Friday was indeed a great day to be a Muslim Brother. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and the most influential Muslim scholar in the world — looked to by most of the world’s Sunni Muslims for guidance about their faith — has made a triumphal return to Egypt. On Friday, Qaradawi spoke to hundreds of thousands (estimates go as high as a million) of cheering supporters in Tahrir Square, which has been the center of the Cairo protests. Over the decades, Qaradawi has inspired countless radical Muslims including, although he officially renounces them, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. From the Investigative Project on Terrorism:

Qaradawi, who has lived in Qatar since 1961, was a vocal critic of deposed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. A profile this week in Germany’s Der Spiegel called him the Muslim Brotherhood’s “father figure”….

It won’t be the first time Qaradawi has been back to Egypt, but his visits have been fleeting. A sermon from him on the first Friday after Mubarak’s ouster could be hugely symbolic as the Brotherhood tries to exert influence over the direction Egyptian society takes. And it will trigger memories of the 1979 Iranian revolution, which took a dramatic turn when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in France….

The Der Spiegel profile notes Qaradawi’s enigmatic nature. Hailed as a moderate for opposing al-Qaida and embracing modern technology, he has called on Allah to kill “the Jewish Zionists” and spoken “about the right of Palestinian women to blow themselves up.” He has been barred from entering the U.S. since 1999, the profile said.

In the past two years, he also has:

• Called on Muslims to acquire nuclear weapons “to terrorize their enemies.”
• Called jihad an Islamic moral duty and said Muslims are permitted to kill Israeli women because they serve in the army.
• Affirmed his support for suicide bombings. “I supported martyrdom operations,” he said, according to a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). “This is a necessary thing, as I told them in London. Give the Palestinians tanks, airplanes, and missiles, and they won’t carry out martyrdom operations. They are forced to turn themselves into human bombs, in order to defend their land, their honor, and their homeland.”
• Called the Holocaust a divine punishment of Jews “for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them - even though they exaggerated this issue - he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hands of the believers.”
• Prayed for the opportunity to kill a Jew before his death. “The only thing that I hope for is that as my life approaches its end, Allah will give me an opportunity to go to the land of Jihad and resistance, even if in a wheelchair. I will shoot Allah’s enemies, the Jews, and they will throw a bomb at me, and thus, I will seal my life with martyrdom. Praise be to Allah.”

According to MEMRI, Qaradawi gave his followers some red meat about Israel on Friday:

In a special mention of the Palestinian issue, Al-Qaradhawi asked the Egyptian army to open wide the Rafah crossing and to pray for the re-conquest of Jerusalem by the Muslims, so that he and the Muslims could pray in security at Al-Aqsa Mosque. This part of his sermon was cheered and applauded by the crowd. [emphasis added]

Gates of Vienna opines:

Remember, this is what the Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] says before it’s in power, before it has its Islamist hands on the levers of state control, before it can command the police or the army.

What do you think the Egyptian situation will look like this time next year? Or in five years’ time?

Hundreds of thousands gather to celebrate the 1-week anniversary of the fall of Hosni Mubarak -- and to join in Friday prayers led by Sheikh al-Qaradawi.

Well, whatever it looks like, the United States will have helped to get it there, according to this news from Reuters:

The United States will spend $150 million to assist Egypt’s democratic transformation after the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Thursday. “It’s very clear that there’s a great deal of work ahead to ensure an orderly, democratic transition. It’s also clear that Egypt will be grappling with immediate and long-term economic challenges,” Clinton told reporters after briefing lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

“I’m pleased to announce today we will be reprogramming $150 million for Egypt to put ourselves in a position to support the transition there and assist with their economic recovery,” Clinton said….

Clinton said Bill Burns, the under-secretary of State for political affairs, and David Lipton, a White House adviser on international economic affairs, would travel to Egypt next week to consult with various stakeholders on how too use the funds.

“Various stakeholders”? Does anyone seriously think that those won’t include the Muslim Brotherhood radicals who’ve been meeting for over a year with Obama’s good friends Bill Ayers (co-founder of the Weather Underground communist terrorist group) and Jodie Evans (leader of Code Pink, which has met with the Taliban and aided terrorists in Iraq)?

As for the $150 million, “funds” is just another word for “money extracted by force from U.S. citizens” — i.e., our tax dollars at work. It’s what Barack Obama likes to call an “investment.” Do you suppose the Muslim Brotherhood will remember to thank us?

Of course, we’ve been giving money to Egypt for decades, but that was when Egypt was an ally of both the U.S. and Israel. According to the Washington Times,

The U.S. armed forces are entwined with Egypt’s military more than with any other Arab country’s. But if Islamists seize Cairo, as the mullahs captured Tehran, this complex relationship unravels.

“Let me count the ways,” said Ken Allard, a retired Army colonel and military analyst. “They are our biggest strategic partner in the Middle East. At that point, you’ve lost your biggest Arab partner. Geostrategically, the mind boggles.”

The U.S. Navy would not be able to use the Egyptian-run Suez Canal. The 150-year-old waterway sharply reduces sailing time for Atlantic-based carriers and other warships going from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, and to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Air Force likely would lose overflight rights into the Middle East, and the Army would lose a partner in building the M1A1 tank….

The U.S. also has been working with Egyptian forces to stop the smuggling of arms into the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

A Cairo run by Islamists likely would end such operations and develop close ties with Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group that calls for the destruction of Israel….

The CIA, too, would lose a valuable partner. It operates a robust station at the U.S. Embassy as well as classified bases. The [U.S. and Egyptian] governments exchange information on terrorism suspects….

One of the first acts by Muslim Brotherhood [sympathizers] in the current crisis was to storm prisons and release accused terrorists, some of whom belong to Hamas.

“The biggest threat is that rather than having an ally in Mubarak, who has helped keep a lid on radical jihadists in Egypt at this pivotal crossroads, you may have a government that facilitates radical jihadists throughout the region and as a potential export location to other parts of the world, primarily into Europe,” said [Rep. Pete] Hoekstra [of the House Select Committee on Intelligence].

Thanks in large part to U.S. military aid (approximately $1.3 billion a year), Egypt’s armed forces are the largest in Africa, the largest of any Arab country, and the 10th-largest in the world. All of which could fall into the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood — soon.

If it does, you can thank Jeremiah Wright’s most famous disciple, the man that Jew-hater extraordinaire Louis Farrakhan once described as the “Messiah.”

Hat tip: Infidel Bloggers Alliance

Cross-posted at West to the West Wing

Several pro-life bills have been introduced in the Ohio legislature, but the one that I especially hope inspires identical bills in each of the other 49 states is the one they call the “Heartbeat Bill.” More than any other mere piece of legislation, this is the bill that could change millions of hearts and minds on the abortion issue. And more than any other, this bill, when it is inevitably litigated and taken to the Supreme Court, could result in the overturn of Roe v. Wade. The bill would ban abortions after the baby’s heartbeat can be detected. At present, a baby’s heartbeat can first be detected at between 18 days and 5 weeks after conception. Since most abortions are done after that point, the bill would effectively ban nearly all abortions in Ohio.

Here’s the ad that Faith2Action has been running in Ohio:

It seems so obvious, once presented, that it makes you wonder why nobody thought of it before. Everyone has a heartbeat; everyone can connect, everyone can relate as a fellow human being when they hear a heartbeat. This is pure genius — and it will ring true. For it is based on a simple physical fact, an objective, measurable criterion — nothing more complicated than a heartbeat! And yet that simple physical phenomenon resonates more deeply than almost anything in human existence: The beating of the human heart has a visceral, elemental, universal affective power.

Only a few short years ago, a baby’s heartbeat could not be detected until 6 weeks. That date has moved up earlier and earlier thanks to advances in technology.

It is similar to the way ultrasound technology has advanced our ability to see the baby in the womb — an ability that has effected some very high-profile conversions to the pro-life cause, including Dr. Bernard Nathanson, at one time the director of the world’s largest abortion facility, and, more recently, Abby Johnson, former director of a Planned Parenthood clinic. Nathanson and Johnson are now highly visible and effective pro-life advocates, whose inside views of the abortion industry give them added credibility with people who are ambivalent on the issue.

Another technology that has made Roe v. Wade more absurd than ever is neonatal care. The Supreme Court in 1973 arbitrarily drew a line at “viability,” ruling that states could impose no restrictions on abortion before “viability,” and some restrictions — at least, theoretically — after that arbitrary point. But the survival rate — and the rate at which babies not only survive but thrive, with no permanent problems — of premature babies has increased dramatically, and moved to earlier and earlier ages.  There may be no greater image of our society’s schizophrenia than that of the many hospitals in which, in one room, a 22-week baby is being brutally killed, while in another room in the same hospital, a 22-week-baby is benefiting from the latest technology to help him or her survive and thrive.

These macabre juxtapositions pointedly show how arbitrary and irrational was the Court’s selection of “viability” as some sort of magical dividing line between person and non-person. The line keeps moving — and it was always subjective in the first place. After all, a 1-year-old toddler cannot survive on its own. A person with advanced Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease or Huntington’s cannot survive on their own. Anyone who’s in the intensive care unit of a hospital — whether for days or for weeks — is not surviving on his or her own. “Viability” as a criterion for deciding who’s human and who’s not was always just plain silly — so silly that it would be laughable if it didn’t have the most deadly serious of consequences: the murder of more than 50 million children in the United States since 1973.

The pro-life movement is a huge, broad, diverse movement, and part of its diversity has been in tactics. There have been those who, with photographs and statistics, have tried to show the magnitude and the horror of child-killing. Others have taken a sunnier, “Life is good” approach, urging us to “celebrate life.” I’ve always thought both approaches, and more, were needed.

In the Ohio “Heartbeat Bill,” we have the perfect confluence of “all of the above.” It is as much an appeal to people’s hearts as it is an irrefutably logical counterblow to a nonsensical court ruling. It brings to the foreground a graphic, physical reality — while making a poignant appeal to the sweetness of natural human affection. It is so plain, so simple, so obvious that it can be understood by any child — and maybe, just maybe, by even some hardened adults.

Cross-posted at West to the West Wing

Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians have been split for nearly 1,000 years — but in Egypt, tragically, they are united in suffering — now so more than ever. Via Catholic Online, the Catholic News Agency reports  [boldface mine, throughout]:

As the U.S. urges Mubarak to step down, Egyptian Christians worry that radical Islamic ideology may fill a void left by his absence.

Issam Bishara, Vice President for Pontifical Mission activities in Egypt, detailed the concerns of Coptic Orthodox and Catholic Christians in a Feb. 3 report provided to CNA by the Catholic Near East Welfare Association.

“Though some of the primary opposition leaders in this revolt appear to be modern secular reformers, church leaders believe the main engine fueling and organizing the demonstrators is the Muslim Brotherhood,” Bishara wrote. “They fear that the brotherhood intends to seize power through future elections, compromising all patriotic and ideological parties participating in the protests.”

The head of the Coptic Orthodox Church, Pope Shenouda III, has maintained his support for the Mubarak regime, and urged Coptic Orthodox Christians not to join the street protests. The Coptic Orthodox patriarch, whose church claims 95 percent of Egypt’s Christians, has instead advocated a program of internal reforms.

So far, most of the demonstrators opposing President Mubarak have kept religion out of the picture. However, the prominent role of the Muslim Brotherhood - considered to be the best-organized opposition to Mubarak’s National Democratic Party - is causing concern among Egyptian Christians.

The group’s stated aim is to make Islam the “sole reference point” for Egypt’s government and society.

That aim is entirely in keeping with the Muslim Brotherhood’s motto: “God is our objective; the Koran is our law; the Prophet is our leader; jihad is our way; and death for the sake of Allah is the highest of our aspirations.”

“Coptic Christians - as well as Egypt’s Armenian, Greek Orthodox, Latin, Maronite and Melkite Greek Catholics - all fear a fate similar to that of Iraq’s Christians,” Bishara stated, recalling how a power vacuum in that country “left its minorities, especially the Christians, marginalized and exposed to the terror of Islamic extremists and criminals.”

Indeed, it is estimated that from 40% to 60% of of Iraq’s Christians have fled in recent years. This is part of the more general problem of the vanishing of Christians from all over the Middle East. Four-fifths of Lebanon’s Maronite Christians have emigrated in the last 50 years, though they were once the majority population in Lebanon. The Christian populationin the Palestinian Territories has dropped precipitously because of outmigration. And in a part of the world where people of every religion have much longer memories than their counterparts in the West, the Ottoman Turks’ genocide of approximately 1.5 million Armenian Christians between 1915 and 1923 continues to cast a long and palpable shadow. Christians in Egypt couldn’t help but be nervous, even before the street protests began. According to CNA,

Anxiety was already running high among Egyptian Christians, after a Jan. 1 church bombing that killed or injured more than a hundred worshipers. On Jan. 24 - one day before protests broke out against President Mubarak - a report by Human Rights Watch detailed “widespread discrimination” against Christians, who comprise about 10 percent of the 90-percent Muslim nation.

The Muslim Brotherhood officially describes itself as a non-violent movement, and has stated its commitment to democracy. But the brotherhood’s connections within the Arab world have caused many to question its professions of peace. Its historical role as the source or inspiration for virtually every radical Islamic political movement now in existence is well-established.

Hamas and al-Qaeda, for example, are both offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood — a fact that is frequently ignored by the same people who ignore the fact that, in the words of the Team B II report Shariah: The Threat to America, “nearly every major Muslim organization in the United States is actually controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood or [one of its] derivative organization[s].”

CNA continues:

Nina Shea, an international human rights lawyer who directs the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom in Washington, D.C., urged Westerners to regard the Muslim Brotherhood with extreme caution - both on account of the group’s history, and because of the recent trend toward radicalization in Egyptian religious culture at large.

“The Muslim Brotherhood started off in Egypt, during the 1920s, with violent tendencies and violent tactics,” Shea recounted. “It shifted those tactics, as it was repressed, to moderate ones. In other places where it flourished - like in Gaza, or Sudan - it’s been anything but moderate.”

The Muslim Brotherhood, in choosing to be more “moderate” when it’s in a less powerful position, then turning more violent once it has control, is merely following the example of Muhammad, who preached tolerance in his earlier days, when he and his followers were at a disadvantage, but then, once he was in the ascendancy, turned very violent indeed.

“[The Muslim Brotherhood is] very tactically-minded,” [Shea] acknowledged. “In the short term, for tactical reasons, I would expect them to be moderate. But in the medium-term, they would revert to their roots” - including their core principle of imposing Islamic law throughout Egypt.

Westerners who choose to support the protesters unreservedly are playing “high-stakes poker,” Shea said - and should take into account that no popular uprising in the Middle East has ever resulted in a more democratic or pluralistic system of government.

“There are no precedents for it,” Shea said. “On the other hand, there is the precedent of Iran” - where the 1979 populist revolt, against a U.S.-backed authoritarian leader, ended with his replacement by the Ayatollah Khomeini and the nationwide institution of Islamic law.

In the event of a takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood, she said, Christians could expect to live as “dhimmis,” a traditional Islamic designation that strips non-Muslims of many legal protections.

In this arrangement, Shea explained, the government does not need to terrorize Christians at any official level. Rather, officials can simply ignore, or even tacitly permit, religiously-motivated violence and repression by other segments of society.

About two-thirds of Christians in the Middle East now live in Egypt. For this reason alone, Shea said, a takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood could have drastic consequences for Christians throughout the region.

“We could see the virtual end of Christianity’s native presence in the Middle East, faster than anyone thought, if they come to power.”

Regardless of how much we might prefer to think of the Muslim Brotherhood as a fringe group without popular support, public opinion polls give us reason to worry. Infidel Bloggers Alliance reports on a Reuters survey of 1,000 Egyptians — taken last April and May, i.e., long before the current crisis — that seems to offer good news and bad news. On the one hand, 59% said democracy was preferable to any other form of government, and 61% are concerned or very concerned about Islamic extremism in Egypt. On the other hand, 85% say Islam’s influence on government is a good thing, 82% believe adulterers should be stoned, and 84% believe Muslims who leave Islam should face the death penalty. In other words, a large majority of Egyptians surveyed have views quite consonant with shari’a law.

So, as Israelis shudder at the possibility of the largest Arab nation in the world taking up arms against them for the first time in decades, Christians within Egypt itself wonder if they could be the next group of Middle Eastern Christians to face effective expulsion, or death.

Two days ago, on my own blog, I posted a defense of Allen West against some “friendly fire” from the wonderful conservative columnist Diana West (no relation), who in turn was disappointed with Allen West’s response to some criticism he’d gotten from a group of liberal religious leaders — you know, the type who probably sport “Coexist” bumper stickers on their cars.

As you may know, Allen West caught some flak for making critical comments about his fellow Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN) in an interview a couple weeks ago. The “Coexist”ers rebuked Congressman West for being so critical of Islam and so uncivil toward a colleague. West responded to them with a letter containing some very harsh words about CAIR, an organization that Ellison has been very buddy-buddy with. CAIR is, as Ben Howe points out in his front-page post today, a front group for Hamas. West criticized Ellison’s involvement with CAIR, which he called one of those “organizations that masquerade as peaceful moderates” while having

long histories of supporting violent anti-American and anti-Israel terrorist organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood. These organizations operate within our borders, and as an elected official, I have the obligation to speak the truth and educate my constituency on the threat they pose. I spent 22 years protecting the United States in uniform and I will continue to do that in the House of Representatives.

The “Coexist” bunch was not mollified, to no one’s surprise.

However, the letter also disquieted some in the anti-Islamist community — for very different reasons. That’s because, in the same letter, West also said the following. (But notice the phrases I’ve boldfaced, which might vindicate West somewhat in the eyes of those who fear that he’s softened his stance):

I am neither anti-Muslim nor anti-Islam. I respect every religion, and the right to practice that faith in a peaceful manner.

In a town hall meeting… Nezar Hamze, Executive Director of the South Florida chapter of [CAIR], asked me a question about my stance on Islam.

I told Mr. Hamze… that “I will always defend your right to practice a free religion under the First Amendment.” I want you to know that I will always support religious freedom practiced in a way that is peaceful for all Americans. Throughout my more than 22 year career in the U.S. Army and working for the government, including 43 months serving in the Middle East, I befriended many who practice the Islamic faith, and have known these people to be peaceful, patriotic Americans.

Let me be clear. It is the extremist, radical element that has hijacked Islam that presents a dangerous threat to both our country and our allies throughout the world. This radical jihadist movement has no place in the United States of America or anywhere on earth. I’ve seen firsthand the vicious hatred that stems from their radical interpretation of the Koran, and I condemn it fully.

[boldface mine]

After the comments about CAIR mentioned earlier, and some sober words about the grave dangers we face as shown by the 1998 embassy bombings, the U.S.S. Cole bombing and the 9/11 attacks, West ended the letter with this:

I certainly will take your concerns to heart, and hope that we can work together to continue to educate the American public on the importance of both understanding the threats we face, and exercising religious tolerance. It appears to me that you have the very same goals as I do — to keep our freedom intact and ensure that the foundations on which this country was founded are never jeopardized.

[boldface mine]

I emphasized certain phrases in the paragraphs above because those should be kept in mind as we consider the critiques of Congressman West’s letter by those on the other end of the spectrum from the “Coexist” bumper sticker crowd. Diana West wrote a whole article at Big Peace about it, concluding with this:

The extremist, radical element — jihad — has not “hijacked” innocent passenger Islam; such radicalism steers the plane — or, more to the point, charts the flight path. Would that the Congressman’s reply have noted instead that his comments were directed at the Islamic faith in jihad, in the Islamic intolerance, indeed, negation of other faiths, and that the respective holy men ought to consider engaging in some serious study of sharia, jihad and dhimmitude and joining this most vital debate — not suppressing it.

Even more hard-hitting is a critique by Ben, an anti-Islam activist who runs the blog Islam Exposed and is apparently a longtime Allen West fan. Yesterday, Ben posted a piece called “Why I Must Reject Rep. Allen West.” Ben is not just disappointed, as Diana West was; Ben feels betrayed. Since I am quite impressed with Ben’s knowledge of Islam, and his commitment to defeating it, I think he deserves to be heard. Here are his rebuttals of each of several phrases and sentences in West’s letter.

“I am neither anti-Muslim nor anti-lslam”

If any seeker or holder of high office is not against Islam, then I am against him. Once you know what it is, you must be opposed to it if you have any morality.

“l respect every religion”

Islam is not a religion, it is a way of life: intra-species predation. Respect is given where respect is due, Islam is not owed any.

“practice that faith in a peaceful manner”

Islam’s faith component serves as a troop motivator and camouflage. It promises Muslims eternity in a celestial bordello if they wage jihad and threatens them with eternal torment in the fire if they refuse. If it is a religion, it must be peaceful and beneficent.

War is a required part of Islam, ordained by 2:216. It is not like “cafeteria Catholicism” it is all or nothing: …”Then do you believe in a part of the Scripture and reject the rest? “…2:85. Islamic law requires a minimum of one military expedition against disbelivers in every year, if it is not performed when possible, all who know of the obligation are in sin.

“right to practice a free religion”

Islam is slavery, not freedom. Believers are Allah’s slaves, purchased to fight his wars; 9:111. Is there a right to engage in world conquest? In 8:39, Allah orders Muslims to fight until only Allah is worshiped, “alltogether and everywhere”. 3:110 tells Muslims that they are “the best of peoples”. Bukhari’s collection of authentic hadith informs us that the expression means: “the best of peoples for the people, as you bring them with chains on their necks till they embrace Islam.”

Islamic law informs us that when women and children are captured by Muslims, “they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman’s previous marriage is immediately annulled”.

Is there a right to rape? The hadith also inform us that Moe gave tacit approval to the practice of raping captives and the Noble Qur’an has seven references to “right hands possess“.

“religious freedom”

Religious freedom is for legitimate religions, not crime syndicates. Islam’s mission is mercenary and its method is martial. Islam does not reciprocate, it demands a monopoly.

“befriended”

The Qur’an contains eight verses which prohibit friendship with disbelievers. Tafsir Ibn Kathir sheds some light on this issue in “The Prohibition of Supporting the Disbelievers“; “We smile in the face of some people although our hearts curse them.”

“radical element that has hijacked Islam”

Islam has not been hijacked, it is evil by design. Terrorism is not a modern innovation, it is a foundational sacrament in the core of Islam. I refer doubters and dissenters to a previous post: “What’s Wrong With Islam/Muslims?” for the disgusting details.

“their radical interpretation of the Koran”

The interpretation belongs to Islam’s founder; what he said and did while not engaged in revelation shows us how he interpreted what he revealed. In the last decade of his life, [Muhammad] started a war on the average of every six weeks. A glance at the table of contents of The Life of Muhammad will tell you what you need to know about Islam.

These are good points, in my opinion. I would only point out that if one reads West’s letter in its entirety, as a unified whole rather than in the bits and pieces presented here, the overall impression is one of firm resolve.

I’d like to close with a perspective from David Gaubatz, an incredibly brave man who went undercover with CAIR, and afterward, co-authored an exposé of what he’d found, titled Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America. Gaubatz was also the first U.S. civilian Federal Agent deployed to Iraq in 2003. It’s probably safe to say that Gaubatz loathes radical Islam as much as anyone out there. But ponder his words in a FrontPageMag interview that he gave when his book came out in 2009:

I owe my life to Muslims from Iraq who risked their lives for me and many Americans in 2003. The family of Mohammed Rehaief (Iraqi lawyer who rescued Private Jessica Lynch in Nasiriyah, Iraq) are examples of Muslims who truly represent the Islamic people. They saved my life on several occasions and I had the opportunity to rescue their family from Al Qaeda who had threatened their lives.

Further I have always advised all children are innocent and I (like many American troops) would have given my life for them in Iraq. During many of my lectures I have informed people they should not fear the Islamic people, but have every right to be an “Islamic Scholar Phobe”….

So, here’s the question.

Has Allen West buckled under, like so many other politicians — has Washington already “gotten to him”?

Or is he “picking his battles” as Sun Tzu, the intellectual mentor he frequently cites, might advise?

To put it another way: As the phrases I boldfaced in his statements might suggest, is he choosing his words carefully for tactical reasons, while remaining just as fully committed to the battle?

Or is it unrealistic to expect any politician to really be that clever?

Every year, the “mainstream” media make a point of not covering the March for Life on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade abortion ruling. They are especially careful to make sure we viewers/readers never see one particular group of people at the March whose presence refutes everything the “liberal” establishment wants us to believe about abortion: the women who have actually had them.

Before the March, out on the National Mall, there is a Rally for Life at which pro-life activists, ministers, Congressmen and Senators take the podium, with a huge sound system that can be heard all the way out to the edges of a crowd that numbers in the hundreds of thousands. Speakers include some of Washington’s most prominent figures, but you will not see photos of any of these speakers in the news. Here’s why: Immediately behind whoever’s speaking, there is a solid, shoulder-to-shoulder line of brave women across the entire width of the stage, each of them holding a black sign with white lettering: “I REGRET MY ABORTION.” It is impossible to take a photograph of any of the speakers without that stark message showing up in your picture. So, the media simply take no pictures. They can’t have the American public knowing that abortion hurts women. Not when they’ve built this whole murderous structure on an absurd fiction of “empowerment” and “choice” for women.

But doesn’t every one of us know better? Haven’t we all seen what abortion has done to women we know who’ve had them? If we’re honest, we know that it has mutilated them emotionally even when it hasn’t left lasting effects physically. But, it’s human nature to resist change, and we’ve gotten so used to abortion… and so we, as a society, keep on trying to convince ourselves that abortion is not that big a deal — and the media are only too eager to make every effort to maintain that fiction.

After the Rally on the Mall, the March begins, with the very front contingent being the women — and men — of the Silent No More movement. The women with the black “I regret my abortion” signs are joined by men carrying black signs that say “Men regret lost fatherhood.” These men are even more ignored by the media than the post-abortive women are. The whole abortion debate tends to focus on the mother and the child — as if the father doesn’t exist. In all the rhetoric about “choice,” abortion advocates are scandalously silent about the fact that abortion is almost never a woman’s “free choice”; it is usually done under intense pressure from someone — quite often, the man involved. Some of these men later come to regret having pressured their girlfriends/wives to abort. Some men, on the other hand, beg their girlfriends not to abort — but since our warped legal system cuts the man completely out of it, the woman has the absolute legal right to kill their child, even over the father’s protests. In still other cases, men do not even find out that their girlfriend was pregnant until after their child has already been killed.

On the Silent No More YouTube channel, there are nearly two hundred testimonies by these women and men. (Thousands of such speeches have been given all over the U.S. by members of Silent No More.) You will notice that all of them list their full names. No anonymity here. They want the whole wide world to know who they are, for they have been healed of their shame. They have no secrets to hide any more. Quite the contrary: Now that they walk in truth, no longer living a lie — now that they have accepted forgiveness, and are no longer trying to hide from God and from themselves — they consider it their mission to tell others their stories, in the hope that others faced with an unplanned pregnancy will be spared from going through the hell that they themselves have gone through, having killed a child who can never be brought back.

You will also notice that all these individuals read from prepared notes, rather than speaking extemporaneously. There are several reasons for this. One is that each of them has put a lot of time, toil and tears into writing their unique, personal story. They do not want to risk getting flustered or breaking down and not being able to communicate it the way they had wanted to. And of course, the odds of goofing up or forgetting some important detail are considerable when one is dealing with such an emotional subject, one involving painful memories and the deepest, most personal parts of oneself.

I couldn’t be there this year, but I was there for last year’s rally and march. The March always ends in front of the Supreme Court building, where, at the base of the steps leading up to the Court entrance, a small podium and portable sound system are set up for the women and men of Silent No More to publicly share their testimonies. For me, this was the most moving, memorable part of the whole March for Life weekend. As the sun sank lower and lower, and the temperature dropped, the audience thinned to a handful — but still the women continued, one after another, in the bitter cold and darkness, telling their stories.

There were less than a dozen of us spectators left by the time the last speaker had her turn three hours later. It became clear to me that they weren’t just giving their testimonies for the world to hear — important as that is — or they would have stopped when the crowds went away. Instead, they continued; evidently, the very act of getting up there and speaking the truth out loud is, in itself, an important part of their own healing.

I am posting here the testimonies of three of the women who made the strongest impressions on me that day.

This video of Angelina Steenstra supposedly was posted in 2009, but her speech here is exactly what I remember from when I heard her speak last year. She broke my heart.

The next video is of Cheryl Carey. I did not personally see this speech because Cheryl was one of the first speakers at the Supreme Court building, and I was one of the last to arrive there, since the March crowd was over a mile long, and I was near the tail end. However, I had the incredible blessing of meeting Cheryl in the hotel later that evening, completely by “chance.” (Meaning: God arranged it!) She is an amazing person. We had a long heart-to-heart talk, even though we’d never met each other before, and may never meet again (in this life). She is one of those people who just glows. That glow doesn’t come through in this speech as it did in our one-to-one conversation — which only goes to show that even when one has been fully reconciled and forgiven and healed, the scars from abortion are still incredibly deep.

In the case of this next video, I was standing right there — just a few feet away from the camera as it filmed this speech. I remember Patricia in a special way because she reminded me so strongly of several women I have known — women who look so much the very stereotype of “the nice girl next door” — and who had abortions because they didn’t want anyone to find out they’d been “bad.” Only too late did they learn that the loss of their child was infinitely worse than the loss of their “reputation” would have been.

There are several very important themes in common in the experiences of these three very different women.
Did you notice?
I heard those same themes in nearly every single one of the dozens of testimonies that were shared that day.

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There is hope and healing after abortion. Nothing is unforgivable. God loves you just as much now as He ever has. In fact, Scripture says, “The Lord is close to the broken-hearted.” If you or anyone you know needs healing from an abortion, please, please, please visit http://www.silentnomoreawareness.org/

Far, far better bloggers than I have been following the Philadelphia “house of horrors” story — bloggers such as Michelle Malkin, Jill Stanek, and Ace of Spades HQ. So I will forgo rehashing all the hideous details. I am still making my way through the Grand Jury indictment — the whole stomach-churning thing — and it’s as revolting as any “slasher” film; only worse, because the whole damn thing is true.

As I am finding out, it isn’t even just one diabolical doctor; four other staffers from the hideous “clinic” have also been arrested for murder, and an additional four staffers have been arrested for multiple crimes ranging from theft, perjury and obstruction of justice, to conspiracy to commit murder, and violations of the Controlled Susbstances Act. Several of them, besides Gosnell, committed multiple murders by using scissors to cut through the spinal cords of living, breathing, crying, born-alive babies. In fact, Gosnell preferred for the babies to simply come out on their own (after labor was induced, as is standard for third-trimester abortions); if they were already delivered by the time he got there, he wouldn’t have to chance perforating the woman’s uterus, cervix or colon, as he’d done — and been sued for — numerous times.

It goes on. It gets worse. It boggles the mind.

So here are the two big questions I have about this whole deal.

The grand jury, which comprised a mix of people from all over the ideological spectrum concerning abortion, had no problem recognizing the cutting, with scissors, of born-alive babies’ spinal cords as “murder.” Yet, had Gosnell done a typical partial-birth abortion — which involves delivering the baby feet-first and reaching up into the birth canal to puncture the baby’s skull with scissors and suction out its brains while its head is still in the birth canal — that would have been legal, and not, in the eyes of the law, “murder.”

My question is: Why is what Gosnell did “murder,” but this isn’t:

I apologize for having to post this picture. It is the worst kind of pornography. Please don’t go away, though. I beg you to keep reading. You know and I know that the only way a country of, mostly, otherwise decent people can allow this to continue is because it is so easy to just close our eyes to it. William Wilberforce was only able to get the slave trade abolished in England when he started showing people the insides of the actual slave ships.

So, again, the question: Why is what’s shown here perfectly legal and “a woman’s right”… while Gosnell, who simply waited until the baby was all the way out — just a few inches further — is being prosecuted on multiple counts of murder? To put it another way, how can people who see that it was wrong for American and British property owners to claim a “right” to enslave Africans, have such a hard time seeing what’s wrong with women claiming a “right” to not only enslave but outright kill their own children?

I remember being at the National Rural Women’s Conference back in 1992, in Des Moines, IA. Since it was an election year, the conference, with several hundred women in attendance, was developing a platform, i.e., a formulation of its positions and recommendations on a whole slew of issues, one of them being health care. There was a clause in there about “reproductive health.” In the final plenary session, when the platform was being presented for the whole conference’s approval, I stood up and said that anyone who hadn’t been living in a cave for the past ten years knew that “reproductive health” was code language for abortion, and that there were plenty of us in that hall who emphatically did not support that. A fierce debate broke out, with people from all around the room standing up and speaking passionately about whether or not a fetus is a baby. Finally, one pert young lady stood up and ended the debate by saying — and it made such a huge impression on me that 19 years later, I can still quote her word for word from memory — “Look. We all know that abortion kills a baby. But that’s not the issue. The issue is women’s lives.”

At that point, all us pro-lifers in the room saw, to our grief and dismay, that our opponents were impervious to any argument we could make. Kind of like the people William Wilberforce ran into who said, “Look. We know the conditions are awful in the slave trade, and that half the niggers die in the holds of the ships before they even reach their destination. But that’s not the issue. The issue is our ability to run a business, and we need cheap labor to do it.”

Sorry for the language, folks, but that is the way they talked. And it’s not only for the sake of historical accuracy that I use that awful word. The language, you see, is not immaterial. Whoever owns the language wins the battle. As George Orwell said, “Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable…” This is why babies are usually referred to as “fetuses” when they’re not wanted, and “babies” when they are. (I have never heard a happily pregnant woman say, “Today I felt the fetus kick for the first time!” or “At the doctor’s today, we got to hear our fetus’ heartbeat!”)

But that is precisely why I and other pro-life people at that women’s conference were so flummoxed. We realized that the abortion debate had entered a new phase. Before that, the people who wanted to keep abortion legal tried to fool everybody with language. Call babies “fetuses” and people won’t care if they’re “terminated.” Now the pro-legal-abortion people were admitting that, yes, it’s a baby, and yes, abortion kills that baby…. and yet, they were saying, that doesn’t matter!

I was in such a state of shock when I heard that, that frankly, I don’t remember whether the final document included the bit about “reproductive health” or not. All I remember was the bright, clean-scrubbed, rosy-cheeked face of that vivacious, pretty young woman, who looked so wholesome and innocent and all-American — until she said those horrendous words: “That’s not the issue.” We kill, so what? No biggie.

My second question of the day is one I don’t see anyone else asking. Not even my fellow conservative bloggers. Not even the pro-life websites, God bless ‘em. I must conclude that either this very, very socially unacceptable question — unspeakable, even — or else, that the answer is obvious to everyone else, and I’m the only person around who’s too stupid to have figured it out. If so, I ask your forbearance in advance for being so clueless.

THIS is what 7 months pregnant looks like!

I honestly do not know the answer to this question: How could a woman — any woman — get an abortion when she’s seven or eight months pregnant? I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but by 7 or 8 months, you’ve been showing for quite some time! Even if you’re obese, by the time you are eight months along, the whole wide world can see that you’re pregnant! How exactly do you walk into your workplace the next day, not showing any more — when everybody there knows you were expecting? Do you lie, and tell them you had a miscarriage? Do you just not care if the whole wide world knows that you had an abortion — and not only that, but abortion of a nearly full-term baby, who could have survived on its own if it were delivered like any other preemie in a hospital? A baby whom, if you could just tough it out for another few weeks, someone would be eager to adopt?

In short: Who the hell are these women?

Call me a moron, but I honestly do not get it.

Cross-posted at West to the West Wing 2012

One of the very promising new members of the freshman class of the 112th Congress is Tim Huelskamp (KS-1). Huelskamp is a Tea Party patriot and enough of a “true conservative” to have won the endorsement and financial support of the House Conservatives Fund.

I am spotlighting him today because on January 22, the most depressing day of the year, we need to look for rays of light in the darkness that is our current abortion regime. Today is the 38th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton, that together legalized abortion in all 50 states, through all 9 months of pregnancy. If someone had told us in 1973 that abortion would still be legal nearly four decades later….

Tim Huelskamp is one of my rays of light. He was originally motivated to get into politics for one reason: to fight for the lives of babies in the womb, who are too young to fight for themselves. Once in office — he’s been a state senator for fourteen years — he gained expertise in a host of other issues as well. Now, in the U.S. House of Representatives, he’s been appointed to the Budget Committee, where his commitment to fiscal responsibility will be a big support to House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan. Huelskamp’s also on the Veterans Affairs Committee and the Agriculture Committee — which is a wise appointment, since he is a family farmer, one of the very few in Congress. (Freshman Kristi Noem of South Dakota, who was picked for a House Republican leadership spot early on, is another.)

As important as these issues are, Huelskamp, who supports the Human Life Amendment, explains that the right to life is the most fundamental. After all, what good are any other rights if you’re not alive to enjoy them? (Isn’t it surreal that we have to continually re-state something so obvious?)

Although Congress was sworn in less than three weeks ago, Huelskamp has already attracted national attention. The new issue of World magazine is dedicated to the pro-life theme, and it includes a glowing profile of him.

While he was in the state Senate, moderate Republicans accused Huelskamp of recruiting conservative Republicans to run against them in primaries, which he didn’t deny. Legislatively Huelskamp sought to strip Planned Parenthood of its state funding, a measure that finally passed the legislature in 2009 but that the Democratic governor [Kathleen Sebelius -- ugh!] vetoed. He wrote the amendment to the state Constitution in 2006 that voters passed overwhelmingly, defining marriage as between a man and a woman, but gay marriage isn’t his only target.

He talks about restoring a “culture of marriage,” so he’s gone after divorce too. He worked on a measure to promote “covenant marriages,” which would limit the grounds for divorce and encourage marital counseling. Under covenant marriages [a strictly voluntary option], the couple would have to be separated for two years before the divorce could be final. He has a beef with the whole welfare system too because he believes it discourages marriage. And he points out that single parenthood, often a result of people “enjoying the fruits of marriage outside of marriage,” is correlated to poverty.

Family is what it all boils down to, in Huelskamp’s view, even as he feels the urgency of the nation’s fiscal crisis. The two are connected. “Fundamentally it’s about what you value,” he said. “We’ve lost our ways on a lot of fronts. You just can’t spend enough to replace the family.”

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in his landmark report on the state of the Black family — a report that was much berated at the time but has proven prophetically accurate — was saying the same thing 45 years ago, if anyone had cared to listen:

There is one unmistakable lesson in American history…. a community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos.

As families disintegrate, emotionally wounded children deal with their pain in many ways, most of which are destructive to themselves and to others, ultimately to the whole society. We can spend all the money in the world on our schools — and we do spend more per pupil than any other country in the world — but what good does it do, when the children are coming into the classroom from chaotic, addiction-addled, dysfunctional households? We just keep spending ever more money for ever more social workers, therapists, law-enforcement officers, etc., to deal with the wreckage.

Rebuilding a “culture of marriage,” as Huelskamp advocates, is the only way we can realistically hope to see things improve.

[Huelskamp] was “worried” in his first days on the Hill when he didn’t hear any discussion of social issues among top Republicans…. So he has appointed himself the watchdog of the class. “I’m not afraid to do that,” he told me. “This is not about having fun. This is about saving our country….” Huelskamp is a rare breed in this freshman class: someone with political experience [14 years in the Kansas Senate]. He’s worried for those new to politics because he said it’s easy to get caught up in the “minutiae” of governing. He tells his colleagues to “wade through all that stuff” and “plant your flag on your principles. Keep an eye on that. This is a place that’s meant to break individuals and break families and break principles.”

We need principled people like Hueslkamp more than ever.

That was brought home this week by the unfolding horror in Philadelphia, which reveals beyond doubt what the abortion industry really is, and always has been, about. The conservative blogosphere is on fire with this story — see, for example, Right Klik and The Other McCain — but Ace of Spades, of all people, has been doing the best coverage of it that I have seen. In case you’ve missed it, here are the posts so far; I’m linking them in order from earliest to most recent. Gabe Malor did the first post; then Ace took it up, and now he is a man on a mission. (Well, you’d have to be some sort of monster — like, say, Barack Obama? — to not be shaken to the depths by what the grand jury lays out in its indictment of “Dr.” Kermitt Gosnell.)

Pennsylvania Abortion Doc Charged with Murder

Grand Jury Report on House of Abortion Horrors Is, Crucially, a Damning Political Indictment of Rendell’s Pennsylvania Government that Deliberately Permitted Gosnell to Thrive

Shocker: All Three Network Morning “News” Shows Embargo Gosnell Story

Feminists: What Gosnell Did Says Absolutely Nothing About Abortion Because It Wasn’t Abortion

Question: Did the Rhetoric of the Abortion-Absolutist Left Encourage Kermitt Gosnell?

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God said:  “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore, choose life, so that you and your descendants may live.”
Deuteronomy 30:19

Cross-posted at West to the West Wing 2012

Maybe it was writing about Charles Manson the other day.

Or maybe it was reading about the carnage in the Juarez valley, just across the Texas border, or the arrest of a 14-year-old hit man near Cuernavaca, or the horrific increase in not only murders, but specifically, beheadings all over Mexico.

For whatever reason, Mark Kilroy has been much on my mind lately.

He was a handsome young man, and by all accounts, smart, fun and friendly. Remember? Or is it only those of us who lived in Texas at the time who were traumatized then and are still haunted by it now, 22 years later? Mark was a pre-med student at the University of Texas (which I, too, attended for a while) and hailed from a little town less than an hour’s drive from where I lived at the time. Maybe that’s why I identified so strongly with him. The way I remember it, though, everyone in Texas came to see Mark as one of their own. After he suddenly disappeared in Matamoros, just over the Mexican border from Brownsville, TX, it was headline news for weeks; every time we opened the paper or turned on the TV, we’d see a picture of that young face so full of life, with his whole life ahead of him and obviously looking forward to it.

What happened to him is too horrible for me to recount in detail. You can read the full story here, if you have the stomach for it. To recap as briefly as I can, the weeks-long search for Mark finally ended when police found what was left of his body on a God-forsaken ranch where a Satanic, voodoo-type cult had killed dozens of people over several years. The beautiful young man had been tortured, mutilated, offered as a human sacrifice, and cannibalized. The cultists were drug dealers, who believed that their sacrifices to the devil obtained magical powers for them that would make them able to operate with impunity. In fact, investigators only discovered the cult’s site because they’d been pursuing a drug trafficker who unwittingly led them right to it since he believed that his black magic had made him invisible, and therefore untouchable by officers of the law.

Once the case was solved, and the perpetrators hunted down and imprisoned, we, the public, mourned and eventually moved on. We thought that this was one of those occasional outbreaks of pure evil, like the Jim Jones cult in Guyana, and that this macabre chain of events had no implications for the future.

Little did we know. Seventeen years later, in 2006, decapitations — with severed heads displayed for maximum terrorizing effect on local populations — began to become commonplace among the Mexican drug cartels, each gang trying to outdo the other in horror. Some observers speculate that videos posted on the Internet by Al-Qaeda In Iraq at that time may have inspired the practice. Others wonder if the slayers have been influenced by bloody rituals practiced in the region back in pre-Columbian times.

Whatever its roots, there appears no end in sight to the current wave of decapitations. [Luis] Astorga [author of several books on the drug cartels] fears that even worse atrocities lie ahead. “Who knows what perverse methods these assassins might use to get one up over their rivals,” he says. “Many are military killers but without the army command to hold them back. Their only limits are what they can imagine or what they can find in the most violent Hollywood movies.”

I can’t deal with this much grimness and horror without looking for a ray of hope. I’ll be honest. I find my hope in the lordship of Jesus Christ over the world. Regardless of how crappy things look sometimes, the final victory really is His. Mark Kilroy’s parents, Jim and Helen, will tell you so themselves. Enduring an ordeal no parent should ever face, they drew on their deep religious faith during the search and afterwards. After it was all over, they were determined to bring good out of unfathomable evil.

Jim and Helen Kilroy work closely with the Mark Kilroy Foundation and its mission: the prevention of substance abuse, providing about 600 youths with free educational and sport activities, counseling, concerts and summer camps….

Since drugs were at the root of their son’s death at the hands of drug traffickers, they take every opportunity to counsel against substance abuse. Concerned residents started the foundation shortly after Mark’s death.

“We were still in shock and not really over our grieving, and as things progressed, it developed into a nice organization that gets lots of things done,” Jim Kilroy said. “Lots of people work on it.”

Helen Kilroy said drug awareness is the direction in which the Lord moved them.

“It seems like, once Mark disappeared, it was almost like we were on a journey,” she recalls. “In searching for him, we were being led in different ways and what brought us to the point that we are at now. It just seems that was what our Lord wanted us to do, that we should be saying whatever we could to help our young people not get on drugs.”