BOBZILLA.tv

Linda Wadsworth of the University of Maryland, left, draws blood from Ethan Houley, 11, of Annapolis, Md., right, as Infectious Diseases Specialist Dr. Julia Hutter, second from left, and Gina Parsons of the University of Maryland, second from right, look on at Annapolis Pediatrics in Annapolis, Aug. 27, 2009. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Since April, 114 Children Have Died from H1N1 - 700,000 Have Died from Abortion
By Karen Schuberg

Swine flu has claimed the lives of at least 114 children in the United States since April, according to the latest data available from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But an estimated 2,247 to 3,305 babies lose their lives to abortion each day, based on statistics compiled by both the CDC and the Guttmacher Institute, a  private research foundation tied to the abortion industry.

A CDC report released last Friday placed the death toll from H1N1 at 114 for persons aged 18 or younger. The week of Oct. 18-24 saw 19 laboratory-confirmed pediatric deaths from H1N1. Since August, 65 children have died from the virus and 12 have died from an unkown subtype of Influenza A. Since April 26, only 1 child has died from seasonal flu.

Meanwhile, in a 2008 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), the CDC said that in 2005, the most recent year for which abortion data is available, 820,151 legal abortions were reported from 49 reporting areas. (Scroll down to p.1 of report -- link above -- for information).

According to Guttmacher data, which are considered more up-to-date and more accurate than federal government statistics, 3,305 babies on average lose their lives to abortion daily. In 2005, the number of abortions totaled 1,206,200 children, (see p. 9, Table 1).

Guttmacher spokeswoman Rebecca Wind told CNSNews.com that her organization’s data are more “complete” than the CDC’s because, rather than relying on state self-reports, Guttmacher contacts abortion providers directly.

“Guttmacher conducts a census of all known abortion providers in the United States,” Wind explained. “The CDC compiles data that are submitted by state departments of health and depend on state reporting requirements, which vary from state to state.  In 2005, California, Louisiana, and New Hampshire did not provide data to the CDC.”

Moreover, the CDC does not factor in how many children die from the legal abortion-inducing drug mifepristone, also known as RU-486.

Based on the Guttmacher statistics, an estimated 694,050 children were killed by abortion over the last seven months -- not including deaths from abortion drugs taken privately, outside of clinics.

Brian Clowes, director of research at Human Life International, told CNSNews.com that while it is "sad" that  that 114 children have died from the H1N1 virus since April, the contrast is overwhelming.

“Over that same seven months, over 700,000 pre-born human beings have been killed legally by abortion in the United States,” Clowes said. “Yet we tolerate the death toll from abortion because we have come to believe, contrary to science and every mother’s experience, that the unborn human being really isn’t a human being.”

Clowes added: “This staggering inconsistency hardly even shocks us anymore, as the latest ‘pandemic’ never even begins to reach the death toll that we have grown to tolerate from legalized abortion.  Ignoring the by-far-largest killer of children in favor of the latest fashionable panic goes beyond mere irony; it speaks of a deep societal sickness that we can hardly comprehend because it is so pervasive.”

George Tiller: America's Most Notorious Abortionist. CLICK HERE

In the wake of the shooting of late-term abortionist George Tiller, President Barack Obama sent out a welcome message that this nation would not tolerate attacks on pro-lifers or any other Americans because of their religion or beliefs.

Ha ha! Just kidding. That was the lead sentence -- with minor edits -- of a New York Times editorial warning about theoretical hate crimes against Muslims published eight months after 9/11. Can pro-lifers get a hate crimes bill passed and oceans of ink devoted to assuring Americans that "most pro-lifers are peaceful"?

For years, we've had to hear about the grave threat that Americans might overreact to a terrorist attack committed by 19 Muslims shouting "Allahu akbar" as they flew commercial jets into American skyscrapers. That would be the equivalent of 19 pro-lifers shouting "Abortion kills a beating heart!" as they gunned down thousands of innocent citizens in Wichita, Kan.

Why aren't liberals rushing to assure us this time that "most pro-lifers are peaceful"? Unlike Muslims, pro-lifers actually are peaceful.

According to recent polling, a majority of Americans oppose abortion -- which is consistent with liberals' hysterical refusal to allow us to vote on the subject. In a country with approximately 150 million pro-lifers, five abortionists have been killed since Roe v. Wade.

In that same 36 years, more than 49 million babies have been killed by abortionists. Let's recap that halftime score, sports fans: 49 million to five.

Meanwhile, fewer than 2 million Muslims live in America and, while Muslims are less murderous than abortionists, I'm fairly certain they've killed more than five people in the United States in the last 36 years. For some reason, the number "3,000" keeps popping into my head.

So in a country that is more than 50 percent pro-life -- and 80 percent opposed to the late-term abortions of the sort performed by Tiller -- only five abortionists have been killed. And in a country that is less than 0.5 percent Muslim, several dozen Muslims have killed thousands of Americans. But the killing of about one abortionist per decade leads liberals to condemn the entire pro-life movement as "domestic terrorists." At least liberals have finally found some terrorists they'd like to send to Guantanamo.

Tiller bragged about performing 60,000 abortions, including abortions of viable babies, able to survive outside the mother's womb. He made millions of dollars performing late-term abortions so gruesome that only two other abortionists -- not a squeamish bunch -- in the entire country would perform them.

Kansas law allows late-term abortions only to save the mother's life or to prevent "irreversible physical damage" to the mother. But Tiller was more than happy to kill viable babies, provided the mothers: (1) forked over $5,000; and (2) mentioned "substantial and irreversible conditions," which, in Tiller's view, apparently included not being able to go to concerts or rodeos or being "temporarily depressed" on account of their pregnancies.

In return for blood money from Tiller's profitable abattoir, Democrats ran a political protection racket for the late-term abortionist.

In 1997, The Washington Post reported that Tiller attended one of Bill Clinton's White House coffees for major campaign contributors. In addition to a $25,000 donation to Clinton, Tiller wanted to thank him personally for 30 months of U.S. Marshals' protection paid for by the U.S. taxpayer.

Kansas Democrats who received hundreds of thousands of campaign dollars from Tiller repeatedly intervened to block any interference with Tiller's abortion mill.

Kathleen Sebelius, who was the governor of Kansas until Obama made her Health and Human Services Secretary, received hundreds of thousands of campaign dollars from Tiller. Sebelius vetoed one bill restricting late-term abortions and another one that would have required Tiller to turn over his records pertaining to "substantial and irreversible conditions" justifying his late-term abortions.

Kansas Attorney General Paul Morrison also got elected with the help of Tiller's blood money, replacing a Republican attorney general who was in the middle of an investigation of Tiller for various crimes including his failure to report statutory rapes, despite performing abortions on pregnant girls as young as 11.

But soon after Morrison replaced the Republican attorney general, the charges against Tiller were reduced and, in short order, he was acquitted of a few misdemeanors. In what is a not uncommon cost of doing business with Democrats, Morrison is now gone, having been forced to resign when his mistress charged him with sexual harassment and corruption.

Tiller was protected not only by a praetorian guard of elected Democrats, but also by the protective coloration of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America -- coincidentally, the same church belonged to by Tiller's fellow Wichita executioner, the BTK killer.

The official Web page of the ELCA instructs: "A developing life in the womb does not have an absolute right to be born." As long as we're deciding who does and doesn't have an "absolute right to be born," who's to say late-term abortionists have an "absolute right" to live?

I wouldn't kill an abortionist myself, but I wouldn't want to impose my moral values on others. No one is for shooting abortionists. But how will criminalizing men making difficult, often tragic, decisions be an effective means of achieving the goal of reducing the shootings of abortionists?

Following the moral precepts of liberals, I believe the correct position is: If you don't believe in shooting abortionists, then don't shoot one.

Ann Coulter

One Nation Under Obama
by AWR Hawkins

The president is co-opting whatever he needs to remake this country. Why not religion too?

Barack Obama has long been known for his socialistic convictions and messianic tendencies. That he therefore wants to rule rather than represent and to dictate rather than debate is not hard to understand. And while he may not come right out and say it, he expects us to pledge allegiance to him. He said as much when he told Republican House members just three days after his inauguration that the quicker they quit listening to voices that run counter to his, the better for us all.

Obama has been encouraged down this kingly path by some very unsavory characters. Just a month before the 2008 presidential elections were held, he drew the praise of the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who said “when Obama talks ‘the messiah is absolutely speaking.’” And more recently, on April 24, 2009, he drew praise from communist dictators from “Boliva, Cuba, Dominica, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Venezuela” who are trusting Obama to join them in their efforts to prove that “capitalism is leading humanity and the planet to extinction” by incorporating everything from health care to cell service under the guise of “human rights” — and thus under the purview of government entitlements at taxpayer expense.

The scary news is that our president is a self-aggrandizing anti-capitalist with or without the support of Farrakhan and the Latin communists, and therefore has no problem overseeing a federal government eager to take over more aspects of our everyday lives. For the more Obama co-opts, the more we have to focus on him. And please don’t fail to understand that this includes religion in the United States — especially Christianity.

Obama wants his judgments and convictions to be our guide in all spheres of life, even when his judgments run 180 degrees counter to the natural law that guided our Founders or the Bibles that guided the Puritans. Therefore, it was as easy for him to skip the National Day of Prayer on May 7, 2009, and open the door to the legalized killing of “days-old unborn children for [stem cell] research” as it was for him to tell GM what type of cars they’ll be building in the future if they want to remain extant.

Obama has long been opposed to the traditional values that undergird this nation and has been wise enough to war against those values in the name of those values, thus disorienting those whom he can’t intellectually disarm. For example, when he discusses any of his personal positions that go against the Christian faith, such as his pro-abortion stance, he always makes certain to mention that he’s a Christian in the process. The implication being that Christianity’s chief characteristic is some vague acceptance of all positions as equally valid instead of the orthodox, historical Christian insistence on truth and justice, good and evil.

Ultimately, this allows him to dismiss Christianity’s ethical claims on the life of the believer altogether. This was clear when he spoke about the tensions between his pro-abortion stance and Christianity at the Call to Renewal Conference in 2006: “Democracy demands that … religiously motivated [individuals] translate their concerns into universal rather than religion-specific values.”

This is also how Obama sidestepped the implications of his support for abortion when giving Notre Dame’s commencement address. He made it sound like the pro-abortion and anti-abortion positions are just two viable positions that Christians can hold. While he admitted that these two positions flow from “views … [which] are complex and even contradictory … [and] irreconcilable,” he wisely avoided the use of smaller but more important words such as “right” and “wrong,” and asked that members of the “irreconcilable” factions “honor the consciences” of those with whom they disagree on the abortion issue. Never mind that this tactic allowed him to continue down the path of supporting abortion without having to explain why he supports it or to justify his use of taxpayer dollars to fund the practice.

But how dare we expect the great and powerful Obama to explain himself, as if he too were a mere serf or subject, or even a run-of-the-mill politician from days gone by?

When it comes to economics, Obama’s mode of operation is similar to that which he uses when talking to religious universities and Christian congregations. Therefore, although he’s only been in office since January 20, 2009, he’s been able to move at a speed that disorients those he can’t convert and has succeeded in the quasi-nationalization of many banks, financial institutions, and the American auto industry. He’s openly setting his sights on our health care system now, which means the Latin American communist leaders who asked Obama to join their war against capitalism should feel encouraged that things are going their way here in the United States.

Of course, Obama always says government bailouts (takeovers) are just temporary and that he only resorts to them as a last-ditch effort to save the economy. But the fact that he has that cheese-eating grin on his face every time he announces more government involvement seems dubious.

In fact, in a style which only a two-bit revolutionary could love, the always-grinning Obama acts then explains or at best acts while explaining, so that by the time his explanation comes through it’s too late to do much more than go along with him. This is the epitome of what the late Harvard Professor Crane Brinton communicated in his book The Anatomy of Revolution, when he wrote of how extremists like Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin (and Obama) cannot wait until people share their views before acting, but must act and trust that the people will eventually see why the action was necessary to further the revolution.

The bottom line is this: Forget the “one nation under God” stuff and understand that for the foreseeable future we are to consider ourselves “one nation under Obama.” The quicker we figure this out, the easier the adjustment is going to be for us all.
_______________

AWR Hawkins is a conservative writer who holds a Ph.D. in military history from Texas Tech University.

Planned Parenthood Matters
The organization has a dark history and a disturbing present.
By Kathryn Jean Lopez

‘We want fewer and better children . . . and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict on us.”

That ghastly message appeared in the introduction to Margaret Sanger’s 1922 book, The Pivot of Civilization.

In a little-noticed incident, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently announced that she is “really in awe” of Sanger. “The 20th-century reproductive-rights movement, really embodied in the life and leadership of Margaret Sanger, was one of the most transformational in the entire history of the human race,” Clinton declaimed upon receiving an award from the organization that Sanger founded, Planned Parenthood.

Clinton’s speech punctured the fiction that she’s a moderate — the radical organization Planned Parenthood certainly has confidence in her.

Clinton’s speech didn’t set off shock waves among the public because Planned Parenthood is about as American as apple pie at this benighted point in history. Most Democrats and even some Republicans bow at its altar. The religious metaphor is intentional: Sanger referred to a “religion of birth control” that sought to “ease the financial load of caring for with public funds . . . children destined to become a burden to themselves, to their family, and ultimately to the nation.”

According to its just-released annual report for 2007–2008, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America was responsible for conducting 305,310 abortions in the United States in 2007, an increase from 289,750 the previous year. Consider that the next time an abortion advocate tells you women are being kept from getting abortions in America. That increase in abortions provided by PPFA coincided with an increase in government funding, from $337 million to $350 million.

Does any of this sound unacceptable to you? We certainly don’t have to subsidize the largest abortion provider in the United States, one with a dark history (which Jonah Goldberg chronicles well in his Liberal Fascism) and a disturbing present.

But attempts by pro-life politicians to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood are always thwarted. Defenders of Planned Parenthood argue that the government money goes to actual family planning, not just abortions. But why does Planned Parenthood even need the U.S. Treasury when it makes a profit? Shouldn’t we at least be arguing over this?

Washington right now is more comfortable with abortion than it has been in a long time. As Hillary Clinton praises the Obama administration’s commitment to “reproductive rights,” it’s an important time for some reflection on what, exactly, that euphemism means.

Does, for instance, Roe v. Wade co-counsel Ron Weddington reflect the reproductive-rights movement? In 1992, he urged the White House to rush to get an abortion pill into the hands of American women. He argued that it will help to “start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy and poor segment of our country.”

He wrote: “Government is also going to have to provide vasectomies, tubal ligations and abortions. . . . There have been about 30 million abortions in this country since Roe v. Wade. Think of all the poverty, crime and misery . . . and then add 30 million unwanted babies to the scenario. We lost a lot of ground during the Reagan-Bush religious orgy. We don’t have a lot of time left.” Sounds a lot like the population-culling paranoia of Sanger, doesn’t it?

Pro-lifers are frequently portrayed by the Planned Parenthood crowd as heartless zealots unconcerned with the realities of women’s lives. Not only does the work of many at, say, crisis-pregnancy centers suggest otherwise, but if you pay attention to the words of Sanger and her followers, you’ll find a much more chilling disdain for the realities of lower-class life.

There are folks with good intentions on all sides of the abortion debate. But if you doubt a little scrutiny is way overdue, consider this. We have not yet hit the 100-day mark in the Obama administration and the United Nations Population Fund [UNFPA] has already been given a $50 million check from the United States. The UNFPA has been criticized for its collaboration with coerced abortion in China. But then that’s exactly what can be expected from a State Department run by a woman “really in awe” of Margaret Sanger.

PPFA’s annual report is titled “Planned Parenthood Matters.” It sure does. It’s about time we take notice.
________________

Kathryn Jean Lopez is the editor of National Review Online.

© 2009, Kathryn Jean Lopez. Distributed by Newspaper Enterprise Assn.

Mrs. Clinton Can’t Defend Patron Saint of Planned Parenthood
By Mona Charen

Margaret Sanger was a most thoroughgoing racist.

Appearing before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was confronted in a way she probably wasn’t expecting. Rep. Chris Smith (R., N.J.) asked the secretary to account for her comments the previous month, when she accepted the Margaret Sanger Award from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “I admire Margaret Sanger enormously,” Secretary Clinton had said in March, “her courage, her tenacity, her vision . . . And when I think about what she did all those years ago in Brooklyn, taking on archetypes, taking on attitudes and accusations flowing from all directions, I am really in awe of her.”

I’m not sure what it means to “take on archetypes” (American Heritage Dictionary: “An original model or type after which other similar things are patterned; a prototype”). Perhaps she meant stereotypes. But it is worth pausing to consider, as Representative Smith did, that the Planned Parenthood organization (of which Sanger’s American Birth Control League was the predecessor) and the secretary of state continue to regard Margaret Sanger as an (if you will) archetypal modern feminist.

Mrs. Sanger was certainly a birth-control pioneer. But when you examine the totality of Mrs. Sanger’s views, you’d think modern feminists would blanch — at least a little. Margaret Sanger was a most thoroughgoing racist. “Eugenics,” she wrote, “is the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political, and social problems.” Here, from her book What Every Girl Should Know, is an example of her thoughts on human development:

In all fish and reptiles where there is no great brain development, there is also no conscious sexual control. The lower down in the scale of human development we go the less sexual control we find. It is said that the aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development, has so little sexual control that police authority alone prevents him from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the streets.

In his book Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg quotes Sanger as describing her life’s work this way: “More children from the fit, less from the unfit — that is the chief issue of birth control.”

Representative Smith asked Secretary Clinton to respond to Mrs. Sanger’s views about the “deterioration in the human stock” and “the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents, and dependents.” As Goldberg has observed, conservatives are always asked to “own” their intellectual forebears and to disavow that which requires disavowal. Yet liberals skate by without having to distance themselves from the dreadful opinions and writings of their heroes and heroines.

The secretary did not respond directly. She chose not to defend Margaret Sanger at all. Instead, she spoke of the suffering women that she had seen around the world. “I’ve been in hospitals in Brazil where half the women were enthusiastically and joyfully greeting new babies and the other half were fighting for their lives against botched abortions. I’ve been in African countries where 12- and 13-year-old girls are bearing children.” I’ve asked the State Department to identify the Brazilian hospital to which Mrs. Clinton was referring. They have yet to get back to me. As for children bearing children in Africa — obviously, birth control is necessary in poor countries, but is she really suggesting that cultures abusive enough to permit the marriage of very young girls would be open to providing them with birth control? It’s like suggesting that the solution to wife beating is to get men to wear boxing gloves.

Secretary Clinton then, in good Obamanista fashion, offered a gratuitous swipe at the Bush administration. “During my time as first lady I helped to create the Campaign Against Teenage Pregnancy . . . and . . . the rate of teen pregnancy went down. I’m sad to report that after an administration of eight years that undid so much of the good work, the rate of teenage pregnancy is going up.”

Politicians always simplify, but this is truly ludicrous. Teen pregnancy down under the Clintons but then up under Bush? Sorry, the statistics do not reflect that. According to the Guttmacher Institute (the research arm of Planned Parenthood), teen pregnancy reached an all-time high in 1988 and 1989 and began trending down thereafter, reaching its lowest recent point in 2005 — past the midpoint of the Bush years. It has been going up since then.

Part of Mrs. Clinton’s solution is to promote abortion, which she calls “women’s reproductive health care.” Anyone for a small irony? Margaret Sanger hated abortion and called abortionists “blood sucking men with M.D. after their names.” Perhaps someone can ask Secretary Clinton about that at the next hearing.
____________

Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist.

© 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Barack Obama’s Newest Spiritual Advisor

Now that he no longer draws spiritual succor from Jeremiah Wright—the America-hating, racist demagogue who served as his pastor and spiritual mentor for twenty years—Barack Obama has turned elsewhere for guidance in the task of carrying out his political duties while remaining true to his religious values.

The most notable of his spiritual advisors today is his friend of many years, Rev. Jim Wallis, founder of the Sojourners organization. Says Wallis, “We’ve [he and Obama] been talking faith and politics for a long time.”

Who is Jim Wallis? According to The New York Times, Wallis “leans left on some issues” but overall is a “centrist, social justice” kind of guy. But a closer look at Wallis’s background reveals him to be nearly as radical, if better at disguising the fact, as Jeremiah Wright.

As a teenager in the 1960s, Wallis joined the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement. His participation in peace protests nearly resulted in his expulsion from the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Illinois, a Christian seminary where he was then enrolled. While at Trinity, Wallis founded an anti-capitalism magazine called the Post-American, which identified wealth redistribution and government-managed economies as the keys to achieving “social justice”—a term that, as educator/journalist Barry Loberfeld has pointed out, is essentially “code for communism.”

In 1971, the 23-year-old Wallis and his Post-American colleagues changed the name of their publication to Sojourners, and in the mid-1970s they moved their base of operation from Chicago to Washington, DC, where Wallis has served as Sojourners’ editor (and leader of the eponymous organization) ever since.

Advocating America’s transformation into a socialist nation, Sojourners’ “statement of faith” exhorted people to “refuse to accept [capitalist] structures and assumptions that normalize poverty and segregate the world by class.” According to Sojourners, “gospel faith transforms our economics, gives us the power to share our bread and resources, welcomes all to the table of God’s provision, and provides a vision for social revolution.”

As one of its first acts, Sojourners formed a commune in the Washington, DC neighborhood of Southern Columbia Heights, where members shared their finances and participated in various activist campaigns that centered on attacking U.S. foreign policy, denouncing American “imperialism,” and extolling Marxist revolutionary movements in the Third World.

Giving voice to Sojourners’ intense anti-Americanism, Jim Wallis called the U.S. “the great power, the great seducer, the great captor and destroyer of human life, the great master of humanity and history in its totalitarian claims and designs.”

In parallel with his magazine’s stridently antiwar position during the Seventies, Wallis championed the cause of communism. Forgiving communism’s brutal standard-bearers in Vietnam and Cambodia the most abominable of atrocities, Wallis was, by contrast, unsparing in his execration of American military efforts. He demanded greater levels of “social justice” in the allegedly oppressive U.S., but was silent on the subject of the murderous rampages of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. In fact, several Sojourners editorials attempted to exculpate the Khmer Rouge of the charges of genocide, instead shifting blame squarely onto the United States.

Following the 1979 refugee crisis in Vietnam, Wallis lashed out at the desperate masses fleeing North Vietnam’s Communist forces by boat. These refugees, as Wallis saw it, had been “inoculated” by capitalist influences during the war and were absconding “to support their consumer habit in other lands.” Wallis then admonished critics against pointing to the boat people to “discredit” the righteousness of Vietnam’s newly victorious Communist regime.

Wallis blamed America alone for the political tensions of the Cold War era. “At each step in the Cold War,” he wrote in November 1982, “the U.S. was presented with a choice between very different but equally plausible interpretations of Soviet intentions, each of which would have led to very different responses. At every turn, U.S. policy-makers have chosen to assume the very worst about their Soviet counterparts.”

Actively embracing liberation theology, Wallis and Sojourners in the 1980s rallied to the cause of Communist regimes that had seized power in Latin America with the promise of bringing about the revolutionary restructuring of society. Particularly attractive for the ministry’s religious activists was the Communist Sandinista dictatorship that took power in Nicaragua in 1979. Wallis embarked on an editorial crusade in Sojourners to undercut public support for a confrontational U.S. foreign policy toward the spread of Communism there and elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere. Moreover, he invited the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) —the public relations arm of the El Salvadoran terrorist group the FMLN—to take part in a number of initiatives with Sojourners.

Steadfast advocates of the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s, Sojourners activists maintained that a U.S. nuclear buildup was “an intolerable evil” irreconcilably at odds with Christian teaching, and that “[t]he Reagan Administration remains the chief obstacle to the first step in stopping the arms race.” While assailing Reagan’s defense buildup, Sojourners downplayed the threat posed by the Soviet Union, chastising U.S. policy-makers for their tendency “to assume the very worst about their Soviet counterparts.”

In 1995 Wallis founded Call to Renewal, a coalition of religious groups united in the purpose of advocating, in religious terms, for leftist economic agendas such as tax hikes and wealth redistribution to promote “social justice.”

To this day, Wallis remains fiercely opposed to capitalism and the free-market system. “Our systems have failed the poor and they have failed the earth,” Wallis has said. “They have failed the creation.”

Wallis continues to lament “all the bad stuff in America—the poverty, the racism, the human rights violations, and always the wars … the arrogance, self-righteousness, materialism, and ignorance [about] the rest of the world, the habitual ignoring of the ones that God says we can’t [ignore], the ones Jesus calls the least of these.”

More than a mere religious leader, Wallis, a registered Democrat, is also an adroit political operative, publicly portraying himself as a politically neutral religious figure whose overriding allegiance is to God. Always with the disclaimer that neither major political party can claim authoritatively to represent the values of religious faith, Wallis nevertheless contends that Republican policies tend to be immoral and godless. For example, he and his ministry reviled welfare reform as a “mean-spirited Republican agenda” characterized by “hatred toward the poor.”

At the same time, Wallis actively works to promote Democratic causes. According to a March 10, 2007 Los Angeles Times report, Wallis has recently sought to re-brand traditional slogans of the religious right, like “pro-life,” to refer to such leftist agendas as working with AIDS victims in Africa or helping illegal immigrants in America achieve legal status so they can continue to live with their U.S.-born children.

But Wallis’s most passionate advocacy concerns Barack Obama. Wallis likens the new president to the Old Testament prophet Nehemiah, someone who “carefully surveyed the broken walls of the temple, called the people together to start the rebuilding and to ‘commit themselves to the common good.’” The activist preacher further gushes that the Bush administration’s allegedly unenlightened national-security strategy will “now be replaced by the wisdom of the prophet Micah—that our security depends upon other people’s security,” thereby setting the stage for America’s “new relationship to the world.”

Immediately after Obama’s January 20th inauguration, a rejoicing Wallis told The Washington Times: “My prayers for decades have been answered in this minute.” Subsequently echoing Michelle Obama’s infamous 2008 declaration, Wallis reported that Obama’s electoral victory had enabled him to feel “proud of my country for the first time in a very long time.” The country, meanwhile, may be properly concerned that the president has sought spiritual counsel from a figure as removed from the political mainstream as Jim Wallis.

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The New Anti-Semitism:
A Guide to the ELCA Campaign Against Israel and Her Christian Supporters

Contact: Rev. CJ Conner, 651-373-9137

MEDIA ADVISORY, Christian Newswire - In early January, 66 Bishops of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America plan to go to Palestine and Israel to study Jewish "oppression" against Palestinians. This after Palestinian Hamas has canceled a cease fire and began bombing Israel again at Christmas time, stridently provoking the present war. No doubt each Bishop will come back with stories of this highly orchestrated trip, perhaps too naive to realize that they will only see what Hamas sympathizers and Christian Dhimmis like the Lutheran Bishop of the Holy Land, Munib Younan, want them to see. They will be fed the one-sided anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian narrative that their Presiding Bishop and President of the Lutheran World Federation, Mark Hanson, has become notorious for.

It is common for delegates of ELCA's Middle East "fact finding" trips to return home only to compare Israel to Nazis. And like most of the Mainline leaders, Hanson has rushed to demand an end to hostilities when Israel defends herself, while remaining silent all this time about the hundreds of rockets launched by Palestinian Hamas against Israeli civilians.

The Bishops will meet to strategize their next big push in their fight against Israel- a propaganda campaign against the Christians around the world who have dedicated themselves to supporting, praying for, and befriending Israel and the Jewish people. In partnership with other liberal Churches, they have put together study guides that demonize friends of Israel, not only painting them with a broad brush-stroke label of "Christian Zionist," but dishonestly mischaracterizing what Christian Zionism really is as a theological construct for understanding the identity of Israel in the salvation history of God.

"Christian Zionism is a dangerous and radical political movement," lies Hanson, all the while hoping nobody catches on to the ELCA's own political activism and un-Christian agenda against a responsible peace in the Middle East.

Angry about those under him who don't agree with his radical views, Bishop Hanson spoke at a meeting in May 2008, as reported by Alan F.H. Wisdom:

Hanson did not hesitate to denounce fellow Christians who disagreed with him on Middle East issues. "Let us as Christians admonish and challenge - publicly and face-to-face - those fellow Christians who espouse the ideology called Christian Zionism,"

Hanson also wished to "admonish the leaders in our churches who think that, given all the pressure, conflict, and uncertainties people face, tranquility in the church is what we seek to maintain." Referring to the ELCA standards for ordained clergy and rostered lay leaders, he asked pointedly, "How can one say that I am living in the power and gifts of the Holy Spirit and conclude the end of the Christian life should be tranquility?" The bishop wanted church leaders to engage Middle East issues even at the risk of bringing new conflicts into their congregations."

This kind of "in your face" approach advocated by the good bishop in his Church is the same militant method for "peace-making" he brings to the Middle East, some say fanning the flames of conflict. Because the ELCA has allowed Hanson to play diplomatic "house," a complicated situation has become more complex, and the blood of innocents on both sides of the Gaza border stains their hands.

Much like Hitler's Germany, the Bishops of the ELCA have expanded their fight against Jews to include the Christians who befriend them, pray for them, and protect them. They also continue to treacherously extend hollow words of peace to Israel- a smoke screen to conceal the dagger in their left hand- the millions of dollars they have poured into de-stabilizing the Jewish state. Even though their partnerships and organizations have sweet sounding mission statements, theirs is always a "blame the Jews first and often" approach to "peace" in the Middle East.

For example, Holy Land Lutheran Bishop Younan enjoys a close partnership with Sabeel- led by Anglican priest Naim Ateek - who fans the flames of anti - semitism by saying that Israel is like those who crucified a Palestinian Jesus. Sabeel supports Palestinian violence against Jews, through subtext, subterfuge, and silent provocation, joining Younan in hoping for a 3rd intifada- which today it seems they accomplished. Both men enjoy quiet time today at their safe and cozy Jerusalem flats, counting the U.S. dollars of personal wealth they have raised with their anti-Israel rhetoric.

Bishop Hanson dishonestly represented Yasser Arafat's relationship with Christians in the region, thanking the father of modern terrorism for his support of Christians in what amounted to a public eulogy of the evil man shortly after his death. Not only is it shameful for Christians to receive favor from the anti-Semitic and hateful murderer Arafat, Hanson minimizes and altogether ignores the harsh persecution Christians have suffered under Palestinian rule, as illustrated in journalist Justus Weiner's monograph "Muslim and Palestinian Persecution of Christians."

On June 15th of 2007, Younan made a statement about the Palestinian Civil War, in which he is angry that the world would not recognize and happily accept the Hamas government as democratically elected. He said "Maybe it is time for deep self-evaluation for Palestinians, Israelis, and the International Community." This kind of intentional language of "deep self-evaluation" is the English translation for the Arabic word Jihad. Though Younan's wording is a call to Jihad to the Middle Eastern ear, it is innocuous to the Western ear. Younan and Hanson are brilliant in crafting their language to always allow for plausible deniability, while their audience always knows what they really mean.

The ELCA, in their "nuanced" divestment strategy against Israel, even funds Palestinian NGO's that refused to promise that the money they receive will not be used to support terrorism. Munib Younan is the president of the board of managers for the International Christian Committee of Israel in Jerusalem, a member organization of Ittijah. Ittijah led the charge to reject the signing of "anti-terror" clauses as a condition to receive International Aid for Palestinian NGO's.

Mark Hanson and his Bishops are leaders of the New Anti-Semitism.
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Rev. C.J. Conne
Author- Jesus and the Culture Wars: Reclaiming the Lord's Prayer
To review the full unabridged guide, please visit: www.revcjconner.com

SCROLL DOWN TO VIEW JIHAD FACEBOOK PAGES

Jihadist Group Trying to 'Invade' Facebook Gets Shut Down
By Joel Mowbray

A quickly growing jihadist group that used Facebook to spread its radical message has been shut down by the popular Web networking site after FOXNews.com alerted the company to the group's activities.

Facebook blocked the group, Fursan Ghazawat Alnusra — Arabic for "Knights in Support of the Invasion" — Thursday evening after the group swelled to about 120 members in just over one week.

The group had been exhorting its members to wage "Jihad to aid the religion of Allah and his Prophet."

Fursan Ghazawat Alnusra wrote that its purpose was "to support Jihad and Mujihadeen" and that it started the Facebook group "to invade this Web site" and to ask "Allah to grant us Jihad and martyrdom."

Facebook Jihadist Group Gets Shut Down It promised future action: "Today we invade your sites, tomorrow your lands and homes, o you cross worshippers."

The site's contents included three graphic videos:

* A so-called "martyr" statement from a soon-to-be homicide bomber;

* An Islamic militant, just before dying in battle, asking others to position him for proper prayer to bless his actions.

* A purported Egyptian "traitor" being beheaded on camera because he was accused of helping Americans in Iraq.

A few members of the group posted photos to identify themselves, known as profile pictures, that included well known members of Al Qaeda's leadership as well as prominent Saudi clerics.

One of the group's founders, who called himself Omar Abdel Hakeem, after the Syrian cleric who wrote the book on how to instruct Al Qaeda followers to use technology, wrote a mission statement to inspire "Jihad" against "the cross worshippers," or Christians:

"Maybe the day will come when one of the martyrs is asked [by Allah] who urged you to Jihad, so he answers saying: a message came to me from Facebook asking me to support the Mujihadeen. The message impacted me therefore I went to Jihad to destroy the places of the cross worshippers."

Jarret Brachman, a freelance cyberterror expert who formerly was director of research in the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy, called the group's members "Ji-hobbyists" — users who may be passionate about Al Qaeda's teachings but were unlikely to take violent action.

"They're very knowledgeable and serious. They know the movement, and are using Facebook, not so much to plan an attack, but to propagate a message," Brachman said.

FOXNews.com contacted Facebook on Thursday seeking information about Fursan Ghazawat Alnusra. A few hours later, Facebook yanked the site. A similar group with the same content appeared briefly Friday and was taken down within minutes.

Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt said the group is now disabled and that the company is investigating the group's "friends," and may take further action.

He said Facebook has taken steps to increase monitoring for content supporting terrorism, but he said such actions are difficult.

"Facebook is a start-up of 800 people with a user base of over 140 million," Schnitt said. "Certainly anything that supports violence is at the top of our monitoring list."

Though radical Islamic groups like Al Qaeda are pioneering uses of the Internet to train, share ideas and organize, cyber experts said the the most threatening Jihadists are reluctant to use sites like MySpace and Facebook.

"There is a major vulnerablility in using these sties. It is just an open way to support their movement," said Brachman.

To protect identities, members of Fursan Ghazawat Alnusra were told to use fake names and new e-mail accounts to avoid detection. Most of the discussions were carried out in Arabic, and there was an explicit appeal made for members who speak English, in order to help with English-language propaganda.

It was unclear how many members were based in the United States, although several members claimed to be Americans. According FOXNews.com's source who regularly monitored the group's discussions throughout the week, at least several of the members appeared to be American because of their writing style.

On Monday, the group announced on Facebook that it had created a formal structure of seven "battalions," responsible for duties ranging from spreading religious materials to military knowledge.

It claimed that three of the seven "battalions" had started recruiting, and communication among those individuals could continue even if the Facebook group were to shut down.

"We can't know if these are sophisticated actors capable of coordinating or assisting attacks or if these are just attention-seekers," warned terror expert David Draper of the Nine/Eleven Finding Answers (NEFA) Foundation. "But just having the propaganda available for impressionable youths to find at Facebook is dangerous in and of itself."

That idea seemed to be echoed by one Fursan Ghazawat Alnusra founding member, who identified himself as AboLbaraa Alshamy. He wrote:

"90% of this war is propaganda war.... Therefore those of us who are not in the real Jihad need to engage in this propaganda war."

Experts agree that moves by Facebook and other Internet companies to shut down the group do little. Members of the now-disbanded Fursan Ghazawat Alnusra could form a similar group on another social networking site or even again on Facebook.

They say that to avoid detection, groups like this know now know to strip out words that get their posts flagged, enabling them to get their message out to impressionable young Muslims.

"Propaganda doesn't need to have overt support for violence or terrorism in order to inspire someone to become a terrorist," Draper said.

CLICK THIS IMAGE AND READ MORE ABOUT HITLER'S "SECRET" POLICE - YOU DECIDE IF IT IS, OR IS NOT, EXACTLY WHAT OBAMA PLANS (I.E. HIS PROPOSED CIVILIAN POLICE FORCE) AND IN SOME CASES IS ALREADY IMPLEMENTING: SARAH PALIN, JOE THE PLUMBER, AND NOW CHRISTIANS. WE ALL COULD BE SUBJECT TO THIS KIND OF ACTION SIMPLY FOR FOR OPPOSING THE NEW PRESIDENT.

Anti-Religious Thuggery
By Joseph D'Hippolito

Jesus Christ condemned the religious authorities of His day by saying, "Woe unto ye hypocrites." Today, such words apply to Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, a leftist group that claims to zealously oppose the politicization of the church. In yet another election, the group has persecuted those whose pastoral ministry did not help the Democratic Party but defended those who advanced its aims.

Bishop Arthur Serratelli of Patterson, NJ, wrote a column  for his diocesan newspaper October 9 in which he implied that Obama’s support for pro-abortion legislation would destroy constitutionally protected freedom. On October 24, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (AU) announced that it would petition the Internal Revenue Service to review the Diocese of Patterson’s tax-exempt status.

AU claims that Serratelli misused his position to endorse a specific candidate or political party; IRS rules prohibit tax-exempt religious institutions from making such endorsements.

Serratelli never mentioned Obama by name. Instead, Serratelli alluded to Obama’s public support for the Freedom of Choice Act, a bill that would prohibit any law limiting the availability of abortion – including laws that protect the consciences of individual health workers and allow for parental notification.

“While advocates trumpet this law as the triumph of the freedom of choice, they hide the dark reality that the law would actually inhibit choice,” Serratelli wrote before offering particulars:

“Laws protecting the rights of nurses, doctors and hospitals with moral objections to abortion would no longer stand. Health and safety regulations for abortion clinics would also vanish. Gone the freedom of health care professionals to be faithful to the Hippocratic Oath...Gone the freedom of conscience so essential for a civil society!

“Advocates of FOCA redefine a woman’s ‘health’ so as to expressly permit post-viability abortions. Thus, a child who survives an abortion can be left to die for the health of the mother. No politically correct word can mask this reality for what it is. This is infanticide. Gone the freedom for a baby, once born, to live!”

Serratelli did not allude to Obama until the final paragraphs:

Along with 108 members of Congress, the present democratic candidate for President continues his strong support for the Freedom of Choice Act. In a speech before the Planned Parenthood Action Fund last year, he made the promise that the first thing he would do as President would be to sign the Freedom of Choice Act. What a choice for a new president!

We choose our leaders who make our laws. Every vote counts. Today, either we choose to respect and protect life, especially the life of the child in the womb of the mother or we sanction the loss of our most basic freedoms. At this point, we are still free to choose! (Italics in original.)

Rev. Barry Lynn, president of AU, told USA Today that it was “impossible to interpret this passage as anything but a command to vote against ‘the present Democratic candidate’ because of his promise to sign a certain piece of legislation disfavored by the Catholic Church's hierarchy.”

Using the IRS as a weapon against politically active religious conservatives is standard operating procedure for AU. In June 2007, the group asked the IRS to investigate the Catholic bishop of Providence, R.I., Thomas Tobin, who criticized former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s views on abortion in the diocesan newspaper.

In March, AU asked the IRS to investigate Pastor Steve Riggle of Houston’s Grace Community Church, who endorsed Shelley Sekula Gibbs for a Congressional seat in a letter on personal letterhead. Dave Welsh, executive director of the Houston Area Pastor Council, defended Riggle in a separate letter to the IRS.

“Scripture, the U.S. Constitution and even IRS guidelines make it clear that a pastor does not give up his rights and duties as a citizen when he takes that position,” Welch said. “Barry Lynn knows that pastors may endorse candidates as individuals, that it is very obvious that the letter sent by Pastor Steve Riggle was not produced by or representing the church organization and that this complaint is a stereotypical act by Lynn of grandstanding and attempted intimidation."

Yet when it comes to his own denomination, the United Church of Christ (UCC), Lynn becomes silent.

Lynn and AU have never filed a complaint against Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ – where Rev. Jeremiah Wright once served as pastor and where Obama once worshipped – though Wright’s following comments during display a far more partisan tone than Serratelli’s:

It just came to me with in the last few weeks y’all why so many folk are hatin’ on Barack Obama. He doesn’t fit the model. He ain’t white, he ain’t rich, and he ain’t privileged. Hillary (Clinton) fits the mold. Europeans fit the mold. Giuliani fits the mold. Rich white men fit the mold…Hillary was not a black boy raised in a single parent home, Barack was. Barack knows what it means to be a black man livin’ in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people…Hillary has never had her people designed as non-persons.

When the UCC accepted $100,000 from the State of Connecticut to hold its annual synod in Hartford in June 2007, Lynn remained silent – despite the fact that, one year earlier, he and AU demanded that Maryland’s attorney general deny a $150,000 grant that the National Baptist Congress of Christian Education requested for its conference in Baltimore.

“This grant is totally inappropriate and clearly unconstitutional,” Lynn wrote on AU’s Web site. “Religious groups should pass the collection plate to their own members, not the taxpayers.”

But James Hutchins, who operates the UCCTruths website, wrote that the Maryland grant "clearly distinguished secular events the grant could support from non-secular events the grant could not support." The grant included increased resources for public transportation. The UCC used the all of Connectictut grant, however, to pay the Hartford Civic Center -- which would hold worship services for those attending the synod.

Obama, who announced his candidacy four months prior, spoke at that UCC synod. Not only did he express specific positions; he attributed those positions to his faith and UCC membership. Some excerpts:

So, doing the Lord's work is a thread that's run through our politics since the very beginning. And it puts the lie to the notion that the separation of church and state in America means faith should have no role in public life.

Yet what we also understand is that our values should express themselves not just through our churches or synagogues, temples or mosques; they should express themselves through our government.

“That's why I've been fighting to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit and the minimum wage.

I have made a solemn pledge that I will sign a universal health care bill into law by the end of my first term as president that will cover every American…

But we also know our conscience cannot rest so long as the war goes on in Iraq. It's a war I'm proud I opposed from the start – a war that should never have been authorized and never been waged. I have a plan that would have already begun redeploying our troops with the goal of bringing all our combat brigades home by March 31st of next year.

Moreover, campaign workers outside of the Hartford Civic Center set up tables featuring “Obama ‘08” signs and literature in plain view.

Yet Lynn -- the man who readily confronts religious conservatives over political activity -- wrote on AU's website that he found "no evidence that a violation of the federal tax law against church electioneering occurred,” before continuing:

“Event organizers took measures to ensure that Obama’s appearance did not take on the trappings of a campaign rally by asking attendees to refrain from bringing in ‘Obama for President’ signs and other paraphernalia.

“During his speech, Obama mentioned his presidential run. He shouldn’t have done so, and I am disappointed that he made the reference. But those remarks did not transform the event into a political endorsement. (Emphasis added.)

“What happened at the UCC gathering is a lot different than some of the cases AU has reported to the IRS in the past. In those instances, there was a clear intent to intervene in a partisan race.”

Hutchins exposed Lynn’s hypocrisy:

If Obama was speaking as a non-candidate (since he was invited over a year ago before he declared) then his reference to campaign pledges if elected to office clearly violates IRS standard for separation...If he was speaking as a candidate, IRS standards call for equal access by the other candidates for the same office…which didn’t appear to happen. In either case, his speeches…were a violation of IRS standards.

From the UCC perspective, there should be no confusion as they publicly advocate for the same rules on separation as AU. Furthermore, UCC leaders and conference ministers understood Obama’s status as a declared candidate for some time and…understood that Obama’s address would be a campaign speech. The UCC clearly and knowingly violated AU’s standard for separation. (Emphasis added.)

Lynn’s convenient standards represent a career dedicated to liberal activism. He worked with the American Civil Liberties Union from 1984 to 1991 as a legislative counsel specializing in church-state relations. During the 1970s, Lynn worked with the UCC to help Vietnam draft resisters receive amnesty.

Lynn also belongs to the national advisory board of Americans for Religious Liberty. His fellow advisors include Frances Kissling (founder of Catholics for a Free Choice, which supports abortion), Rev. James Lawson (a United Methodist minister who has called Christianity “the most violent religion in the world”) and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark (who acted as defense counsel for Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein).

Given Lynn’s ideological beliefs, associations, and hypocritical activism, it should be apparent that Americans United for the Separation of Church and State is nothing but a political hit squad.
_______________

Joseph D’Hippolito is a columnist for Frontpagemag.com, whose main focuses are religion and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.