Category Archives: Freedom of Religion

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What did we achieve?

Captain Harry Wales in Afghanistan.

There was little choice for the United States to go into Afghanistan following the September 11th attacks. There were 2,459 American military deaths, along with 20,769 Americans wounded. Along with that were 1,822 civilian contractors and 18 Central Intelligence Agency operatives killed in the two months short of twenty years we were there. 457 British soldiers were killed there, and another 2,209 wounded seriously enough to be admitted to field hospitals.

Even His Royal Highness, Prince Henry of Wales, before he went bat guano insane over Meghan Markle, served in Afghanistan, as an Apache helicopter pilot.

Al Qaeda was routed reasonably quickly, although Osama bin Laden wasn’t killed until May 2, 2011, at a compound hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan. His successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, lasted until July 31, 2022, after the United States had evacuated troops from the country, by an American drone strike at a villa in Kabul that he used.

Al Qaeda Is Back—and Thriving—in Afghanistan

The architects of 9/11 are profiting from gold and gem mines in the Taliban-led country.

By Lynne O’Donnell, a columnist at Foreign Policy and an Australian journalist and author. | March 22, 2024

Al Qaeda is back to its old tricks in Afghanistan. Much as it did before masterminding the 9/11 attacks, the terrorist group is running militant training camps; sharing the profits of the Taliban’s illicit drug, mining, and smuggling enterprises; and funneling the proceeds to affiliated jihadi groups worldwide.

An unpublished report circulating among Western diplomats and U.N. officials details how deeply embedded the group once run by Osama bin Laden is in the Taliban’s operations, as they loot Afghanistan’s natural wealth and steal international aid meant to alleviate the suffering of millions of Afghans.

The report was completed by a private, London-based threat analysis firm whose directors did not want to be identified. A copy was provided to Foreign Policy and its findings verified by independent sources. It is based on research conducted inside Afghanistan in recent months and includes a list of senior al Qaeda operatives and the roles they play in the Taliban’s administration.

To facilitate its ambitions, al Qaeda is raking in tens of millions of dollars a week from gold mines in Afghanistan’s northern Badakhshan and Takhar provinces that employ tens of thousands of workers and are protected by warlords friendly to the Taliban, the report says. The money represents a 25 percent share in proceeds from gold and gem mines; 11 gold mines are geolocated in the report. The money is shared with al Qaeda by the two Taliban factions: Sirajuddin Haqqani’s Kabul faction and Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada’s Kandahar faction, suggesting both leaders, widely regarded as archrivals, see a cozy relationship with al Qaeda as furthering their own interests as well as helping to entrench the group’s overall power.

There’s more at the original.

So, after going in and spending almost twenty years there, spending trillions of dollars and seeing over 2,000 American soldiers coming bad in body bags, all to destroy al Qaeda, the terrorist group are back.

The younger President George Bush included in the mission ousting and, supposedly, destroying the Taliban, the hardline Islamist faction which governed the country at the time. It wasn’t too difficult for American soldiers and Marines to kick the Taliban out of power, but, as we all know, the US, under President Donald Trump, negotiated a withdrawal from that abysmal place, though it wasn’t accomplished until August of 2021, under President Joe Biden. Naturally, under Mr Biden, the final departure was a complete mess and foul-up, in which 13 more Americans were killed, and the US handed power right back to the same Taliban President Bush swore would be driven from power.

And now we have this:

Taliban publish vice laws that ban women’s voices and bare faces in public

The Taliban say it’s mandatory for Afghan women to conceal their voices and bare faces in public

by The Associated Press | Thursday, August 22, 2024 | 12:19 PM EDT

ISLAMABAD (AP) — Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers have issued a ban on women’s voices and bare faces in public under new laws approved by the supreme leader in efforts to combat vice and promote virtue.

The laws were issued Wednesday after they were approved by supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, a government spokesman said. The Taliban had set up a ministry for the “propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice” after seizing power in 2021.

The ministry published its vice and virtue laws on Wednesday that cover aspects of everyday life like public transportation, music, shaving and celebrations.

They are set out in a 114-page, 35-article document seen by The Associated Press and are the first formal declaration of vice and virtue laws in Afghanistan since the takeover.

“Inshallah we assure you that this Islamic law will be of great help in the promotion of virtue and the elimination of vice,” said ministry spokesman Maulvi Abdul Ghafar Farooq on Thursday.

There’s more at the original

Al Qaeda are back and the Taliban are back, returning to the same basic Islamist and authoritarian principles they imposed in their previous regime. And that, along with the failure of democracy in Iraq, raises the obvious question: what the f(ornicate) did we gain from all of the blood spilled and all of the treasure burned up and blown up?

President Bush was seduced by Natan Sharansky’s and Ron Dermer’s book, The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, in which the authors argued that the only moral foreign policy is to expand democracy across the world, and that once a people experience democracy, they will want to keep it. More, democracies will never be aggressors against their neighbors. Mr Bush tried to impose democracy on Iraq and Afghanistan — remember the purple-stained ‘I voted’ fingers? — but once American soldiers were not there to enforce democracy, it just never took.

Democracy is an artifact of Western civilization, a development of northern European and American culture. We managed to impose democracy on Japan and South Korea, but only after they had been completely devastated by war, and much of their military aged male population were killed or wounded. Those nations have copied and assimilated Western culture to the extent that they could. Israel is a Western democracy because it was resettled by Jews fleeing from Europe.

But let’s tell the truth here: We will never see true democracy or Western civilization in the Muslim Middle East, and we should not be naïve enough to waste our money and our blood on trying to push it. Iraq and Afghanistan are abject lessons in this.

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Anti-Semitism in America isn’t about religion

It was just last night, at 10:14 PM EDT, that I published an article pointing out that Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff opted against choosing Governor Josh Shapiro (D-PA) as her running mate, noting that, despite the denials, it was all because he and his wife are Jewish. With the open drive toward anti-Semitism by the young and the ignorant among the harder left, and Mrs Emhoff’s husband, Douglas Emhoff also being Jewish, there’s just no way the Vice President and her staff would make a selection which would drive the anti-Jewish and anti-Israel leftists away.

And on Monday morning, The Philadelphia Inquirer gave OpEd space to Zev Eleff, president and professor of American Jewish History at Gratz College in Melrose Park, that barely glossed over — if you can even call it that much — the radical anti-Semitic left in the decision:

Josh Shapiro, the veepstakes, and the role of faith in presidential politics

I’m proud that the governor was reportedly on the short list of Kamala Harris running mates. Yet I was also troubled by those who asked whether America was “ready” for a Jewish vice president.

by Zev Eleff | Monday, August 12, 2024 | 6:37 AM EDT

The polarizing discussion surrounding Gov. Josh Shapiro’s faith and his recent bid to join Kamala Harris on the Democratic ticket struck a very different tone than the Jewish presidential question of 1959. Back then, the journalist Bernard Postal polled a who’s who of American politics — Earl Warren, Hubert Humphrey, Dwight Eisenhower, to name-drop a handful of the 30 respondents — on a very pithy question: “Can a Jew be elected president?”

Postal was prompted by the wide speculation that John F. Kennedy, the Catholic senator from Massachusetts, would run for president in the next election. “I believe that a candidate’s religion should have no bearing upon his qualifications for the Office of President,” wrote Kennedy to Postal. “Accordingly, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews should all base their appeal to the voters upon their record of accomplishments and their program or action.”

Postal reported that most agreed with Kennedy, hopeful “that before too long the voters will do away with the tacit but nonetheless effective religious test that has traditionally barred all but white Protestants from the Presidency and the Vice Presidency.”

There’s a lot more at the original, but, like so many historians, he has missed the point!

Dr Eleff’s OpEd piece tells the reader something of the history of religious tolerance, as it slowly gained a foothold in the American body politic. While there were a few, and I stress the description few, anti-Semitic influences and incidents in the United States, the bigotry against Jews, Muslims, and Catholics in the United States was fairly minor as far as being based on their faith. It was more pronounced based upon ethnicity, and ethnicity was not part of the professor’s OpEd.

Catholics don’t really come with an ethnicity link in the United States, other than we are primarily white and Hispanic; the percentage of blacks who are Catholic has always been small. For Muslims, much of the ethnic mix are of Arabic or African extraction.

Jews? In the United States, they are almost exclusively white, and so indistinguishable in appearance, other than by the way some sects of Judaism in the US dress, that the Nazis in Germany actually published a “Jewface” caricature of ‘Jewish physiognomy,’ because Jews weren’t that easy to distinguish in many cases just by looking. The Nazis wanted everyone to be able to know who was Jewish! In the United States, in most of Europe, Jews are characterized primarily by ethnicity. In a way that would be funny if it wasn’t so pathetically sad, so many good, white Europeans and Americans view Jews as not being white, while much of the Arab Middle East sees Jews as too white, and not ethnically connected to the Holy Land.

Do Mr and Mrs Shapiro attend the synagogue? Does Mr Emhoff go to Temple? If anyone has asked those questions, I haven’t seen them, but my point is that the discrimination against Jews is not really religious, at least not in the 21st century. We all seem to know that Jews have a different faith than Christians or Muslims — though I would point out here that every Catholic Mass on Sunday has a reading from the Old Testament, the pre-Christian Jewish holy books — but how many actually understand Judaism, as a religion, to be offended by the religious differences?

And let’s tell the truth here: a large percentage of Americans who might tell you that they are Christian don’t attend church. Joe Biden is famously Catholic, and attends Mass frequently, but his being a Democrat is far, far, far more important to him than being Catholic!

Today’s anti-Semitism is almost entirely political. We good, white Christians drove the Jews out of Europe, because the Nazis tried to kill them all. Half of the Jews of Europe were killed by the Third Reich, but those who survived were thoroughly dispossessed. They couldn’t return to their homes in Europe because they had no homes in Europe, and even if they had, their neighbors would have been the same good, white Christians who turned them over to the Nazis. Zionism was a political movement, started long before the Nazis came to power, but it became a political and social imperative thanks to the Nazis.

Mr Shapiro was not chosen as Mrs Emhoff’s running mate because he is religiously Jewish, but because his ethnic and family history is Jewish. Among today’s fanatical and anti-Semitic left, that’s all it takes.

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Hamas delendum est

In November of 2022, I had the privilege of a far-too-short visit to Jerusalem, really just 3 days, and my daughter and I spent almost all of our time in the Old City. We were able to attend Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, visit the Western Wall, then ascend the Temple Mount to the al-Aqsa Mosque, though we could not enter that. We saw the Garden of Gethsemane, and many of the Christian sites there, along with taking the Via Dolorosa, the Way of the Cross.

The Old City is simply amazing. Jerusalem has been destroyed several times before, and the Old City is not what it was in Jesus’ time, and much of what can be seen is actually Byzantine construction. Some things are clearly fanciful, as the alleged Tomb of Mary and Birthplace of Mary are there, even though there is no evidence whatsoever that Mary was either born or died in that city. Our best guess is that Mary was Galilean, from the area around Nazareth, and even though Nazareth is close to Jerusalem, at least in modern terms, roughly 144 kilometers, it’s not the kind of journey a young woman would normally have made just before the time of Jesus.

One of the places we stopped can be seen in the photo at the beginning of this article. To my American eyes, it looked like some kind of reading room, though SSG Pico — she is an Army Reservist, then deployed to Kuwait, and I met her in Jerusalem when she had a four-day pass — and I had to go along with Islamic respect: a head covering for her, and shoes off for both of us.

It wasn’t a reading room, but actually a mosque, the gentleman shown to the left of the photograph told us. It was quiet, and yes, he did try, gently, to proselytize us — we informed him that we were Catholic — but he was entirely respectful of us.

In November of 2022, the Christians, Jews, and Muslims of Jerusalem were able to live in peaceful coexistence. Yes, there were armed Israeli policemen around and very visible to keep the peace, but we were not bothered by anyone, in any place we walked, including the Temple Mount, run by a Muslim Waqf out of Jordan by mutual agreement, even though we were about as obviously Westerners as can be.

Our hotel was about half a mile north, off of Jaffa Street, and the vast majority of the people we saw walking to and from the Old City were visibly Jewish by their dress, and they, too, never bothered us. The Jewish restaurants outside the Old City, as well as Arabic restaurants inside — there’s an amazing sidewalk-and-inside cafe on the Via Dolorosa, near the fourth Station of the Cross! — served us very politely.

One important point: don’t ever eat at a kosher McDonald’s! They are absolutely awful!

My point is a simple one: these people can live together, if they’ll only try. In 2005, the government under then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, forcibly evacuated all of the Jewish settlers from Gaza, and told the ‘Palestinians’ to make of it what they would. The Israelis hoped that reasonable heads would prevail, and the Arabs would take advantage of their unoccupied land to try to build something peaceful and prosperous. Gaza has few natural resources, but also enjoys some of the best beachfront property on the Mediterranean, and could have built resorts which would attract well-to-do European vacationers, and the euros that they’d have to spend.

Obviously, that’s not what they did. Instead, the Arab irredentists fought with each other, Hamas seized control in Gaza, and the whole thing became a big terrorist training camp. Instead of resorts which could bring some prosperity to Gaza, they built a vast tunnel system. What an absolute waste!

What’s happening in Gaza didn’t have to happen. It was started by bloodthirsty Hamas terrorists, who must have thought that, if they started a war, the other Arab nations would join them. Oops!

This is why Hamas must be completely destroyed! Given a chance for peace, being given land where they could develop the beginnings of a peaceful ‘Palestine,’ the Arabs proved that they were not interested in peace, that they were still interested in complete victory. You cannot reason with such people, at least not reason as those of us living in a Western civilization culture would do.

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This morning’s rant

Via William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove, I saw this quote:

“I never imagined seeing the flag of a terror group holding eight Americans hostage for 292 days waved in the streets of our nation’s Capitol,” Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) wrote alongside an image of a protester waving the Hamas flag.

I guess that he’s not old enough to remember the campus protest chant, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win!”

It’s amazing to me that there are so many people in Western countries, enjoying the fruits of Western civilization and a modern economy, supporting Islamist savages who would gladly hang all of the queers and force the women back into subjugation. It’s as though they just can’t wrap their pointy heads around the notion that, if Hamas did win, and drive all of the Jooooos into the sea, this new ‘Palestine’ would not somehow be all sweetness and light, with a First World economy, liberation for queers and trannies, religious freedom, freedom of speech and of the press, and the happiness of a wealthy, Ivy League university campus, but become the same squalor that the rest of the non-oil producing Arab Middle East is.

I have to laugh at the “Queers for Palestine” signs, of (mostly) white young women taking a leadership role in these protests, when none of them would be allowed any leadership roles at all under Islam. I have to laugh at those calling the Israelis “white settler colonialists” when every white person in America is the descendant or beneficiary of white settler colonialists, only here because white settler colonialists — including my first American ancestor, Richard Warren — drove out and (mostly) killed the Indians here before them. Every black person in America is the descendant or beneficiary of the evil white slaveholders who brought their ancestors here, rather than leaving them in the undeveloped squalor that is most of sub-Saharan Africa today. Every Hispanic person in America today is the descendant or beneficiary of the white Spanish settler colonialists who drove out and (mostly) killed the Indians south of the Rio Grande.

Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday, to Congress, referring to the anti-Semitic protesters outside:

I have a message for these protesters. When the tyrants of Tehran who hang gays from cranes and murder women for not covering their hair are praising, promoting and funding you: you have officially become Iran’s useful idiots.

Absotively, posilutely right!

When the people that today’s left are supporting actually take over, all of the campus idiots are going to be utterly astonished when they are among the first to be lined up against the wall and shot.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.

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“The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left.” — Ecclesiastes 10:2

In the modern world, abortion has become something of a secular sacrament, down to which all politicians must make obeisance. If they do not, then they are clearly haters of women and an obvious supporter of the evil, reich-wing Donald Trump. The Roman Catholic Church is one of the few bulwarks against pre-natal infanticide in the West, though the Church’s actual action against it seems sparse.

Irish politician refused communion over abortion vote

BBC | Monday, July 15, 2024

The refusal of the Eucharist to a public representative in the Republic of Ireland has been “unambiguously condemned” by the Association of Catholic Priests.

It follows reports that Fine Gael TD and Minister of State Colm Burke was refused Holy Communion at a funeral Mass on Friday.

That politicians would have condemned the priest’s actions is unsurprising; that the Association of Catholic Priests would do so ought to be shocking. Continue reading →

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#Antisemitism at Columbia University How can educated administrators be so calm and complacent about it?

My old Bible, using an Israeli ₪20 note as a bookmark.

Catholics the world over have just completed a series of liturgical readings from the Gospel of John, and Gospel readings at Sunday Mass now come from Mark. But the Gospel of John is disturbing in its language, with its frequent reference to “the Jews.” From the foreword to The Gospel According to John, The New American Catholic Bible:[1]© Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, 1970. This has been the Bible I’ve had and used since the 1970s, purchased sometime between 1976 and 1978, and is the one pictured at the top of this … Continue reading

The polemic between the synagogue and the church[2]At the time. John is believed to be the last of the Gospels written, with editing into its final form being completed between 90 and 100 AD. influenced Johannine language toward harshness especially by reason of the hostility toward Jesus manifested by the authorities — Pharisees and Sadducees — who are referred to frequently as “the Jews”.

Yes, I wince at some of the readings from John, even though I know the real meanings of the language used.

I attribute a significant amount of anti-Semitism among Christians to just such language, and I hate that. Jews are our religious forebears, and the hostility of some, hopefully few, Christians toward Jews is simply wrong. Sadly, the tradition of anti-Semitism seems to be festering again. From The Times of Israel:

In newly revealed texts, Columbia deans discuss Jewish student ‘privilege’ and ‘$$$$’

US House panel probing antisemitism at universities publishes exchange between administrators who called Hillel official a ‘problem’ during May event on campus

Continue reading →

References

References
↑1 © Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, 1970. This has been the Bible I’ve had and used since the 1970s, purchased sometime between 1976 and 1978, and is the one pictured at the top of this article. It is a true hard-cover publication, but the spine is broken, and a couple of forward pages are missing. I broke down and bought a newer, larger-print Bible several months ago, because it’s easier for me to read.
↑2 At the time. John is believed to be the last of the Gospels written, with editing into its final form being completed between 90 and 100 AD.
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Once again, the hoitiest and the toitiest rally in favor of #Hamas So, what happens to the Stanford grads when it comes to their employment prospects?

Stanford University, 2024-25 tuition only: $21,709 per quarter, a private university in the Pyrite State, has a joyous image of commencement featuring a pretty, blonde girl openly smiling and cheering and clapping her hands in the California sunshine headlining the university’s website main page, or at least they do on Monday, June 17th, at 7:42 AM EDT. Stanford, one of the truly prestigious universities in the United States, sort of an Ivy League of the West school, attracts students from around the world, applying in a highly selective environment.

One would think that, as savvy and smart as those students are, they’d occasionally check the news, and ought to have seen stories noting that corporations which recruit top students are wary of hiring those who’ve been taking part in the pro-‘Palestinian,’ pro-Hamas demonstrations which have taken place. Continue reading →

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Nooo, not anti-Semitism at all! What would they have said had people been shouting at the 6.1% of the USC student body who are black, "Go back to Africa"? 

Genesis Chapter 15:

18 On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying,

“To your descendants I have given this land,
From the river of Egypt as far as the great river, the river Euphrates:

19 the land of the Kenite, the Kenizzite, the Kadmonite, 20 the Hittite, the Perizzite, the Rephaim, 21 the Amorite, the Canaanite, the Girgashite, and the Jebusite.”

That is how it should be, but, Alas!, so many students at our universities have no knowledge of the Bible, or seemingly of not-so-ancient history. Continue reading →

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Going to jail for telling the truth? That’s what Europeans risk! "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." — George Orwell, 1984

In 1984, country music singer Lee Greenwood released his song, “God Bless the USA.” I was reminded of that song, when I read the article below, and the stanza:

I’m proud to be an American
Where at least I know I’m free
And I won’t forget the men who died
Who gave that right to me
And I’d gladly stand up next to you
And defend Her still today
‘Cause there ain’t no doubt
I love this land
God Bless the U.S.A.

The article?

Transgender Spanish Actor Sues French Politician For Calling Him A “Man”

By Genevieve Gluck | Saturday, June 1, 2024

Spanish actor Karla Sofía Gascón, a trans-identified male previously known as Juan Carlos, has filed a legal complaint against French politician Marion Maréchal, alleging she committed hate speech by calling him a “man.” Maréchal could face one year in prison and a €300,000 fine (£255,300) if found guilty.

On May 26, Maréchal, the head of France’s Reconquête! party for the European elections, made a comment on social media about Gascón after it was announced that he had won an award for “Best Actress” at the Cannes Film Festival. Gascón had won the award for his role in ‘Emilia Pérez,’ wherein he plays the titular role as a ruthless Mexican drug lord who decides to “transition” in order to evade law enforcement.

“So a man has received the prize at Cannes for… female performance. Progress for the left is the erasure of women and mothers,” wrote Maréchal in response to the news of Gascón’s win.

Apparently in Europe, a politician can face up to a year in jail for telling the truth!

Well, sort of the truth. Juan Carlos is most certainly a male, but it’s clear that he isn’t actually a man. The rest of this article is below the fol, because I have included Mr Greenwood’s music video. Continue reading →