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January 2017

Soros And MasterCard Join Forces To Profit From Immigration The radical billionaire helped create the immigration crisis; now he wants to reap the rewards. Matthew Vadum

Radical currency speculator George Soros is scheming to profit from the illegal immigration crises in the United States and the European Union that he was instrumental in creating.

Soros traffics in revolution and human misery. His devious business deals have brought the financial systems of the United Kingdom and Malaysia to their knees. Soros helped finance the 1989 “Velvet Revolution” in then-Czechoslovakia. He acknowledged having orchestrated coups in Croatia, Georgia, Slovakia, and Yugoslavia.

Soros hates America. “The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States,” he has said. Soros praises Communist China effusively and has said the totalitarian nation—which cuts babies in unauthorized pregnancies from the wombs of their mothers, tortures and kills religious dissenters, and runs over eminent domain resisters with steam-rollers—has “a better-functioning government than the United States.” In the U.S. he has financed the violent, politically destabilizing Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements.

Now the preeminent funder of border-busting campaigns in the U.S. and overseas has entered into a partnership with credit card giant MasterCard Inc. to create something called Humanity Ventures.

In recent years Soros has focused on making grants through his Open Society Foundations to various nonprofits, but this new project has for-profit goals.

“Humanity Ventures is intended to be profitable so as to stimulate involvement from other businesspeople,” Soros and MasterCard said in a joint press release.

The claimed objective is to make the lives of “migrants” better through spending on education, health care, and economic development.

“Migrants are often forced into lives of despair in their host communities because they cannot gain access to financial, healthcare and government services,” they said, ignoring the veritable minefield of taxpayer-funded assistance available to illegal aliens in the U.S.

“Our potential investment in this social enterprise, coupled with MasterCard’s ability to create products that serve vulnerable communities, can show how private capital can play a constructive role in solving social problems.”

Any profit Soros and his billionaire buddies in the left-wing donors’ consortium, the Democracy Alliance, extract from the operations of Humanity Ventures can be used to fund more projects aimed at destroying Western culture, rule of law, individual rights and limited government. Perhaps the money can be used to finance the future presidential runs of Keith Ellison and Chelsea Clinton.

This new venture comes as countries like Soros’s native Hungary and Macedonia are threatening to kick his operations out.

Anti-Trump Protesters Spat on Gold Star Families Daniel Greenfield

Remember when the media briefly decided that anyone who offends a Gold Star family was the worst human being in existence? Dissent is patriotic now. And how better to define dissent than spitting on Gold Star families?

Don’t worry, shortly Michael Moore will be on to explain that spitting on Gold Star families is truly the highest form of patriotism. And that their children died to protect the right of anti-Trump patriots to spit on them.

On Friday, Amy and I were assaulted by angry “protesters” outside the Renaissance Washington DC Hotel, where the American Legion hosted a tribute to Medal of Honor recipients at their Veterans Inaugural Ball. We were pushed by a man in a mask hiding his face. Our clothes were drawn on with permanent marker by other “protesters.” And we were called the most vile names I have ever heard as we entered and exited the venue.

What the individuals who assaulted us did not know is that I am the sister of Marine First Lt. Travis Manion, and Amy is the wife of Navy SEAL Lt. Brendan Looney, who gave their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. Travis was killed in 2007, and Brendan in 2010.

I doubt very much that they would have cared. If anything, it would have only encouraged the anti-American left.

Looney and Manion were initially late to the ball because they couldn’t get through “an angry mob in the street that was burning trash cans and smashing windows,” Manion wrote on Facebook. When they eventually got near the entrance a group of around 75 people tried separating them from the ball. It was as the two women walked through the crowd that people began pushing them and yelling insults.

“We understand more than most how fortunate we are to live in a country where we can demonstrate and share our different beliefs,” Manion wrote. “But my question for those who chose to take this route Friday is this: Are you truly accomplishing anything by inciting hate?”

Fordham University Rejects SJP SJP’s goals “clearly conflict with…the mission and values of the University.”Sara Dogan (Bravo Fordham!!!!)

In a rare but promising decision, Fordham University in New York has elected not to allow the formation of a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine on campus, citing the conflict between SJP’s emphasis on “polarization rather than dialogue” and its support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

In a leaked email, Keith Eldredge, Dean of Students at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus, wrote:

After consultation with numerous faculty, staff and students and my own deliberation, I have decided to deny the request to form a club known as Students for Justice in Palestine at Fordham University. While students are encouraged to promote diverse political points of view, and we encourage conversation and debate on all topics, I cannot support an organization whose sole purpose is advocating political goals of a specific group, and against a specific country, when these goals clearly conflict with and run contrary to the mission and values of the University.

There is perhaps no more complex topic than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it is a topic that often leads to polarization rather than dialogue. The purpose of the organization as stated in the proposed club constitution points toward that polarization. Specifically, the call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions of Israel presents a barrier to open dialogue and mutual learning and understanding.

In a statement announcing their vote to approve the club, United Student Government at Lincoln Center acknowledged the need for open, academic discussion and the promotion of intellectual rigor on campus; however, I disagree that the proposal to form a club affiliated with the national Students for Justice in Palestine organization is the best way to provide this. I welcome continued conversation about alternative ways to promote awareness of this important conflict and the issues that surround it from multiple perspectives.

Dean Eldredge’s email correctly points to several highly problematic facets of SJP’s mission and strategy including its policy of rejecting the “normalization” of relations with any pro-Israel individuals or groups, which stands in blatant opposition to the spirit of open discussion which liberal arts universities aim to foster. This policy has led SJP to reject overtures of cooperation from pro-Israel groups, even when the two organizations are agreed upon a common issue.

At San Diego State University, for instance, the pro-Israel campus group Students Supporting Israel (SSI) attempted to co-sign a petition to make the campus more inclusive for Muslims after a Muslim student was assaulted on campus. SDSU-SJP refused to allow SSI to co-sign the petition claiming that it “didn’t serve the interests of the community.” According to members of SSI, “Out of the over 30 organizations that had signed the document, SSI was the only organization to be excluded from the statement.”

To Modulate Drug Prices, We Need Less Regulation and More Competition Allowing drugs in the U.S. that have been approved abroad would greatly help patients, providers, and producers. By Henry I. Miller & John J. Cohrssen

To control escalating U.S. drug prices that seem to be disconnected from research, development, and manufacturing costs, an array of politicians, policy wonks, and pundits have proposed a spectrum of government interventions. The Senate Special Committee on Aging is the latest to weigh in, with a report that makes various recommendations.

Characteristically, it focuses on high-profile abuses and proposes only tepid measures to “rein in price spikes in off-patent, decades-old drugs purchased by companies that did not bear the drugs’ research and development costs.”

The report urged, for example, that the Food and Drug Administration be given expanded authority to allow imports of medicines from countries with drug-safety standards similar to those in the United States, but only in narrowly defined circumstances, such as when consumers face sharp, sudden increases in the price of off-patent drugs that have no competition. (Regulators already have the ability to allow imports when there are acute critical shortages of approved drugs in this country.) But the Senate recommendations would require the imports to end “as soon as the monopoly was broken up.”

There is certainly sympathy from the incoming administration for reform of drug regulation. President Trump pledged during the campaign to “remove barriers to entry” of “imported safe and dependable drugs from overseas,” and he told Time magazine after the election: “I’m going to bring down drug prices. I don’t like what’s happened with drug prices.”

That’s a widely shared sentiment, but pharmaceutical pricing is neither simple nor transparent, not only because of global and national competition, but also because of inconsistent national laws, individual company practices, industry-wide insurance-company discounts, and government rules that require preferential pricing, rebates, and discounts. American politicians often cite foreign countries’ approaches to controlling prices, but their very different market and reimbursement systems make it difficult to judge the extent to which they are applicable to the United States.

Foreign governments’ cost savings arise from price controls and refusal to pay for drugs that do not show sufficient medical benefit to justify the cost. This sort of technology assessment is not done routinely in the United States. “If it’s an FDA-approved drug and prescribed by a duly licensed physician, Medicare will cover it,” notes Gail Wilensky, who ran U.S. Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement in the 1990s. Non-government insurers also often (but not always) cover approved drugs and medical devices.

Government-imposed price controls on a wide variety of goods have an extensive and unhappy history in the United States. At various times the federal government, states, and even localities have imposed price controls on items such as oil, electricity, apartment rents, food, and plane fares, but the benefits tend to be short-term at best, with unintended consequences including consumer dissatisfaction from shortages and curtailed industrial production, investment, and innovation.

Bailing Out the Palestinian Authority In its final hours, the Obama administration transferred $221 million to the Palestinian Authority, which gives payments to terrorists and their families. By Elliot Kaufman —

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry surprised many observers by devoting so much of their waning time in office to excoriating Israel. But it turns out they had more mischief planned: a last-minute Palestinian bailout.

Only three hours before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Obama administration notified Congress that it would send $221 million to the Palestinian Authority (PA). The funding had previously been blocked by two separate congressional holds, which are usually respected by the executive branch.

The Obama administration informed Congress that the money would fund humanitarian projects as well as political and security reforms to help prepare for a future Palestinian state. However, only the willfully blind can deny that this money will also finance terrorism and ultimately prolong the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Since 2004, Palestinian law has explicitly mandated large monthly payments to the families of terrorists who attack Israel, as well as salaries and jobs for the terrorists on their release from Israeli jails. The PA structures the payments so as to make its incentive structure crystal clear: The more Israelis you wound or kill, the more money your family will receive.

Some families of terrorists can even receive up to $3,100 per month — so long as their relative has killed many Israelis and either died during the attack or was sentenced to over 30 years in Israeli jail. By comparison, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reports that the average Palestinian salary is just over $276 per month.

These payments add up. In 2014, Israel estimated that the PA paid $75 million per year to families of terrorists. However, the number may have risen sharply this past year, to $137.8 million, financing the “knife intifada” that terrorized Israelis. By transferring $221 million in its final hours, the Obama administration has ensured that the PA will be able to carry on business as usual without reducing its terror subsidies.

Palestinian leaders have tried to hide their support for terrorism by transferring the subsidies in 2014 from the PA, which receives international aid, to the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which does not. This even managed to fool State Department official Anne Patterson, who said of the subsidies at the time, “I think they plan to phase it out.” However, Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party run both the PA and the PLO, and the subsidies have continued.

How can we be so easily fooled into funding terrorism? “Willful blindness helps,” writes David Feith in the Wall Street Journal. America continues to prop up Abbas’s government, even though he denies the Holocaust, incites terrorism, and his term in office technically ran out in January 2009.

Haneen Zoabi and 180 of the adoring faithful Israel Bashers in Richmond, UK by David Collier…..see note please

What makes this so appalling is that Haneen Zoabi, is an Israeli Arab politician, who currently serves as a member of the Knesset!!!! ….rsk
22 January 2017. I am at an event organised by the Richmond Palestine Solidarity Campaign. A big crowd, perhaps 180, have gathered to hear Israeli Arab member of the Knesset Haneen Zoabi speak. The room is full, but the demographic breakdown is simple. A large majority are white, British and over 55. It is the typical PSC crowd.

Haneen Zoabi had received a standing ovation at the PSC annual general meeting just two days before, she receives one here before she has even spoken. I am in the presence of PSC royalty.

The situation with the Arabs of Israel is complex. If Zoabi was here to fight for the Israeli Arab citizens, she would have my attention. If her aim was to improve the living standards, education and employment prospects of those who voted her into power, she would have my support. If the real goal was to reduce the inequality that minorities often experience, I’d wave a flag in her name. But Zoabi is not here to represent the needs of Israel’s minorities, she is here to perpetuate the external conflict.

When speaking of the democratic freedoms of a minority group Zoabi comments thus: “We want the opposite. Give us our land back. Give us our homeland back. Give us our people back. We don’t want to scream, we don’t need this freedom of expression”. This, as the entire Middle East burns in radical Islamic bush fires around her.
Racism, racism, everywhere

Not everyone in the room is a racist, not everyone an antisemite. But many are. Two PSC activists are speaking in the row behind me. One had been to Salisbury for an event with Ilan Pappe on 19th January. He had also been at the PSC AGM over the weekend. Busy guy.

He spoke of how ‘real Palestinians’ are needed to speak up against Balfour. Pappe he said “is not a real Palestinian”. What he meant of course, was that “Pappe is Jewish”. There is no other translation that works. This the evidence that anti-Zionism cuts too close to antisemitism to be ignored. Pappe is no Zionist. If Pappe was exactly Pappe, but with only the Jewish identity stripped away, he would be ‘a real Palestinian’ without question. Pappe’s offence here is simply his ‘Jewishness’.

For a PSC activist to suggest Pappe is not a ‘true Palestinian’, is like someone suggesting I am not ‘truly British’. No difference. None.

Two more standing next to me just before the event begins. Discussing PSC attempts to have Zoabi speak to British MP’s whilst she is here. Sir Alan Duncan’s name is mentioned, and from Duncan it was just a short trip to discussion over the Al Jazeera documentary and the ‘lobby’. In the heart of Richmond’s PSC base there is no need to even look over the shoulder as it is identified as the ‘Jewish lobby’.

Then there are the faces I recognise. Hard core antisemitic PSC groupies. Examples of the nature of ‘humanitarian concern’ that drive the Palestinian cause. In the image below are social media posts *only* from some of those who attended last night. Posts about Chabloz, Atzmon, Mein Kampf and Holocaust denial. When these are your points of reference for all things ‘Jewish’, all talk of it just being opposition to Zionism are washed away.

Trump’s Executive Orders Clear the Way for Energy Development

Democrats thrilled when President Obama vowed to govern by means of “a pen and a phone.” Now President Trump has inherited those instruments of communication and is putting them to excellent use clearing the way for the development of U.S. energy infrastructure.

The issue involves two important pipelines: The Keystone XL pipeline, which would run oil from Canadian tar sands to refineries on the Gulf coast, and the Dakota Access pipeline, which would connect the Bakken shale with petroleum facilities in Illinois. Keystone was locked up by bureaucratic opposition for years while the Obama administration pretended to think about approving it (in the end, it put a halt to the project), while the Dakota project was the subject of a briefer though no less intense effort to prevent its construction, with the Army Corps of Engineers calling off the original plan after protests and rioting from environmentalists and Indian tribes.

Trump’s executive orders would fast-track approval of both projects. The president also demands (with no obvious legal authority) that the projects be completed using steel manufactured in the United States.

Some political context is in order: The specific objections to Keystone and Dakota were never particularly persuasive, but they are, in the greater scheme of things, almost entirely beside the point: The environmentalist movement is dedicated to stopping all development of infrastructure for oil, natural gas, coal, and other ordinary sources of energy, categorically. The complaints about culturally sensitive Indian lands deployed against Dakota have also been drummed up as weapons against other projects, including coal-export depots on the West Coast, just as the arguments against Keystone have been used to prevent pipeline development in the rest of the country. When the pipelines are blocked, then the environmentalists fight against other means of transporting fuel, such as trains. If ExxonMobil were reduced to using pack animals to move barrels of oil between well and refinery, there would be an animal-rights case filed to stop it. The Left simply objects to the development of energy infrastructure per se. And that, politically, is what this is all about.

It is easy to make an economic fetish out of “Made in the U.S.A.,” and President Trump surely is guilty of doing so. But for a nation as blessed with energy resources as ours, with an economy as hungry for energy as ours, failing to allow for the development of the domestic energy industry would be beyond foolish — it would mean holding national prosperity hostage to a narrow ideological concern. The only path to abundance is abundance, which means production and investment in productive capital.

HILLARY CLINTON’S NEXT STEPS MAY INCLUDE HELPING CHELSEA CLINTON RUN FOR CONGRESS IN 2018

While many eyes were on Donald Trump when he gave his Inaugural Address this past Friday, millions more were on Hillary Clinton, to gauge her reaction when watching her fiercest opponent give a speech she was predicted to give. Hillary Clinton, as always, gave no reaction, but for the odd cheerful smile, and watched and attended the Inauguration with the same stoic expression she has become known for. Many eyes are still on Hillary Clinton, as they wonder what her next steps will be, and if those include political inclinations.

Politico reports that since the election, Hillary Clinton has been poring over a forensic analysis of where and how she lost the 2016 Elections, suggesting that she has not given up on political aspirations at all. As the Inquisitr previously reported, when sending her supporters a farewell to 2016 at the end of last year, she told them she would “be in touch” and left her plans for 2017 and onward in the air, as she is prone to do.

For the elections cycle of 2016, millions talked about the Hillary Clinton run for years before it actually happened, and she didn’t formally announce her candidacy for 2016 until just before the primaries in January, 2016. Whether she will run again remains to be seen, but she is definitely not leaving politics anytime soon.

With the Inauguration of America’s forty-fifth president now just another day in history, all eyes are on the next election cycle, which will occur in November 2018 at Trump’s mid-term mark, when elections for Congress and the Senate occur. Speculation that Hillary Clinton’s daughter Chelsea Clinton will be running in that election for a Congressional seat in New York began to pick up steam shortly after Hillary Clinton’s loss.

And, the New York Post reported shortly after that loss that coincidental events began happening in Chappaqua, New York, Hillary Clinton’s hometown, that could help Chelsea Clinton run for Congress. In the meantime, however, Hillary Clinton is working through a series of “private meetings and phone calls” in her Chappaqua home, and also in Washington, to begin sorting out what happened to her campaign in 2016.

Politico reports that once she has gone through this forensic analysis, she will provide a report “mapping out some of her next political steps” and that is expected to occur with a spring timeline. It is not expected, according to Politico, that Hillary Clinton is entering a partisan arena again, but instead wants to work more on things like writing or working on specific policy initiatives.

However, with Hillary Clinton, anything concrete remains to be seen, and all of her plans and moves have historically been strategically aligned with the times. Anything can happen in the political arena between now and then, that would have a direct impact on Hillary Clinton’s next move.

Politico reports that among Hillary Clinton’s next steps are focusing on the younger leaders of the party, to help them rise in the Democratic Party. She also wants to help see that the Democratic National Committee is reconstructed more effectively. In the meantime, however, she is undergoing a very thorough analysis of her campaign, which is reportedly a step she is taking to give some assurance to her investors. A source close to Hillary Clinton says,

“She understands that a forensic exam of the campaign is necessary, not only for her, but for the party and other elected, and for the investors in her campaign. People want to know that their investment was treated with respect, but that their mistakes wouldn’t be repeated.”

J Street’s dead end By Gregg Roman

At the end of 2017, the far-left Jewish advocacy group J Street will celebrate its 10th anniversary. At its inception, J Street promised to be the first political movement “to explicitly promote American leadership to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” However, an objective summary of the organization’s progress toward accomplishing this goal results in abject and damning failure.

In fact, the circumstances couldn’t have been more amenable toward J Street’s lofty goal. Within 14 months of J Street’s inception, Barack Obamaswept to power in elections that also left both houses of Congress controlled by Democrats.

As president, Obama’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was groundbreaking in many ways, deviating from the positions and tone of his predecessors, both Republican and Democrat. J Street backed this shift with political cover, campaign donations and organizational unanimity, providing a convenient panacea to American Jewish community outrage over Obama’s maneuvers.

The fledgling J Street found itself at the top table with veteran Jewish and pro-Israel organizations at the White House, with almost unprecedented access during Obama’s two terms.

It wasn’t merely a spectator: J Street saw itself as a vital part of the administration’s strategy and policy on Israel and the peace process. It prided itself on the puppeteer role it played in defending the White House or pushing its policy platform.

“We were the blocking-back, clearing space for the quarterback to do what we wanted him to do,” said J Street’s president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, in 2011. Ben-Ami added, Obama “hasn’t been able to push as aggressively as we would like,” and J Street has “switched from being out front and clearing the way, to pushing him to do something more.”

Something more turned out to be a lot less.

During the full eight years of the Obama administration, which set as one of its foreign policy goals a peaceful resolution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas never sat in the same room for more than a few hours in total.

While Netanyahu constantly repeated that he was willing to meet with the Palestinian leader at any place at any time, with no preconditions, Abbas made a series of impossible preconditions that pushed meaningful negotiations further and further away. J Street ended up blamingNetanyahu for Abbas’s intransigence.

Nomination for Nobel Peace Prize: Reverend Gavin Ashenden by Douglas Murray

The section of the Quran that a Muslim student recited at the church service points out the Islamic belief that Jesus was not the Son of God. Even in today’s Britain, this does not seem quite the view that leaders of the national church are supposed to propagate.

“The justification offered that it engages some kind of reciprocity founders on the understandable refusal of Islamic communities to read passages from the Gospel in Muslim prayers announcing the Lordship of Christ. It never happens…. apologies may be due to the Christians suffering dreadful persecution at the hands of Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere. To have the core of a faith for which they have suffered deeply treated so casually by senior western clergy such as the Provost of Glasgow is unlikely to have a positive outcome.” — Reverend Gavin Ashenden, The Times.

“I resigned in order to be able to speak more freely about the struggle that Christianity is facing in our culture. I had no idea that there were plans afoot by a Scottish Cathedral to ‘reach out to Muslims’ by scrapping a Bible reading from their worship on the Feast of the Epiphany (when Christ’s Lordship is celebrated as the Light of the World) and replacing it with a part of the Koran that denied Jesus was the Son of God…. it represented one more step along a road, which if the Church continues to follow, will speed up the destruction of Christianity in our country.” — Reverend Gavin Ashenden, The Times.

In a nation much in need of heroes, an Anglican Reverend has stepped forward, putting his sincere and serious beliefs ahead of the unserious and insincere pieties of our time. Everybody — secular or religious — has cause to feel enormous gratitude.

Very occasionally — even in contemporary Britain — some good news arrives. No single piece of news has been more invigorating than the discovery that a member of the clergy of the Church of England has found a vertebra.

In recent years, the British public have become used to a steady succession of bad-news stories from the purveyors of the Good News. This has taken every imaginable form, from the former Bishop of Oxford suggesting in the House of Lords that the Quran could be recited at the next coronation service, to the former Archbishop of Canterbury — Rowan Williams — notoriously suggesting that a place should be found for Islamic sharia in the law of the land.

So the place in the British national comedy reserved for the type of vicar unwilling to take the side of his own faith in any argument has darkly morphed. The failure of the Church of England to defend its own beliefs or its own followers when they are facing persecution around the world, has become an unamusing stain on the reputation of the church. Its representatives increasingly look as though they are willing to defend anything — including the most intolerant expressions of the world’s most intolerant religions — rather than argue for their own faith or the faith of their own congregants.

One example that emerged earlier this month appeared to epitomise the trend. At a service in the Cathedral of St Mary in Glasgow to mark the Feast of the Epiphany, the Cathedral thought it wise to invite a Muslim student to read from the Quran. The aim — according to the leader of the Scottish Anglican church, Bishop David Chillingworth — was to try to improve relations between Muslims and Christians in the city. If that were indeed the intention, it was singularly ill-advised. And as though the decision were not already poorly enough thought through, the section of the Quran the Muslim student recited at the service was the section of the Quran about Jesus. The section in question points out the Islamic belief that Jesus was not the Son of God. Even in today’s Britain, this does not seem quite the view that leaders of the national church are supposed to propagate.

There was a small rumpus when this story broke. During it, the ray of hope came in the form of a letter in The Times of London. Written by the Reverend Gavin Ashenden, it pointed out that:

“Sanctioning a key passage from the Koran which denies the divinity of Jesus to be read in Christian worship has been widely criticised as a rather serious failure. The justification offered that it engages some kind of reciprocity founders on the understandable refusal of Islamic communities to read passages from the Gospel in Muslim prayers announcing the Lordship of Christ. It never happens.

“Quite apart from the wide distress (some would say blasphemy) caused by denigrating Jesus in Christian worship, apologies may be due to the Christians suffering dreadful persecution at the hands of Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere. To have the core of a faith for which they have suffered deeply treated so casually by senior western clergy such as the Provost of Glasgow is unlikely to have a positive outcome. There are other and considerably better ways to build “bridges of understanding”.

It is not a lie to say that on reading this letter the heart sang. And not just for the contents and for the fact that the signatory was a Reverend but for what was listed beneath as his title: “Chaplain to Her Majesty the Queen.” It may be pointed out that there are several dozen people who hold this title, and so the Revd Ashenden is not the sole spiritual adviser to Her Majesty. But nevertheless, this made the letter a statement of considerably more significance. The Queen is the Head of the Church of England who swore at her coronation that she would be the “Defender of the Faith.” Here was one of her Chaplains standing against the prevailing trends of the age and actually defending the faith which his employer swore to uphold. In a struggle this complex, such stands — even, or especially when they should be statements of the obvious — stand for a great deal.