passed in New York and the law proposed in Virginia are the definition of infanticide.

All of these forms of coveting, and many more, will be on full display during the 2020 Presidential primaries.

Coveting leads to worshiping false images (the earth), disrespecting your parents, adultery, stealing, lying (bearing false witness) and even murder.

Watch for them. Beware of them. Vote to end coveting.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is by Pixabay.

VIDEO: Starting the New Year off right with the Word of God for America.

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The Book of Jude.

Jude.1

[1] Jude, the servant of Jesus Christ, and brother of James, to them that are sanctified by God the Father, and preserved in Jesus Christ, and called:
[2] Mercy unto you, and peace, and love, be multiplied.
[3] Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.
[4] For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ.
[5] I will therefore put you in remembrance, though ye once knew this, how that the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed them that believed not.
[6] And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.
[7] Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.
[8] Likewise also these filthy dreamers defile the flesh, despise dominion, and speak evil of dignities.
[9] Yet Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee.
[10] But these speak evil of those things which they know not: but what they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves.
[11] Woe unto them! for they have gone in the way of Cain, and ran greedily after the error of Balaam for reward, and perished in the gainsaying of Core.
[12] These are spots in your feasts of charity, when they feast with you, feeding themselves without fear: clouds they are without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots;
[13] Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever.
[14] And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints,
[15] To execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.
[16] These are murmurers, complainers, walking after their own lusts; and their mouth speaketh great swelling words, having men’s persons in admiration because of advantage.
[17] But, beloved, remember ye the words which were spoken before of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ;
[18] How that they told you there should be mockers in the last time, who should walk after their own ungodly lusts.
[19] These be they who separate themselves, sensual, having not the Spirit.
[20] But ye, beloved, building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost,
[21] Keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life.
[22] And of some have compassion, making a difference:
[23] And others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire; hating even the garment spotted by the flesh.
[24] Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy,
[25] To the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen.

U.S. Catholic bishops complicit in Muslim persecution of Christians

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Recently I was interviewed about the persecution by Catholic bishops of Catholic priests who enunciate unpopular truths about Islam.

“Leave them; they are blind guides. And if a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.” (Matthew 15:14)

“Islamic Expert: US Bishops Complicit in Muslim Persecution of Christians,” by Anita Carey, ChurchMilitant.com, May 8, 2017:

DETROIT (ChurchMiltant.com) – A prominent Islamic expert is comparing the bishops’ silence on terrorism to sex abuse cover-up. Robert Spencer, an Islamic terror expert and author of 16 books on Islam, released an editorial Sunday excoriating the U.S. bishops’ actions to punish clergy and schoolteachers who speak out against Islam, including Spencer himself.

“The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops moves actively and swiftly to silence and demonize voices that tell the truth about the Muslim persecution of Christians,” Spencer noted, naming various bishops who’ve refused him, as well as other Muslim critics, a platform in their dioceses.

“You can reject every element of the Nicene Creed and everything the Church teaches, and still the U.S. Catholic Bishops will consider you a Catholic in good standing,” he continued. “But if you believe that Islam is not a religion of peace, you have no place in the U.S. Catholic Church.”

Church Militant spoke with Spencer on his thoughts regarding the reasons why the U.S. bishops are so reluctant to speak out against the evil of Islam.

CM: At what point do you think the bishops started to pander to a politically correct agenda?

RS: This is an outgrowth of the confusion that overtook the Church in the wake of Vatican II, and the popular but erroneous idea among liberal Catholics that the Church had discarded its tradition and dogmas and essentially embraced the leftist agenda. This idea took root in earnest in the 1960s, but began germinating long before that.

CM: Knowing the historical conflicts between Islam and Christianity, why would the bishops be so quick and severe toward those who are informing the laity? Why would they want the laity ignorant?

RS: This mystifies me, but my best assessment is that this is an outgrowth of the spirit of Vatican II, which called upon Muslims and Christians to set aside ancient antagonisms and find common ground. There is a general assumption among the bishops that just as Christianity has changed since the time of the Crusades, so also has Islam, and dialog will iron out any remaining differences.

In reality, this is an unfounded assumption, as Islamic teaching has not changed, and still contains an imperative to wage war against Christians and subjugate them under the rule of Islamic law. I would expect that most bishops, however, would dismiss the idea that Islamic teaching contains such an imperative as an “Orientalist” and “Islamophobic” false claim. They, however, are the ones who are ignorant.

CM: What do you think the bishops’ problem is with your talks and position on Islam?

RS: I’m told that Bp. Nicholas Samra believes that I am “spreading hate,” and since I was a member of his diocese, he himself told me that many bishops had approached him at the USCCB conference telling him that he had to “do something” about me. They apparently believe that I am harming the dialog they are conducting with Muslims, and they apparently also think that this dialog is producing results, even though Muslim persecution of Christians has increased exponentially since it began.

For my part, I reject the charge that I am spreading hate, and challenge Samra or any other bishop to quote a single hateful statement from my work. I am exposing facts that many would prefer to keep concealed; the “hate” charge is simply an attempt to make people of good will turn against my work.

CM: If the bishops do start to speak out against Islam, will it make Christian persecution worse or start an all-out war? 

RS: In Islamic law, Christians must live in subservience and submission to Islamic law. If they speak out about their plight, it will get even worse for them, and their lives could be forfeit. Thus they generally adopt an attitude of publicly praising and siding with those who persecute them, so that it won’t get even worse for them. This is the attitude that the bishops now appear to have adopted as well: Samra himself told me that I shouldn’t speak out against Muslim persecution of Christians, as doing so would only make matters worse for Middle-Eastern Christians.

While I am aware of that possibility, at the same time to dissimulate about the nature and magnitude of that persecution only misleads Christians outside the Middle East into complacency. It also just validates and reinforces violent intimidation. It is incumbent upon the bishops as messengers of the truth to tell the whole truth about what is happening to the Christians of the Middle East, and to reject a submission to Islamic intimidation that would condemn our children and our children’s children to slavery. To accept that intimidation and lie or remain silent because of it is only to encourage more such intimidation. They could speak out while working to ensure that the United States and other powers do everything they can to protect the remaining Christians in the Middle East from further persecution.

CM: What can the faithful do to influence the bishops or fight back against the liberal media?

RS: Call them to tell the truth. When they issue statements about Islam that are dishonest and misleading, challenge them. I have been severely criticized for criticizing bishops. Many Catholics seem to think that to do so is disloyal to the Church. On the contrary, I believe that not to call out bishops when they are sinful and wrong is even more disloyal to the Church. It is the kind of thinking that led to the pedophilia scandals.

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‘The Catholic Church…has become one of Islam’s loudest boosters’

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In this excellent piece, George Neumayr refers to the rupture of relations between the Vatican and al-Azhar that took place during the time of Pope Benedict. As I explained here, that rupture took place because Pope Benedict dared to speak out about the Muslim persecution of Christians.

By contrast, Francis energetically defends Islam, and leaves the persecuted Christians twisting in the wind, so he is acceptable to al-Azhar.

The worst part about this is the fact that because this man is Pope, all too many Catholics, including some in positions of high authority, treat him as if he were a divine oracle, his every utterance to be revered, respected, studied, and followed. Because of the statement of Vatican II that “religious submission of mind and will must be shown in a special way to the authentic magisterium of the Roman Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra,” and “must be shown in such a way that his supreme magisterium is acknowledged with reverence, the judgments made by him are sincerely adhered to, according to his manifest mind and will,” Catholic leaders and publications tend to think that they must adhere to anything the Pope says about anything.

This leads them into impossible positions. When Pope Benedict XVI appeared to criticize the aspects of Islam that incite and justify violence, they allowed for criticism of Islam. When Francis showed himself to be an Islamic apologist, they became Islamic apologists. All too many Catholic leaders and institutions, in other words, are more interested in being papists than in being truthful. They would rather show loyalty to the Pope, no matter how damaging his utterances, than stand for the truth on the own against the Pope.

The contradiction is clear, and absolute. If the Catholic Church has become one of Islam’s loudest boosters, then those who are aware of the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat, rooted in Islamic texts and teachings, have to make some hard decisions about where they stand.

“Leave them; they are blind guides. And if a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.” (Matthew 15:14)

POPE-ISLAM-NON-VIOLENT“The Papal Propagandist for Islam Heads to Egypt,” by George Neumayr, American Spectator, April 26, 2017 (thanks to Lookmann):

As the prototypical progressive Jesuit, Pope Francis prides himself on his “ecumenism.” He oozes enthusiasm for every religion except his own. At the top of his list of favorite religions is the Church’s fiercest adversary — Islam.

He often sounds more like a spokesman for CAIR than a Catholic pope. After jihadists cut off the head of a French priest in July 2016 — yelling “Allahu Akbar” over the priest’s slit throat — Pope Francis rushed to the defense of Islam. “I don’t like to talk about Islamic violence, because every day, when I read the newspaper, I see violence,” he said, before ludicrously blaming the rise of terrorism on the “idolatry” of free-market economics: “As long as the god of money is at the center of the global economy and not the human person, man and woman, this is the first terrorism.”

As Europe turns into Eurabia, Pope Francis is picking up honors and awards from progressives, including, hilariously, the 2016 “Charlemagne Prize” for his Islamic apologetics. It is hard to imagine a Christian leader less like Charlemagne. Pope Francis is energized not depressed by the disappearance of Christian Europe. “States must be secular,” he told La Croix. Christian states, he said, “end badly” and go “against the grain of history.” He added that “when I hear talk of the Christian roots of Europe, I sometimes dread the tone, which can seem triumphalist or even vengeful.” It also takes on “colonialist overtones,” he complained.

The most liberal pope ever, of course, sees no irony in shilling for the most illiberal religion on Earth. On his anti-colonialist scorecard, Islam wears the white hats and Christian Europe, the black ones. After jihadists gunned down ten journalists at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, Pope Francis rushed to Islam’s defense again, in effect rebuking the dead journalists for incitement: “You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.” Those who do, he continued, should “expect a punch.”

This week Pope Francis takes his pro-Islamic apology tour to Egypt. Previewing the trip, which starts on Friday, he said he seeks to “offer a valid contribution to inter-religious dialogue with the Islamic world.” Francis’s fawning media courtiers are already rolling out the propaganda for it, predicting that it will “build bridges to moderate Islam.”

“A main reason for the trip is to try to strengthen relations with the 1,000-year-old Azhar center that were cut by the Muslim side in 2011 over what it said were repeated insults of Islam by Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict,” according to Reuters. “Ties with the center were restored last year after [Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb] visited the Vatican. Tayeb, widely seen as one of the most moderate senior clerics in Egypt, has repeatedly condemned Islamic State and its practice of declaring others as apostates and infidels as a pretext for waging violent jihad.”

Being “one of the most moderate senior clerics in Egypt” is about as meaningful a distinction as being one of the most chaste Kardashian sisters. Useful idiots in the West call Tayeb moderate, but anyone paying attention knows that he is not, unless calling for the killing of apostates now counts as “moderate.”…

Past popes regarded Islam as a font of poisonous heresies. Dante placed Muhammad in hell. St. Thomas Aquinas said Muhammad peddled “fables and doctrines of the greatest falsity” and sardonically remarked upon the perverse basis for his claim of divine favor: “Muhammad said that he was sent in the power of his arms — which are signs not lacking even to robbers and tyrants.”What has changed? Nothing. Islam remains as violent as it started. But one thing is new: The Catholic Church, under the death-wish progressivism of Francis, has become one of Islam’s loudest boosters.

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