Tag Archives: Barack Obama

News

Christians celebrate the end of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government

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North Africa and Middle East Political Map
North Africa and Middle East Political Map

CNS News explains how the downfall of Obama’s Muslim Brotherhood allies is being greeted with joy by Egypt’s Christian community.

Excerpt:

Father Rafik Greiche, head of the press office of the Egyptian Catholic Bishops’ Conference, declared that the ouster of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood supporters on July 3 was “a joyous day for Christians.” “The ousting of Morsi and the political new beginning is a joyous day for us Christians in Egypt and for all Egyptians. We hope that we will not be excluded from the political process that lies before us,” he said during a talk last Thursday with the Catholic charity, Aid to the Church in Need (ACN).

[…]Fr. Greiche made a point to note that what happened in Egypt was not a coup d’état. Rather, he said, “the army carried out the will of the people. They expressed this unequivocally over the last few days through millions of signatures and massive demonstrations in Cairo and throughout the whole country.”

“A number of western media are now presenting it as a coup d’état. But a putsch happens when officers take power and act without the endorsement of the people. But this is exactly what did not happen in Egypt yesterday. Moreover, the army wanted to prevent the bloodshed the Muslim brothers were threatening. This is why they took action.”

[…]A 2012 State Department report noted increased violence towards Egyptian Christians following the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 and the election of Muslim Brotherhood-backed Morsi a year ago.

“The government generally failed to prevent, investigate, or prosecute crimes against members of religious minorities, including Coptic Christians, which fostered a climate of impunity. In some cases, authorities reacted slowly or with insufficient resolve when mobs attacked Christians and their property,” according to the State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report.

I think this story beautifully illustrates why Christians should care about politics and foreign policy. The truth is that there are forces in places throughout the world that are hostile to Judeo-Christian values. Good foreign policy that promotes economic freedom and freedom of religion should be the cause of every informed Christian. One of the reasons why the Muslim Brotherhood, a group linked to terrorism, is doing so well is because Egypt’s economy is doing so poorly.

Investors Business Daily thinks that the best way to bring freedom to Egypt is by bring prosperity to Egypt – the same way that freedom was brought to Chile in the past.

Take a look:

Like with Morsi, Chile in 1973 was ruled by a so-called democrat, Salvador Allende, who after barely winning election revealed he didn’t intend to govern democratically. A Marxist, Allende moved fast to ram through radical, Cuban-style “reforms” on an unwilling public.

Allende foreshadowed Morsi, demolishing political institutions, trampling the free press, disrespecting minority rights, ignoring the constitution, disregarding the separation of powers, trashing property rights and ruining the economy. Also, Allende was in thrall to a failed and inhuman foreign ideology — communism — just as Morsi was to Islamofascism. In both cases, the only exit was a military coup.

Had Chilean military commander Augusto Pinochet simply handed the country back to “democracy” without changing the root causes of the turmoil and tyranny, the cycle would have had a replay.

But he didn’t. He used his military government as an incubator for free-market changes, transforming his country into not just Latin America’s best economy, but also Latin America’s most durable democracy. Pinochet — who stepped down dutifully after 17 years upon losing a referendum — understood that economic freedom had to precede political freedom. He employed a brilliant group of mostly University of Chicago-educated young Chilean economists, known as the Chicago Boys, to transform the society by cleaning out thousands of weedlike laws choking Chile’s economy — on labor, mining, currency, fishing, vineyards, startups and pensions.

They made the central bank independent and instituted hard-core fiscal discipline that has left the country debt-free and pushed its credit rating toward triple A.

Thousands of businesses were freed to open and operate without thickets of regulations — resulting in the spate of Chilean products now seen in America’s supermarkets: wine, fruit, fish.

They signed free-trade pacts with 60 countries to expand the reach of their tiny market to a global one — the better to attract foreign investment.

And in what economist Milton Friedman called “the crown jewel” of these reforms, Chile’s 30-year-old Labor Minister Jose Pinera offered Chileans a choice of public or private pensions — making each worker a minicapitalist with a stake in the system — and giving the country a vast pool of capital to develop the country.

Right now, frankly, this is what Egypt needs — a free-market economy that enables it citizens to matter.

America now pushes for political freedom before the economic kind. It did this Iraq and now in Egypt, creating weak or failed democracies. In 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she was getting calls from Egyptians during the Arab Spring asking how to replicate Chile’s reforms — and we’ve heard nothing since.

But the Chilean example shows that economic freedom is what makes political freedom possible .

Fox News recalls why the Muslim Brotherhood got into power in the first place.

Excerpt:

Millions protesting in the streets. Another leader deposed. Dozens killed in violent clashes, including at least 51 people slain on Monday. Obama’s Mideast policy is in shambles. Nowhere is that more obvious that Egypt, which just held its second revolution in as many years.

Egypt isn’t just a problem. It’s a full-fledged disaster, hand-delivered to us by President Obama. He sabotaged our ally Hosni Mubarak more than a year ago, then defended that strategy during his reelection campaign.

[…]Back in February 2011, Obama first said “change must take place” and about a week later outright called for Mubarak to go. Given the U.S.’s financial influence on Egypt, that effectively destroyed a key ally.

[…]When asked during the presidential debates in October if he regretted abandoning Mubarak, Obama was clear: “I don’t because I think that America has to stand with democracy.” He then listed several areas that he expected the new government to push including taking “responsibility for protecting religious minorities,” recognizing “the rights of women,” abiding “by their treaty with Israel,” and “developing their own economy.”

With the exception of Israel, Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood failed at the rest and now Obama is standing by them. Christians have been attacked, women raped and terrorized, and the Egyptian economy is a disaster. Fuel shortages are common and half the population is living on less than $2 a day.

The Muslim Brotherhood has shown itself to be radical and dangerous. One of the last straws for the Egyptians was apparently when Morsi called for a holy war in Syria in support of the Sunni Muslims against the Shia Muslim leadership.

The Brotherhood even released a bizarre, anti-Semitic statement about Morsi’s replacement, saying, “A Jew in Egypt’s seat of power.”

Now that same military Obama trusted last time around has rejected Morsi’s anti-American, radical Islamist government. The Obama response? He has ordered a review of the funding we send to Egypt. He even supported keeping the Brotherhood in the government.

What Christians should have done in 2008 and 2012 is voted against Obama, because apologizing to Muslim dictators and Communist dictators is not going to spread the prosperity and liberty we need in order to have world peace. Christians need to think hard about the role that foreign policy plays in a Christian worldview. I think this is especially important for Christian women, who in my experience struggle to understand how foreign policy works. We need to think about the way the world works in order to achieve good. Achieving good is not the same thing as being liked or feeling good. We want to achieve good, and that takes knowledge of how the world really works.

Commentary

Charles Krauthammer explains why Obama isn’t going to be able to fix global warming

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In the liberal Washington Post.

Excerpt:

Global temperatures have been flat for 16 years — a curious time to unveil a grand, hugely costly, socially disruptive anti-warming program.

[…]For the sake of argument, nonetheless, let’s concede that global warming is precisely what Obama thinks it is. Then answer this: What in God’s name is his massive new regulatory and spending program — which begins with a war on coal and ends with billions in more subsidies for new Solyndras — going to do about it?

The United States has already radically cut carbon dioxide emissions — more than any country on earth since 2006, according to the International Energy Agency. Emissions today are back down to 1992 levels.

And yet, at the same time, global emissions have gone up. That’s because — surprise! — we don’t control the energy use of the other 96 percent of humankind.

At the heart of Obama’s program are EPA regulations that will make it impossible to open any new coal plant and will systematically shut down existing plants. “Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they’re having a war on coal,” explained one of Obama’s climate advisers. “On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.”

Net effect: tens of thousands of jobs killed, entire states impoverished. This at a time of chronically and crushingly high unemployment, slow growth, jittery markets and deep economic uncertainty.

But that’s not the worst of it. This massive self-sacrifice might be worthwhile if it did actually stop global warming and save the planet. What makes the whole idea nuts is that it won’t. This massive self-inflicted economic wound will have no effect on climate change.

The have-nots are rapidly industrializing. As we speak, China and India together are opening one new coal plant every week. We can kill U.S. coal and devastate coal country all we want, but the industrializing Third World will more than make up for it. The net effect of the Obama plan will simply be dismantling the U.S. coal industry for shipping abroad.

To think we will get these countries to cooperate is sheer fantasy. We’ve been negotiating climate treaties for 20 years and gotten exactly nowhere. China, India and the other rising and modernizing countries point out that the West had a 150-year industrial head start that made it rich. They are still poor. And now, just as they are beginning to get rich, we’re telling them to stop dead in their tracks?

Fat chance. Obama imagines he’s going to cajole China into a greenhouse-gas emissions reduction that will slow its economy, increase energy costs, derail industrialization and risk enormous social unrest. This from a president who couldn’t even get China to turn over one Edward Snowden to U.S. custody.

Now previously I wrote about how there hasn’t been any global warming in the last 16 years. I linked to the New York Times saying that, and to Reuters saying that. So everyone who isn’t a flat-Earther agrees that there has been no global warming in 16 years – those are the facts. This is just Obama’s attempt to change the subject now that everyone knows how badly he’s been screwing up on foreign policy and with the economy.

Commentary

Who killed marriage? A look at the history of gay marriage activism

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From National Review, a reminder from Ed Whelan on which political party pushed for the redefinition of marriage.

Excerpt:

In 1996, defenders of marriage respond to judicial mischief against marriage by drafting and proposing the Defense of Marriage Act. DOMA wins overwhelming majorities in both Houses of Congress—85 to 14 in the Senate and 342 to 67 in the House. Among its supporters are many strong advocates of gay rights, including President Clinton, who signs DOMA into law, and then-senator Joe Biden.

This modest measure merely reaffirms and makes crystal clear what Congress had always meant by the term marriage in provisions of federal law: a male-female union. DOMA doesn’t intrude at all on a state’s authority to regulate marriage under state law. It doesn’t nullify or prohibit any marriages, or in any other respect preempt the operation of state law. On the contrary, it leaves the states free to define, or redefine, marriage as they please.

Initial litigation attacks against DOMA fail. But then President Obama is elected. First, the Obama administration, with the complicity of then-Solicitor General Elena Kagan, actively sabotages its purported defense of DOMA. Then, on the flimsiest of pretexts, it completely abandons its duty to defend DOMA and aggressively attacks DOMA. (See Part IV of my House testimony on the “First” proposition and the remainder of it on the latter.) The Supreme Court ends up invalidating DOMA in an opinion by Justice Kennedy that, in the course of breaking new ground, smears supporters of DOMA as mean-spirited bigots. To top off the farce, Kagan provides the decisive fifth vote.

The battle for marriage in California displays a similar pattern. In 2000, California voters adopt Proposition 22 to affirm that marriage in California remains what it has always been—the union of a man and a woman. In May 2008, the state supreme court, in a novel opinion and by a 4-3 vote, strikes down Proposition 22 as supposedly violative of the state constitution. Marriage supporters respond with Prop 8, which the voters of California adopt in November 2008. Intense and vicious bullying of supporters of Prop 8 ensues.

Proponents of same-sex marriage then run to their favorite federal courthouse to challenge Prop 8 on federal constitutional grounds. They draw as the judge in the case Vaughn Walker, who proceeds to engage in what is probably the most egregious course of misconduct ever by a federal district judge (and who discloses only after his retirement from the bench that he is in a long-term same-sex relationship and thus was ruling on his own right to marry his same-sex partner). The Ninth Circuit ruling on appeal, which also holds Prop. 8 to be unconstitutional, is written by notorious liberal activist Stephen Reinhardt. Judge Reinhardt’s wife, Ramona Ripston, directed an ACLU affiliate that filed briefs in support of the Prop. 8 challengers in the same case and publicly rejoiced over Judge Walker’s ruling. Yet Judge Reinhardt somehow refuses to disqualify himself from deciding the appeal.

As reprehensible is the unprecedented refusal of California officials to defend Prop 8—a refusal that ultimately leads five members of the Supreme Court (including Kagan, the decisive vote once again) to rule that the Court has no jurisdiction over the case.

So Obama’s selection of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, a known opponent of marriage, was decisive. She was confirmed to the court in 2010, so you might expect all the church-attending people who supported Obama to not vote for him again in 2012. I wrote about her pro-abortion views and pro-gay-agenda views in 2010, so we all had the opportunity to realize what Obama believed by nominating Kagan. But something tells me that the church people who voted for Obama in 2008 just went ahead and voted for him a second time in 2012. Because they were not interested in his record at all. They were moved by shallowness and appearances.

One thing that I would like to say to people who attend church, but who voted for gay marriage activists. The Bibles in the pews are there for a reason. If you formulate your decision on how to vote without it, then that is not authentic Christianity. You should not vote without reading evidence from research (e.g. – scientific research like the Regnerus study) to confirm the Bible and apply the Bible. I don’t think that God is pleased with people who disregard his Word and the evidence that confirms it. You are not here to be influenced by Hollywood or by public schools. You are here to know God and to puzzle these moral questions out using evidence.