Read this book!

I wish everyone in the West would read Brigitte Gabriel’s Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America. It is not a pleasant read; at points I was nauseated at the clear depiction of evil. But it is a compelling and necessary read.

The book forms two sections. First, Gabriel recounts the fall of her native land to Islamic conquest, then she discovers that the same terrorism she experienced as a child has now followed her to her adopted land, and she tells us how to recognize and counter its stealth maneuverings.

Gabriel grew up in Lebanon, just as it suffered an Islamic takeover. Lebanon was a cosmopolitan paradise, with a stable government apportioned among three main population groups. But tensions mounted as Muslim political power grew due to their high birth rate. Then the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran radicalized the world’s Muslim population. Finally, the welcoming of Arafat’s lawless PLO into Lebanon was like a match struck to tinder, setting off a civil war.

Gabriel recalls how Muslims began a reign of terror. Road blocks would set up, and those with “Christian” marked on their ID card would be machine-gunned. Christians finding loved ones’ bodies in alleys, beheaded or with their throats slit, became a daily occurrence. Mere killing was seldom enough; brutality was celebrated. There was one instance where a Christian mother was physically forced by her own hand to slit her son’s throat, and then to watch as her two daughters were raped. Thus thousands were slaughtered as Muslims claimed the land for their god, and many more thousands fled the nation. Yet the West was oblivious toward the hideous modern-day genocide.

Though a Maronite Christian, Gabriel still was an Arab raised in Arab culture, and as such she was taught to hate Jews. But her understanding of life and culture suddenly turned around when of necessity she accompanied her injured mother to an Israeli hospital. There she was astonished to find that Jews, far from being apes and pigs as she was taught, were an advanced, open-hearted people who gave precious medical care even to enemies that were implacably trying to destroy them. As she contrasted this magnanimity to the irrational hatred of the very Palestinians that the Jews were treating, she clearly saw the nature of the veil of evil for the first time in her life, and she realized that she had been raised in a culture of lies.

Batteries and misplaced religion

Thus says the Lord: “Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the Lord.  – Jer 17:5
Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help. – Ps 146:3
Blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust, who does not turn to the proud, to those who go astray after a lie! – Ps 40:4

I stopped in at our local recycling place last week, looking for a way to efficiently process my household waste. I know the people who started and run the 20-year-old facility. While I might not agree with their political grid, they are dedicated environmentalists who do a lot of good at the local level.

The woman who co-founded the facility told me that they used to separate batteries for dedicated processing, but now there is no one who will take them, so they just get thrown in with the rest of the waste. She said there’s a lot of resistance from commercial carters, who want to simplify the collection process, and she even alleged that the carters were simply merging separated recyclables into the main garbage stream.

Startling evidence of how far we have fallen

If you want to get a taste for how far we’ve fallen, for how deeply our culture has embraced a suicidal level of political correctness that prevents us from defending ourselves from evil, give http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Y2QxNWFlZDM5MDQ0NzM4MDg3ZjA3MDE5ZjNmYzBjYzU a read.

The Army has learned nothing at all from the Ft. Hood massacre, and indeed seems to have stepped up efforts to insure that no Muslim will be offended by our response to that atrocity – even to the point of inviting representatives of terrorist organizations in to lecture our troops and to care for them as chaplains.

Can you see that the West is doomed unless it returns to the Lord? All our freedoms, all our accomplishments, were not due to our brilliance or natural resources, they came because we ordered ourselves according to the revealed truth of God’s Word. We are seeing dramatic and horrible proof of that assertion, as we now witness our downfall even in the midst of the greatest prosperity the world has ever seen, because we have functionally abandoned our God, the one true God, the only God.

I’m torn with how best to fight this battle. I know it needs to be fought spiritually, through prayer and the Word. I know the Kingdom and the church need to be built up. But at the same time I believe that getting the warning out regarding political developments can be used of the Lord to wake people up to our dire condition.

Between the globalist humanists on one hand and the radical Muslims on the other, we are living in critical times.

Questions regarding the Ft. Hood massacre

The way the Ft. Hood massacre is being investigated has raised important questions. I see three immediate areas of concern.

Fourteen dead, but thirteen counts of murder

Fourteen people were killed during the shooting, yet only thirteen counts of murder were lodged. One of the troops was pregnant, and her baby died with her. It has been well-established by now that even in a prevailing humanist ethos that countenances the taking of human life in the womb, when that is done without the consent of the mother it is murder. For the humanists, it’s about pro-choice, solely from the mother’s prospective, and clearly in this case the baby was taken unwillingly and violently from the mother.

Why then did the army bring only thirteen murder charges, when an unborn child was killed as well? From the prosecutor’s point of view, wouldn’t you want to include every count? Wouldn’t the murder of a pregnant woman and her baby add to the case for depraved indifference? Why did the government pull its punches?

I can see no practical or theoretical legal reason for doing so, so I must turn to politics. Obama, you will recall, had the most pro-abortion record of all the senators. Previous to that, he was the only Illinois legislator to vote against the Born Alive Infant Act, which mandated that a doctor be called in to protect the life of a baby if it had survived an abortion attempt. When questioned on this vote during the presidential debates, Obama made an articulate case for the bill being redundant, because Illinois already required that a doctor look to such a baby’s interests. He was so logical and cool that even I doubted the information I had been given on this issue – until I made the effort to dig deeper.

While the proposed law called for an independent pediatrician to be called in to attend to the baby, the existing Illinois law required that the abortionist, on seeing that a baby had survived his killing attempts, himself now look to the baby’s wellbeing. Consider the abortionist, obviously with no scruples toward killing the child, faced with the choice of, on one hand, simply finishing the job he had started, or on the other hand, ensuring that the baby lived, knowing that if there was any damage he would be facing some very ugly press and ruinous lawsuits from the mother. How strong do you think that existing law was, compared to the proposed statute? Do you think Obama was essentially telling the truth to the American people when he gave his explanation?

A solemn, dire warning, from Naval Commander Jerry Wilson

Before I print Jerry Wilson’s letter I need to affirm some foundational points. This is first and always a Christian blog, yet I feel the need to delve into cultural and societal issues because they affect us so deeply. I also believe that we are living through a period of extraordinary crisis and change, and that the change we’re seeing is emphatically not for the good. That makes the need to speak out more compelling.

God works the way He, in His perfect goodness and unlimited wisdom, chooses. He can use the world’s evil to bring about good, while at the same time punishing those who choose the evil. He prefers to bless rather than send affliction, but in an imperfect world He does what He needs to do. This is not a game.

We as a nation are perilously close to incurring the horrible judgment of God. Kicking God out of the schools and the public square decades ago was not a victimless crime; its consequences can increasingly be noted by simply scanning the news headlines. Or ask 50 million dead babies, in the US alone, what they think of our new-found humanist values.

The one thing Jerry Wilson barely mentions below is the coming elections. I believe this is America’s final chance to forestall punishment. If we wake up, admit our mistakes, and send a clear message to arrogant and ungodly powers that we are not going to tolerate this assault on our values and families, there is a chance we can turn the tide.

The enemy has established himself deeply within our institutions. Another generation is about to go down to the indoctrination, and a change lasting three generations generally signals the loss of  the original values – a catastrophic situation remedied only by starting again, almost from scratch. And that is very hard. The golden age of democratic republics has passed. It would take profound national repentance, a return to God and His Word, and a miracle of mercy and grace.

I’ve spoken enough, so I’ll end with a call to prayer and then bring on Jerry Wilson. Remember, God was willing to spare Sodom if He found just a few righteous people. We can do this, if we rise up and seize the opportunity.

If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land. -2Chr 7:14

America’s descent into Marxism

It’s amazing when more truth can be found in the editorial pages of Pravda than in those of the New York Times, but that’s exactly the state in which we find ourselves.

The Pravda edit speaks of the systematic take-down of the American system of free enterprise, hitting on these major steps:

• First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their “right” to choke down a McDonalds burger… than for their constitutional rights.
• Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different “branches and denominations” were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the “winning” side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another.
• The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America’s short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Weimar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

Simplistic, perhaps, but essentially correct. Liberalism crept into our institutions slowly at first (and I hasten to add the media to the above list), but now the dam is breaking. Accordingly, we are seeing a massive response from people who are aware of what is being taken from us. Will it be enough and in time?

Fear and hatred, meet love

Persecution is raging against Christians, but the Gospel and its Kingdom is spreading nonetheless.

Yesterday came yet another case of Islamic blasphemy laws, again in Pakistan, being used against Christians: Punjab, Muslim extremists burn church over alleged blasphemy case.

According to these Sharia laws, anyone desecrating the Koran is subject to the death penalty. Consider the warped value system that holds the pages of a book – not even the book’s thought content, but the mere physical paper it’s printed on – to be more valuable than human life.

It doesn’t even end there. Just the overhanging threat of invoking the blasphemy laws is used to coerce and cow Christians (and to a lesser extent Muslims – we don’t want to be discriminatory) and deprive them of freedom and prosperity.

In this case, as in many others, phony desecration charges were used for ulterior motives. A Christian boy and a Muslim girl had fallen in love, and that is not acceptable to many Muslims. So rumors were spread, a mob was whipped up by the local Imams, a church was burned and homes ransacked, and authorities try to cover it over.

Exaggerated Muslim honor

This vid comes courtesy of the Atlas Shrugs blog. The video is dramatic, but if there are any questions about the girl being perhaps overemotional, there is no question about the statistical reality of the danger she is in. Ex-Muslims are being killed for the sake of honor even in the US. And at this point, if her father isn’t out to get her, others are.

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Over in Pakistan a week ago, on mere rumors that Christians had torn pages of a Koran as part of a wedding ritual (hardly likely, knowing it would be suicide in that culture), thousands of Muslims went on a rampage. They shot, they looted, they burned, they burned to death. When it was done 14 Christians had been murdered, eight of them mercilessly burned to death, as the police stood by, claiming to be helpless against the numbers.

So, according to the Muslim mentality, it’s ok to kill for a book. You tear a page of my precious Koran, and I kill you. Allah’s honor is assuaged and I get to sleep with a good conscience.

Few Muslims will admit the gross moral inequity in that. A human life, created in the image of God, for a page of a book? What’s going on here? Why are Muslim so easily and disproportionately offended?