Tag Archives: Terrorism

News

How serious is Obama about stopping the persecution of Christians abroad?

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Consider this article from National Review. (H/T Muddling Towards Maturity)

Excerpt:

Connect these dots: In Nigeria this week, Muslim youths set fire to a church, killing more than two dozen Christian worshippers. In Egypt, Coptic Christians have been suffering increased persecution including, this month, a drive-by shooting outside a church in which seven people were murdered. In Pakistan, Christian churches were bombed over Christmas. In Turkey, authorities have been closing Christian churches, monasteries, and schools, and seizing Christian properties. Recently, churches in Malaysia have been attacked, too, provoked by this grievance: Christians inside the churches were referring to God as “Allah.” How dare infidels use the same name for the Almighty as do Muslims!

In response to all this, Western journalists, academics, diplomats, and politicians mainly avert their eyes and hold their tongues. They pretend there are no stories to be written, no social pathologies to be documented, no actions to be taken. They focus instead on Switzerland’s vote against minarets and anything Israel might be doing to prevent terrorists from claiming additional victims.

[…]Not so long ago, the Broader Middle East was a diverse region. Lebanon had a Christian majority for centuries but that ended around 1990 — the result of years of civil war among the country’s religious and ethnic communities. The Christian population of Turkey has diminished substantially in recent years. Islamists have driven Christians out of Bethlehem and other parts of the West Bank; almost all Christians have fled Gaza since Hamas’s takeover.

Muddling has some pictures of a protest by Egyptian Coptic Christians in front of the United Nations building.

CNS News notes that Obama has yet to appoint an ambassador for international religious freedom.

Excerpt:

One year after President Obama took office, the administration’s top international religious freedom post remains empty, at a time when a wave of religious persecution is troubling veteran campaigners.

“President Obama has not yet named an ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom,” a State Department press officer confirmed by phone late Wednesday.

The Christian advocacy organization Open Doors USA launched a petition Wednesday urging Obama to appoint an ambassador immediately, saying that leaving the position unfilled violated U.S. law.

“By not having an ambassador-at-large for the past 12 months, the U.S. has failed to demonstrate the importance of religious freedom,” said advocacy director Lindsay Vessey.

The liberties of Christians and other persecuted religious minorities abroad must not be a real big blip on his secular leftist radar.

Videos

MUST-SEE: Marc Thiessen defends water-boarding against Christiane Amanpour

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The debate spans two videos. (H/T Newsbusters via ECM)

Part 1:

Part 2:

The transcript is here.

Here is a good part:

THIESSEN: Excuse me, Philippe. I thought you said we’re not going to interrupt each other. Let me — it does. Let me tell you something. We – – we waterboarded in the CIA — the CIA waterboarded three terrorists, just three. Nobody waterboarded in Guantanamo. You know who else the U.S. government has waterboarded? Tens of thousands of American servicemembers during their SERE training.

We do not pull off their fingernails. We do not electrocute them with cattle prods. We do not pour hot oil down their nostrils or other forms of interrogation or do the things that were done to them in S-21. But we do waterboard them.

Do you not think, if waterboarding was torture, that one of those American servicemembers would have complained to his congressman, there would have been congressional hearings, and we would have — and it would have been banned by law? If we had been pulling off their fingernails, that would have happened.

And better still:

THIESSEN: But why would we give them Geneva Convention protections? They don’t merit Geneva Conventions protections. They’re terrorists.

The — the Geneva Conventions — this is one of the biggest myths about the Geneva Convention — it is not designed to govern the treatment of prisoners of war. It is designed to protect civilians, to get people to follow the laws of war. So if you give the same protections to someone who violates the laws of war as someone who follows them, you completely undermine the Geneva Conventions.

But the point is, these techniques, as applied by the CIA, produced intelligence that stopped a terrorist attack to blow up our consulate in Karachi, to blow up our Marine camp in Djibouti, to blow — for Al Qaida, who was — they were planning to hijack an airplane and fly it into Heathrow Airport and — and buildings in downtown London — I hope nowhere near your offices, Philippe — and they were planning to fly an airplane into Library Tower in — in — in Los Angeles.

So my question to Philippe is, which of these attacks would you prefer we hadn’t stopped?

This debate really shows the ignorance of national security issues on radically leftist propaganda networks like CNN. Facts are irrelevant to the left. They’re ignorant of the way the world really works, and their job is to act as an arm of leftist political parties. Republicans are grown-ups and Democrats are children. Children who are going to get us killed because they are dangerously unqualified to protect us from terrorist attacks. In 2010, we need to vote as many children as possible out of office.

Commentary

Contrasting Muslim martyrs and Christian martyrs

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Claudia Rosett

Story from Forbes magazine, by Claudia Rosett. (H/T Muddling Towards Maturity)

Excerpt:

This past Christmas Day brought us the stories of two young men, both willing to martyr themselves for their beliefs, but in ways and for visions so utterly different that their tales might serve as a parable for the defining struggles of our time.

One, as you surely know, was the underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a wealthy young Muslim from a prominent Nigerian family. Following his embrace of radical Islam, he tried to sacrifice himself–allegedly–in a botched attempt to sow terror and death by blowing up an American airliner packed with 289 other people, en route to Detroit. Having entered American air space decked out as a suicide bomber, he is now availing himself of U.S. constitutional rights, granted to him by the Obama Administration, to plead not guilty to criminal charges.

The other martyr, in stark contrast, was a 28-year-old Christian missionary, Robert Park. An American of Korean descent, Park offered himself up peacefully, on Christmas Day, for the cause of life and liberty for others. He went to northeast China, and from there walked across the frozen Tumen River into North Korea. Witnesses told reporters that as he went, he called out, in Korean, messages of God’s love, as well as “I am an American citizen.” He took with him a letter to North Korean tyrant Kim Jong-il, asking Kim to open his country and shut down his prison camps.

Are all religions basically the same? Are the beliefs different? Do different beliefs result in different actions? Does it make sense to equate Islam with Christianity? What do people do when they are fully committed to their religion? These are two different versions of full commitment. Two different versions of full commitment.

Park’s final interview with Reuters is here.