RUTHFULLY YOURS

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The new pope is a puzzle to nearly everybody, particularly to the politicians, pundits and other know-it-alls. He looks and sounds like a remnant of a previous time, thrown up in the squalid swamp of a trashy and superficial age. He’s not at all hip and “with it.” He’s not interested in “moving forward,” as in the current cliché. He projects humility and kindness and speaks of his Christian faith as if he really believes in the amazing grace of the Gospel. This makes the intellectual elites, and even some “holy men” of the various bureaucracies of modern Christendom, incredulous, nervous and embarrassed.

The elites are willing to tolerate religious faith as long as a believing Christian keeps it to himself and never acts on it or even talks about it. It’s OK, barely, to be a “cultural Christian,” who often isn’t really a Christian at all as Christ defined the faith in the New Testament. The new pope rebukes this synthetic Christianity, urging a return to “the Christ of the Cross” who came to redeem humankind with a sacrificial death on Calvary. This puts Pope Francis clearly at odds with cultural Christians who would reduce the faith of our fathers to a catechism lifted from the pages of the New York Times.

“I don’t think he’s what we need right now in the Catholic Church,” Madeline Cuomo, the sister of the current governor of New York and member of a powerful family with a lot of the vowels in their name that Daddy Cuomo imagined kept him out of the White House, tells Crain’s New York Business magazine. “We’re looking to move the Church forward, with gay marriage and women priests. He’s going to turn back the clock.”

Her father, the former governor, offers more unsolicited advice for the new pope, with an avuncular pat on the head: “The way he’s lived has been simple and admirable, but it has not taught him how to deal with the high pressure of huge problems in the Church. . . . The whole question of women, the question of marriage – not even the question of same-sex marriage, which is a recent development – but the whole idea of priests not being allowed to be married. That’s led to a lot of unhappy relationships and ugly relationships by people who are basically sick. That’s something this new pope will have to deal with.” And he had better deal with it at once, and with it in a way “forward” pleasing to those for whom Cuomo, pere and fils, speak.

A new documentary sheds light on the vicious terror inflicted on Christians by Soviet communism.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/martyred-in-the-ussr-militant-atheism-in-the-former-soviet-union/

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Kevin Gonzales, the producer of a new upcoming documentary, “Martyred in the USSR, Militant Atheism in the Former Soviet Union.” The estimated release date is at the end of 2013 and you can view the trailer and get more information on the documentary at martyredintheussr.com.

FP: Kevin Gonzales, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Tell us what your new documentary is about.

Gonzales: Martyred in the USSR is a documentary about religious persecution, brought on by militant atheism in the former Soviet Union. The film dives into the personal and tragic stories of those who survived the persecution and the history behind it. We’ve only gotten a hand full of testimonials so far and their stories alone are very gut wrenching. One story we have tells of a father who was taken out of his house without warning and had to walk over 40 miles to the gulag in a chain gang. His daughter followed the whole time carrying a loaf of bread because she was afraid he would not have enough to eat in prison. When they finally made it to the gulag, after trudging through 40 miles of snow, the father entered the prison and she was never able to hand him the bread. In desperation she threw it over the fence hoping he would get it. She never saw him again. His crime: he simply attended a church. It is really amazing how the Soviet government hated religion of any kind. Many people don’t know this but Nikita Khrushchev launched an anti-religious campaign that was worse than Stalin’s, and that was between 1953 to 1964.

Nicholai Khamara after being tortured to death in prison in 1964. He was found with a rag stuffed in his mouth and his tongue cut out. He was tortured simply for being a newly converted Baptist.

FP: What inspired you to make this film?

Gonzales: I wasn’t really looking for it and it kind of just fell in my lap. I’ve done news and corporate video most of my career and I wanted to make the switch to the more creative side so I thought a documentary would be the best way to do it. I was looking for a topic but I’m here to tell you, this one would have been the last thing on my mind to produce. I was in church one day and was talking to one of the parishioners, Oxsana, and asked her where she was from. She told me she was from a small town in Russia and of course, the first thing I asked, being a nosey producer, was “How was practicing a faith of any kind during the Cold War?” and it started from there. She told me she remembers her dad, a local pastor, telling her and her siblings to hide under the bed because the KGB was banging on their front door. Oxsana moved to the US when she was five so she told me I should really interview her parents because they have more first- hand knowledge and so a year later I went down to Orange County, just outside of LA, and interviewed her dad, grandfather and two family friends. Their stories were amazing and I knew this would make a fantastic documentary.

Ft. Samsomas. Beaten to death during a KGB interrogation.

FP: Why do you think our mainstream culture and our society at large ignores this issue?

Gonzales: Well, I believe there are two reasons for this. First is, the public in general simply does not know about it. Dr. Christopher Marsh, one of our experts who’s interview is on the website, says that when he lectures in Russia the youth he talks to know nothing about it and will deny that it ever happened. They even go on to say that Stalin had a few faults but he was really an OK guy. I almost fell out of my seat when Dr. Marsh told me that. He went on to say that since the persecution was never taught in the schools, the new generation of teachers don’t even know themselves. (History is written by the victors.) I have gotten much of my information from the Keston Institute which has hundreds if not thousands of personal hand written documents, magazines, and photos from those that lived during that militant atheist regime, that prove otherwise. To say that Stalin, Lenin, Khrushchev, or any of them were “OK guys” is pretty much an oxymoron.

Secondly, many of the survivors simply want to forget and move on with their lives. I tried to speak to get three groups of Russian Jews to tell their story and none of them wanted to speak. This has happened to me with other religions as well, not just the Jews.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3624/sharia-law-belgium Islamic Sharia law is “incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy.” — European Court of Human Rights After members of the newly established Islam Party vowed to implement Islamic Sharia law in Belgium, Members of Parliament introduced a bill that would limit the power of Muslim extremists who win elected office at the local […]

This is truly a hoot. Here is some information about Ariel University from OUTPOST http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/occupying-the-laboratory-by-ruth-king.html

“In October 2012 a project by a Danish and Israeli team at Ariel University in Samaria developed a lower radiation modality which was demonstrated to be very effective in destroying recalcitrant lung tumors. The Israeli team included physics professors Konstantin Komoshvili, Jacob Levitan, and Asher Yahalom, as well as engineering professor Boris Kapilewitch and Dr. Stella Aronov of Ariel’s cancer research lab. On the Danish side, the team includes researchers from Denmark’s Technical University and the well-known physicist Henrik Bohr, grandson of the Jewish physicist and Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr, and a nephew of nuclear physicist Aage Bohr, also a Nobel Prize winner.

Pretty impressive, but on December 27, 2012 Alistair Burt, British Minister for the Middle East expressed “deep disappointment” at the upgrading of Ariel to university status, stating: “Ariel is beyond the Green Line in a settlement that is illegal according to international law. This decision will deepen the presence of the settlements in the Palestinian territories and will create another obstacle to peace.”

And apparently President Obama shares that view.

He had no compunctions however in delivering his obsequious speech in Cairo in June 2009 at Al-Azhar University whose faculty and imams have issued the most racist calls for Jihad against the West.

Here is just a tidbit from one of their resident scholars posted by Raymond Ibrahim on March 6th, 2013

http://counterjihadreport.com/2013/03/06/al-azhar-scholar-christian-copts-will-pay-jizya/

“During a recent interview, Dr. Mahmoud Shu‘ban, a professor at Al Azhar University, made clear that the Copts, Egypt’s Christian minority, will pay the jizya—what is often referred to in the West as an Islamic “poll tax.” According to the Al Azhar professor, “If non-Muslims were to learn the meaning of ‘jizya,’ they would ask for it to be applied—and we will apply it, just like Islam commands us to.” His logic is that, if Christians pay the jizya, they would buy for themselves “protection,” hence why they themselves should want to pay it.”

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/the-end-of-the-republic/

As I write, I am looking out the window at the gradual but remorseless deconstruction of one of the oldest structures in the Canadian capital of Ottawa, the heritage-designated Ogilvy Building. Built in 1907, it had stood empty for the last 20 years and left to deteriorate, until it was recently condemned. According to the Ottawa Citizen for December 17, 2012, this well-staffed and popular emporium “was the place to shop for ‘quality’ goods of every description…founded on the motto ‘Good Merchandise, At a Fair Price, With Service.” With its buff-colored brick facade, large wood-framed windows, high ceilings, ornamental metal cornices and panels decorated with the ‘tree-of-life’ motif, it was an imposing municipal landmark. It now resembles an architectural carcass, its top two floors reduced to a heap of rubble, the medallions and wall plaques scraped away, the sculpted pillars lopped like amputated limbs, the decorative linear meanders chiselled off, and the remaining bricks sandblasted to a lackluster grey. An army of industrious laborers wielding jackhammers and scurrying about in tractors are chipping and hacking away at the once-solid grandeur of what, for a time, seemed indestructible.

“Another emblem there,” said poet William Butler Yeats, mourning the passing of a rich and storied world, “in memory glorified.” But now, “all is changed.” And so it is with the Shining City on the Hill, thanks to a president whose actions belie what appears to be an underlying purpose, namely, the erosion of the structures that sustain the greatest republican enterprise in history.

I have been suspicious of Obama from the very beginning of his meteoric national career. I could not understand how a man with so obscure a dossier, very few salient records disclosed to the public; with little or no executive or working experience; and affiliated with a host of decidedly shady characters—communist poet and activist Frank Marshall Davis, former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi, unrepentant former terrorist Bill Ayers, America-and-Jew bashing Jeremiah Wright, corrupt financier Tony Rezko, racist leader of the Nation of Islam Louis Farrakhan, to name only a few—could captivate the media, bask in the glow of an adoring public, receive the Democratic nomination, and then be elected to the presidency of the United States.

My suspicion of the man’s bona fides deepened even more after the Honduras affair in July 2009, in which Obama (and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton) sided with leftwing strongman Manuel Zelaya, implicated in a conspiracy to overturn the civil Constitution of the country, and against the democratic legislature that had deposed him. The historically invalid and politically tendentious Cairo speech, the evident shilling for the Palestinians and their flagrantly concocted narrative of ancestral title, the clear animus against Israel and the outrageous treatment meted out to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu only confirmed my misgivings concerning the president’s political agenda.

That an American president should cozy up to the Venezuelan leftist dictator and bow from the waist to the Saudi monarch was beyond my comprehension. (And more recently, his hearting of Turkish autocrat and neo-Ottoman jihadist Recep Tayyip Erdogan as his personal “friend and colleague” is only a further indication of Obama’s troubling and discreditable policies.) That he should see to the massive increase of the American debt within only a few years and apply himself, in the words of Victor Davis Hanson, to “tun[ing] a properly moribund economy,”—i.e., “ensuring 50 million on food stamps, putting over 80,000 a month on Social Security disability insurance, and extending unemployment insurance to tens of millions”—was another sign that something was profoundly amiss. His bruited release of criminal illegals from American prisons defies common sense, as does his refusal to patrol and seal the incendiary border with Mexico. And that he should eagerly adopt the lifestyle of a Hollywood playboy and the jet-setting 1%, in defiance of his own proletarian rhetoric, while the country was foundering economically and absorbing one setback after another in the international theater, should have earned him the distrust of every sentient American citizen. Another stain on this dismal record of political degeneracy is his abandonment of the American ambassador and his entourage in Libya, leading to the death of four Americans.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/iraq-ten-years-since-removing-saddam-on-the-glazov-gang/

Shant Kenderian, Michael Walsh and Josh Brewster reflect on the ten year anniversary of our war: Did we win? Should we have gone?

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/davidhornik/will-obama-confront-abbas-on-palestinian-terror-surge/print/ President Obama will be arriving in Israel on Wednesday, and on Thursday he’ll be taking a break from meeting Israeli leaders and visiting Israeli sites to go to Ramallah and meet with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. In this rundown of the president’s itinerary, U.S. deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes says that in […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
Time and time again, the liberal defenders of government power have attacked any call for reform as a plot by the wealthy. Even now New York Times editorialists pound their keys about the “Concentration of Wealth”, invoking presidents from Andrew Jackson to Theodore Roosevelt. But in our America, the “Concentration of Wealth” is not found in the hands of a few billionaires. It is found in the hands of the government.

The editorialists talk about the income gap and how much wealth is held by the top 1 percent of the country, but they are leaving something out. Their statistics deal with individuals, not institutions. And it is institutions which threaten our liberties, not individuals.

The top 10 wealthiest men and women in America barely have 250 billion dollars between them. That sounds like a lot of money, until you look at annual Federal budgets which run into the trillions of dollars, and the country’s national debt which approaches 15 trillion dollars. And that’s not taking into account state budgets. Even Rhode Island, the smallest state in the union, with a population of barely a million, has a multi-billion dollar budget.

As the 10th richest man in America, Michael Bloomberg wields a personal fortune of a mere 18 billion dollars, but as the Mayor of the City of New York, he disposes of an annual budget of 63 billion dollars. In a single year, he disposes of three times his own net worth. A sum that would wipe out the net worth of any billionaire in America. That is the difference between the wealth wielded by the 10th wealthiest man in America, and the mayor of a single city. And that is the real concentration of wealth. Not in the hands of individuals, but at every level of government, from the municipal to the state houses to the White House.

While liberal pundits pop on their stovepipe hats, fix their diamond stickpins and cravats, and trade in 19th century rhetoric about the dangers of trusts and monopolies– the power in 20th century America lies not in the hands of a few industrialists, but with massive monopolistic trust of government, and its network of unions, non-profits, lobbyists and PAC’s. The railroads are broken up, offshore drilling is banned, coal mining is in trouble and Ma Bell has a thousand quarreling stepchildren– now government is the real big business. How big?

The 2008 presidential campaign cost 5.3 billion dollars. Another 1.5 billion for the House and the Senate. And that’s not counting another half a billion from the 527’s and even shadier fundraising by shadowy political organizations. But that’s a small investment when you realize that they were spending billions of dollars to get their hands on trillions of dollars.

Do you know of any company in America where for a mere few billion, you could become the CEO of a company whose shareholders would be forced to sit back and watch for four years while you run up trillion dollar deficits and parcel out billions to your friends? Without going to jail or being marched out in handcuffs. A company that will allow you to indulge yourself, travel anywhere at company expense, live the good life, and only work when you feel like it. That will legally indemnify you against all shareholder lawsuits, while allowing you to dispose not only of their investments, but of their personal property in any way you see fit.

Let Francis Shepherd http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/343224 Rome — “May God forgive you.” That’s Cardinal Dolan’s translation of a joke Pope Francis toasted the College of Cardinals with a day after being elected the 267th pontiff. Having watched the prayerfulness of some of the cardinals going into the papal conclave that would elect the Argentine cardinal Jorge Mario […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/343180 According to a new study jointly produced by three liberal organizations — the Center for American Progress, the Stimson Center, and the Center for Climate and Security — global warming may be destabilizing the Arab world. Entitled “The Arab Spring and Climate Change,” the study was given prominent publicity by New York Times columnist […]