Bible study aids

I have put up some comments on my Scripture Blog about the Bible study aids that I have found most useful -- in the hope that others might discover something there of use.

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Social Conservatives Win at the Polls

Will Obama's excesses usher in a long period of conservative ascendancy?  The British Labour party's lurch Left delivered a big victory to the Conservatives in the recent British national election

Conservative principles and candidates have no chance, according to conventional wisdom. Democratic core groups -- minorities, single women, social liberals in favor of LGBT reforms -- keep increasing and cities keep growing. Liberal progressivism is ascendant in politics, and the era of the Republican Party is over.

Recent elections have blown this theory out of the water. Not only did the GOP take the U.S. House in 2010 and the U.S. Senate in 2014, but this year the GOP won again -- by championing strong conservative values, especially on social issues.

This Year’s Victories

As Molly Ball wrote in The Atlantic, "liberals are losing the culture wars." At the beginning of this month, liberal Democrats lost five issue-based elections that conventional wisdom says they should have won. Voters rejected recreational marijuana, a transgender “non-discrimination” law, so-called “sanctuary cities” for illegal immigrants, and gun-control candidates. Voters elected a Tea Party activist -- who publicly embraced Kim Davis -- as governor. Liberals took a shellacking.

Ohio voters rejected a ballot initiative to legalize medical and recreational marijuana by a 30-point margin. Governor John Kasich opposed the measure, saying the U.S. needs a coherent drug policy. “When you run around telling kids not to do drugs, young kids, and then they read that we might legalize marijuana, I just think that’s a mixed message,” Kasich said. Voters may have rejected the initiative’s production cartel, rather than legal marijuana, but in any case, weed is still off limits in Ohio.

Voters in Houston -- the most liberal city in Texas -- overwhelmingly defeated a non-discrimination ordinance that would grant “equal rights” to those who identify as transgender. In this city, where whites are less than a third of the population, 61 percent of voters opposed the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO).

As National Review’s Kevin Williamson put it, the ordinance would “have made the abolition of penis-bearing persons (we used to call them 'men') from the ladies’ locker room an official offense in the same category of wrongdoing as shoving Rosa Parks to the back of the bus.” Opponents said the law would lead to “men in women’s bathrooms,” and for some reason, no matter how HEROic this may seem, voters overwhelmingly rejected it.

San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, who defended the city’s “sanctuary city” policies -- not returning illegal immigrants to national immigration authorities -- was defeated by 31 points. Illegal immigration gained the national spotlight following the alleged murder of 32-year-old Kate Steinle by previously deported Mexican illegal immigrant Francisco Sanchez on July 1. This issue boosted Donald Trump early on, and has now returned to oust Mirkarimi.

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s gun control group, Everytown for Gun Safety, targeted two GOP state senate candidates in Virginia. One did lose, but the other won, leaving the State Senate in Republican hands.

Finally, Matt Bevin, the Tea Party candidate who failed to defeat Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in the 2014 GOP primary, won the Kentucky governorship by nearly 10 points. Bevin campaigned on phasing out the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, and championed social issues -- going so far as embracing Kim Davis, the county clerk who refused to violate her conscience by signing marriage licenses after the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage.

Voters Are More Conservative Than You Might Think

One night dealt huge losses to the transgender and gay marriage movements, the left’s embrace of illegal immigration, and Obamacare. Gun control again fell short, as did marijuana legalization. While liberals may poo-poo these results as the outcome of low voter turnout, they also illustrate a resounding backlash to an unpopular and overreaching president.

Kentucky, despite consistently voting for Republican presidential candidates, has only had one other Republican governor since the 1970s. Bevin’s Tea Party support illustrates a key theme of the last five years -- Obama has been terrible for his party.

Under President Obama, Democrats have lost over 900 state legislature seats, 12 governorships, 69 U.S. House seats, and 13 U.S. Senate seats. While some have argued that Democrats need not worry about losing all these elections, it may be wishful thinking to repeat the old mantra that the Democratic party has every advantage going into 2016.

Indeed, as Bloomberg View’s Megan McArdle argues, “parties are most vulnerable at precisely the moment when they feel themselves strongest.” McArdle recalls the 2004 elections -- when commentators speculated about a “permanent majority” for Republicans which had faltered in 2006 and clearly broken in 2008. Similarly, Obama’s impressive 2008 victory led the Democrats to overreach, giving birth to the Tea Party in 2010.

“The passage of Obamacare despite the fact that it was unpopular, despite the fact that no one in the opposition party wanted to touch it, despite the fact that the voters of Massachusetts sent a Republican to the Senate to vote against it, was hubris,” McArdle notes. “Did Democrats just accept that their goal of national health care was worth alienating voters and losing control of lower offices?” Perhaps unconsciously, that is exactly what they did.

In addition to the signature health care law, President Obama has overplayed his hand as chief executive in the immigration arena. Last week, a federal court ruled that Obama had misused his authority by providing work permits and protecting a huge swath of illegal immigrants from deportation. The president has requested a review by the Supreme Court.

Despite the historic wins of 2006 and 2008, and the argument that the Obama coalition will continue electing Democratic presidents going forward, McArdle argues that the current presidential candidates ought to be a warning sign for the party. “It should worry Democrats that their two leading contenders for the nomination are a self-proclaimed socialist and a center-left candidate with her roots in a much earlier, more bipartisan era,” she wrote.

Why Conservatism Won

The electorate may not be as liberal as Democrats believe. When Obama won his resounding victory in 2008, he ran as a moderate on social issues. He did not yet support same-sex marriage -- a position he subsequently “evolved” into. In 2012, he won re-election, but with a smaller margin of the popular vote and the electoral college.

Perhaps most telling, socially liberal overreach has failed at the ballot box, not just this year, but last year as well. Abortion starling Wendy Davis suffered a severe defeat in the Texas gubernatorial election last year, as did Senator Mark Udall who campaigned on the tired talking point of the Republican “War on Women.” Bevin’s victory and the loss of the transgender ballot initiative in Houston merely solidify a trend against progressive overreach.

Hillary Clinton seems to have missed the lesson. Rather than realize the failure of Obama’s overreach, she is doubling down on the same leftist policies that propelled Bevin to victory, and Udall and Davis to defeat.

In a country with record gun sales for six months in a row, and where the NRA’s approval rating is a record 58 percent, Hillary chose to make gun control a centerpiece of her campaign. After the voters of Houston -- of all places! -- rejected a transgender initiative, Clinton continues to back similar laws.

As Democrats lurch left, the GOP scores electoral victories. After the recent election, Republicans will have “total control” of 24 states, holding the governorship and a majority in the state legislature. Out of 50 states, 33 now have Republican governors. Out of 99 state legislatures, 67 belong to the GOP.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, conservatism wins at the ballot box, especially after liberals overreach. Republicans need to learn this going into 2016. A strong conservative message will give Americans a true choice next November -- and the GOP may just like what it sees.

SOURCE

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A Pattern of Executive Overreach

Recently, the Justice Department announced it would not be indicting anyone for his or her role in the most serious domestic political scandal since the Nixon years.

Starting in 2010, the IRS, under pressure from congressional Democrats and the White House, engaged in blatant ideologically motivated discrimination against conservative organizations applying for non-profit status.

That the most feared bureaucracy in Washington was making decisions based on illegal political criteria should send a chill down the spine of any American who cares about the First Amendment and the rule of law.

Yet the Department of Justice has refused to indict even IRS official Lois Lerner, who invoked her Fifth Amendment right to silence to avoid incriminating herself in testimony before Congress.

Unfortunately, the failure to prosecute anyone responsible for abusing the IRS’s authority reflects the Obama administration’s broader contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law.

Consider just a few examples:

Going to war in Libya in blatant violation of the War Powers Resolution, and in defiance of the legal advice of the president’s own lawyers, based on the ridiculous theory that bombing the heck out of Libya did not constitute “hostilities” under the law

Appointing so-called policy czars to high-level positions to avoid constitutionally-required confirmation hearings

Modifying, delaying, and ignoring various provisions of Obamacare in violation of the law itself

Attacking private citizens for engaging in constitutionally protected speech

Issuing draconian regulations regarding sexual assault on campus not through formal, lawful regulation but through an informal, and unreviewable, “dear colleague” letter

Ignoring 100 years of legal rulings and the plain text of the Constitution and trying to get a vote in Congress for the D.C. delegate

Trying to enact massive immigration reform via an executive order demanding that the Department of Homeland Security both refuse to enforce existing immigration law, and provide work permits to millions of people residing in the U.S. illegally

Imposing common core standards on the states via administrative fiat

Ignoring bankruptcy law and arranging Chrysler’s bankruptcy to benefit labor unions at the expense of bondholders

Trying to strip churches and other religious bodies of their constitutional right to choose their clergy free from government involvement.

More generally, the president has abandoned any pretense of trying to work with Congress, as the Constitution’s separation of powers requires. He prefers instead to govern by unilateral executive fiat, even when there is little or no legal authority supporting his power to do so.

Presidents trying stretch their power as far as they can is hardly news. What is news, however, is that top Obama administration officials, including the president himself, see this not as something to be ashamed of, but as a desirable way of governing, something to brag about rather than do surreptitiously.

Obama behaves as if there is some inherent virtue in a president governing by decree and whim, as if promoting progressive political ends at the expense of the rule of law is proper not simply as a desperate last resort but as a matter of principle.

After all, Obama says, democracy is unduly “messy” and “complicated.” “We can’t wait,” the president intones, as he ignores the separation of powers again and again, ruling instead through executive order.

“Law is politics,” and only politics, according to a mantra popular on the legal left, and therefore the law should not be an independent constraint to doing the right thing politically. Obama seems to agree.

As Obama’s lawlessness has received increased attention from Congress, the (conservative) media, and the general public, the president has been defiant, even petulant. When confronted by allegations of lawlessness, Obama takes no responsibility, and doesn’t even bother to defend the legality of his actions.

Harry S. Truman famously said “the buck stops here.” Obama responds to serious concerns about his administration’s lawlessness with a derisive “so sue me.”

As George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley writes, Obama “acts as if anything a court has not expressly forbidden is permissible.” And in many situations, no one has legal standing to challenge the president’s actions in court—which means that no judge can stop the administration’s lawbreaking.

So sue me? If only we could.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Psychologizing Jihadis

I reproduce below the introduction to a long article in the Left-leaning "New Scientist" which is reasonably scholarly but which ignores what Jihadis say, and, indeed, what the Koran says.

It looks at the functioning of brain regions and finds only very equivocal evidence for the view that  Jihadis have different brains.  So they then resort to discussing Jihadis in a group  dynamics context.  In an academic way they draw the familiar conclusion that the Jihadis "just got in with a bad crowd".  And they firmly reject the conclusion that Jihadis are evil.  And they do eventually conclude that Jihadis are not psychologically  abnormal.

But is getting in with a bad crowd sufficient to explain the extraordinarily evil behaviour that we get from (say) ISIS? Their behavior is a long way away from the civilized norms in which most of the Jihadis have grown up, so surely needs detailed explanation.  And similar behaviour by the Nazis also needs to be explained.  But what does explain it?  The article below offers next to nothing towards such an explanation.

But the explanation is no mystery at all. Nazis, Jihadis and their ilk have in fact been keen to explain themselves to us.  Given their assumptions, what they do is perfectly rational.  What they do, they do in expectation of a great reward.  It is very similar to what happens in a field we know well: capitalism.  If the expected reward is great, some people will take all sorts of risks to get it.  Why does anybody start up a business when he knows (or should know) that around 90% of new businesses go broke within a year?  Because he expects to make a "killing".  Note the parallelism.  The businessman's "killing" simply means a lot of money.  Great profits are expected.

So Nazis and Jihadis do what they do because they expect a large reward from it.  Normal rules can be disregarded because of the magnitude of the reward.  So what is that reward?  The article below puts it well when it notes that "Young people need a dream. Appeals for moderation will never be attractive to youth, yearning for adventure, for glory, for significance”.  Not all Nazis and Jihadis have of course been young but it does seem to be mainly young people who have flocked to such movements.

And Islam in fact offers rewards of that sort to young and old.  The aim of Jihad is to subjugate the world to Islam. So that offers adventure, glory and significance to anyone who participates.

Nazism offered similar heroic visions.  Nazis  fought for Führer, Volk (race) and Vaterland (homeland).  Their ideals were Courage, Honor, and Loyalty. The "Nazizeit" was a immensely exciting era for Germany.  The song of the Hitler youth below may give you some sense of it. The translations are good but do not match the power of the original German



Music is very powerful emotionally and Nazis had the unparalleled German talent for music at their disposal.  The German lands are home to the timeless music of Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven.  And that does matter.

And for Jihadis too there are many rewards. As well as the worldly rewards mentioned above, there is religion. It is easy for us to mock it but don't forget that most of the world is  religious.  Jihadis really believe what the Koran tells them: That if they die in battle fighting the infidel they will pop off straight to heaven and be waited on there forever after by seventy beautiful women. And, given the puritanical nature of Islam, that may be the only sort of woman many of them will ever get. So, at the risk of putting it too frivolously, Islam has great sex appeal!

And one thing that Jihadis and Nazis have in common is that both have taught adherents that they are special and superior by virtue of their beliefs.  Being a member of a master race or master religion obviously feels good.  The Nazis were not however looking to an afterlife.  They thought that once they had conquered the vast lands to their East, each German could become a gentleman farmer with serfs to do his bidding.  Most of Europe was once organized on feudal lines like that so it was not an unrealistic  dream.  That was not the whole of the Nazi incentive system but I have written about that in much detail elsewhere.

So where does that leave us with the Jihadis?  It leaves us where we are with the Nazis. You cannot appease them, you cannot change them, you cannot buy them off, you cannot deter them, you cannot talk them out of it.  The rewards that lure them are too great for any of that.  You can only destroy them.

And destroying them will be unlikely to be possible without destroying much of their support system, which is the whole Muslim world.  To adapt a saying by Mao Tse Tung, the Jihadis are fish who swim in the sea of their people so the sea may have to be drained to eradicate them.  Many Muslims may have to die from bombing etc. if a serious attempt to eradicate the Jihadis is made.  And, if that seems too harsh, do note that exactly that is happening right now in the lands occupied by ISIS.  Does anybody seriously think that it is only Jihadis who are dying in the bombing campaigns?  Most of the dead will simply be people from the sea in which the Jihadis swim.

So if a nuclear device were dropped on the ISIS headquarters of Raqqa, it would just do at once what is already happening gradually -- but would also be an unambiguous sign to the Jihadis that their Jihad cannot succeed.  In 1945, nukes tore the heart out of the Bushido warriors of Japan, real tough guys. They should have a similar impact on the slime of ISIS, or what remains of them

And President Trump might just do it.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Now to look at what "New Statesman says

WHY would an apparently normal young adult drop out of college and turn up some time later in a video performing a cold-blooded execution in the name of jihad? It’s a conundrum we have been forced to ponder ever since a group calling itself ISIS declared war on infidels. But 70 years ago we were asking something similar of guards in Nazi concentration camps – and, sadly, there have been plenty of opportunities to ponder the matter in between.

What turns an ordinary person into a killer? The idea that a civilised human being might be capable of barbaric acts is so alien that we often blame our animal instincts – the older, “primitive” areas of the brain taking over and subverting their more rational counterparts. But fresh thinking turns this long-standing explanation on its head. It suggests that people perform brutal acts because the “higher”, more evolved, brain overreaches. The set of brain changes involved has been dubbed Syndrome E – with E standing for evil.

In a world where ideological killings are rife, new insights into this problem are sorely needed. But reframing evil as a disease is controversial. Some believe it could provide justification for heinous acts or hand extreme organisations a recipe for radicalising more young people. Others argue that it denies the reality that we all have the potential for evil within us. Proponents, however, say that if evil really is a pathology, then society ought to try to diagnose susceptible individuals and reduce contagion. And if we can do that, perhaps we can put radicalisation into reverse, too.

Following the second world war, the behaviour of guards in Nazi concentration camps became the subject of study, with some researchers seeing them as willing, ideologically driven executioners, others as mindlessly obeying orders. The debate was reignited in the mid-1990s in the wake of the Rwandan genocide and the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia. In 1996, The Lancet carried an editorial pointing out that no one was addressing evil from a biological point of view. Neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried, at the University of California, Los Angeles, decided to rise to the challenge.

In a paper published in 1997, he argued that the transformation of non-violent individuals into repetitive killers is characterised by a set of symptoms that suggests a common condition, which he called Syndrome E (see “Seven symptoms of evil“). He suggested that this is the result of “cognitive fracture”, which occurs when a higher brain region, the prefrontal cortex (PFC) – involved in rational thought and decision-making – stops paying attention to signals from more primitive brain regions and goes into overdrive.

“The set of brain changes has been dubbed Syndrome E – with E standing for evil”

The idea captured people’s imaginations, says Fried, because it suggested that you could start to define and describe this basic flaw in the human condition. “Just as a constellation of symptoms such as fever and a cough may signify pneumonia, defining the constellation of symptoms that signify this syndrome may mean that you could recognise it in the early stages.” But it was a theory in search of evidence. Neuroscience has come a long way since then, so Fried organised a conference in Paris earlier this year to revisit the concept.

At the most fundamental level, understanding why people kill is about understanding decision-making, and neuroscientists at the conference homed in on this. Fried’s theory starts with the assumption that people normally have a natural aversion to harming others. If he is correct, the higher brain overrides this instinct in people with Syndrome E. How might that occur?

More HERE

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Trump Reveals Plan to Defeat ISIS

In a new radio ad, Donald Trump outlines his plan to defeat ISIS:

    "The tragic attacks in Paris prove once again that America needs to get tough on radical Islamic terrorism. President Obama and other politicans have consistantly failed us. Just hours before the attacks in Paris, President Obama said ISIS had been contained. It is amazing that the United States could have a president who is so out of touch. It is also dangerous.

Obama has no strategy to defeat ISIS and now he is preparing to let hundreds of thousands of refugees from Syria into the United States. I will stop illegal immigration. We will build a wall on the southern border, and yes, I will also quickly and decisively bomb the hell out of ISIS.

We'll make the military so strong, no one and I mean no one, will mess with us. If I win, we will not have to listen to the politicans who are losing the war on terrorism, we will make America safe, and we will make America great again.

Unlike President Obama, Trump makes no bones about calling the problem- radical Islam- out by name. It's this plain spoken certitude that has made him the favorite of GOP voters.

SOURCE

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FRC’s Tony Perkins: ‘The President and the Left, They Hate America’

Commenting on the debate over whether to allow Syrian refugees into the United States in the wake of the Paris attacks by the Islamic State, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins said sharia law is a problem constitutionally, that President Barack Obama is promoting “Islam in this country,” and that “the president and the left, they hate America.”

He also noted that while Obama is “lecturing Americans about compassion and kindness” for the Syrians, “where are all the Islamic relief organizations lining up to help these people?”

“They’re not,” he said. It’s “crickets.”

After fielding a caller’s question about the refugees on his radio program, Washington Watch with Tony Perkins, on Tuesday, Perkins explained the conflict between religious freedom and sharia (Islamic) law.

“We have religious freedom -- I get this question people want to give to you: Do you believe in religious freedom, then you should allow Islam in,” said Perkins.  “Well, I believe in religious freedom, as the Founders did, and religious freedom is in the context of ordered liberty. “

“The Christian faith, the Jewish faith, the orthodox religions that have been here in this country have not sought to overturn our government – because it’s a faith, it’s religion,” he said.  “It is not a political, economic, judicial system, military system as Islam is. And, as these people themselves are saying, they see it as incompatible with the Constitution.”

“They want -- a majority would want sharia law,” Perkins.  “That’s a problem.”

He continued, “It’s interesting, you know, the president lecturing Americans about compassion and kindness. Where are all the Islamic relief organizations lining up to help these people? Crickets.  They’re not.”

“But notice how Christian nations open their doors to everybody, how we’re welcoming to the hurting, to the poor, to the helpless,” said Perkins.  “It’s those values that make us what we are. But it’s those values that are changed when you have no cogent immigration system, no means of controlling and assimilating people into the country so they become American, and America doesn’t become something else.”

“You see, the president and the left, they hate America,” he said.  “They deny the whole idea of American exceptionalism, the ideals of America. That’s foreign to them. They deny what makes us exceptional and so therefore they want to change it. Look, people on the left want to argue, but look at it, just look at the facts.  They’re all right there, very clear.”

In another segment of the show, Tony Perkins stressed that President Obama has an obligation to protect America from its enemies but it is unclear whether Obama actually sees that as a top priority.

“[A]s I said earlier, the president has an obligation to protect Americans from all enemies foreign and domestic,” said Perkins.  “And we’ve seen time and time again where the governors are actually doing what the president should be doing.”

“But the president has the orientation of a community organizer, not a president of the United States,” he said.

“Think about this for a moment, I’ve been in politics, I understand the dynamics,” Perkins continued.  “But let’s say you get something similar to what happened in Paris were to happen in someone’s state given what we now know. The political repercussions of that would be huge.”

“Of course, the president doesn’t care,” said Perkins.  “He’s on his way out. And he’s doing everything he can to, I think, to promote Islam in this country.”

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Honduras arrests five Syrians heading to US with fake passports

Authorities in Honduras say they have arrested five Syrian nationals who were attempting to travel to the United States using stolen Greek passports, according to Reuters.

Authorities said there was no apparent indication the Syrians were among suspects linked to last week's attacks in Paris, the news outlet reported.

Debate has raged since the Friday attacks over whether terrorists may attempt to slip into the U.S. after reports that one Paris attacker may have come to Europe mixed in with Syrian refugees.

A French official said a passport found near a Paris suspect's body and had passed through Greece border controls was probably stolen

SOURCE

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GOP LAWMAKERS CALL FOR CURBS, FREEZE ON MUSLIM MIGRATION TO U.S.

As Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) prepares a show vote on the nation’s importation of Muslim refugees, a growing group of Congressional conservatives are calling for a reduction or suspension of visa issuances to Muslim nations with jihadist movements.

Conservative Review’s Daniel Horowitz has explained the details of Ryan’s anticipated “bait and switch”:

Instead of listening to their constituents and following the calls of 30 governors to shut down Islamic refugee resettlement, Republicans are about to pull the classic bait and switch: pass a phony standalone bill and decline to defund it in the budget bill…

Remember Obamacare, executive amnesty, EPA regulations, and Planned Parenthood? The Islamic refugee issue is no different. They have no intention of actually stopping it, despite the fact that they could destroy the Democrats in the upcoming election on this issue alone. They will pass phony legislation, but will never defund it.

While Ryan’s decision has sparked the ire of conservatives, his decision has won the praise of Democrats like Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) who said: “I think Speaker Ryan has the right idea… to leave any refugee legislation separate and apart from the omnibus.

Some conservative lawmakers, however, have suggested that they will not settle for a mere show-vote. In recent days, an increasing number of conservatives lawmakers have called— not just for moratorium on Muslim refugees— but for a reduction or temporary suspension of visa issuances to terror-prone nations in general.

Presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), as Breitbart News has previously reported, has called for stopping visa issuances from nations that have significant jihadist movements, or roughly 30 countries. “I say from the Middle East, we don’t need any more immigrants…students or refugees or otherwise,” Paul declared on a Monday conference call with reporters.

“My message not only to the leadership, but to the country is if we want to defend ourselves, we have to defend ourselves and the first way to do it is to bar people from coming to your country who would attack you,” Paul told Breitbart. “The interesting thing about this is people are talking about world-wide war to stop this and you would think the first thing you would do is stop people from coming to our country.”

Similarly, Congressman Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX)67%
— who led the charge on halting the importation of Muslim refugees and introduced legislation to stop refugee resettlement months before the Paris attack— expressed his support for Sen. Paul’s initiative:  "I support every plan, including Senator Paul’s effort, that would protect Americans from radical jihads infiltrating this country".

Babin told Breitbart that a mere show vote from the House Speaker on this matter would not be acceptable. “The last thing we need is a show vote. As an elected official I swore an oath to protect the safety and security of the American people,” Babin declared. “We cannot allow this to happen on our watch and anything that fails to have real teeth should be rejected.” ....

Every year the United States admits 280,000 migrants from predominantly Muslim countries. This includes more than 100,000 migrants who were permanently resettled on green cards, more than a 100,000 temporary guest workers and students, and nearly 40,000 refugees and asylees. This means that every year the U.S. admits two Muslim migrants for every one Raul Labrador voter in Idaho’s first Congressional District. Equality Now recently issued a report documenting how, as a result of unbridled Muslim migration, half a million U.S. girls are at risk of Female Genital Mutilation. Arabic and Urdu – Pakistan’s national language– are the fastest-growing foreign languages spoken at home, according to U.S. Census data analyzed  by the Center for Immigration Studies. According to a separate report based on census data, Muslim immigration is the fastest growing bloc of new immigrants.

Reports have documented how large-scale Muslim migration has posed some difficulties for assimilation.

Minnesota, for instance, which has the largest Somali population in the country, has struggled to stem terror recruiting. The Minneapolis Star Tribune recently reported that six men from Minnesota were arrested and charged attempting to fight alongside ISIS. The Star Tribune writes: “During the last two years, more than 20 Somali-Americans from Minnesota have left to fight alongside terrorists under the banner of ISIL, according to the FBI. Another four, also arrested while trying to leave, face federal prosecution in the Twin Cities under charges that they intended to fight for ISIL or the Al-Shabab terrorist brigade in Somalia.”

Similarly, as National Review has reported, “Dearborn, Michigan is home to just under 100,000 people, about 40 percent of whom are Muslim. In 2013, a leaked government document revealed that more people from Dearborn were on the federal terrorist watch list than from any other city except New York.”

Pew Research has estimated that immigration will cause the population of U.S. Muslims to more than double over the next two decades—from 2.6 million in 2010 to 6.2 million in 2030. This demographic change is almost entirely the product of legal admissions– that is, it is a formal policy of the federal government adopted by Congress.

More HERE

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Petulant Obama Mocks GOP on Refugees

In 2013, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev detonated two bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three and injuring 264. The Tsarnaev brothers were Islamist radicals and “refugees.”

In July 2015, five military personnel in Chattanooga were murdered by Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez — an Islamist Palestinian immigrant. In other words, refugees and immigrants committing terrorism in the U.S. is not some theoretical hypothetical. It’s already happened. It happened in Paris, too — at least one attacker was a Syrian “refugee.”

But that makes no difference to the man-child in the Oval Office. Rather than assaulting the Islamofascists who commit such heinous acts, he turned his rhetorical fire on Republicans. Again. Still.

“I cannot think of a more potent recruitment tool for ISIL than some of the rhetoric coming out of here in the course of this debate,” Obama said of his plan to bring in the Islamic Trojan horse via Syrian refugees. “Apparently [Republicans] are scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America. At first, they were too scared of the press being too tough on them in the debates. Now they are scared of three-year-old orphans. That doesn’t seem so tough to me.”

Obama has never said a word in regard to the long list of orphans left in the wake of Islamist attacks in the U.S. and worldwide. Instead, he prefers hurling insults at his political opponents. That’s what narcissists do. And that in itself illustrates a big reason conservatives oppose his plan: It isn’t heartlessness on the part of Americans who don’t want a flood of 10,000 unknown Syrian refugees, it’s distrust of our own government.

Remember, this is the administration that ran guns to Mexican drug cartels, targeted conservatives for IRS audit and set up ObamaCare in all its colossally inept glory. Secretary of State John Kerry insists “we have a very capable ability” to vet refugees, and he argues, “I just think people shouldn’t be hysterical here.” But forgive us for not hopping aboard the Trust Obama Express, trusting that he’ll successfully distinguish between those in need and those bent on killing Americans.

Besides, if Obama really wanted to help refugees, he’d quit hammering Republicans for advocating a focus on persecuted Christians. He doesn’t ever admit it, but Christians aren’t the ones blowing themselves up or firing into crowds with AK-47s yelling “allahu akbar.” And yet Christians are the group Obama isn’t admitting.

Finally, as we said yesterday, the real question is this: Why is Obama burning so much political capital on this issue? First, he’s a narcissist, and opposition usually serves only to make him double down. But second, and more important, he knows if he gives way on Syrians, Republicans will point out that our porous southern border poses a national security threat, which is going to eat into Democrats' appeal with illegal immigrants. His faux immigration strategy is to play the issue for political gain. The political capital he’s investing now is all part of the plan.

SOURCE

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Governors Defying Obama over Syrians

Barack Obama has stated that the attack in Paris will not change his plans to import Syrian refugees to America, and the Freedom Caucus is nervous that new Speaker of the House Paul Ryan won't take action. Across the country, those concerned with the health and welfare of American citizens might feel like they have little recourse.

Enter the Governors. As the Daily Mail reports, governors of several states have openly informed the White House that they won't be accepting any Syrian refugees.

    "Alabama Governor Robert Bentley has announced he is refusing Syrian refugees relocating to his state on the same day Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan said in a statement that his state would also postpone efforts until federal officials fully review security clearances and procedure.

    In a news release Sunday Bentley said, 'After full consideration of this weekend's attacks of terror on innocent citizens in Paris, I will oppose any attempt to relocate Syrian refugees to Alabama through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. 'As your Governor, I will not stand complicit to a policy that places the citizens of Alabama in harm's way.'

    Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker and Governor Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas also said on Monday that they would not be allowing Syrian refugees into their states at this time.

    Elsewhere, Governor Bobby Jindal asked the White House how many Syrian refugees have been resettled in Louisiana, saying he wanted that figure and other information 'in hopes that the night of horror in Paris is not duplicated here'.

    One day later, he announced that Louisiana would also stop accepting refugees.

    Indiana Governor Mike Pence wrote on Twitter Monday; 'Indiana has a long tradition of opening our arms and homes to refugees from around the world but, as governor, my first responsibility is to ensure the safety and security of all Hoosiers".

As of this writing, Mississippi and Ohio have also joined in the pledge not to take Syrian refugees. Perhaps President Obama should heed their advice and act in the best interest of the American people.

SOURCE

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A Democrat candidate hearts ISIS

Democrats can "understand" everyone but patriotic Americans

A Minnesota Democratic Farm Labor Party candidate for the House has suspended his campaign after one of the most bizarre social media meltdowns imaginable:

A Burnsville DFLer’s campaign for the state House abruptly ended Sunday morning within hours of him posting on social media that ISIS “isn’t necessarily evil” and is “made up of people doing what they think is best for their community.”

The Twitter posting Saturday by Dan Kimmel, coming as the world’s emotions remain raw from Friday’s terror attacks in Paris, brought swift rebuke from others on Twitter. House Minority Leader Paul Thissen, DFL-Minneapolis, called for Kimmel to give up his campaign.

“I’m folding up the campaign tent,” Kimmel told the Star Tribune. He later issued a written apology and called his tweet “stupid,” adding that it’s probably best for him to “shut up” for the time being.

Kimmel said in the interview that the posting “was not interpreted as I intended. It was so badly misinterpreted.” He added that he was dropping out of the race “to remove the ick” from his party.
The last phrase says it all. To social justice warriors like Kimmel and Bernie Sanders, every third world revolutionary group is comprised of agrarian reformers who would be tending their crops and hugging their Christian neighbors but for the Evil AmeriKKKan empire. This common left-wing delusion is not just ill informed, it's dangerous.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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A very old controverrsy revisited

I have put up some further comments on my Scripture Blog about the nature of Christ.

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Obama's Islamic Trojan Horse

The terrorist attacks in France this weekend demonstrate the stark reality that radical Islamic terrorism has no borders. (That’s why we coined the term Jihadistan — a borderless nation of Islamofascists with global reach.) Every civilized Western nation has borders for the main purpose of keeping its citizens secure from outsiders who seek to do harm. Yet when a nation’s government decides to accept refugees from another nation, a vulnerability is created, which in the case of Paris was exploited by those seeking to terrorize the population.

So what’s Barack Obama’s real agenda with Syrian refugees?

Two months ago, Mark Alexander warned of the jihadi pipeline Obama was opening by welcoming 100,000 Syrian refugees. Indeed, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper called Obama’s crisis “a disaster of biblical proportions” and warned that terrorists would infiltrate the ranks of refugees. Many of the Muslims flooding into Europe were not “refugees” at all but rather migrants — only 15% were women and children. At least one of the French attackers was a “Syrian refugee.”

Yet despite Clapper’s warning, Obama decided to open the pipeline into the U.S. — not the Keystone pipeline, but the one for jihad.

Last month, we warned that Syrian refugees would be coming soon to a city near you. It’s already happening. In fact, 32 states have accepted a total of 1,809 Syrian refugees since Jan. 1, with the highest numbers in California, Texas, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Florida.

Fortunately, the Paris attacks awoke a sense of caution. More than two dozen governors have now closed their doors. Though most are Republicans, even the Democrat governor of New Hampshire has said enough is enough.

Meanwhile, Sen. Rand Paul, a GOP presidential candidate, introduced legislation calling for an “immediate moratorium” on all Syrian immigration.

Though Obama yawns at jihadi attacks, what really makes him angry is Republicans. During his press conference Monday in Turkey, Obama slammed opponents of his agenda to flood our nation with Syrian refugees. “That’s shameful,” he lectured. “That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have a religious test for compassion.”

The last was a reference to proposals to limit refugees to Christians — those who are worst persecuted in the Middle East.

If Obama’s moral preening wasn’t outrageous enough, he also told other world leaders that “slamming the door” shut to Syrian refugees “would be a betrayal of our values.” He went on, “Our nations can welcome refugees who are desperately seeking safety and ensure our own safety. We can and must do both.”

It’s hard to fathom the nonsense that comes out of Obama’s mouth. What’s actually shameful is that this commander in chief will not acknowledge the threat posed by radical Islamic extremists. (In fact, he mentioned climate change Monday before he got around to terrorism.) It is un-American to think that the safety of these refugees is more important than the safety of the citizens in our country whom he and countless others swore an oath to protect.

If we don’t have a religious test for compassion, then why does Obama welcome Muslim refugees but turn a cold shoulder to Christians fleeing persecution? CNS News reports, “Of 2,184 Syrian refugees admitted into the U.S. since the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011, only 53 (2.4 percent) have been Christians while 2098 (or 96 percent) have been Muslims, according to State Department statistics updated on Monday.”

All of the terrorist attacks in the Middle East, France and America have been carried out by Islamic extremists who are committed to waging jihad wherever they can. Christians are facing persecution and slaughter, yet their plight goes unrecognized by this administration.

Clearly, not all Muslims are terrorists, but most terrorists are Muslim. So why on earth would we even take the chance to let thousands of un-vetted refugees into our homeland knowing the incredible risk that one or two of them could very well carry out an attack like that in Paris or worse?

Hours before the attack in Paris, Obama boldly proclaimed that he has “contained” the Islamic State. This so called containment policy clearly isn’t working, yet he has the audacity to claim that we can welcome potentially hostile migrants while maintaining our own safety. Containing an enemy doesn’t mean opening your borders to them. It means stopping them from expanding their operations and expanding their influence. It means taking the fight to them on their turf, rather than allowing them to gain a foothold on yours.

National Review’s David French sums it up nicely: “The Obama administration insults our intelligence if it claims we can trust the government’s vetting process. And it insults our character if it pretends that aiding refugees abroad while defeating the enemy that drove so many of them from their homes is a ‘betrayal of our values.’ Americans have big hearts, but we also have brains, and we can certainly discern the difference between generosity and foolishness.”

Finally, the real question is this: Why is Obama burning so much political capital on this issue? First, he’s a narcissist, and opposition usually serves only to make him double down. But second, and more important, he knows if he gives way on Syrians, Republicans will point out that our porous southern border poses a national security threat, which is going to eat into Democrats' appeal with illegal immigrants. His faux immigration strategy is to play the issue for political gain. The political capital he’s investing now is all part of the plan.

Addendum: The Wall Street Journal editorialized, “If Mr. Obama fought the Islamic State with half the vigor with which he delivers moral lectures, he’d find that a much less fearful America would welcome far more refugees.”

SOURCE

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Obamacare critics say high deductibles make insurance ‘unaffordable’

A telling episode: A woman returned to her native Ethiopia, where care is cheaper, to consult a neurologist and seek follow-up care

OH: When President Obama’s landmark health care law ushered in a slew of new insurance options in 2013, the Andersons could not wait to sign up. Roger Anderson, 54, a formerly uninsured construction worker, has a bad back and a bad heart. He and his wife are still paying for his earlier heart surgery and feared another crisis could ruin them.

“This law was going to give people a chance,” said Cassaundra Anderson, 44, a freelance proof reader.

But in April, when Roger Anderson fell while hiking and hurt his shoulder, he discovered, to his dismay, that simply being insured was not enough. The Andersons’ mid-tier plan, which costs them $875 a month, requires them to meet a $7,000 deductible before insurance payments kick in.

“We can’t afford the Affordable Care Act, quite honestly,” said Cassaundra Anderson, whose family canvassed for Obama in their neighborhood, a Republican stronghold outside Cincinnati. “The intention is great, but there is so much wrong. . . . I’m mad.”

The Andersons’ experience echoes that of hundreds of thousands of newly insured Americans facing sticker shock over out-of-pocket costs. Although the law survived two Supreme Court challenges, it could still be on the line in the 2016 presidential election, posing a significant political barrier to Democrats in this critical battleground state, which includes both conservative rural sections of Appalachia and diverse cities.

The problem experienced by the Andersons is particularly acute in Ohio, which has the fourth-largest number of people enrolled in high-deductible insurance plans in the country, after Texas, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, according to America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s trade association based in Washington.

Now that the law’s major provisions are in place, the outcry over cost has prompted Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, to call for changes to Obama’s signature domestic achievement.

“This will be an issue at least one more time in the 2016 election. It could absolutely still hurt Democrats,” said Robert Blendon, a professor of health policy and political analysis at the Harvard School of Public Health. “Polls about the Affordable Care Act have a considerable amount of middle-income people who say either the program has done nothing for them or actually hurt them.”

Governor John Kasich, like other Republicans running for the party’s presidential nomination, blames rising insurance costs on Obama’s 2010 health reform law and has called for its repeal.

Clinton defends the Affordable Care Act on the campaign trail but is pledging to lower out-of-pocket costs including deductibles and making affordable health care a “basic human right.” Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist challenging Clinton for the Democratic nomination, says Obama’s health law does not go far enough and advocates for a “Medicare-for-all” single-payer system instead.

The percentage of Ohioans who view the law unfavorably is higher than in the nation as a whole, especially among independents and Democrats, according to new data from the annual Ohio Health Issues Poll. Nearly half of Ohioans do not like the law, compared with the 42 percent national figure reported by the Kaiser Family Foundation in October.

Nearly 30 percent of people insured through the federal marketplace who had deductibles higher than $1,500 went without needed medical care in 2014 because they could not afford it, according to Families USA, a health care consumer group based in Washington. That includes diagnostic tests, treatments, and follow-up care as well as prescription drugs.

Deductibles have grown six times faster than wages since 2010, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation study. The growing national problem is also reflected in Massachusetts, where a 2015 annual report by the state’s Center for Health Information and Analysis shows that more than half of those enrolled in individual plans faced high deductibles.

“Unfortunately, what we are headed toward now is universal crappy health insurance,” said Dr. Budd Shenkin, a California pediatrician who wrote the American Academy Pediatrics policy on high-deductible plans, which he calls nefarious.

“It’s just not a good deal for people,” he said. The academy last year advised the federal government to restrict such plans to adults because they discourage families from seeking necessary primary care for their children.

The Obama administration, in response to the criticism, acknowledges that high deductibles are an “important issue” but says the problem is part of longstanding insurance trends.

A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services points out that the law, for the first time, caps the out-of-pocket costs families pay to $13,700. It recently introduced an online “cost calculator” that gives those shopping for insurance a fuller picture of their total out-of-pocket costs.

The Affordable Care Act, while providing coverage to millions of previously uninsured Americans, does nothing to turn the tide away from high-deductible plans. The government provides subsidies that lower premiums and out-of-pocket costs for people with incomes below 250 percent of the federal poverty line, individuals making less than $30,000 a year. More than half of those buying insurance through the marketplace receive subsidies to offset copays and deductibles, according to the administration.

But those with more moderate incomes receive no help. Mandated by the law to buy coverage, they most often opt for high-deductible plans as a way to make their monthly premium payments more manageable. And they end up making medical decisions much like they did when they were uninsured, advocates say — by putting off care.

In fact, the growing use and size of deductibles as a way to lower premiums “threatens to undermine the gains Americans have made in coverage since 2014,” according to a September report by The Commonwealth Fund on the affordability of marketplace plans.

Cost concerns have lead tens of thousands of the newly insured to drop their Affordable Care Act plans and opt for free or discounted care at community health clinics. Consumer advocates worry that the numbers will increase as the trend toward high deductibles worsens.

Cassaundra Anderson has been bombarded by a slew of e-mails reminding her to reenroll when the 2016 sign-up period for marketplace plans begins in November. She is not certain the family will re-up. Their premium next year would jump to more than $1,000 a month.

“We’re in the process of looking at going without insurance,” she said, calculating that the family will be better off financially just paying the $2,000 tax penalty for not abiding by the law’s mandate. “What am I even paying these insurance people for? Why should we re-enroll?”

She figures that the amount the couple pays toward their insurance premium could instead go toward paying off her husband’s latest round of medical bills, now tallying $6,700. The mounting debt has Roger Anderson choosing to forgo the twice-weekly physical therapy prescribed by his doctor — and losing muscle mass as a consequence — because he can’t afford the $200-a-month copay. He’s also skipping a follow-up MRI of his back.

Cassaundra Anderson said she still plans on voting for whoever the Democratic nominee for president will be. “Republicans who have fought this law tooth and nail are not going to try to make it better,” she said.

But independent swing voters may not be as forgiving. “If they are having the experience we’re having, they are going to say, ‘This is a lot of doo-doo,’ ” she said.

On a recent afternoon, Laura Torres, a 62-year-old home health aide who is in nursing school, visited a community health clinic tucked into a strip mall 20 minutes from downtown Columbus. This is where she sought care when she was uninsured, paying an affordable sliding scale rate based on her $22,000 yearly income.

Now she visits Whitehall Family Health Center seeking financial — not medical — help. An insurance counselor there helped Torres apply for a government subsidy, lowering her $6,000 deductible to $800. But she says she was better off before having to buy insurance.

“I cannot get anything with this insurance. Nothing,” said Torres, who avoids seeking treatment for her thyroid condition and high blood pressure because of cost. “I just pay my monthly payments, try to take care of myself, go to work, and hope something serious doesn’t happen to me.”

Amete Kahsay, 53, works as a temporary warehouse packer in Columbus. The Affordable Care marketplace is her only option for health insurance. She and her husband, an airport shuttle driver, pay $275 a month for a “bronze” plan with a $13,200 deductible.

Shortly after they signed up for insurance last year, her husband rushed her to the emergency room when she experienced dizziness. The visit, which included a CT scan of her brain, cost $1,700. She paid the charge from her savings, then returned to her native Ethiopia, where care is cheaper, to consult a neurologist and seek follow-up care.

“I support Obamacare. Without it, I wouldn’t have any type of insurance. But I’m not sure it’s worth the money,” said Kahsay, a US citizen who is registered as an independent voter. “Now, unless I get very, very sick, like only if it’s life-threatening, I won’t go to the doctor. I just lay down and take a rest.”

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- with some encouraging news from Poland.

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Comparing Philippians 2:6 and John 1:1

I have put up some further comments on my Scripture Blog showing that both the above texts support the conclusion that Christ was a spirit being but not the creator.

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The Paris attacks were not 'nihilism' but sacred strategy

by Mark Durie

LEADING commentator Janet Daley's article in Saturday's Telegraph ‘The West is at war with a death cult’ stands for everything that is woeful about European elites’ response to Islamic jihad. It is a triumph of religious illiteracy.

The jihadist enemy, she asserts, is utterly unintelligible, so beyond encompassing in ‘coherent, systematic thought’ that no vocabulary can describe it: ‘This is just insanity’, she writes. Because the enemy is ‘hysterical’, lacking 'rational demands', 'negotiable limits,’ or ‘intelligible objectives’ Daley claims it is pointless to subject its actions to any form of historical, social or theological analysis, for no-one should attempt to ‘impose logic on behaviour that is pathological’.

Despite this, Daley then ventures to offer analysis of and explanations for ISIS’ actions, but in doing so she relies upon her own conceptual categories, not those of ISIS. Her explanations therefore fall wide of the mark.

‘Civilians’

Daley writes: ‘We face a violent and highly contagious madness that believes the killing of civilians is a moral act.’  Here she appeals to Western concepts of war, reflected, for example, in the Geneva Convention, which provides detailed principles for the ‘protection of civilian persons’.

Yet the first step in understanding a cultural system alien to one’s own, is to describe it in its own terms.

ISIS does not subscribe to the Geneva Convention.  Its actions and strategies are based upon medieval Islamic laws of jihad, which make no use of the modern Western concept of 'civilian’. They do, however, refer to the category of disbelievers (mushrik or kafir).

ISIS believes that killing disbelievers is a moral act, in accordance, for example, with Sura 9:5 of the Qur’an, which states:‘Fight and kill the idolators (mushrik) wherever you find them'.

 Not nihilism

Daley writes: ‘The enemy has stated explicitly that it does not revere life at all’ and ‘Civilians are not collateral damage in this campaign: their deaths are the whole point.’  She goes on to lament that the latest French attacks lack any purpose, but are ‘carried out for the sheer nihilistic thrill of it’.

The claim that ISIS does not ‘revere life’ seems to refer to any number of statements by Islamic radicals, including an ISIS militant who vowed to ‘fill the streets of Paris with dead bodies’, and boasted that ISIS ‘loves death like you love life’.  This is a theological reference to a series of verses in the Qur’an in which Jews are criticised for desiring life (Sura 2:94-96, 62:6-8).

According to the Qur’an, loving life is a characteristic of infidels (Sura 3:14; 14:3; 75:20; 76:27) because it causes them to disregard the importance of the next life.  The taunt much used by jihadis, ‘We love death like you love life’,  implies that jihadis are bound for paradise while their enemies are hell-bound.

The point of these statements is that Muslims are willing to fight to the death, while their infidel enemies will turn back in battle. This is not about reverence for life, but about who has the will to win. This has nothing to do with nihilism, which is a belief that there are no values, nothing to be loyal to, and no purpose in living. In fact ISIS fighters have strong and clear loyalties and values, alien though they may be to those of Europe.

Daley’s claim that the deaths are ‘the whole point’ is also mistaken. While it is true that the jihadis consider killing infidels a meritorious act, potentially earning the killer a place in paradise, and they consider being killed in battle against infidels a ticket to paradise, in fact the killings do serve a strategic purpose. This is to make infidels afraid, and thereby to weaken their will to resist Islamic dominance.

This strategy is commended by the Qur’an, for example in Sura 8:12, 'I shall cast dread into the hearts of those who disbelieve. So strike above (their) necks and strike (off) all their fingers!', as well as by the successful example of Muhammad in fighting the Jews of Medina, referred to in Sura 33:26-27, ‘He brought down from their fortifications those of the People of the Book who supported them, and cast dread into their hearts. You killed a group (of them), and took captive (another) group. And he caused you to inherit their land, their homes, and their wealth, and a land you had not set foot on.’  A similar passage is Sura 59:2, which ISIS has in fact been quoting in its celebrations of the Paris carnage.

It may seem to Daley that ISIS’ often-stated intention of defeating the West is fanciful, but the point is to understand ISIS, and as far as it is concerned, these deadly attacks are instrumental in weakening the will of infidels and hastening eventual victory.

Daley wonders what possible point these attacks could serve. She speculates:  '… what is the alternative that is being demanded? Sharia law? The subjection of women? An end to liberal democracy? Are any of these things even within the bounds of consideration? What could be accomplished by national self-doubt or criticism at this point, when there is not even a reasonable basis for discussion with the enemy?'

It is hardly a secret that the ultimate goal of ISIS is to bring non-Muslims everywhere  to convert to Islam or live under an Islamic caliphate as dhimmis. Sharia law and the subjection of women are part and parcel of this.

It is odd that Daley laments having no reasonable basis for negotiating with the enemy.  ISIS is not playing by a Western-style negotiating rule book. It is following Muhammad’s instructions to his followers to offer three choices to infidels: conversion, surrender, or the sword.  Bin Laden has explained that the West’s rejection of this framework is the whole reason for its conflict with what he calls ‘the authority of Islam’:

    “Our talks with the infidel West and our conflict with them ultimately revolve around one issue; one that demands our total support, with power and determination, with one voice, and it is: Does Islam, or does it not, force people by the power of the sword to submit to its authority corporeally if not spiritually? Yes. There are only three choices in Islam: [1] either willing submission [conversion]; or [2] payment of the jizya, through physical, though not spiritual, submission to the authority of Islam; or [3] the sword, for it is not right to let him [an infidel] live. The matter is summed up for every person alive: Either submit, or live under the suzerainty of Islam, or die.”

 It may seem unimaginable to European elites that ISIS is fighting for the goal of the surrender or conversion of Europe, but ISIS is thinking in time frames which extend to centuries, and their forebears conquered vast territories using such tactics.  A final act of conquest can be preceeded by decades, or even centuries, of military raids.

While killing is currently the main mode of ISIS’ attacks inside the West, if they could they would use other tactics as well, such as taking booty and slaves or destroying infrastructure, as they have been doing in Syria and Iraq.

Grievances

Daley claims it is pointless to argue with people who have no reasonable grievances, for ‘the French people did not deserve this, just as Americans did not deserve 9/11’.  However the important question is how ISIS sees its own motivations.  Their ideology teaches them that infidels deserve death, simply by virtue of their unbelief.

This has nothing to do with France’s history of colonialism or its treatment of Muslim minorities.  ISIS needed no appeal to grievances to justify killing and enslaving Yazidis in Iraq and Syria, so why should they view the people of France any differently?  Their objection to Europeans is that they are not Muslims, and their objection to European states is that they do not implement sharia law.

Irresponsible

It is irresponsible and dangerous to claim that a tenacious enemy is insane and incomprehensible. To refuse to acknowledge the ideology of ISIS, and to deny its relevance is tantamount to a death-wish.

Like so many other revivalist Islamic groups, ISIS believes that it will be successful if it stays faithful to its divinely-mandated goals and tactics.  It believes the nations of Europe are morally corrupt, weak infidels who love life too much to fight a battle to the death with stern Muslim soldiers who have set their hearts on paradise.  It believes Europe stands on the wrong side of history.

To combat this ideology it is necessary for Europe to prove ISIS wrong on all counts. It must show strength, not weakness. It must have confidence in its cultural and spiritual identity. It must be willing to fight for its survival. It must show that it believes in itself enough to fight for its future. It must defend its borders.  It must act like someone who intends to win an interminably long war against an implacable foe.

There is still much that European states could do to defeat ISIS.  They could, for example, inflict catastrophic military failure upon it as a powerful counter-argument to its theology of success.  This will not deliver decisive, final victory against jihadism, but it will make the supremacist claims of ISIS less credible and hurt its recruitment.  Islam’s laws of war allow Muslims to suspend their battle with infidels temporarily if there is no immediate prospect of victory and the risks to their cause are too great.

SOURCE

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The elite will block any serious reaction to the Paris Massacre



The murder of some 127 innocents in Paris by a jihadi gang on Friday has again shocked the French and led to another round of solidarity, soul searching, and anger. In the end, however, Islamist violence against Westerners boils down to two questions: How much will this latest atrocity turn public opinion? And how much will it further spur the Establishment to deny reality?

As these questions suggest, the people and the professionals are moving in opposite directions, the former to the right, the latter to the left. In the end, this clash much reduces the impact of such events on policy.

Public opinion moves against Islamists specifically and Islam more generally when the number of deaths are large enough. America's three thousand dead on 9/11 stands out as by far the largest mortality but many other countries have had their equivalent – the Bali bombings for Australia, the railroad bombing for Spain, the Beslan school massacre for Russia, the transportation bombings for Britain.

Will the Establishment continue to pretend that Islam has no role in terrorist violence?

Sheer numbers are not the only consideration. Other factors can multiply the impact of an assault, making it almost the political equivalent of mass carnage: (1) The renown of those attacked, such as Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands and the Charlie Hebdo office in France. (2) The professional status of the victim, such as soldiers or police. (3) High-profile circumstances, such as the Boston Marathon bombing.

In addition to the over 27,000 attacks globally connected to Islam since 9/11, or more than 5 per day (as counted by TheReligionOfPeace.com), a huge increase in illegal immigration from the Middle East recently exacerbated feelings of vulnerability and fear. It's a one-way street, with not a single soul ever heard to announce, "I used to worry about Islamism but I don't any more."

These cases make more Westerners worried about Islam and related topics from the building of minarets to female infibulation. Overall, a relentless march rightwards is underway. Surveys of European attitudes show 60 to 70 percent of voters expressing these concerns. Populist individuals like Geert Wilders of the Netherlands and parties like the Sweden Democrats are surging in the polls.

But when it comes to the Establishment – politicians, the police, the press, and the professors – the unrelenting violence has a contrary effect. Those charged with interpreting the attacks live in a bubble of public denial (what they say privately is another matter) in which they feel compelled to pretend that Islam has no role in the violence, out of concern that to recognize it would cause even more problems.

These 4-P professionals bald-facedly feign belief in a mysterious "violent extremist" virus that seems to afflict only Muslims, prompting them to engage in random acts of barbaric violence. Of the many preposterous statements by politicians, my all-time favorite is what Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, said about the Charlie Hebdo jihadis: "They're about as Muslim as I am."

This defiance of common sense has survived each atrocity and I predict that it will also outlast the Paris massacre. Only a truly massive loss of life, perhaps in the hundreds of thousands, will force the professionals to back off their deeply ingrained pattern of denying an Islamic component in the spate of attacks.

That pattern has the very consequential effect of shutting out the fears of ordinary voters, whose views thereby have negligible impact on policy. Worries about Shari'a, rape gangs, exotic diseases, and bloodbaths are dismissed with charges of "racism" and "Islamophobia," as though name-calling addresses these real issues.

More surprising yet, the professionals respond to the public's move to the right by themselves moving to the left, encouraging more immigration from the Middle East, instituting more "hate speech" codes to suppress criticism of Islam, and providing more patronage to Islamists. This pattern affects not just Establishment figures of the Left but more strikingly also of the Right (such as Angela Merkel of Germany); only Eastern European leaders such as Hungary's Viktor Orbán permit themselves to speak honestly about the real problems.

Eventually, to be sure, voters' views will make themselves heard, but decades later and more weakly than democratically should have been the case.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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More on Philippians 2:6

My post on Philippians 2:6 attracted some correspondence from Christians so I have put up some further comments on my Scripture Blog.

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How America Failed to Keep the Republic

The story, whether true or not, is that after the Constitution was adopted in closed proceedings at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Ben Franklin was asked on the street what form of government was created. He replied, “A republic -- if you can keep it.”

Through the creation of the “Administrative State,” with vast bureaucracies violating the separation of powers in ways unaccountable to the people and the Constitution itself, America has failed to keep the republican form of government created by the Founders.

Former Reagan administration lawyer Charles Cooper has penned a must-read essay, “Confronting the Administrative State,” which in terms of brilliance in describing the root causes plaguing America’s governance, ranks with Angelo Codevilla’s “America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution.”

Cooper’s essay describes how America has failed to keep the republic because the constitutional structure created by Franklin and his fellow Founders is no longer the law of the land. The Administrative State “has become a sovereign power unto itself, an imperium in imperio regulating virtually every dimension of our lives. Its nearly 450 agencies are manned by legions of bureaucrats, now numbering almost 2.7 million,” writes Cooper.

Unlike the frequent violations of the Constitution through legislation or executive orders that may be reversed by future Congresses or presidents, the Administrative State has become an institutionalized violation of the constitutional structure itself.

Instead of the representative branch of government making laws, a separate executive branch enforcing laws, and a neutral judiciary adjudicating disputes -- and enforcing the rule of law on government itself -- the republican structure of government has been displaced by the Administrative State.  No longer are the powers of government separate.

Congress has delegated lawmaking functions to bureaucrats; bureaucrats have usurped the power to adjudicate disputes; and courts now defer to bureaucrats in interpreting the law. This is exactly contrary to the purposes of the Constitution, and has been a “fundamental transformation” of American government starting decades before Barack Obama ever uttered the words.

Citing Federalist Papers such as James Madison’s No. 51, Cooper explains how the separation of powers was designed to create conflict among the branches of government, which was “admitted on all hands to be essential to the preservation of liberty.” Instead of “ambition . . . [being] made to counteract ambition,” the Administrative State grew under a ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ approach among the three branches of government.

The principal villains in the destruction of the republic are not the electorate or those whom they elected, although elected officials clearly share the blame. It has been the courts, which time after time since the 1930s refused to be the bulwark for liberty by preserving the separation of powers. The courts have dismantled the constitutional structure by yielding powers to the Administrative State in ways not authorized by the Constitution. By conceding to the accretions of power within the Administrative State, the courts have institutionalized violations of the Constitution, and replaced its carefully planned structure with the Leviathan.

The other villain is Woodrow Wilson and his progressive roadmap of transplanting the Constitution by giving government officials “large powers and unhampered discretion.”

The lonely hero in Cooper’s essay, who seems to be holding his finger in the dike against total transformation away from a constitutional republic, is Justice Clarence Thomas. In the past term at the Supreme Court:

…four opinions authored by Justice Clarence Thomas…call into question the constitutionality of the massive and largely unaccountable bureaucracy that we commonly refer to as the administrative state. In bold and clear prose, Justice Thomas explained how the basic principles of our Constitution's separation of powers are incompatible with the system of bureaucratic rule that took root in the Progressive era and now reaches into virtually every realm of American life.

Cooper notes Justice Thomas’ reliance on the brilliant scholarship of Philip Hamburger, whose book Is Administrative Law Unlawful? has exposed the flawed, even unlawful, bases of the current Administrative State.

I would add two thoughts to Cooper’s brilliant analysis.

The power given to administrative agencies to issue their own warrants for papers, emails and other private property without probable cause or oath and affirmation before neutral judges has created a police-state effect. “Administrative subpoenas” are judge-less warrants. They are not only institutionalized violations of the Fourth Amendment, but are used as blunt-force instruments to create policy and silence critics of government through extortive concessions by their targets.

Secondly, the destruction of our republican structure of government at the federal level has trickled down into the states, which to varying degrees have adopted the Administrative State methods of the federal government. States themselves have a constitutional obligation under Article IV, section 4 to follow a republican form of government, yet many states have transplanted administrative discretion for the constitutional rule of law.

Opponents of a constitutional convention will find fault with Cooper’s recommendation for one, but that proposed solution should not distract from anyone’s appreciation of how his analysis of the problem shows the roots go beyond merely a solution through the ballot box. The destruction of America’s constitutional republic has become institutionalized, and may be beyond cure by even an army of constitutional conservative legislators.

Cooper’s is a must-read essay for political commentators, conservative elected officials, and anyone who is serious about trying to understand the sad state of how America is governed today in violation of the Constitution.

 SOURCE

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Paris attacks: fall of Rome should be a warning to the West

Niall Ferguson, a Harvard historian, says that Europe today is as decadent as the late Roman empire

I am not going to repeat what you have already read or heard. I am not going to say that what happened in Paris on Friday night was unprecedented horror, for it was not. I am not going to say that the world stands with France, for it is a hollow phrase. Nor am I going to applaud Francois Hollande’s pledge of “pitiless” vengeance, for I do not believe it. I am, instead, going to tell you that this is exactly how civilisations fall.

Here is how Edward Gibbon described the Goths’ sack of Rome in August 410AD: “ ... In the hour of savage licence, when every ­passion was inflamed, and every restraint was removed ... a cruel slaughter was made of the ­Romans; and … the streets of the city were filled with dead bodies ... Whenever the Barbarians were provoked by opposition, they ­extended the promiscuous massacre to the feeble, the innocent, and the helpless …”

Now, does that not describe the scenes we witnessed in Paris on Friday night? True, Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, represented Rome’s demise as a slow burn. Gibbon covered more than 1400 years of history. The causes he identified ranged from the personality disorders of individual emperors to the power of the Praetorian Guard and the rise of Sassanid Persia. Decline shaded into fall, with monotheism acting as a kind of imperial dry rot.

For many years, more modern historians of “late antiquity” ­tended to agree with Gibbon about the gradual nature of the process. Indeed, some went further, arguing “decline” was an anachronistic term, like the word “barbarian”.

Far from declining and falling, they insisted, the Roman Empire had imperceptibly merged with the Germanic tribes, producing a multicultural post-imperial idyll that deserved a more flattering label than “Dark Ages”.

Recently, however, a new generation of historians has raised the possibility the process of Roman decline was in fact sudden — and bloody — rather than smooth.

For Bryan Ward-Perkins, what happened was “violent seizure ... by barbarian invaders”. The end of the Roman west, he writes in The Fall of Rome (2005), “witnessed horrors and dislocation of a kind I sincerely hope never to have to live through; and it destroyed a complex civilisation, throwing the ­inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times”.

In five decades the population of Rome itself fell by three-quarters. Archaeological evidence from the late 5th century — inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer coins, smaller cattle — shows the benign influence of Rome dimin­ished rapidly in the rest of western Europe.

“The end of civilisation”, in Ward-Perkins’s phrase, came within a single ­generation.

Peter Heather’s TheFall of the Roman Empire emphasises the ­disastrous effects not just of mass migration, but also organised vio­lence: first the westward shift of the Huns of central Asia and then the Germanic irruption into Roman territory.

In his reading, the Visigoths who settled in Aquitaine and the Vandals who conquered Carthage were attracted to the Roman ­Empire by its wealth, but were ­enabled to seize that wealth by the arms acquired and skills learnt from the Romans ­themselves.

“For the adventurous,” writes Heather, “the Roman Empire, while being a threat to their existence, also presented an unprecedented opportunity to prosper ... Once the Huns had pushed large numbers of (alien groups) across the frontier, the Roman state ­became its own worst enemy. Its military power and financial sophistication both hastened the process whereby streams of incomers became coherent forces capable of carving out kingdoms from its own body politic.”

Uncannily similar processes are destroying the European Union today, though few of us want to recognise them for what they are. Like the Roman Empire in the early 5th century, Europe has allowed its defences to crumble. As its wealth has grown, so its military prowess has shrunk, along with its self-belief. It has grown decadent in its malls and stadiums. At the same time, it has opened its gates to outsiders who have coveted its wealth without ren­ouncing their ancestral faith.

The distant shock to this weakened edifice has been the Syrian civil war, though it has been a catalyst as much as a direct cause for the great Volkerwanderung of 2015.

As before, they have come from all over the imperial periphery — North Africa, the Levant, South Asia — but this time they have come in their millions, not in mere tens of thousands. To be sure, most have come hoping only for a better life. Things in their own countries have become just good enough economically for them to afford to leave and just bad enough politically for them to risk leaving.

But they cannot stream northwards and westwards without some of that political malaise coming with them. As Gibbon saw, convinced monotheists pose a grave threat to a secular empire.

It is doubtless true to say that the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Europe are not violent. But it is also true the majority hold views not easily reconciled with the principles of our liberal democracies, including our novel notions about sexual equality and tolerance not merely of religious diversity but of nearly all sexual proclivities. And it is thus remarkably easy for a violent minority to acquire their weapons and prepare their assaults on civilisation within these avowedly peace-loving ­communities.

I do not know enough about the 5th century to be able to quote Romans who described each new act of barbarism as unprece­dented, even when it had happened multiple times before; or who issued pious calls for solidarity after the fall of Rome, even when standing together meant falling together; or who issued empty threats of pitiless revenge, even when all they intended to do was to strike a melodramatic ­posture.

I do know that 21st-century ­Europe has itself to blame for the mess it is now in. Surely, nowhere in the world has devoted more ­resources to the study of history than modern Europe did.

When I went up to Oxford more than 30 years ago, it was taken for granted that in the first term I would study Gibbon. It did no good. We learnt a lot of nonsense to the effect that nationalism was a bad thing, nation states worse and ­empires the worst things of all.

“Romans before the fall,” wrote Ward-Perkins, “were as certain as we are today that their world would continue for ever substantially unchanged. They were wrong. We would be wise not to ­repeat their complacency.”

Poor, poor Paris. Killed by ­complacency.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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