It's been nearly 2,000 years since Jews celebrated Passover at the Temple in Jerusalem, but that will change soon if a growing Orthodox Jewish movement in Israel has its way.....
"The present-day Sanhedrin Court decided Tuesday to purchase a herd of sheep for ritual sacrifice at the site of the Temple on the eve of Passover, conditions on the Temple Mount permitting," the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports this morning.
"The modern Sanhedrin was established several years ago and is headed by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz. It claims to be renewing the ancient Jewish high court, which existed until roughly 1600 years ago, and meets once a week. Professor Hillel Weiss, a member of the Sanhedrin, told Haaretz on Tuesday that the action, even if merely symbolic, is designed to demonstrate in a way that is obvious to all that the expectation of Temple rituals will resume is real, and not just talk.
Several years ago, a number of members of the various Temple movements performed a symbolic sacrifice on Givat Hananya, which overlooks the Temple Mount from Jerusalem's Abu Tur neighborhood. During the ceremony, participants sacrificed a young goat that was donated by a resident of Tekoa. The participants also built a special two-meter tall oven, in accordance with halakha (Jewish law).
The Passover sacrifice is considered a simple ceremony, relative to other works performed in the Temple."
.....numerous Biblical prophecies in the Old and New Testaments also indicate a new Temple will be built in the "last days," suggesting such headlines have been foretold for centuries....for more information on similar recent preparations in Israel, see Chapter 13 of Epicenter -- Future Headline: JEWS BUILD THIRD TEMPLE IN JERUSALEM.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, some friends of mine had a band called Burning Tree which, for a short time, made a splash at Epic Records. They toured the world, built a rep, and ultimately, were buried by Tommy Mottola's obsession with Mariah Carey.
The proof is in the pudding. While it is true that Burning Tree's music is hard to get, if you can get it, you will see that it kicked ass, and did so in a prescient manner. Major labels would die to have an act like this now.
Too bad they sold their soul.
Anyway, I was just listening to my Burning Tree CD, and I ran across these lyrics:
You don't cross the forbidden pathway Swim the stormy sea Fly on the one-way Eagle And you sure don't want to fuck with me
While that may not be the most eloquent statement to have ever graced the tracks of a great rock n' roll record, for me, in the mood I'm in, it expresses the way I feel, perfectly well.
I'm a middle aged man now, but, I swear to God, in some ways, I don't think I will ever grow up. I go to work and earn millions for my business. I love my wife, and I take care of my kids. I go to the same church I have gone to for fifteen years. I deal with problems as they come, and I have learned the lesson that emotions are a passing thing, while principles are the rock upon which I must rely.
But, I have also learned that I am who I am, and I, and everyone I know, are simply going to have to accept that fact. It ain't gonna change.
There are some things, darlin', you just don't do. You don't cross the forbidden pathway, you don't climb the burning tree, and you sure don't want to fuck with me.
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - Olympic wrestling champion Rulon Gardner lost a toe to frostbite after being lost in the wilderness, impaled himself with an arrow and was involved in a serious motorcycle accident.
In his latest escape from death, he survived a plane crash over the weekend into the aptly named Good Hope Bay on the Utah-Arizona border.
"I think I'm really lucky," Gardner told CNN on Monday, "after everything I have been through."
Gardner and two Utah brothers were rescued by a fisherman Sunday after swimming more than an hour in 44-degree water and spending the night without shelter.
"It takes only about 30 minutes for someone swimming in 44-degree water to start suffering the effects of hypothermia, so the fact that they swam in it for an hour, not to mention surviving the plane crash and the night without fire or shelter, is pretty amazing," said Steven Luckesen, a district ranger at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.
"If these guys were a cat with nine lives, they just used up three of them."
Since delivering one of the great Olympic upsets at the 2000 Sydney Games, the 35-year-old Gardner has had a history of harrowing escapes.
In 2002, he became stranded while snowmobiling in the Wyoming and lost a toe. Then in 2004, he was struck by an automobile while riding a motorcycle. Back in third grade, he punctured his abdomen with an arrow at a class show-and-tell.
The lesson, Gardner said, is "hopefully teach people to be smarter about the choices they make."
First off, dude's a real man.
But, beyond that, for God's sake, when you start making statements like, I guess the point of my life is for other people to learn from my mistakes and make smarter choices, you know, maybe, just maybe, it's time to make some of those smarter choices yourself.
But, where would we be in our world without men like this; men who have absolutely no fear.
I just can't keep my mouth shut. I keep hearing about what's going on, whether I want to or not, and I feel the need to get the information out there. (Thanks to Michael):
By Anne Bayefsky A newly released United Nations report epitomizes the foul anti-Semitism which has overtaken the U.N. human-rights machinery. In language reminiscent of Nazi Germany, John Dugard, the U.N.'s "Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967," has announced that Jews seeks racial domination.
In Dugard's words: "The IDF inflicts serious bodily and mental harm on Palestinians…Palestinians throughout the OPT [Occupied Palestinian Territory] are denied freedom of movement. Can it seriously be denied that the purpose of such action is to establish and maintain domination by one racial group (Jews) over another racial group (Palestinians) and systematically oppressing them?"
Dugard's U.N. mandate is to demonize Israel. Palestinian human-rights violations were deliberately omitted from the job description, first drafted by the U.N. Human Rights Commission in 1993 and continued by the "reformed" U.N. Human Rights Council. Dugard, a lawyer, not only accepted the one-sided mandate, he relished the opportunity to become an advocate of a one-state solution in the name of human rights. What Dugard fears most is not hate and the terrorism it fuels, but "Judaization" — the idea of a Jew living in claimed Arab land. Deliberately mirroring Nazi imagery, his report refers to Israel's security fence this way: "The Wall being built in East Jerusalem is an instrument of social engineering designed to achieve the Judaization of Jerusalem…"
The "Judaization" problem stands side-by-side with this U.N. champion of the Hamas government. According to Dugard, Israel has no right to refuse to transfer funds to the Hamas government. Why? "Predictably, Israel justifies its action on security grounds, but the real reason seems to be a determination to effect a regime change." A look at the Hamas Charter might help determine the wisdom of regime change: "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it…There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad…" But according to this U.N. expert the problem is not a government dedicated to killing Jews, but the Jews themselves.
1I (A)waited [a]patiently for the LORD; And He inclined to me and (B)heard my cry. 2He brought me up out of the (C)pit of destruction, out of the miry clay, And (D)He set my feet upon a rock (E)making my footsteps firm. 3He put a (F)new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God; Many will (G)see and fear And will trust in the LORD. 4How (H)blessed is the man who has made the LORD his trust, And (I)has not turned to the proud, nor to those who (J)lapse into falsehood. 5Many, O LORD my God, are (K)the wonders which You have done, And Your (L)thoughts toward us; There is none to compare with You If I would declare and speak of them, They (M)would be too numerous to count. 6(N)Sacrifice and meal offering You have not desired; My ears You have [b]opened; Burnt offering and sin offering You have not required. 7Then I said, "Behold, I come; In the scroll of the book it is written of me. 8(O)I delight to do Your will, O my God; (P)Your Law is within my heart." 9I have (Q)proclaimed glad tidings of righteousness in the great congregation; Behold, I will (R)not restrain my lips, O LORD, (S)You know. 10I have (T)not hidden Your righteousness within my heart; I have (U)spoken of Your faithfulness and Your salvation; I have not concealed Your lovingkindness and Your truth from the great congregation. 11You, O LORD, will not withhold Your compassion from me; Your (V)lovingkindness and Your truth will continually preserve me. 12For evils beyond number have (W)surrounded me; My (X)iniquities have overtaken me, so that I am not able to see; They are (Y)more numerous than the hairs of my head, And my (Z)heart has failed me. 13(AA)Be pleased, O LORD, to deliver me; Make (AB)haste, O LORD, to help me. 14Let those be (AC)ashamed and humiliated together Who (AD)seek my [c]life to destroy it; Let those be turned back and dishonored Who delight [d]in my hurt. 15Let those (AE)be appalled because of their shame Who (AF)say to me, "Aha, aha!" 16(AG)Let all who seek You rejoice and be glad in You; Let those who love Your salvation (AH)say continually, "The LORD be magnified!" 17Since (AI)I am afflicted and needy, (AJ)Let the Lord be mindful of me. You are my help and my deliverer; Do not delay, O my God.
Pamela, from Atlas Shrugs, started it, and we're kicking around some big ideas. You ought to check it out. It is a work in progress. Eventually, it is going to be a multi-media news and entertainment network.
This is a speech from General George S. Patton. (Thanks to R. Davis)
General Patton arose and strode swiftly to the microphone. The men snapped to their feet and stood silently. Patton surveyed the sea of brown with a grim look. "Be seated", he said. The words were not a request, but a command. The General's voice rose high and clear.
"Men, this stuff that some sources sling around about America wanting out of this war, not wanting to fight, is a crock of bullshit. Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. You are here today for three reasons.
First, because you are here to defend your homes and your loved ones.
Second, you are here for your own self respect, because you would not want to be anywhere else.
Third, you are here because you are real men and all real men like to fight. When you, here, everyone of you, were kids, you all admired the champion marble player, the fastest runner, the toughest boxer, the big league ball players, and the All-American football players. Americans love a winner.
Americans will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win all of the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost nor will ever lose a war; for the very idea of losing is hateful to an American."
The General paused and looked over the crowd. "You are not all going to die," he said slowly. "Only two percent of you right here today would die in a major battle. Death must not be feared. Death, in time, comes to all men.
Yes, every man is scared in his first battle. If he says he's not, he's a liar. Some men are cowards but they fight the same as the brave men or they get the hell slammed out of them watching men fight who are just as scared as they are.
The real hero is the man who fights even though he is scared.
Some men get over their fright in a minute under fire. For some, it takes an hour. For some, it takes days. But a real man will never let his fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty to his country, and his innate manhood.
Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best and it removes all that is base. Americans pride themselves on being He Men and they ARE He Men.
Remember that the enemy is just as frightened as you are, and probably more so. They are not supermen."
"All through your Army careers, you men have bitched about what you call "chicken shit drilling". That, like everything else in this Army, has a definite purpose. That purpose is alertness. Alertness must be bred into every soldier.
I don't give a fuck for a man who's not always on his toes. You men are veterans or you wouldn't be here. You are ready for what's to come. A man must be alert at all times if he expects to stay alive. If you're not alert, sometime, a German son-of-an-asshole-bitch is going to sneak up behind you and beat you to death with a sockful of shit!" The men roared in agreement.
Patton's grim expression did not change. "There are four hundred neatly marked graves somewhere in Sicily", he roared into the microphone, "All because one man went to sleep on the job". He paused and the men grew silent.
"But they are German graves, because we caught the bastard asleep before they did".
The General clutched the microphone tightly, his jaw out-thrust, and he continued, "An Army is a team. It lives, sleeps, eats, and fights as a team. This individual heroic stuff is pure horse shit. The bilious bastards who write that kind of stuff for the Saturday Evening Post don't know any more about real fighting under fire than they know about fucking!"
The men slapped their legs and rolled in glee. This was Patton as the men had imagined him to be, and in rare form, too. He hadn't let them down. He was all that he was cracked up to be, and more. He had IT!
"We have the finest food, the finest equipment, the best spirit, and the best men in the world", Patton bellowed. He lowered his head and shook it pensively.
Suddenly he snapped erect, faced the men belligerently and thundered, "Why, by God, I actually pity those poor sons-of-bitches we're going up against. By God, I do". The men clapped and howled delightedly. There would be many a barracks tale about the "Old Man's" choice phrases. They would become part and parcel of Third Army's history and they would become the bible of their slang.
"My men don't surrender", Patton continued, "I don't want to hear of any soldier under my command being captured unless he has been hit. Even if you are hit, you can still fight back. That's not just bull shit either.
The kind of man that I want in my command is just like the lieutenant in Libya, who, with a Luger against his chest, jerked off his helmet, swept the gun aside with one hand, and busted the hell out of the Kraut with his helmet. Then he jumped on the gun and went out and killed another German before they knew what the hell was coming off. And, all of that time, this man had a bullet through a lung. There was a real man!"
Patton stopped and the crowd waited. He continued more quietly, "All of the real heroes are not storybook combat fighters, either. Every single man in this Army plays a vital role.
Don't ever let up. Don't ever think that your job is unimportant. Every man has a job to do and he must do it.
Every man is a vital link in the great chain. What if every truck driver suddenly decided that he didn't like the whine of those shells overhead, turned yellow, and jumped headlong into a ditch? The cowardly bastard could say, "Hell, they won't miss me, just one man in thousands".
But, what if every man thought that way? Where in the hell would we be now? What would our country, our loved ones, our homes, even the world, be like?
No, Goddamnit, Americans don't think like that. Every man does his job. Every man serves the whole. Every department, every unit, is important in the vast scheme of this war. The ordnance men are needed to supply the guns and machinery of war to keep us rolling. The Quartermaster is needed to bring up food and clothes because where we are going there isn't a hell of a lot to steal.
Every last man on K.P. has a job to do, even the one who heats our water to keep us from getting the 'G.I. Shits'."
Patton paused, took a deep breath, and continued, "Each man must not think only of himself, but also of his buddy fighting beside him.
We don't want yellow cowards in this Army. They should be killed off like rats. If not, they will go home after this war and breed more cowards. The brave men will breed more brave men. Kill off the Goddamned cowards and we will have a nation of brave men.
One of the bravest men that I ever saw was a fellow on top of a telegraph pole in the midst of a furious fire fight in Tunisia. I stopped and asked what the hell he was doing up there at a time like that. He answered, "Fixing the wire, Sir". I asked, "Isn't that a little unhealthy right about now?"
He answered, "Yes Sir, but the Goddamned wire has to be fixed". I asked, "Don't those planes strafing the road bother you?" And he answered, "No, Sir, but you sure as hell do!"
Now, there was a real man. A real soldier. There was a man who devoted all he had to his duty, no matter how seemingly insignificant his duty might appear at the time, no matter how great the odds.
And you should have seen those trucks on the rode to Tunisia. Those drivers were magnificent. All day and all night they rolled over those son-of-a-bitching roads, never stopping, never faltering from their course, with shells bursting all around them all of the time.
We got through on good old American guts. Many of those men drove for over forty consecutive hours. These men weren't combat men, but they were soldiers with a job to do. They did it, and in one hell of a way they did it.
They were part of a team. Without team effort, without them, the fight would have been lost. All of the links in the chain pulled together and the chain became unbreakable."
The General paused and stared challengingly over the silent ocean of men. One could have heard a pin drop anywhere on that vast hillside. The only sound was the stirring of the breeze in the leaves of the bordering trees and the busy chirping of the birds in the branches of the trees at the General's left.
"Don't forget," Patton barked, "you men don't know that I'm here. No mention of that fact is to be made in any letters. The world is not supposed to know what the hell happened to me. I'm not supposed to be commanding this Army. I'm not even supposed to be here in England.
Let the first bastards to find out be the Goddamned Germans. Some day I want to see them raise up on their piss-soaked hind legs and howl, 'Jesus Christ, it's the Goddamned Third Army again and that son-of-a-fucking-bitch Patton'."
"We want to get the hell over there", Patton continued, "The quicker we clean up this Goddamned mess, the quicker we can take a little jaunt against the purple pissing Japs and clean out their nest, too. Before the Goddamned Marines get all of the credit."
The men roared approval and cheered delightedly. This statement had real significance behind it. Much more than met the eye and the men instinctively sensed the fact. They knew that they themselves were going to play a very great part in the making of world history.
Patton continued quietly, "Sure, we want to go home. We want this war over with. The quickest way to get it over with is to go get the bastards who started it.
The quicker they are whipped, the quicker we can go home. The shortest way home is through Berlin and Tokyo. And when we get to Berlin", he yelled, "I am personally going to shoot that paper hanging son-of-a-bitch Hitler. Just like I'd shoot a snake!"
"When a man is lying in a shell hole, if he just stays there all day, a German will get to him eventually. The hell with that idea. The hell with taking it. My men don't dig foxholes. I don't want them to. Foxholes only slow up an offensive.
Keep moving. And don't give the enemy time to dig one either. We'll win this war, but we'll win it only by fighting and by showing the Germans that we've got more guts than they have; or ever will have.
We're not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we're going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.
We're going to murder those lousy Hun cocksuckers by the bushel-fucking-basket. War is a bloody, killing business. You've got to spill their blood, or they will spill yours. Rip them up the belly. Shoot them in the guts. When shells are hitting all around you and you wipe the dirt off your face and realize that instead of dirt it's the blood and guts of what once was your best friend beside you, you'll know what to do!"
"I don't want to get any messages saying, "I am holding my position." We are not holding a Goddamned thing.
Let the Germans do that. We are advancing constantly and we are not interested in holding onto anything, except the enemy's balls. We are going to twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him all of the time.
Our basic plan of operation is to advance and to keep on advancing regardless of whether we have to go over, under, or through the enemy. We are going to go through him like crap through a goose; like shit through a tin horn!"
"From time to time there will be some complaints that we are pushing our people too hard. I don't give a good Goddamn about such complaints.
I believe in the old and sound rule that an ounce of sweat will save a gallon of blood.
The harder WE push, the more Germans we will kill. The more Germans we kill, the fewer of our men will be killed. Pushing means fewer casualties. I want you all to remember that."
The General paused. His eagle like eyes swept over the hillside. He said with pride, "There is one great thing that you men will all be able to say after this war is over and you are home once again.
You may be thankful that twenty years from now when you are sitting by the fireplace with your grandson on your knee and he asks you what you did in the great World War II, you WON'T have to cough, shift him to the other knee and say, "Well, your Granddaddy shoveled shit in Louisiana."
No, Sir, you can look him straight in the eye and say, "Son, your Granddaddy rode with the Great Third Army and a Son-of-a-Goddamned-Bitch named Georgie Patton!"
A song by the Verve. I don't know if anyone will understand this, but this is my praise song to my God. Read the lyrics closely and think on them. I praise God with these words. Especially when I am depressed.
Happiness More or less It's just a change in me Something in my liberty Oh, my, my Happiness Coming and going I watch you look at me Watch my fever growing I know just where I am
But how many corners do I have to turn? How many times do I have to learn All the love I have is in my mind?
Well, I'm a lucky man With fire in my hands
Happiness Something in my own place I'm standing naked Smiling, I feel no disgrace With who I am
Happiness Coming and going I watch you look at me Watch my fever growing I know just who I am
But how many corners do I have to turn? How many times do I have to learn All the love I have is in my mind?
I hope you understand I hope you understand
Gotta love that'll never die
Happiness More or less It's just a change in me Something in my liberty Happiness Coming and going I watch you look at me Watch my fever growing I know Oh, my, my Oh, my, my Oh, my, my Oh, my, my
Gotta love that'll never die Gotta love that'll never die No, no I'm a lucky man
It's just a change in me Something in my liberty It's just a change in me Something in my liberty It's just a change in me Something in my liberty Oh, my, my Oh, my, my It's just a change in me Something in my liberty Oh, my, my Oh, my, my
I believe that we humans are involved in a creative project, an endeavor, a collaboration which is a wrestling with God. We work with God to create our lives and to help others in their lives.
The only thing I would change in this song is to say that, rather than being a "Lucky Man," I am a "Blessed Man."
A Complex Post About The Issues Surrounding Tim Hardaway's Anti-Gay Statements
UPDATED AT BOTTOM OF POST
There are a few things I want to point out about the Tim Hardaway issue. First, kudos to the NBA for banishing Hardaway from all league functions. Hardaway's statement went way beyond expressing a personal dislike for homosexuals. Instead he said, "I don't like gay people and I don't like to be around gay people. I am homophobic. I don't like it. It shouldn't be in the world or in the United States."
So, you know, what does he propose? That we kill them all, or ship them off to an island?
Tim Hardaway is a fascist. In my recent post, I called him a "Faggot," and I did so for a very specific reason, because I honestly doubt that the man would even know the definition of fascist, and I'd rather call him a name which pisses him off, then to be specific in language, because he is so far beyond the pale that his words do not even merit serious and nuanced consideration.
Furthermore, let me say this, when Poland killed all their Jews, they also killed their culture. Poland had a thriving arts culture in the years before WWII. But, it was primarily inspired by the Jews. The Polish Nobel Prize winner for Literature, Isaac Bashevis Singer, is just one example of a great many Polish artists who contributed to Polish culture in the early part of the 20th century.
But, Poland killed its Jews, and its arts community disappeared.
Similarly, for all my fellow Christians, and other Infidels, if we got rid of gay people, we would destroy much of our arts culture.
I am a rock n' roll musician, and a writer. I'm telling you, you can't be in the arts without knowing a lot of gay people. My direct experience with gay people has led me to believe that their contributions are important to our way of life.
I once pointed out to one of my Pastors that an awful lot of the best male singers and dancers we have at our church never end up getting married. I asked my Pastor why she thought that was. The answer ought to obvious. They are gay. And, they go to church. My church is not pro-gay. But, these men go anyway, because they believe that Christ was the Messiah, and that he died for their sins, and they are thankful for that fact.
And, so they go to church and contribute to our worship services, and their contributions are beautiful and appreciated.
I also want to point out about this whole Tim Hardaway controversy is that it came up because former NBA player John Amaechi had come out of the closet. This is what provoked Tim Hardaway's ignorant comments.
Beyond mere issues of locker room trust and bonds among teammates, Amaechi said Hardaway's words of anger and intimidation show why gay people worry about making their sexual orientation public.
"It now allows people to take off those rose-colored glasses and understand that homophobia is a problem not only in sports but society," Amaechi told sports TV network ESPN, publishers of his book.
"Spewing vitriol isn't something we should give credit to (for sparking discussion). Society is not for that. One man has made hundreds of thousands of people now feel uncomfortable, unsafe, feel they should hide and run.
"What he has done has made life more difficult, perhaps more dangerous, for people in society, not just in sports. His views embolden those who hold the same views.
"When he depersonalizes it, it's not just a foolish comment. It's a foolish comment that echoes around the country.
"People will feel under pressure, like they are under attack. They will feel anxious. They will know there's a face and a voice for all those people out there who hate them.
"I don't know how that can be conducive to any kind of society at all."
Amaechi, who is black, rejects the idea of mere tolerance for gays, saying "I have no interest in being tolerated" as a black or gay person.
Amaechi said that while response to his revelation has been overwhelmingly positive, Hardaway's comments touched of a wave of threatening anti-gay messages beyond what he had been receiving.
"Every comment that (Hardaway) made is labeled with hate," Amaechi said. "The percentage of e-mails I've received overnight that are going to have to go into a little box somewhere just in case I end up dead are unbelievable.
People who denigrate homosexuals, and say they deserve to go to hell, and that they are sick, degenerate, or whatever adjectives, or names, they choose to use, do not seem to recognize that their words have real world consequences for innocent gay people.
Now, here's another interesting thing about this story. Guess who came out in support of John Amaechi?
Writers and NBA personalities, including Heat center Shaquille O'Neal and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, have widely praised Amaechi's revelation.
Now, the reason this is so interesting to note is that it is a little known fact that Shaquille O'Neal is a Muslim and a member of the Nation of Islam. He counts Louis Farrakhan as a personal family friend.
Shaquille O'Neal never ceases to impress me for his ability to go his own way without concerning himself with what those around him think. He is truly his own man. Farrakhan makes no secret of the fact that he hates gay people, or that Muslims ought to hate gay people. Yet, Shaquille O'Neal chooses to not fall into that trap.
I also want to remind everyone that Shaquille O'Neal is a tremendously charitable individual who personally packed trucks full of food and supplies and drove them down to New Orleans to help out the victims of Hurricaine Katrina.
O'Neal clearly does not limit his charitable giving to only those who are members of the Ummah. Good for him. He's a truly good man.
UPDATE:
JB writes in:
pastorius writes: Farrakhan makes no secret of the fact that he hates gay people, or that Muslims ought to hate gay people.
That is one bold faced lie.
I've heard plenty of Farrakhan speechs and read many columns, many of which are online and have not seen anything like what you are lying about.
This is Farrakhan's take:
I cannot fault a Christian pastor for standing on his platform to preach what he believes, nor a Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or a member of any religious or political party. All of us must be true to what we earnestly believe. I cannot fault a gay or lesbian person who stands on their platform to preach what they believe of self and how the world should view them. Although what we say on our platform may, in some way, be offensive to others, we must not allow painful utterances of the past or present, based on sincere belief, or based on our ignorance, or based on our ideology or philosophy to cripple a movement that deserves and needs all of us—and, when I say all, I mean all of us. We must begin to work together to lift our people out of the miserable and wretched condition in which we find ourselves.
I find that I am not quite accurate, but I also do not think it is quite accurate of you to say what I have said is a "bald-faced lie."
Here are some quotes from Farrakhan on gays:
"And the Christian right, with your blindness to that wicked state of Israel…can that be the holy land, and you have gay parades, and want to permit to have a gay parade in Jerusalem when no prophet ever sanctioned that behavior. HOW CAN THAT BE THE ISRAEL, how can that be Jerusalem with secular people running the holy land when it should be the holy people running the holy land. That land is gonna be cleansed with BLOOD!" Saviours' Day, Chicago, Illinois, 2/26/06
“I call them the so-called Jews because to be a Jew you have to adhere to the statutes and laws that create the special relationship. How can you be a Jew and promote homosexual marriage?” National Black Agenda Convention, Boston, 3/18/04
"But all of a sudden in the night clubs, they started having transvestite shows, drag queens… Scripture say no liar, no adulterer, no effeminate will get in the Kingdom." Saviours' Day Speech, Chicago, 2/23/03
But overall, I will say, you are right. I stand corrected, and, as I said, I apologize.
Churches are often percieved by non-Christians as the home of the pious. Instead, I see them as being like families. You do not choose your family. Instead, you are born into it. And, you find yourself "yoked" with people with whom you can not believe you must be forced to deal with.
The consequence of this is you find yourself dealing with human beings and all their attendant problems and misfortunes. Among these are divorce, adultery, and abuse.
When you do find yourself confronted with these problems, and they are being perpetrated by your fellow Christians, you do not abandon them. Instead, you make an attempt to help them come to see the error of their ways.
The Bible does tell us that we are to confront a person in their sin, and if that doesn't work, then we are to confront him, or her, in the presence of two or three fellow Christians. And then, if that doesn't work, we are to ostracisize the person.
Ostracization is a very difficult decision, but sometimes it is inevitable, and necessary. In my opinion, men must stick by their families. They must honor their wives, love their wives, and love and honor their children. When they don't, they need to be held to strict account, and sometimes that includes ostracization. (By the way, obviously, women must also be held to account. I, as a man, tend to deal with this issue more directly with men.)
Protein Wisdom linked to a study in the UK on what women find attractive in men. It’s not a rigorous accounting by any means, but it certainly shows the intuitive mating selection process for women.
High-flying men are not as attractive to women looking for love as those with an average job, scientists say.Perhaps unsurprisingly, the University of Central Lancashire research found the 186 female students asked preferred good-looking men.
But within that group, those without top careers were deemed most suitable, the Personality and Individual Differences journal reported.
The team said women seemed to feel high-flyers would not be good fathers.[…]
“We suggest that females see physically attractive, high status males as being more likely to pursue a mating strategy rather than a parenting strategy.”
There is more information at the site, with looks being weighed against men’s professions.
When I first saw this at post at Protein Wisdom and read the comments, I noticed there were only men on the thread. So I had to put my two cents in. And as I thought about it, I remembered the many groups I’d facilitated with battered women as they struggled to figure out how they’d ended up being in a nightmare relationship. Was there a way to gauge which men were safe and if there was some way to tell ahead of time, what was it? So often they’d say sadly, “but he was so nice…Over the course of several years, with the input of hundreds - if not thousands - of women, we came up with some basic guidelines. I was surprised, as I commented on PW’s post, that I remembered most of the criteria for “safe” men. But then, we did work on this subject for several years, and it was a pressing one for each member of the group.
Obviously, I internalized their ideas.
What follows is not necessarily in order of importance. In fact, I don’t recall that we ever ordered the criteria that way. It seemed more important to simply understand the details that went into making a safe choice where men were concerned.
It’s important to remember that this is after-the-fact reasoning. Each woman was bringing to the conversation what she needed and what had been sorely missing in her relationship with the man she’d trusted, the man who ended up beating her.
“Scientific” it’s not. But heart-felt is definitely the foundation of this list. Such sadness and loss went into describing a safe man - but also great hope.
The study that Protein Wisdom linked to discussed whether wealthy men would be considered most attractive. That was one issue we talked about since some of the women came from upper class backgrounds. And physical attractiveness was another. Some physically abusive men are quite handsome…
Here’s my comment at Protein Wisdom, with some editing for this post:
When I used to do crisis counseling with battered women the idea of a “safe” man was a recurrent theme, hashed over again and again as women struggled to figure out why they hadn’t seen it coming...Handsome isn’t necessarily safe — very often, having gotten by on his looks since he was two, Handsome may tend toward narcissism. tend — obviously they’re not all like that, except for those in Hollywood. Narcissism flourishes there.
Very wealthy men are of two categories: inherited and earned. The former do tend to make strategic alliances, though some of these partnerships are disastrous. See Ethel Kennedy’s family tree.
The latter, with their earned wealth, have a different sense of entitlement. Usually they’re looking for drop-dead beautiful as a further proof of their success. Again, just a tendency, not an absolute. There is a high rate of divorce in this category due to the driven nature of many high earners. Just ask any bitter ex-wife of some doctor. She ended up raising the children by herself only to have him trade her in after thirty years for a newer model. Strangely, the new one often looks like the old one, just twenty or thirty years younger.
Anyway, that said, here’s the “safe” list my battered women evolved over the years:
1. He gets on well with his family, particularly his mother or sisters. Family members don’t do dramas or cut off relationships —e.g., his momma gets on with her own family and her in-laws (as best she can).
2. He works steadily at a job he really likes. Never leaves one job without having lined up another. Isn’t a work-a-holic.
3. He has an avocation that really engages him — fishing, reading, motorcycles...whatever. But not so absorbing he’s never home or unavailable for extended periods.
4. He has some interest in the larger world and gives some of his time to a community group or someone in need. Like maybe he mows the yard for the old people next door.
5. His moods are reliable. Not happy-sappy, just predictable— e.g., you know for certain how he feels and what he will say and how loud he’ll say it if — again — you borrow his tools and don’t put them back. A corollary: the person he is in public is the same person he is at home. No Jekylls/Hydes need apply.
6. His times and routines are predictable. He’s never three days late for dinner.
7. He has a sense of humor and thinks you’re funny, too. You share secret jokes.
8. He’s sensible about money and reasonable. You don’t have to account for every penny, nor do you have to worry he’ll buy a $500.00 whats-is instead of paying the rent or the mortgage or the children’s dental bills.
9. He enjoys children to some extent, especially his own. He sees them as people.
10. He’s trustworthy. Keeps his word.
It’s been a few years, so that’s the list as I remember it —though maybe there were twelve qualities, not ten. I think one was “no substance abuse of any kind” since that was a frequent problem, and physical abuse is often accompanied by substance abuse. However, battering a woman when you’re stone cold sober is far more frightening an indicator that you’re a dangerous person. Those are the women I preferred to send out of town to another shelter.
And I believe they decided that a “loner” was a danger signal since it meant you couldn’t have friends, either. It also meant he didn’t have good people skills, another warning signal.By the way, this phenomenon really does cut across socio-economic lines — and political ones, too. Though politics didn’t enter the equation much if the abuse was severe. No room to think about who’s running for office when you’re busy running from someone who swears they love you.
That was then. I wonder what it’s like now for Muslim women here in the US. That problem never came up on my innocent pre-9/11 horizon.
One week after retired NBA player John Amaechi publically identified himself as gay, retired Heat guard Tim Hardaway said on a Miami radio show that he would not want to play with a gay man.
"You know, I hate gay people, so I let it be known," Hardaway said Wednesday, according to a transcript on the Miami Herald Web site. "I don't like gay people and I don't like to be around gay people. I am homophobic. I don't like it. It shouldn't be in the world or in the United States." Hardaway was a guest on the show and was asked at the end of the interview how he would handle having a gay teammate.
''First of all, I wouldn't want him on my team,'' Hardaway answered. "And second of all, if he was on my team, I would really distance myself from him because I don't think that is right.
Hardaway doesn't think he's alone in that view, either.
''Something has to give,'' he said. "And I think the majority of players would ask for him to be traded or they would want to be traded...If you have 12 other ballplayers in your locker room that are upset and can't concentrate and always worried about him in the locker room or on the court it's going to be hard for your teammates to win and accept him as a teammate.''
He later apologized for the remarks during a telephone interview with FOX affiliate WSVN in Miami.
"Yes, I regret it. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said I hate gay people or anything like that," he said. "That was my mistake."
I understand the idea that the warrior has to be in the foxhole with men. I understand that you are not going to convince men that "homos" are going to have their back. But, this kind of attitude among athletes and warriors is disgusting nonetheless.
It is fine for Tim Hardaway to have his own personal opinions, but it is not ok for him to expect us to agree with him. And, honestly, as much as I am opposed to Political Correctness, it is not fine for the world's media to give Mr. Hardaway's opinions without the context of judgement.
We, here in America, are free to be who we are, as long as we do not hurt others physically with our behavior.
Tim Hardaway is a fascist. He says, "This is not acceptable in America." He is a bad human being. And, the media (Fox Sports) published that without any context or judgement.
Fine, he apologized later. We can surmise that he is lying for the sake of political correctness and keeping his contract intact.
I am an American, and a Christian. I believe in Freedom first, morality second. As an American, and a Christian, I believe that we are free to make our choices to be who we are, as long as we are not hurting others physically.
Less than 1,000 miles east of Tel Aviv a new Auschwitz is being prepared, as the world looks on and does virtually nothing to stop it. Instead of the gas chambers being fired up, centrifuges are being installed. In place of Zyklon-B gas, the agent of choice is now uranium.
And while the language spoken by its architects may be different, the threat to the future of the Jewish people, and that of the entire Western world, is no less grave than it was six decades ago in Europe.
Indeed, with each passing day the would-be Hitler of Persia draws perilously closer to his goal of obtaining a nuclear arsenal, threatening everyone, and everything, that all of us hold dear. The press loves to mock the Iranian president, portraying him as a nut, a kook, and a fanatic. But I take him at his word. He has made quite clear what his objective is, telling us over and over again that he plans to eliminate Israel and destroy the West.
Like it or not, we are all in his crosshairs, and we ignore him at our peril. And that is why it is time to show a little more courage and a lot more determination, and to tackle this threat head-on.
It is time for Israel or the US to bomb Iran now. Not next week, next month, or next summer, but now. As quickly and as hard and as painfully as possible.
THE ALARM bells are ringing, and the danger signs are near. In recent days it was reported that Teheran has installed at least the first two sets of 164 centrifuges to enrich uranium at its underground nuclear facility in Natanz, part of its plan to fit nearly 3,000 in all.
You don't have to be a nuclear scientist to understand that the large-scale use of centrifuges means a country can produce more enriched uranium in a shorter period of time. And that is exactly what the Iranian leadership is vowing to do. In a speech on Sunday in Teheran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad promised his audience an "April surprise."
"From now until April 9," he said, "you will hear frequently about the great progress of the Iranian people and the unique developments in the fields of industry, agriculture, and especially nuclear energy."
"This is the nuclear celebration," Ahmadinejad promised the crowd. His idea of a "celebration," of course, is our idea of a funeral.
According to the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies, once the 3,000 centrifuges are operational it will take possibly as little as nine months for Iranian scientists to produce enough highly-enriched uranium to make an atomic bomb.
And so, by the end of this year, the atomic ayatollahs could very well have their hands on the ultimate weapon of mass terror and destruction. This cannot and must not be allowed to come to pass. And the only way to stop it is with military action.
DIPLOMACY has run its course. Its only effect has been to give the Iranians still more time to progress toward achieving their surreptitious and malicious aims. After the UN Security Council passed a resolution in December insisting that Iran end its uranium-enrichment program, Ahmadinejad dismissed it as "a piece of torn paper" and vowed to expand his country's nuclear program; which is precisely what he proceeded to do.
For more than a decade Iran hid its nuclear program from the international community. It has interfered with inspections of its nuclear facilities and repeatedly defied demands to cease and desist from its dangerous actions. Does anyone really think another UN resolution is going to do the trick?
The effects of the world's inaction have already begun to be felt, as other Arab countries in the region now speak openly of pursuing their own nuclear capability.
On Sunday, the secretary-general of the Gulf Cooperation Council announced that six Gulf Arab states are moving ahead with plans to build their own nuclear power plants. These same countries have oil coming out of their ears, so there is hardly a pressing need for them to develop nuclear energy resources. But they are undoubtedly looking on with alarm at their Iranian neighbor to the north, nervous at the prospect that he will be allowed to succeed in his quest to obtain nuclear weapons.
So now, thanks to the failure to shut down the Iranian nuclear program, we have the beginnings of a good, old-fashioned Middle Eastern arms race on our hands. Furthermore, the Iranians have grown so emboldened that they now feel comfortable enough to start sharing their nuclear know-how with other rogue regimes. As the official Iranian news agency IRNA reported last week, "Iran's ambassador to Belarus on Friday expressed Teheran's readiness to explore cooperation in construction of a nuclear plant in the country."
And according to reports last month in the British press, Iran is cooperating with North Korea on nuclear research and ballistic missile technology.
THE FACT is that Iran is out to assert its power and dominance, and to sow instability for the US and its interests far and wide. Last summer, Teheran orchestrated the war in Lebanon through its proxy group, Hizbullah, and it is now waging war against the West by sending arms for use against US and coalition troops in Iraq.
At the same time, the ayatollahs are busy expanding their military arsenal so they can create an ever-greater arc of terror and fear. Back in November, Iran test-fired dozens of missiles, including the Shihab-3, which is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead and can hit targets up to 1,200 miles away - meaning that all of Israel is now within reach.
And lest anyone still doubts Ahmadinejad's intentions, he made them abundantly clear at the Holocaust denial conference he hosted in Teheran back in December. In his closing speech, the would-be Persian executioner gleefully declared that "The life-curve of the Zionist regime has begun its descent, and it is now on a downward slope towards its fall... The Zionist regime will be wiped out, and humanity will be liberated."
And once he dispenses with the Jews, as we know, it is the West that will be next. So this is not just Israel's battle, it is everyone's war, and it is time for the decision-makers in Washington and Jerusalem to act.
Sure, the thought of striking Iran is scary, particularly in light of the trouble America is having next door in Iraq. But as frightening as the idea might seem, it pales in comparison with the ayatollahs having their finger on the button and being able to threaten the world with nuclear blackmail and destruction.
So like it or not, time is of the essence, and there is not a moment to lose. The US or Israel should bomb Iran now, before it proves too late.
Diane Sawyer wears an Islamic headress to interview Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It is so important to her to get the interview, and promote her career, that she is willing to submit herself to Sharia.
This weekend -- amidst rapidly rising tensions with Iran and riots on the Temple Mount -- I had the privilege of speaking to the 12,000 people who attend the four church services at Calvary Chapel of Albuquerque. When I was there last fall, I spoke on Ezekiel 38-39 and Matthew 24 and the question of "Are we living in the last days?" This time, I spoke on Matthew 25, and the question of "how shall we live in the last days?" I explained the details of The Joshua Fund's new strategy to bless Israel and her neighbors with humanitarian relief supplies and shared how people can get involved in a global movement of evangelical Christians to touch the lives of the people in the epicenter with the love of Jesus. The sermons were broadcast on radio on stations throughout New Mexico and nationwide, and webcast worldwide. I hope you'll find it encouraging. The God of the Bible is on the move, and He offers good news amidst all the bad news coming out of the Mideast right now.
To watch the webcast, please click here.
Note: the webcast begins with music and worship (it's not me singing). It's great stuff, but if you want to go right to the introduction and my sermon, you can fast forward to the 20:10 minute mark. posted by Joel C. Rosenberg
"TOO LATE" TO STOP IRAN'S NUCLEAR WEAPON? THE FIGHT FOR JERUSALEM
Breaking news this morning: a new study compiled by EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana says it may be too late to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons.
"At some stage we must expect that Iran will acquire the capacity to enrich uranium on the scale required for a weapons programme," says the paper, dated February 7 and circulated to the EU's 27 national governments ahead of a foreign ministers meeting yesterday, according to the Financial Times. "In practice . . . the Iranians have pursued their programme at their own pace, the limiting factor being technical difficulties rather than resolutions by the UN or the International Atomic Energy Agency....The problems with Iran will not be resolved through economic sanctions alone."
The Financial Times story concludes: "The EU document is embarrassing for advocates of negotiations with Iran, since last year it was Mr Solana and his staff who spearheaded talks with Tehran on behalf of both the EU and the permanent members of the UN Security Council."
Embarrassing? That's quite an understatement. Solana and his Western diplomatic colleagues have blown it. They've wasted precious time and proved that to misunderstand the nature and threat of evil is to risk being blindsided by it. Now, rather than support the type of decisive military action necessary to prevent Iran from using the bombs it is making, they are advocating just learning to live with a nuclear Iran. Will that the policy of our White House and Congress as well? Can they not see the threat that is building?
Last month in Jerusalem, I spent several hours with a diplomat who does get it, thank God. Dore Gold was a senior advisor to various Israeli Prime Ministers and once served as Israel's Ambassador to the United Nations. I interviewed Dore for the Epicenter documentary we're currently producing. It was a great time catching up with an old friend. It was also a sobering time, hearing Dore's latest analysis of the urgent and growing threats in the region, an analysis which forms the basis of his new powerful and provocative book, The Fight For Jerusalem: Radical Islam, The West, and The Future of the Holy City.
The Epicenter documentary will be released nationwide on June 1st, and Dore's insights form a key part of the film. But don't wait until then. Dore's book was just released, and on Sunday will hit #3 on the Washington Post bestseller list and #17 on the New York Times list. No wonder. The Fight For Jerusalem should be required reading for the President and every Member of Congress and the Cabinet. It is the best researched, most informative, and most important book on the threat of radical Islam by an Israeli author in this decade.
Dore, an observant Orthodox Jew who was born in the U.S. and emigrated to Israel, knows his stuff. He's negotiated with Middle Eastern and other world leaders at the highest levels. He's had behind-the-scenes relationships with Arab and Islamic officials and scholars for decades. He currently runs the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a highly respected think tank. Unlike most senior Western diplomats, he has come to the accurate conclusion that secular Arab nationalism is no longer driving events in the Middle East as it did in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Today, it's Islamic eschatology -- or end times theology -- that is inspiring a deadly new effort to hasten the destruction of both Israel and Judeo-Christian civilization as we know it. What's more, Dore understands that this requires an entirely different Western strategy than past conflicts, beginning with the realization that you can't successfully negotiate with or deter extremists who believe it is their God-given mission to annhilate the world.
One chapter I found particularly detailed and chilling: Chapter 8, "Jerusalem as an Apocalyptic Trigger For Radical Islam." Allow me to quote a few passages:
* "For [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, the destruction of Israel is one of the key global developments that will trigger the appearance of the Mahdi [Islamic Messiah]. It was on Iran's annual 'Jerusalem Day' on October 26, 2005, that Ahmadinejad made his famous reference to the need to 'wipe Israel off the map.'....Ahmadinejad shows all the signs of not only using apocalyptic language, but also believing that he has a personal role in bringing the end of times about." (p. 232)
* "[W]hat was the connection between Jerusalem and Ahmadinejad's planned final battle? Dr. Bilal Na'im served as an assistant to the head of the Executive Council of Hizbullah, the Iranian-controlled Lebanese Shiite terrorist organization. In an essay discussing the details of how the Mahdi is supposed to appear before the world, according to Shiite doctrine, he states that initially the Mahdi reveals himself in Mecca 'and he will lean on the Ka'abah and view the arrival of his supporters from around the world.' From Mecca the Mahdi next moves to Karbala in Iraq. But his most important destination, in Na'im's description, is clearly Jerusalem. It is in Jerusalem from where the launching of the Mahdi's world conquest is declared. He explains, 'The liberation of Jerusalem is the preface for liberating the world and establishing the state of justice and values on earth.' In short, Jerusalem serves as the launching pad for the Mahdi's global jihad at the end of days." (p. 233)
* "[I]t has been clear for more than a decade that Jerusalem has become a focal point for apocalyptic authors whose works have become relatively popular across the Arab world during these years. Their books are not just part of a theoretical discourse, but rather their language is reiterated by some of the most violent terrorist groups operating in the Middle East." (p. 251)
* "Diplomats and intelligence agencies don't normally pore over obscure religious texts about the end of days. But considering their widespread popularity and their practical impact on the issue of Jerusalem, that could be a colossal error. If one day Israel succumbed to the constant barrage of pressures from EU diplomats -- backed by certain quarters in the U.S. foreign policy establishment as well -- to redivide Jerusalem by relinquishing its holy sites, it might well unleash a new wave of jihadism emboldened by a sense that the traditions of radical Islamists about final battles at the end of history are about to come true. Western diplomats pursuing such a course of action may well believe they are lowering the flames of radical Islamic rage, but in fact they will only be turning up those flames to heights that have not been seen before." (p. 254)
Bottom line: Dore Gold's book could not be better written or better timed. I doubt Javier Solana will read it. But I am and you should. posted by Joel C. Rosenberg @ 6:25 AM 7 comments
"Quantum Computing." It's one of those things that bring a sparkle to the eyes of propellerheads — and make the rest of us just scratch our heads.
But it's been a holy grail in the arcane world of supercomputers — and a Canadian firm claims it will be unveiling one on Tuesday. Nevermind that most engineers thought quantum computers were decades away.
D-Wave Systems, Inc., based near Vancouver, is the company that's been working on the project. Its machine is described as a computer that can perform 64,000 calculations at once. Following the odd laws of quantum mechanics, the digital "bits" that race through its circuits will be able to stand for 0 or 1 at the same time, allowing the machine, eventually, to do work that is orders of magnitude more complex than what today's computers can do.
"There are certain classes of problems that can't be solved with digital computers," said Herb Martin, the firm's CEO, over a decidedly-noisy digital cell phone. "Digital computers are good at running programs; quantum computers are good at handling massive sets of variables." Coming Soon to a Store Near You?
So will you or I be able to have one soon? Will it come as a laptop?
The answers, for now, are no, and no. The current prototype, says Martin, is as big as a good-sized freezer, and a lot colder. It uses superconducting circuits that have to be refrigerated, close to absolute zero. That's the kind of temperature at which electrical resistance fades nearly to nothing (think of the heat generated by a conventional laptop), so that massive calculations can be done.
What sorts? Martin says, for instance, that a quantum computer could be used to design genetically based drugs (remember that the DNA in every human cell has 3 billion "base pairs," or "rungs" on that famous helical ladder).
Or it could be used by companies to manage their supply chains. "Think," says Martin, "of a company that has 40 factories and makes a million different parts. That's a lot to keep track of."
President of Czech Republic Calls Man-Made Global Warming a 'Myth' - Questions Gore's Sanity
The President of the Czech Republic is my new hero. He is not a politician. He is a leader.
Mon Feb 12 2007 09:10:09 ET
Czech president Vaclav Klaus has criticized the UN panel on global warming, claiming that it was a political authority without any scientific basis.
In an interview with "Hospodárské noviny", a Czech economics daily, Klaus answered a few questions:
Q: IPCC has released its report and you say that the global warming is a false myth. How did you get this idea, Mr President?•
A: It's not my idea. Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so. It is not fair to refer to the U.N. panel. IPCC is not a scientific institution: it's a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavor. It's neither a forum of neutral scientists nor a balanced group of scientists. These people are politicized scientists who arrive there with a one-sided opinion and a one-sided assignment. Also, it's an undignified slapstick that people don't wait for the full report in May 2007 but instead respond, in such a serious way, to the summary for policymakers where all the "but's" are scratched, removed, and replaced by oversimplified theses.• This is clearly such an incredible failure of so many people, from journalists to politicians. If the European Commission is instantly going to buy such a trick, we have another very good reason to think that the countries themselves, not the Commission, should be deciding about similar issues.•
Q: How do you explain that there is no other comparably senior statesman in Europe who would advocate this viewpoint? No one else has such strong opinions...•
A: My opinions about this issue simply are strong. Other top-level politicians do not express their global warming doubts because a whip of political correctness strangles their voice.•
Q: But you're not a climate scientist. Do you have a sufficient knowledge and enough information?•
A: Environmentalism as a metaphysical ideology and as a worldview has absolutely nothing to do with natural sciences or with the climate. Sadly, it has nothing to do with social sciences either. Still, it is becoming fashionable and this fact scares me. The second part of the sentence should be: we also have lots of reports, studies, and books of climatologists whose conclusions are diametrally opposite.•
Indeed, I never measure the thickness of ice in Antarctica. I really don't know how to do it and don't plan to learn it. However, as a scientifically oriented person, I know how to read science reports about these questions, for example about ice in Antarctica. I don't have to be a climate scientist myself to read them. And inside the papers I have read, the conclusions we may see in the media simply don't appear. But let me promise you something: this topic troubles me which is why I started to write an article about it last Christmas. The article expanded and became a book. In a couple of months, it will be published. One chapter out of seven will organize my opinions about the climate change.•
Environmentalism and green ideology is something very different from climate science. Various findings and screams of scientists are abused by this ideology.•
Q: How do you explain that conservative media are skeptical while the left-wing media view the global warming as a done deal?•
A: It is not quite exactly divided to the left-wingers and right-wingers. Nevertheless it's obvious that environmentalism is a new incarnation of modern leftism.•
Q: If you look at all these things, even if you were right ...•
A: ...I am right...•
Q: Isn't there enough empirical evidence and facts we can see with our eyes that imply that Man is demolishing the planet and himself?• A: It's such a nonsense that I have probably not heard a bigger nonsense yet.• Q: Don't you believe that we're ruining our planet?• A: I will pretend that I haven't heard you. Perhaps only Mr Al Gore may be saying something along these lines: a sane person can't. I don't see any ruining of the planet, I have never seen it, and I don't think that a reasonable and serious person could say such a thing. Look: you represent the economic media so I expect a certain economical erudition from you. My book will answer these questions. For example, we know that there exists a huge correlation between the care we give to the environment on one side and the wealth and technological prowess on the other side. It's clear that the poorer the society is, the more brutally it behaves with respect to Nature, and vice versa.• It's also true that there exist social systems that are damaging Nature - by eliminating private ownership and similar things - much more than the freer societies. These tendencies become important in the long run. They unambiguously imply that today, on February 8th, 2007, Nature is protected uncomparably more than on February 8th ten years ago or fifty years ago or one hundred years ago.• That's why I ask: how can you pronounce the sentence you said? Perhaps if you're unconscious? Or did you mean it as a provocation only? And maybe I am just too naive and I allowed you to provoke me to give you all these answers, am I not? It is more likely that you actually believe what you say.
By Don FederFrontPageMagazine.com February 12, 2007
Among the many groups for whom I feel absolutely no sympathy is the Jewish Left – which has lately been agonizing over the prevalence of Jew-hatred at antiwar rallies.
Signs comparing Israelis to Nazis and identifying Jews as the enemies of humanity have become de rigueur at (you should pardon the expression) peace rallies.
Jewish leftists – at least those who still feel a connection to the Jewish people – are dismayed. An article in the January 27 Contra Costa (California) Times calls our attention to the San Francisco Anti-Defamation League’s first conference on how progressives “can protect themselves against anti-Semitism – from the liberal Left.”
Among other examples of tolerance and brotherhood cited by the Times, at one San-Fran demonstration last year, Arabs chanted “Jews are our dogs.”
According to the article, many on the lox-and-cream-cheese Left is upset with former President Pinhead’s latest book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid – which condones suicide bombings. (Carter calls on peaceful Palestinians to stop terrorist attacks if Israel begins “respecting international law” – rolling over and playing dead. )
Jewish progressives wonder why the movement seems to single out Israel for hysterical denunciations, and if their comrades haven’t replaced “Israel” for “Jew” in the old anti-Semitic formulation. (Try to imagine Carter writing a book called Saudi Arabia: Equality Not Misogyny or Iran: Democracy Not Theocracy.)
Regarding the group-therapy for Jewish leftists, Jonathan Bernstein, director of the ADL’s San Francisco regional office, says, “We have heard from so many people who feel ostracized and alone and don’t really know what to do with this problem.” Bernstein complains that said good people shouldn’t “have to pick between being Jewish and whatever worthwhile cause.”
That some Jewish leftists are uncomfortable with the movement’s uglier antics is surely one of humanity’s great tragedies – ranking right up there with the heartbreak of psoriasis.
According to organizers, the conference (which was held the following weekend) would include a discussion of “coping strategies,” “having a rally within a rally,” and “on the spot responses to hurtful language.” Wow, “on the spot responses to hurtful language” – talk about getting tough with anti-Semitism.
I’m reminded of a Woody Allen movie where the comedian is at a cocktail party and some of his Upper East Side friends start discussing how to respond to the Nazis marching in New Jersey. One suggests putting on a satirical play parodying the brown shirts. An agitated Allen says that – harsh as that may be – instead, perhaps they should consider getting rocks and clubs and beating the Nazis to a bloody pulp.
Now that’s a coping strategy I can relate to.
Leftist anti-Semitism is as old as the Left. Since the French Revolution, polemicists have cast Israelites as the quintessential capitalist exploiters – never mind the prevalence of Jews in various socialist movements. (Voltaire charged that the Jews were “born with a raging fanaticism in their hearts.”)
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (the father of modern socialism and anarchism) – who coined the expression “Property is theft” – explained:
“The Jew is by temperament an anti-producer. He is an intermediary, always fraudulent and parasitical, who operates, in trade and in philosophy, by means of falsification, counterfeiting, and horse-trading.”
What then should be done with this irredeemably anti-social element? “The Jew is the enemy of mankind,” Proudhon advised. “It is necessary to send this race back to Asia, or exterminate it…By fire or fusion, or by expulsion, the Jew must disappear.” Said genocidal raving predated the Holocaust by a century.
Karl Marx, old Uncle Fuzzy-Whiskers (the scion of a German-Jewish family that had converted to Christianity for social position) explained the Jewish problem this way: “What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.”
No wonder Hitler and Stalin got on famously, until that unfortunate incident of June of 1940. After the fall of the Third Reich, the Soviet Union became the worldwide nexus of anti-Semitism.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, anti-Semitism’s Mecca shifted to – well, Mecca. In the Moslem world, Mein Kampf, and “The Protocols of Zion” are best-sellers and rabid Jew-hatred is standard fare in political, religious and cultural discourse. So, naturally, Islam has become the Left’s pet religion and Islamacism its principal ally.
Besides an unremitting animus toward the Jewish state, the antiwar Left has embraced many of the old anti-Semitic stereotypes of its revolutionary forebears. Feminist author Phyllis Chesler observes: “The Jews and the Jewish state have become the symbol of Satanic America, capitalism, imperialism, colonialism.”
Consider Noam Chomsky – Hugo Chavez’s favorite philosopher. Sure he wants to see Israel destroyed, and trusts in the good will of Hamas and Fatah for the safety of those Jews left in Palestine. Sure he associates with Holocaust-deniers. And sure he admires Iran’s version of Jack The Ripper. But is the Jewish-born Chomsky an anti-Semite?
In a 2002 interview with a Palestinian solidarity group, Chomsky declared, “By now, Jews in the U.S. are the most privileged and influential part of the population.”
When a Marxist says someone’s “privileged” it means they’re getting something they didn’t earn and don’t deserve.
Chomsky hates American society. Thus the avatar of the New Left and leading intellectual light of the antiwar movement is saying that Jews have risen to the top of a rotten, corrupt culture that spreads war, famine and misery across the globe. Did they attain that favored status by dint of their virtues?
For today’s Left, the Jew is the corporate executive, exploiting his workers, raping the environment and reaping obscene profits. He’s the globalist, pushing a world economy run by multinationals. He’s the neo-con manipulating the White House and Congress to engineer a war with Iran – to enhance Israel’s security. He’s the quintessence whatever the left despises at any particular point in time.
And not just the loony Left, not just the fringy Left – but the establishment Left.
Toward the middle of last month, in an online posting at Arianna Huffington’s website, retired general and former Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark was asked why he thought America would attack Iran.
Clark replied: “You just have to read what’s in the Israeli press. The Jewish community is divided but there is so much pressure being channeled from the New York money people to the office seekers.”
Why the Israeli press, and not the Wall Street Journal, Rush Limbaugh, or Fox News? And, in case you haven’t guessed it, “the New York money people” isn’t code for Episcopalians.
In his 2004 campaign, Howard Dean urged that regarding Israel and the Palestinians, the United States should adopt an “even-handed” approach. This is another way of saying that between an historic ally and a people who invariably side with our enemies and never miss a chance to tell us how much they hate our guts, America should be strictly impartial.
Any objections from Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama to Carter’s vile comparison of Israel to South Africa’s former white supremacist regime? Not that I’m aware of.
Is the Democratic Party anti-Semitic or merely soft on anti-Semitism? Nothing could be more damning than the party of Old Joe Kennedy’s embrace of Al Sharpton – the man who sparked a full-scale pogrom in Crown Heights in 1991 and a massacre at Freddy’s Fashion Mart in 1995. (Instead of “New York money people,” Sharpton prefers “diamond merchants with blood on their hands” and “interlopers.”)
During the 2000 campaign, Al Gore obediently appeared at a Sharpton-organized debate at Harlem’s Apollo Theater – which would be comparable to George Bush carrying the torch at a cross-burning.
Anywhere you look on the Left, you’ll find spiritual descendants of the Cossacks and storm troopers – anti-Semites or those who condone anti-Semitism.
Peace and justice don’t grow in a cesspool. Instead of kvetching about “hurtful language” and devising “coping strategies,” Jewish leftists – those who are more Jewish than leftist – should reconsider their “whatever worthwhile cause.” ...Which may not be that worthwhile after all.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Sunday he does not think voters have a litmus test on religion, whether evangelical Christianity or his childhood years in the Muslim faith.
“If your name is Barack Hussein Obama, you can expect it, some of that. I think the majority of voters know that I’m a member of the United Church of Christ, and that I take my faith seriously,” Obama said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Now that the Associated Press has given this fact their blessing, it does raise a rather uncomfortable question for a man who wants to be the commander in chief of the United States. The penalty under well-established shari’a law for apostasy—leaving Islam—is death. How would the world’s 249 gazillion Muslims react to having an American president who is also a Muslim apostate?
TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) — Iran’s controversial president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Sunday his country will make an announcement in April about new nuclear achievements.
Reports surfaced last fall that Tehran was trying to produce 3,000 centrifuges and expected to meet the goal by March of this year. The report was published by the Iranian Student News Agency and quoted a member of parliament. Last month, an official with Iran’s nuclear agency denied Iran was building 3,000 centrifuges. ...
The production of 3,000 centrifuges would allow Iran to begin industrial scale production of nuclear fuel — a move that has raised international concern that the country might ultimately produce nuclear weapons.
Ahmadinejad said Iran will not come to the negotiating table with Western nations if suspension of Tehran’s nuclear program is a precondition for talks.
“If you seek negotiation why do you insist on suspension? If we suspend, what do we want to talk about?” he asked, as a crowd dressed mostly in black — some holding signs reading “Down with America” — looked on. “How come your factories and reactors are working day and night while you’re asking our factories and centers to stop its facilities? Our nation will never accept such conditions.”
The president warned the Western nations that Tehran will not permit any of its “rights” to be taken away, by word or by action. “The world must know that if they try to deny that right to us they will be the most hated nation,” he said. Applause rippled through the crowd.
1 Moreover the word of the Lord came to me, saying,
2 "Son of man, set your face against Mount Seir and prophesy against it,
3 and say to it, 'Thus says the Lord God:
"Behold, O Mount Seir, I am against you;
I will stretch out My hand against you,
And make you most desolate;
4 I shall lay your cities waste, And you shall be desolate.
Then you shall know that I am the Lord.
5 "Because you have had an ancient hatred, and have shed the blood of the children of Israel by the power of the sword at the time of their calamity, when their iniquity came to an end, 6 therefore, as I live," says the Lord God, "I will prepare you for blood, and blood shall pursue you; since you have not hated blood, therefore blood shall pursue you.
7 Thus I will make Mount Seir most desolate, and cut off from it the one who leaves and the one who returns.
8 And I will fill its mountains with the slain; on your hills and in your valleys and in all your ravines those who are slain by the sword shall fall.
9 I will make you perpetually desolate, and your cities shall be uninhabited; then you shall know that I am the Lord.
10 "Because you have said, 'These two nations and these two countries shall be mine, and we will possess them,' although the Lord was there,
11 therefore, as I live," says the Lord God, "I will do according to your anger and according to the envy which you showed in your hatred against them; and I will make Myself known among them when I judge you.
12 Then you shall know that I am the Lord. I have heard all your blasphemies which you have spoken against the mountains of Israel, saying, 'They are desolate; they are given to us to consume.'
13 Thus with your mouth you have boasted against Me and multiplied your words against Me; I have heard them."
14 'Thus says the Lord God: "The whole earth will rejoice when I make you desolate.
15 As you rejoiced because the inheritance of the house of Israel was desolate, so I will do to you; you shall be desolate, O Mount Seir, as well as all of Edom--all of it! Then they shall know that I am the Lord."'
My friend Olivia sent me this beautiful Christian Praise song about Jerusalem, and it's Savior Yeshua.
But, I can not post such a video, or song, without acknowledging that we Christians have let our brothers in Abraham down.
So, here, from Schindler's List, is the music
I Could Have Done More
Think, nails were driven into Christ's hands and feet, and all the sins of the millenia were dropped upon His Soul, like an atomic bomb, and He bore that for us.
And, He was a Jew.
We owe the Jews everything, and we have done nothing but let them down.
What kind of Bride are we to Christ?
With all that in mind, here is the Christian Praise Song about Jerusalem.
Pray for Peace for Jerusalem, but also pray for forgiveness for the fact that we all participated in driving the nails into Christ's hands and feet.
A Turkish man who is believed to be a descendant of Mohammed himself has come to know Jesus as his Lord and Messiah (from Atlas Shrugs):
They are not going to like this down at the mosque. Not one bit. This man's life is not worth a plug nickel. Want to convert to Islam? Think twice. Because if you change your mind, you're an apostate and they will kill you. Channelling Centanni and Wiigs here and here Descendant of Muhammad converts to Christianity But faces threat to life if forced to return to Turkey
A Turk who claims to be a descendant of Islam's prophet Muhammad has converted to Christianity while living in Germany.
But Sedar Dedeoglu, of Luedenscheid, now faces a threat to his life if he's forced to return to Turkey, and is seeking help from German authorities.
Dedeoglu, who is involved in Christian outreach programs among Muslims, has been receiving death threats from Muslims unwilling to accept his conversion. His relatives also regard the apostasy as shameful.
If Dedeoglu is returned to his native country, he very likely would be killed, his lawyer says.
Muslims are converting to Christianity in their thousands in France but face exclusion from their families and even death threats.
Most Muslims hide their conversion and Protestant ministers do their utmost to protect new converts. It is estimated that every year in the world some six million Muslims convert to Christianity.
The Muezzin call to prayer. But here in France it is no longer reaching all Muslim ears.Around 15,000 Muslims each year are converting to Christianity - around 10,000 to Catholicism and 5,000 to Protestantism.[...]
Many Muslims in France hide their conversion but the trend is continuing. World wide around six million Muslims a year convert to Christianity.
If my estimates are correct, the Muslims population in France may actually be shrinking, as many of them turn to Christianity instead.
Here is a song by a friend of mine. His name is Tyrone Wells. You can check out his music at iTunes. He is not very well known yet, but I believe he will be. He is one of the finest songwriters that I know of.
The video here has little to do with his music. Ignore it. Just listen. This song grew out of the Earth. It is organic and born of the Spirit moving across the Waters. And it is good.
When all is said and done And I'm looking back upon this race I've run And when my heart gives in I know you will be beside me precious friend It's just the same from the beginning to the end When all is said and done.
If I lose my way And I wander down this open road for days And if the sun should fall And the dancing we once did becomes a crawl Let the memories move like shadows on the wall If I lose my way.
When I'm coming home And I walk across the bridge of death alone I will fix my eyes On the One that's waiting on the other side It's my old friend with countless others there beside When I'm coming home
What Would Happen If Christs' Church Was Suddenly Gone?
The Berean Call Daily Email (thanks to Olivia):
Although skeptics Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris denounce "religion," their tepid (really timid with good reason) barbs against Islam, for example, show that it is biblical Christianity they are fighting. For one reason, it is safer. In spite of all the rhetoric about "religion" being the greatest taker of life, we know that man-made "isms" such as Communism take top honors in shedding the blood of their comrades: "20 million in the Soviet Union, 65 million in the People's Republic of China, 1 million in Vietnam, 2 million in North Korea, 2 million in Cambodia, 1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe," etc.
[TBC: Should Dawkins and Harris meet their goal of removing the influence of biblical Christianity, they will find they have only given opportunity for every form of false religion to flourish.]
THE GATHERING OF NATIONS AGAINST ISRAEL #4 by Emanuel A. Winston, Member Board of Directors and Research Associate, Freeman Center For Strategic Studies
I have written 4 prior articles entitled "THE GATHERING OF THE NATIONS"...each was built on prior observations in terms of the gathering of the nations from the north (as it says in the Bible) - each seemingly for their own reasons to attack Israel but, hostility was a common theme for them all. The Arab Muslims, of course, have a religion-driven hatred, based upon the Koran teachings by murderous Islamic clerics. Their interpretation is that Islam is supreme and the Jewish faith and their presence on Land they previously conquered and lost to the Jews, impinges on their testicle-driven manhood and the simple fact that they have always been low achievers throughout history - except for their permanent state of war with all others. "All Others" means Christians, Jews, all other religions and races who do not ascribe to their self-perceived superiority, hiding a much deserved inferiority complex. But, they are a scary bunch as they promise to blow up, cut heads off, torture anyone who gets in their way.
In Europe there is a growing "Diaspora" as native Europeans begin to exodus areas where Muslims have become a dangerous "Critical Mass". There have been projected guesses as to where the French, English, Dutch, ‘et al’ would emigrate once it became unlivable in Eurabia. It is supposed that the French will go to Canada (where French is demanded to be spoken); the English to Australia (to where the English sent their POWs and criminals - but Australia speaks English - sort of) - or America (where they speak a different kind of English). Those of the Netherlands would simply scatter.
One cannot help but think of how the Jews forced into the Diaspora, first by Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon who laid the Jews’ First Temple in Jerusalem to waste in 586 BCE, murdered the nobles, blinded and exiled King Zedekiah - along with a large portion of the population who were sent into captivity in Babylon, Persia - today Iran.
The "parable" or lesson in this history is that now, a more cruel leader has arisen in ancient Babylon, Persia which is now Tehran, Iran as represented the Ayatollah Khomeini who toppled the Shah February 1, 1979. Today Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declares he will build his nuclear bombs, has demonstrated today (November 2nd) his missile capability by launching several kinds of short-range missiles. Ahmadinejad opened a big, new naval exercise dubbed the "Great Prophet" with his "cluster warhead" capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. The Shehab 3 has a range of more than 2,000 km., can reach Israel and the American troops in the Middle East and that he will "wipe Israel off the map". Israel’s Arrow anti-missile missile system, developed for defense against the Shehab, is not capable of preventing an attack by large numbers of multiple-warhead missiles. IF the Shehab fulfills Ahmadinejad’s boasts, it will pose a lethal strategic threat to Israel, the U.S. military in the Mid East and Iran’s Arab neighbors. (1)
In 538 CE Cyrus II the Great of Persia proclaimed in his "Edict of Toleration" that the Jewish exiles could return and re-settle in Palestine and rebuild the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. 42,360 Jewish pilgrims returned and began to re-build the Jewish Temple from 535 to 515 CE when it was completed with the help of Darius the Great of Persia.
The Roman Empire achieved the wider Jewish Diaspora after the Romans captured Judea, destroyed the Second Temple, burned the Old City of Jerusalem and the Temple to the ground, salting the earth so nothing would grow, killing and exiling the Jews.
Henceforth, the Jews were hunted by the Europeans, the aristocracy and the Church - whenever they needed a target for the ignorant peasantry, the Inquisition (whenever they wanted to make an example of a Jew who was converted by force but still secretly practiced Judaism).
Later, after the rise of Islam in the 7th Century, the conquest by the Muslims of North Africa and all the area of Europe as far as Tours in France. There the Muslims were routed by Charles Martel and pushed back into the Middle East. However, Muslims laws in the Arab countries were quite cruel to Jews and Christians (who they called "Dhimmis": second class). Romantically inclined historians offered revisionist opinions calling this period: "The Glory of Islam" or "The Golden Years" when Islam, Christianity and Judaism created a "golden" civilization.
However, the true history is that throughout the centuries the Christians of Europe tried to force conversion upon the Jews. The worst of these times was the Inquisition (described above) where Jews either accepted conversion, were burned alive or were forced to flee.
"What goes around, comes around."
Now today, like the wrath of G-d playing a grim joke of retribution, the Europeans must soon choose between Islam, death or slavery ("Dhimmitude") or as suggested earlier, simply flee their country. This is where this homily: "What goes around, comes around." is applicable.
But, the Nations are, indeed, gathering to go against Israel acting out the "Stockholm Syndrome". They wish to blame Israel because the Arab Islamists hate Israel and the Jews who claim their heritage to Eretz Yisrael who actually live there and have made it green. The Muslim nations have chosen Israel as their convenient victim to initiate their march toward their intended Global Caliphate (The Islamic New "One World Order"). While the Muslims are causing havoc, mayhem and murder everywhere in the world, the nations of the world need someone else to blame - other than the Muslims and their "Jihadist" terrorists - because the Free West fears retribution if they correctly label Muslims as the root actors in today’s Global Terror network.
As the Arabs chose Israel to be their stepping stone toward domination of all nations so, too have the nations chosen Israel as their "safe" victim to attack in order to solve the problem of the uprising Muslims. The Europeans and Americans fear facing 1.2 Billion Muslims head on so they choose to victimize Israel - which they think is a safe middle ground and a method of appeasement which, of course, is not working. Israel is supposed to give up Land to the Arab Muslim Palestinians as an appeasement to the Arab oil nations on the off chance they will cease Global Terror. Do you think that will work?
The Arab Muslims, having lost their religious and masculine manhood by being defeated in 7 wars by those whom they call the lowly Jews, must first retrieve their vaunted honor by blood and war. While their real goal is to dominate all non-Muslim nations, forcing Sharia laws on all, attacking Israel provides the short fuse to ignite and unify the "Jihadi" Muslim forces world-wide. Women in the Muslim world suffer greatly, of course, since they are considered only chattel and breeding stock to be totally covered up from sight. Some say Islam means "submit". Women and men who refuse to submit are generally slaughtered in some horribly bloody manner. Decapitation is one favored punishment. This does not mean that they are unified since they also slaughter each other as gleefully as they slaughter those whom they consider the "infidels" (unbelievers).
You have been watching the daily ritual in Iraq where the Sunnis kidnap, torture, and slaughter Shi’ites in large numbers and the Sunnis do the same. Sometimes they even kill those Muslims who are like them. They always manage to find sufficient differences to justify what they do best, namely: pillage, rape and murder.
I have written previously about the day a flotilla would cross the Mediterranean Sea to attack Israel. Presently, there is a large war game of warships off the coast of Lebanon. One of the German ships launched a helicopter which crossed into Israeli air space (seemingly by accident). Given Israel’s sensitivity and high state of alert (for good cause as she is surrounded by hostile terrorists and Muslim Arab countries), it seemed a stupid, if accidental, mistake. Israeli jets did a fly-by and launched a couple of missiles, not at the helicopters but, merely in open space as a brief demonstration to show that crossing unannounced into Israeli airspace was not permitted.
But then, the German ship on another day did it again, clearly with the intention to provoke the Israelis and possibly cause an international incident and a "Casus Belli" to either justify and attack on Israel or generate serious sanctions. The Germans do not do things by accident nor would they have launched a provocation without discussing it first with the American, the E.U. and NATO.
We have already seen the activity of the U.N.’s MNF (Multi-National Force) attached to UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Forces In Lebanon) start a mission of protecting Hezb’Allah as Syria re-arms Hezb’Allah and the PLO in Sidon, Lebanon. Israel has been doing air reconnaissance over Lebanon to track Hebz’Allah’s re-building of bunkers and re-supply of missiles and other arms. The French (part of the UN MNF) issued a warning that it would shoot down Israeli aircraft or camera drones.
The Russian troops Ras-Putin sent to Lebanon are Muslim Chechnyans, Russian soldiers who get along quite well with the Muslim Arab terrorists. Naturally, they will train and arm the terrorists as they have been doing for some time. They have begun building their base in Sidon quite close to the Israeli border. There is also a large flotilla in the Red Sea, off the coast of Saudi Arabia. (2)
As I said earlier, the nations are gathering. Regrettably, Israel has a pacifistic Government who simply doesn’t know what to do and who cripples her own military from aggressively defending the nation. Hopefully, as it says in Tanach (Bible) "G-d will curse those nations who curse Israel" with unspeakable horrors.
BENEFITS
Each nation expects a return for either attacking Israel directly, assisting others through the sale of arms, penetration of their markets, satisfaction of their xenophobic hatred, oil - either receipt of crude or given leases to explore and drill, thereby profits at two sides and dozens of other known and unknown benefits. For example:
Russia: Endemic hatred plus profits through sale of weapons to Iran and Syria. Sold nuclear technology and building nuclear power plants. Hopes to penetrate all other Arab oil markets by assisting terrorists. Hopes to push America out of the Middle East and uses Israel as a victim to play to Arab xenophobic hatred of Jews and Israel.
America: Here the issues are more complicated: The American people like Israel and generally think of Arabs as terrorists who threaten Homeland Security. On the other hand, the U.S. is the world’s largest consumer of oil, making them feel perceptively vulnerable to the oil nations which principally includes Saudi Arabia. There are those in Washington who would like to see Israel disappear both the oil business and their visceral hatred of Jews.
Europe: Instead of making this complicated by analyzing each of the E.U. members (except for a few), I will compress my thoughts: Christian Europe has carried on a savage vendetta against Jews since they adopted a Jewish man as their connection to G-d. Like the Arab Muslims it was a competition of who would be the heir on earth to G-d’s Covenant with the Jewish people. Would it be Christianity or Islam? Pogroms, Genocide, torture, abduction of children for conversion, attempts to co-opt the Jews to add to the claim of being the only true heirs of G-d’s Presence on earth. Each of the European nations have either slaughtered their Jews, turned them over to others (Nazi Germany) to be slaughtered or exiled them. It didn’t matter whether it was a self-perceived nation like the French, or the Poles, Ukrainians, Dutch, Hungarians, Rumanians, Norwegians, ‘et al’ because each in their own way carried out the teachings of their church.
Arab and/or Muslim oil states: Iran, the Gulf States, Venezuelan, African countries, etc. Saudi Arabia plays two (or more) roles. One, it needs U.S. military support or else surrounding rogue states like Syria, mainly Iran and Egypt would occupy and send the Royal Family either to the Mediterranean Sea or to Hell. The smaller Gulf States like Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain also need a U.S. security umbrella.
The Saudis, however, do fund terrorist organizations both through fear and compelling religious doctrine. They also fund "Madrassas" (Muslim schools) in Europe, America and all other Muslim countries where the curriculum teaches hatred for all non-Muslims and the right of Islam to ritually rule the world in an Muslim Caliphate with strict Sharia law.
Therefore, one finds the Bush Family, the Baker contingent which would include the U.S./Multinational oil companies who genuflect to the wishes of Arab Muslim hatred against Israel in as subtle and hidden a manner as this contingent can politically get away with.
The Arabist U.S. State Department works closely with all of the above to subvert and, if possible, eliminate Israel or, as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says "I’ll wipe Israel off the face of the earth." The State Department and many of the above also carry that xenophobic hatred as a visceral part of their thinking. Eliminating Israel would give then personal satisfaction in addition to the lucrative business they do with the Arabs - especially in high tech arms sales.
Like Russia, the U.S. arms industry counts on selling massive quantities of arms to the Arabs - both terror factions and countries. They should be grateful that Israel exists because their hatred lubricates the sale of weapons to Arab nations. They, like the oil companies and State Department do what they can to carry out Arab wishes against Israel. All of this is called "Lobbying" both the Administration and Congress.
Jews of Europe considered themselves lucky over the centuries to be expelled and all their property and assets confiscated - given the alternatives. Here the Church played a vital role in instilling a deep and personal hatred that has almost became a genetic feature of their civilization.
Strangely, although Islam and Christianity have been natural enemies through the centuries, they do cooperate in attempting to eliminate Israel and the Jews in it. On this they agree, although presently in Europe it has not reached the level (yet) where they can express their hatred too openly. The Arab Muslim immigrants take care of that as Germany and France tell their Jews not to look Jewish on the streets.
Europe also wishes to sell armaments to the Arabs. They also want the oil. Both of these motives drive their official government attitude toward Israel. However, underlying the urge for profit, there is always the taught, but now endemic, hatred of Jews and the Jewish State.
It’s no longer a question of hatred; it’s just a matter of degree. Right now, as Islam threatens their society, by extension, it increases Jew hatred. The European benefits are both money and satisfaction in their hatred of Jews. They would like to see Israel eliminated. After that it’s highly probable they would go to war with the Arab Muslims, hoping for U.S. participation. Expect some form of the Crusades or, as some refer to it, as a Clash of Civilizations.
One last thought: With the elimination of Israel, they could expunge their ever-present guilt for their active participation in the Genocidal murder of six million Jews. In other words: "Out of Sight - Out of Mind!" As for the rest of either Islamic and or other countries like Indonesia, Venezuela, Argentina - they are minor players whose governments will change by "coup d’etat".
The Nations are indeed gathering. Whether you subscribe to the Biblical forecasts of a coming war of Gog and Magog, causing Armageddon, or you consider yourself a pragmatist seeing the nations girding for war as ‘merely doing what mankind does’, the Clash of Civilizations has begun.
New evidence has come to light that Alexander Litvinenko may have been involved with Islamic terrorists in the preparation of tactical nuclear weapons for use in the jihad against the United States and its NATO allies.
Litvinenko, a former KGB agent, died in London on November 23 after ingesting a microscopic amount of polonium-210.
Investigators have now uncovered the following:
Litvinenko was a Muslim convert with reported ties to radical Islam.
The former Soviet spy masterminded the smuggling of radioactive material to Zurich in 2000. This finding was corroborated by Mario Scaramella, one of Litvinenko's business associates.
Litvinenko became closely allied with Boris Berezovsky, a Russian billionaire who established close ties with the Chechen leaders, and Chechen leader Ahmed Zakayev. Both men served as pallbearers at the funeral. Several years ago, Berezovsky boasted to the press that the Chechen separatists had acquired a portable nuclear weapon that lacked one "minor" component. That component, Scotland Yard officials now believe, was polonium-210. In a deathbed statement, Litvinenko blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for the poisoning -- an accusation which the Kremlin has vehemently denied.
The denial was contradicted by the fact that polonium-210 is a rare radiological substance that is man-made by bombarding Bismuth-209 with neutrons within a nuclear reactor. It is expensive to produce and difficult to handle. Polonium-210 is also rare -- fewer than four ounces are produced annually. All of the reported production comes from Russian reactors. This amount is purchased annually by the United States, simply to keep the substance from leaking into the black market. Several rogue nations have been suspected of clandestinely producing polonium-210 for nefarious purposes. A quantity was detected in Iran by IAEA inspectors and in North Korea by U. S. airborne samplings. When Russian officials resorted to nuclear poisoning in the past -- including the assassination of two Swiss intelligence officials who were engaged with Russia and South Africa in the nuclear black market -- they relied on such readily available radiological substances as cesium-137 in salt form.
According to nuclear expert David Morgan, killing a spy or political dissident with a grain or two of polonium-210 is as ludicrous as shooting a rat with a howitzer. Indeed, if Litvinenko was a victim of radiological assassination, his murder would represent the costliest hit in human history with a price tag of $30 million.
Litvinenko, who was born an orthodox Christian, was a convert to Islam with close ties to the Chechen rebels. His last words consisted of his desire to be buried "according to Muslim tradition."
This wish was not fulfilled. The former spy was buried in a plain wooden coffin from a London mosque but was sealed in a Jacobean oak Garratt casket and laid to rest in Highgate Cemetery -- not the day after his death -- but on December 7, 17 days after his mysterious demise. The imam refused to allow the casket to enter the mosque because of fears of radiation contamination.
In recent years, considerable attention has been paid to suitcase nukes that were developed by U.S. and Soviet forces during the Cold War. Reliable sources, including Hans Blix of the United Nation, have confirmed that bin Laden purchased several of these devises from the Chechen rebels in 1996.
According to Sharif al-Masri and other al Qaeda operatives who have been taken into custody, several of these weapons have been forward deployed to the United States in preparation for al Qaeda's next attack on American soil.
The neutron source or "triggers" of the reported suitcase nukes are composed of beryllium-9 and polonium-210. When these two elements are combined, the alpha particle is absorbed by the nucleus of the beryllium causing it to decay by emitting a neutron. Such "triggers" were a feature of early nuclear weapons in the U.S. and Soviet stockpiles.Polonium-210 has a half-life of 138 days, necessitating the replacement of the triggers every six months. For this reason, the suitcase nukes are far from maintenance-free. In addition, the nuclear core of these devises emit a temperature in excess of one hundred degrees Fahrenheit -- further exposing the weapons to oxidation and rust. Small wonder that al Qaeda operatives including Adnan el-Shukrijumah, who are spearheading "the American Hiroshima" have received extensive training in nuclear technology.
Polonium-beryllium triggers are packaged in foil packs about the size of a package on sugar on a restaurant table. When the twin foil packages are crushed, the elements mix and the neutrons are emitted. A courier transporting nuclear triggers could have had a mishap causing the packages to rupture and a trail of contamination to occur.
Polonium-210 is a fine powder, easily aerosolized. Litvinenko could have inhaled the powder, or had a grain or two on his fingers when he ate the sushi.
The most probable source of the polonium packets, according to investigators, remains North Korea. The nuclear bomb which was tested by North Korea on October 9, 2006, registered 4.2 on the Richter scale -- displaying an explosive yield of five to 15 kilotons. The Bush Administration dismissed the test as a "fizzle." But the explosion matched the yield of a Soviet Small Atomic Munitions Device (SADM), such as a suitcase nuke with a plutonium core.
A dozen associates of Litvinenko have displayed symptoms of polonium poisoning. The list includes Andrei Lugovoi, a former KGB colleague of Litvinenko, who met with the deceased at the Millenium Hotel in London on November 1, 2006, the day Litvinenko became ill; Dimitry Kovtun, Lugovoi's business associate, who attended that meeting; Mario Scaramella, an Italian security consultant, who had dinner with Litvinenko the evening of November 1 at the Itsu Sushi Restaurant; and Litvinenko's Russian wife, Marina.
Traces of the lethal substance have been found in Litvinenko's home in Muswell Hill, two London hotels, and two British Airways 757s.
In an interview with The Independent shortly before the poisoning became public, Scaramella said that Litvinenko had been involved in the smuggling of radioactive material to Zurich. He also said that black market dealings in radioactive isotopes provided Litvinenko with badly need revenue to meet his living expenses. Litvinenko's father said that the former Soviet spy had converted to Islam before his death. He told the press: "He [Alexander] said I want to be buried according to Islamic tradition. I said okay son. It will be as you wish. We already have one Muslim in our family. The important thing is to believe in the Almighty. God is one." Original Source
My friend Michael sent this to me this morning. The origin of this piece is unknown:
I used to know a man whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War Two. They owned a number of large industries and estates. I asked him how many German people were true Nazis, and the answer he gave has stuck with me and guided my attitude toward fanaticism ever since.
"Very few people were true Nazis "he said," but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories."
We are told again and again by "experts" and "talking heads" that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace.
Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam. The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history.
It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals.
The hard quantifiable fact is that the "peaceful majority" is the "silent majority" and it is cowed and extraneous.
Communist Russia comprised Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. China 's huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.
The average Japanese individual prior to World War 2 was not a warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet. And, who can forget Rwanda , which collapsed into butchery. Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were "peace loving"?
History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points:
Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence.
Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don't speak up, because like my friend from Germany , they will awake one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.
Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late.
As for us who watch it all unfold; we must pay attention to the only group that counts; the fanatics who threaten our way of life.
When I was in my young teens, my best friends father packed us in the VW and hauled us down to a local amusement park called Knott's Berry Farm to see some chick named Emmy Lou Harris.
I was a big fan of Bob Dylan's Desire album, so I was aware of who Emmy Lou was, but I was unprepared for the brilliance of her performance, and, in such a mundane setting it was all the more stunning.
Cairo Book Fair: Religious Books, MeinKampf Selling Well
We in the West have to wake up to the fact that the Islamic world is seriously ill. A fire has started in their brains, and they live mental lives of barbarism, racism, and murderousness.
It might sound extreme for me to say that, but when viewed in the perspective of history, you will understand that this has happened in other societies as well. Germany went crazy in the thirties and forties, as did Japan. North Korea is currently a very sick society run by an evil madman. And, of course, we all know that madmen have run various societies into the ground throughout history.
So, you see, it is not racist or bigoted for me to say what I am saying. I am simply stating a fact. And, here is more evidence:
[M]any complain that the crowds are just there to picnic and buy religious books… Of the 700 Egyptian and Arab publishers at the fair, the vast majority stock religious books on their shelves. “Even we reserve about a quarter of our catalog for them,” said publisher Ansari. Korans of all styles, from the simple to the leather-bound, share shelf space with collections of religious sayings and fatwas as well as their more modern incarnations on cassettes and compact disks.
The fair also has its darker sides, with anti-Christian polemics advocating conversion to Islam as the only solution to a flawed religion and of course plenty of editions of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” for sale.
“It makes up a big part of our success, especially among the 18 to 25 crowd,” said Mahmud Abdallah of the Syrian-Egyptian Dar al-Kitab al-Arabi publishing house…
For one brief shining moment yesterday, bitter partisanship was replaced by prayer, and it couldn't have been more refreshing. Lynn and I had the wonderful opportunity to attend the 55th Annual National Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton, along with 4,000 business and political leaders, diplomats, military officials and journalists representing all 50 states and 160 different countries.
We met and shook hands with Sen. Barack Obama, perhaps the biggest rock star to move through the room since Bono came as the keynote speaker last year.
The President and First Lady were gracious and humble, breaking bread with Democratic leaders while thanking Americans for being "a nation of prayer" and for praying for our troops overseas and our leaders here at home.
Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain sat together, swapping stories and jokes and taking a respite from what will no doubt be a long and heated presidential campaign. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat from Missouri as well as a former Methodist minister, was a fabulous emcee -- funny, insightful, collegial and sincerely eager to encourage his fellow Washingtonians to humble themselves before God.
The highlight of the morning, however, was the keynote address by Dr. Francis S. Collins, the director of the Human Genome Project and thus arguably the most important doctor and scientist on the planet today. He and his colleagues have mapped out the 3 billion letters of the human genetic code imprinted into each of our cells. ("Three billion -- that's a very large number," he deadpanned, "even in Washington.") They are figuring out the Creator's "instruction book" for the human body, and thus racing to find cures for cancer, diabetes, and so many other horrible diseases. And for him, it is a journey of faith as well as science.
Dr. Francis explained that he was raised on a small farm in Virginia by a family for whom religion was not that important. He developed a fascination with medicine and science early in his life and along the way, like many of his colleagues, thought of himself as an agnostic, and eventually as an atheist.
But one day, an elderly woman who was a patient of his and dying of cancer, explained to him that she had no fear of dying because she had a personal relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ. She explained the good news that God loves us and has a wonderful plan for our lives, and offers us a way to eternal life through Jesus, and then she asked, "Doctor, what do you believe?" Dr. Collins said he fled the room as fast as he could. He was touched by the woman's story, and moved by her faith, but he didn't have a satisfying answer to her question, and he said it was as if all of a sudden "the atheistic ice under my feet was cracking."
Though he was a scientist, he said he had never really considered the evidence for whether Jesus was the Messiah and Savior that He claimed to be. Why not? What was he afraid of?
So he began to study the life of Jesus. He began to read the works of famed atheist-turned-believer C.S. Lewis, the brilliant British professor. He learned that the New Testament teaches that "faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," (Hebrews 11:1) so he began pursuing the evidence wherever it led. And along the way he said that he found Jesus a man unlike any other -- humble, caring, willing to love His enemies, ready to forgive sinners of any race, creed or color.
"The evidence demanded a verdict," Dr. Collins explained, and the verdict, he concluded, was that Jesus really was who He said He was: "the Way, the Truth and the Life" (John 14:6) So one day he bowed his head and prayed for God to forgive him and make him a fully devoted follower of Jesus, and it changed his life.
"But you're a scientist," Dr. Collins said people say to him so often. "Doesn't [all this talk of Jesus] make your head explode? Doesn't this create a huge conflict for you between faith and reason?" His answer, simply, is "no." True, only 40% of scientists believe there is a God, but he said he sees science as a means both of discovery as well as worship. The more he learns of how God has created and wired us, the more he feels he has "caught a glimpse of God's mind."
"There's an unwritten taboo among scientists about talking of one's spiritual leanings," Dr. Collins conceded, but he urged this not to be the case. It was a moving and personal talk from a hero of modern science, and one I hope is reported widely in the coming days in the media. Dr. Collins concluded by asking us to sing a song with him, as he played the guitar. That's not something you see every day at Washington political gatherings. The song was "Praise The Source of Faith and Learning," by Rev. Thomas Troeger. Here's the first stanza:
Praise the source of faith and learning that has sparked and stoked the mind With a passion for discerning how the world has been designed. Let the sense of wonder flowing from the wonders we survey Keep our faith forever growing and renew our need to pray.
America the Beautiful.
There is no other country on the face of the Earth which affords such sanctuary to the Church. Of course, God doesn't necessarily need our sanctuary, and we ought not be arrogant about it, but the truth is, in countries like Saudi Arabia, China, and the old Soviet Union, Christians were and are horribly persecuted to the point of imprisonment, torture, and death.
Thanks be to God that we are free to choose whom we will worship here in America. Thanks be to God that we can make a choice to follow Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God that we have free and easy access to Bibles, and churches which sit on street corners, instead of darkened rooms with the shades drawn.
Let us all understand the fragility and the exceptionalism of freedom. Let us understand that there are people who want to take that away from us, and that it is possible that they could, if they aquire nuclear weapons.
Let us understand that life would never be the same if we allowed that to happen.
Let us work together to make sure it does not happen.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, at a Democratic National Committee meeting, an Imam, who is a known terror supporter, opened the festivities with a prayer which slyly asked God to take all our rights away from us, and sadly, no Democrat has protested.
A few years ago, a man who faced a terminal diagnosis of cancer asked a friend to give him some compact disks so that he could have a little music to help him get through the night. Among the recordings that the friend sent was "Tabula Rasa," on the ECM label, which contained three works by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. A day or two later, the man called to thank his friend for the disks, and, especially, for the Pärt. In the last weeks of his life, he listened to practically nothing else.
Several people have told me essentially this same story about the still, sad music of Pärt—how it became, for them or for others, a vehicle of solace. One or two such anecdotes seem sentimental; a series of them begins to suggest a slightly uncanny phenomenon. Patrick Giles, in an article for Salon, reported that when he worked as a volunteer for an AIDS organization, in the nineteen-eighties, he played "Tabula Rasa" for those facing the final onslaught of the disease, and they developed a peculiar, almost desperate attachment to it. Once, when Giles was away, the mother of one of the dying men called with an anxious query. "He keeps asking for 'angel music,' " she said. "What the hell is that?" The music in question was the second movement of "Tabula Rasa," in which a rustling arpeggio on a prepared piano leads into glacial chords of D minor.
According to the unsentimental evidence of record sales, Pärt's music reaches far beyond the conspiracy of connoisseurs who support most new classical music. He is a composer who speaks in hauntingly clear, familiar tones, yet he does not duplicate the music of the past. He has put his finger on something that is almost impossible to put into words—something to do with the power of music to obliterate the rigidities of space and time. One after the other, his chords silence the noise of the self, binding the mind to an eternal present. For this reason, anecdotes of listeners' experiences, whether extreme or mundane, may give a better account of the music than any analysis of its inner workings. For me, "Tabula Rasa" will always be a snowy New England afternoon in 1989, during which there was nothing in the world but this music and that snow.
Earlier this month, a festival called Music Around presented twenty-two of Pärt's works in various Scandinavian cities. The composer travelled from his home in Berlin to observe the event, settling into a hotel in Copenhagen. I talked to him there, in a smattering of English and German, at the hotel's restaurant.
Pärt is a gaunt man with a pale, gentle face and mournfully powerful eyes. His bald pate is balanced by a tightly curled beard of a few inches' length. He has been described as "monkish" so often that a German musicologist has undertaken a deconstruction of the term, but the word still springs to mind unbidden: he could pose for an icon of St. John Chrysostom, or another of the literary saints. Yet, when his large eyes fix on you, he becomes more worldly and formidable; his stare seems to ask, "Are you serious?" At times, he is unexpectedly impish, even antic. He needs few words to make himself understood, using a repertory of quasi-operatic gestures and clownish faces.
"My life is a river, and I am a boat being borne along the current," he told me. "I cannot relate to my life as a story, as a sequence of events, because I cannot get off the boat in order to see where I am. I do not see myself as moving forward or going backward." I asked him whether he believed in musical progress, in the idea of an avant-garde. He vigorously shook his head. "I do not know what this word 'progress' means, at least in the area of art. Progress in science can certainly be measured and described. But to talk about a particular style or a particular work as progressive or regressive is arbitrary, totally misleading. It reminds me a little of Brueghel's painting of the blind leading the blind. One man is tumbling down, his staff held out like a spear or sword in front of him, and the others are following behind him. They are all making progress, and they are all falling down. The story is found in the Bible. How many painters this word 'progress' has made blind! How many composers this word has made deaf! And they carried behind them generations!" He looked stricken for a moment, as if he had just seen a horror out of Bosch.
Pärt was born in 1935, in a small town in the Estonian countryside. According to Paul Hillier's study of the composer, he grew up playing an ancient grand piano that lacked a middle register, so that he made music only at extremes of high and low. He studied composition in the national conservatory, in Tallinn. He moved steadily through all the styles that were available to him, from neoclassicism to socialism and on to Western avant-garde techniques of serialism and chance. He even dipped into John Cage-ish happenings, once participating in a concert at which a violin somehow caught on fire.
Finally, in 1976, he turned inward, discovering a new, radically simplified language. "Tabula Rasa" was one of the first products of this style, which came to be called "tintinnabuli," after the Latin word for bell. In its basic form, it involves the interweaving of two voices, one of which moves by melodic steps while the other rotates through the pitches of a major or a minor chord. The method has something in common with the early minimalist pieces of Steve Reich, but the resemblance is better explained by the fact that both composers drew on the same ancient sources: polyphonic composers of the late medieval and early Renaissance periods.
The tintinnabuli works were also informed by an intense religiosity, flowing from Pärt's embrace of Russian Orthodoxy. This meditative strain contributed to his subsequent popularity in the nineteen-nineties, when records of Gregorian chant mysteriously showed up on the pop charts. But there was nothing fashionable about Pärt's choice of style back in the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. The composer had already established himself as something of a maverick; his 1968 work "Credo," in which a prayerful choral arrangement of Bach's Prelude in C Major sounds defiantly in the middle of musical chaos, drew official censure. By the late seventies, as Pärt began to acquire international fame, he found that he was not permitted to travel freely abroad, and that his works were being taken off the market. In 1979, at a meeting of the Estonian Composers' Union, Pärt denounced official policy while wearing a longhaired wig. The following year, he was able to obtain an exit visa to Israel—his wife, Nora, is Jewish. Alfred Schnittke, who had played the prepared piano in the first Western performances of "Tabula Rasa," arranged for the Pärts to stay in Vienna, and they ended up settling in Berlin.
Pärt said of his early, "wild" years, "I was writing music in which there were many notes thrown down on the page like so." He made a scattering gesture with his hands. "Notes were being strewn about like coins or jewels. I was not guarding these notes as treasures. I was not holding them, one after another, in my hands. Every note is decisive, every note is telling." Yet, for all his love of spare, repetitive textures, he does not treasure the minimalist label that has been attached to him. "Two composers, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, changed the world at that time," he said. "I have great respect for them. Still, I am not a minimalist. I understand that music critics will always find categories for my works and put them away in suitable drawers, but to call me a 'holy minimalist' sounds a bit ridiculous." He cupped his ear and listened to the hollow air.
As Pärt and I talked, a pan-flute arrangement of the "Titanic" soundtrack was playing on the restaurant's loudspeakers. It played over and over, in an endless loop. Although Pärt asked the waitress to turn it down, it refused to go away. The juxtaposition was ironic, because this composer has sometimes been accused of writing background music—a higher Muzak for sensitive souls. His works have been used on movie soundtracks and in other suspect environments. The false association with New Age aesthetics has perhaps inadvertently been aided by the exquisite care that ECM takes in recording him. Since the mid-eighties, Manfred Eicher, ECM's longtime director and chief producer, has given Pärt's music a distinctive ambience, a sonic halo. Even the packaging of the disks, all crisp lines and monochromatic fields, is a beautiful exemplar of minimalist style.
Recordings tell only half the story, however. They remain two-dimensional experiences, whereas Pärt is intensely concerned with the positioning of music in space. It was actively stunning to hear his works in the airy, chilly churches of Copenhagen, where the music seemed to crystallize out of the air and become an organic, multivalent thing. The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, under Tõnu Kaljuste, and the Latvian Radio Choir, under Kaspars Putnins, gave the music enormous immediacy: the voices buzzed against each other, then soared as one. Most commentators have overlooked the dramatic tension inherent in Pärt's work—the way an apparent state of equilibrium is undermined by one or two serpentine notes, or the way small harmonic shifts can turn into seismic shocks. When, in the choral work "Beatitudes," an intricately pivoting chain of modulations leads through twenty of the twenty-four major and minor chords, the effect is of a huge vista opening up from a narrow space. As happens so often, Pärt has found a precise musical image to explicate his chosen text: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven."
In recent years, Pärt has stretched his tintinnabulist idiom in order to accommodate a freer harmonic rhythm. He has set Latin, German, English, Spanish, and Old Slavonic texts, recalibrating his language to fit the demands of each. "Kanon Pokajanen," an eighty-minute-long setting of the Orthodox canon of repentance, mixes the rawness of folk ritual with the fastidiousness of theology. The English works, such as "Beatitudes" and "Litany," echo the soaring forms of Anglican hymns. "Como Cierva Sedienta," a Spanish-language setting of Psalms 42 and 43, has a strikingly vibrant, almost Fauvist orchestration and a richly ornamented vocal line; it is very nearly opulent. This recent work appears on ECM's latest Pärt disk, "Orient & Occident," which contains other intimations of new directions. The title piece, an elegy for strings, echoes the feverish intimacy of Benjamin Britten, whom Pärt reveres, while also forming unexpected links with Indian string writing and Arabic cantillation.
The composer acknowledged his latest tendencies with a guilty smile. "Yes," he said. "I got a little crazy, didn't I?" He mimed a gesture that suggested a flamenco dancer throwing tennis balls. The wild Pärt of the Estonian years, who mocked the authorities and played the holy fool, is still lurking below the surface. The austerity of his present style may really serve to hold the other self in check; one wonders how much turbulence lies deep within these chapels of sound, which come close to Bachian perfection. Often, in the spiritual sphere, faith hovers at the brink of disorder and sorrow.
At the end of our talk, I asked Pärt whether he felt lonely, both as a religious artist in a secular Western culture and as a classical composer in the kingdom of pop. He paused for a while, and the pan flutes filled the silence. "If loneliness brings bitterness and anger," he finally said, "then, I think, loneliness is a disease. We composers cannot brood, we cannot cultivate loneliness. Schubert, for example, never heard his symphonies in performance—they got no interest from publishers. But they are full of life. And his songs are nearer to Heaven than most music written for the church. He had the talent of love and the talent of compassion. Of course he was lonely, but his suffering gave out sweet nectar.
"We cannot know all the good people in the world," he went on. "Not many of the good people are composers. Twenty years ago, my friend Valentin Silvestrov, one of the greatest composers of our time, said that nowadays great music isn't made in concert palaces. Instead, it is created in lofts, basements, and garages. Here you are, with your feet in lukewarm water, and the pan flutes are making noise—"
He stopped, frustrated at the inability of either English or German to bring his image to life. He took a pen out of his pocket and put it in front of me, as if that would explain everything. "Schubert's pen," he said, "was fifty per cent ink, fifty per cent tears."
Ladies And Gentlemen, The Future President Of The United States
If the Republicans don't get serious and field a candidate with media saavy, and a story the Americans want to tell themselves, Hilary Clinton will be the next President of the United States.
Check out the look on her face when she says, "... the highest profits in the history of the world."
She has a self-satisfied look of sarcastic bemusement on her face, as if we should all agree with her that a corporation does not have a right to make such profits.
Profits ought to be celebrated. They are evidence of success. It ought to go without saying, but it doesn't for Hilary, that we want corporations to make a healthyprofit. If all corporations failed to make a profit, we would be in a depression.
I know he's, supposedly, singing to a different God than I sing to, but I love this song, and I can sing it to God, as I know Him. (I'm sure we're all mistaken about who God Is, to some extent.)
And, besides, it seems to me George Harrison was truly a man of love and peace, but what do I know? One day the fire of God's Love will separate the wheat from the chaff, and I'll bet you an awful lot of what George did will be refined into Gold.
Munira Mirza , an expert on identity, multi-culturalism and radical Islam knows what she is talking about. You might have caught her recent series The Business of Race on Radio 4, or heard her contributions to such programmes as Start The Week on the very same subjects. Or perhaps you may have read one of her articles or think tank reports. Munira is much in demand. 'I'm not quite sure how to explain what I do,' she laughs, when I ask her.
This turns out to be a PhD, freelance research and writing, and a project on the rise of UK radical Islam for much in demand think tank, Policy Exchange. Oh, and then there is are the media appearances.
Crikey.
No matter, because for a woman in such demand, Munira is in no hurry. So we sip milky coffee in a café along from the House of Commons, complain about the miserable weather, and then get down to the subject of race.
Q: I realised the other day that I don't actually understand what multi-culturalism is.
A: There are two ways that you can look at it. First there is the lived experience; we live in a country that has an enormous amount of ethnic and cultural diversity. In London, in particular, there are a lot of languages spoken, different food and arts, etc. That's the cosmopolitan experience of living in a society with lots of differences and that's great. But then there is multi-culturalism as a political idea, which is quite different and which elevates the importance of difference above what we have in common. The message off multi-culturalism is that your cultural identity as an individual is the most important thing, and that we should organise society around that principle. So rather than looking for the things that we might have in common, we instead take all these differences and relate to people through this filter. It is a way of making sense of the relationships between us, and it is also a view of culture that is, in a sense, fixed in the multi-cultural model. So the fact that I am Asian means that my identity, if you are a multi-culturalist, is something that is created for me, and something that I am born with, rather than something that I make for myself.
Q: What was 7-7 about, do you think?
A: I think the terrorists were looking for meaning too. They can't find it here; being British is so discredited in this country that they look for that identity elsewhere. But the most compelling thing about the al-Qaeda identity is its victimhood status; it is the ultimate logic of multi-culturalism, with its claim that it represents an oppressed minority.
Q: But what makes a group of apparently well educated young men put explosives in backpacks and explode themselves on crowded underground trains?
A: You won't find the answer to that question abroad; you'll find it here in the vacuum of meaning in the West. The only value such people believe in is an entirely nihilistic one, which is the philosophy which dominates much of our current western culture. The anti-western sentiment of those bombers was not that dissimilar to the anti-western characteristics of the Left; anti-capitalist and anti-globalist. The almost emotional attachment to hating the West is much stronger than any kind of rational political analysis.
But to combat terrorism we have to present an alternative, to confidently state that we have values, to be clear that they are strong and to not accept the characterisation of the West as something that is entirely destructive. The West has made remarkable strides and its ideas can be universal and understood around the world.
Attacks on Britain's Jews have risen to the highest level since records began.
A study published today shows the number of reported anti-Semitic incidents has almost tripled in 10 years, with more than half the attacks last year taking place in London.
The findings prompted the report's authors to warn of a "wave of hatred" against Jews.
The number of incidents increased to 594 last year, up by 31 per cent on the previous year.
Violent assaults soared to 112, up by more than a third on 2005.
Incidents ranged from the unprovoked stabbing of a Jewish man in north London to the sending of hate mail and the vandalism of Jewish cemeteries and synagogues.
The Anti-Semitic Incidents Report 2006, compiled by the Community Security Trust (CST), responsible for combating anti-Semitism in the UK, blames the huge rise on a number of factors ranging from Israel's invasion of Lebanon last summer to the jailing of the historian David Irving in Austria for denying the Holocaust.
The threatened suspension of Ken Livingstone as Mayor for comments made to a Jewish Evening Standard reporter triggered 11 anti-Semitic incidents, according to the report.
When the figures were first compiled in 1984, there were just 154 reported incidents, about a quarter of the total for last year.
Mark Gardner, CST spokesman said of the level of hate crimes: "This is unacceptable racism, that many Jews had hoped and believed was a thing of the past.
"Today's anti-Semitism is a wave of hatred, intimidation and abuse against British Jews, who are stupidly blamed and randomly attacked over international tensions for which they bear no responsibility."
Incidents last year include:
• An Orthodox Jew punched in the face and almost pushed off a Tube platform by an Arab man who screamed: "Get back to Stamford Hill, I want to kill you all" • A Jewish man walking to synagogue with his two young sons suffered a broken leg after being punched and kicked by a white man shouting "f***ing Jew" • Seventy incidents of desecration and damage to synagogues, cemeteries, Jewish schools and private homes with attacks including swastikas daubed on walls • Savage assault of a 12-year-old Jewish girl Jasmine Kranat, who was beaten unconscious on a north London bus by two teenage girls who asked her first if she was Jewish.
The physical descriptions of perpetrators in 205 of the incidents show 96 were by white people, 28 by black people, 60 by Asians and 16 by Arabs. The report has been passed to ministers.
