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Why are Palestinian Christians Fleeing? Robert Nicholson

Posted By on March 2nd, 2016

Robert Nicholson is the executive director of The Philos Project, a nonprofit organization that seeks to promote positive Christian engagement in the Middle East. He holds a BA in Hebrew Studies from Binghamton University, and a JD and MA (Middle Eastern History) from Syracuse University. A formerly enlisted Marine and a 2012- 2013 Tikvah Fellow, Robert lives in New York City with his wife and two children.

The Jesuit magazine America recently reported that Arab Christians are fleeing in droves from Bethlehem, the hallowed city of Jesus Christ’s birth. In 1990, Christians made up a majority of the city’s residents; today they make up only about 15%. “With thousands more fleeing the city every year,” reports America’s correspondent Jeremy Zipple, “you can’t help but wonder, will there be any Christians left here…in the not too distant future?”

Zipple’s question is rhetorical. He clearly believes that Christianity in Bethlehem may be nearing its end.

But why? Why are Christians fleeing?

At first Zipple says “it’s complicated.” But he goes on to list one reason, and one reason only: “Since 2003 Bethlehem has been circumscribed by a 26-foot military grade wall.”

Zipple is, of course, referring to the separation barrier that was constructed by Israel during the Second Intifada to keep out suicide bombers who tried to cross from the West Bank into Israel. Although the vast majority of the barrier is a chain link fence, in Bethlehem and a few other metropolitan areas it becomes a tremendous gray wall. Since its construction, the barrier has become the international symbol of Palestinian resistance against Israel.

“[T]he separation wall…cuts family from each other. People get humiliated at checkpoints. People do not have many opportunities to improve their living standards. So, therefore, Christians who can afford to, are trying to leave this country,” says interviewee Hanan Nasrallah, a Palestinian employee of Catholic Relief Services.

Nasrallah’s calculation is simple: Israel built a wall; the wall makes life difficult; therefore, Palestinian Christians are leaving.

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Bombed, Burned, and Urinated On: Churches Under Islam Muslim Persecution of Christians, January 2015 by Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on March 2nd, 2016

When Col. Steve Warren, spokesman for U.S. military efforts against ISIS, was asked about the status of Christians in Iraq soon after the monastery’s destruction, he replied “We’ve seen no specific evidence of a specific targeting toward Christians.”

Kuwait lawmaker Ahmad Al-Azemi said that he and other MPs will reject an initially approved request to build churches because it “contradicts Islamic sharia laws.” He added that Islamic scholars are unanimous in banning the building of non-Muslim places of worship in the Arabian Peninsula.

“We have little hope left that there can be a future for us, Aramean Christians, to stay in the land of our forefathers.” — Fr. Yusuf, head the last Christian family to flee Diyarbakir, Turkey.

Yet another Christian girl in Pakistan was abducted by a group of Muslim men, forced to convert to Islam, and, at the age of 15, marry one of her kidnappers.

Iraq: The Islamic State blew up the country’s oldest Christian monastery, St. Elijah’s. The 27,000-square-foot building had stood near Mosul for 14 centuries. For several years, prior to 2009, U.S. soldiers protected and sometimes used the monastery as a chapel. “Our Christian history in Mosul is being barbarically leveled,” reported a Roman Catholic priest in Irbil. “We see it as an attempt to expel us from Iraq, [and] eliminating and finishing our existence in this land.” Yet, when Col. Steve Warren, spokesman for America’s military efforts against ISIS, was asked about the status of Christians in Iraq soon after the monastery’s destruction, he replied, “We’ve seen no specific evidence of a specific targeting toward Christians.”

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Progressive ‘Thought-Blockers’: Racism How the Left amasses and consolidates political power. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on March 2nd, 2016

Rather than being a racial healer, Barack Obama has presided over and at times stoked more racial divisiveness than we have seen in a long while. Just in the last year we’ve had Black Lives Matter marches and verbal assaults of Democratic candidates, the Oscar protests over the absence of nominated black actors, Ivy League university students marching over “microagressions” no one else can see, and the still simmering protests and agitation over police shootings of black men. Driving it all is our duplicitous and malignant national racial discourse.

At the heart of it lies “racism,” a question-begging epithet and verbal aerosol sprayed over issues to avoid honestly confronting them. The idea of racism is peculiarly modern, and like most of progressive ideology it reflects the rise of pseudo-science in the wake of the scientific revolution. As such, racism was a consequence of the massive category error that tries to reduce human beings to mere material phenomena to be classified and understood and shaped with the methods of real science. In “scientific” racism, certain characteristics of physical appearance and behavior were stripped of historical and cultural context, and the “irreducible complexity” defining all humans reduced to this simplified, superficial description. Worse yet from the perspective of the West’s Judeo-Christian and Hellenic heritage, the unique individualism of people, with their God-given natural rights and spiritual freedom, was denied to fellow human beings.

Before modern racism, there were prejudice and bigotry, the leftover tribal instinct to distrust the stranger or those who look and live differently. Humans are naturally clannish and exclusionary, as a visit to any playground or school, or a perusal of multiculturalist dogma and curricula, will reveal. The idea of a universal human nature and the subsequent tolerance for difference was and still is a strange one, a learned behavior that culture has to teach and reinforce.

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Duke Prof: Feminist ‘Soft’ Jihad a Force for Peace The twisted fantasy world of Prof. Ellen McLarney. March 2, 2016 Andrew Harrod

Posted By on March 2nd, 2016

Ellen McLarney, who teaches Asian and Middle Eastern studies at Duke, would have you believe that a “pacifist struggle for civil jihad” led by Islamic feminists offers a benign “alternative kind of jihad” to that practiced by Islamist terrorists worldwide.

She peddled her thesis to about twenty listeners (mostly graduate students) in a February 8 George Washington University lecture, reprising discussion of her recent book, Soft Force: Women in Egypt’s Islamic Awakening. McLarney’s lecture omitted the totalitarian jihadist ideology underlying what she described as a “protracted struggle with non-democratic regimes over matters of human rights.”

McLarney lauded the 1995 book (in Arabic) Women & Political Work: An Islamic Perspective, by Cairo University political science professor Heba Raouf Ezzat. Yet McLarney neglected to mention the book’s publisher, none other than the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) in Herndon, Virginia, an entity founded by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB). She noted that Ezzat explicated her concept of feminine “soft force” Islamist subversion, itself derived from the late American political scientist Joseph Nye’s concept of “soft power.”

Beginning in the 1970s, McLarney explained nonchalantly, an Egyptian Islamic revival developed via a “passive revolution” to spark an “Islamic civil society that runs parallel to the more secular civil society in Egypt.” As foreshadowed by the 1960s Egyptian writer Nimat Sidqi—who according to McLarney’s slides wrote that “Raising Children is Jihad”—women “have a pivotal role to play in this struggle.” Borrowing from the American feminist slogan “the personal is political,” Ezzat and others developed the “Islamic family as a place for the cultivation of Islamic sensibilities”—the “very seat of politics.”

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Hamas Threatened to Bury Own Man in Concrete to Force Him to Confess to Being Gay March 1, 2016 Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on March 2nd, 2016

According to gay activist Judith Butler, Hamas is a progressive organization and anyone who points out that Israel doesn’t have the death penalty for gays is just “pinkwashing”. But Hamas is not actually all that progressive on gay rights as we see with the case of Mahmoud Ishtiwi, a Hamas commander who was tortured into confessing to being gay and then killed.

A Hamas commander who was executed in February was tortured and then killed after at least one terrorist under his command admitted to having sex with him.

Relatives and other sources say he was tortured extensively during that period, including beatings, whippings, being suspended by his hands from the ceiling for hours on end, sleep deprivation and more.

So bad were his conditions that family members protested outside the home of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, in a rare show of dissent in authoritarian-ruled Gaza. Demonstrators were beaten by Hamas police and dispersed.

Here’s how Hamas progressively dealt with the whole gay thing.

In his next meeting with relatives, on March 1, Mr. Ishtiwi told his brother Hussam that he had been tortured since his fourth day in detention. Six weeks later, when his wives visited, they sneaked out a note, of which Human Rights Watch shared a photograph. “They nearly killed me,” it says. “I confessed to things I have never done in my life.”

By June 7, when Samia visited her brother at a Qassam base near Gaza City’s used car market, Mr. Ishtiwi “looked destroyed,” she recalled.

“I asked, ‘Why are you crying, brother?’ ” she said. “And he said, ‘I have been wronged, wronged.’ ”

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Republicans Choose Change on Super Tuesday Two parties, two very different choices. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on March 2nd, 2016

Super Tuesday was defined by change. The Democrats have had enough change. Solid majorities in key states said that they did not want a more liberal candidate than Obama. The one major exception was Vermont which went for Bernie Sanders. Sanders also won Oklahoma where around a third backed a turn even further left than Obama. But beyond them, there was no great appetite for outsiders.

“This campaign is not just about electing a president; it is about transforming America,” Bernie Sanders bleated back in Vermont. But the Democrats may be suffering from transformation fatigue.

Most Democrats have made it clear that they want another two terms of Obama. Exit polls from Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia showed solid support for a continuation of Obama’s policies. The Sanders change agenda plays well with younger voters, particularly with white voters, but fails with a Democratic Party whose base is in thrall to Obama despite his legacy of economic misery and failure.

Hillary Clinton had initially hoped to run as a historic candidate while touting her own experience, but was instead forced to run as a proxy for Obama in order to preserve her minority firewall which saved her in South Carolina and other states with large black Democratic constituencies. It’s a humiliating comedown for Hillary to have to run as Obama’s shadow. But she’s willing to do that and abandon the dream of creating her own legacy beyond Obama for the opportunity to make it to the White House.

On the Republican side there was a great appetite for outsiders and for change. The two big winners, Trump and Ted Cruz, both ran as outsider candidates on platforms of change. In an extraordinary turn of events, Rubio, the establishment candidate, had the poorest performance of the top three candidates.

Democrats may no longer be interested in transforming America, but Republicans are. Hope and Change has lost its luster for the party that inflicted two terms of Obama on the country. But Change is running strong among Republicans, even if Hope has not always come along for the long ride of the primaries.

While the establishment lane prevailed for the Democrats, the anti-establishment lane dominated among Republicans. These two different snapshots of Super Tuesday from both parties also help explain the dramatic difference in voter turnout. Republican voter turnout quadrupled in Virginia and increased by hundreds of thousands in Tennessee, Texas, Georgia and Massachusetts. Democratic voter turnout was underwhelming. Voting for the safe establishment choice does not really rally primary voters.

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‘We’re All Muslims Deep Down,’ Says … Boston Police Commissioner- Robert Spencer

Posted By on March 2nd, 2016

Politicians insisting that the latest Islamic jihad attack has nothing to do with Islam have become a familiar feature of the mainstream media landscape, but last Saturday, Boston Police Commissioner William B. Evans went them all one better.

Speaking at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, Evans declared:
We’re all Muslims deep down. We all yearn for peace.

Evans thus went farther than Barack Obama, John Kerry, David Cameron, and all the other Western politicians who insist that Islam is a religion of peace. For Evans, Islam is not just a religion of peace, but the religion of peace: to be a Jew, a Christian, a Hindu, a Buddhist, or an atheist would not make one yearn for peace.

This is taking pandering to dizzying new heights, and that wasn’t all: this wasn’t the police commissioner’s first visit to the Islamic Society of Boston. He went there last December — right after two Muslims murdered fourteen people at a Christmas party in San Bernardino. He made that visit in order to make sure that the local Muslims weren’t jittery after that attack:

I don’t think we can tolerate bigotry toward the Muslim population. They’re an important part of our city. I just want to reassure them that we’re here for them.

Muslims acting avowedly in the name of Islam and jihad committed mass murder of non-Muslims, and in the wake of that attack, the Boston police commissioner took it upon himself to reassure … Muslims. However he went about doing this reassuring, it is certain that he never asked members of the Islamic Society of Boston why so many Muslims don’t yearn for peace at all, but seem instead to relish war.

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Professor Goes on Unhinged Rant About Israel Creating ISIS By Rick Moran

Posted By on March 2nd, 2016

Joy Karega, an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at Oberlin College, let loose on Facebook with several unhinged posts about Israel and ISIS.

She is unapologetic about her rampant anti-Semitism, claiming that Israel was responsible for the Charlie Hebdo attack as well as for the rise of ISIS.

Campus Reform:
“This ain’t even hard. They unleashed Mossad [Israel’s national intelligence agency] on France and it’s clear why…And I stopped letting folks bully me with that ‘You’re being anti-semetic’ nonsense a long time ago. Just a strategy to shut folks up who criticize Zionism…” Karega wrote along with her post.

Later that day, Karega wrote another post blasting Netanyahu for attending a free speech rally in Paris when French President François Hollande had asked him not to come.

“Netanyahu wanted to bend Hollande and French governmental officials over one more time in public just in case the message wasn’t received via Massod [sic] and the ‘attacks’ they orchestrated in Paris,” she wrote.

In November, Karega posted another theory to her Facebook, claiming Israel’s national intelligence agency was conspiring with ISIS.

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In Florida State House, Rubio Produced Real Conservative Accomplishments By Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on March 2nd, 2016

Marco Rubio is leading the “Endorsement Primary” by a huge margin, but many are hard-pressed to name any of the Florida senator’s concrete accomplishments. While his record in the Senate may be scarce, Rubio has an impressive slate of achievements from his days in the Florida House, and these show what kind of conservative he would be in the Oval Office.

Rubio pushed many reforms, from limiting eminent domain to expanding school choice and education options for high-demand/high-skill jobs. His leadership also helped streamline Florida’s laws and even helped privatize toll roads.

“As speaker and in earlier leadership positions in the Florida House, Rubio demonstrated a willingness to delegate to focus on his strengths, communicating and negotiating,” National Review’s Jim Geraghty writes.

Donald Trump likes to say that Rubio has never hired anyone, and that may be true in the private sector. But in government, Rubio has much experience doing what presidents do: delegating.

One Hundred Ideas

When Rubio became speaker of the Florida House of Representatives in 2006, he gave every member of the group a book titled 100 Innovative Ideas for Florida’s Future. Rubio asked his fellow representatives to fill the books with ideas from constituents. This step may have been “flashy,” but it represented a governing philosophy — to involve voters and other legislators as much as possible.

Similarly, Rubio gave more power and responsibility to state House leaders when he became speaker. He let members of his leadership team decide which representatives would chair committees, and he let committee chairs skip the subcommittee step on important legislation. Committees were given broad leeway in how to prioritize different concerns with the money they were allocated.

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The calamitous climate at Indoctrination U By Anthony J. Sadar

Posted By on March 2nd, 2016

Recently, on their opinion pages in a piece titled “Notable & Quotable: The Campus Climate” (February 12, 2016), The Wall Street Journal exposed a curious curriculum program offered by the University of California, Irvine. The overall goal of the curriculum program is to “boost climate change/sustainability education at UCI, especially targeting those students for whom climate and sustainability may not be a focus.”

Turns out such programs are not that unusual on college campuses across the U.S. Whether through standalone seminars, integrations into the general catalog of courses, or more intensely focused for environmental science majors, students are “educated” to be activists for the atmosphere.

Yet the most calamitous climate is the one sustained in the echo chamber of college campuses, resonated by leftist groupthink. Instead of targeting students for indoctrination in foregone conclusions about the Earth and its future climate, educators should be expanding students’ objective knowledge of the complexities of the ecosphere and atmosphere. Maybe then an uncoerced understanding by enough intelligent students will lead to more careful and beneficial use of Earth’s abundant natural resources for the good of people and the planet.

Anthony J. Sadar is author of the new book In Global Warming We Trust: Too Big to Fail (Stairway Press, 2016).