Brownsville Tea Party Association

Archive for the ‘Religion in Politics’ Category

By Chris Rowan

American Thinker is my favorite place to go for thoughtful conservative commentary. Sometimes, the comments that follow a piece are just as interesting as the article itself. The comment below followed an article by George Picard titled “Obama’s Racial Spoil System.” It is an excellent article, but what really caught my attention was this comment:

Stanley Kurtz coined a term to describe Barack Obama’s modus operandi as a state senator. He gave him the moniker Senator Stealth. One way of understanding Barack Obama’s stealthiness and capacity for hiding and befogging is that he is psychologically Islamic. Christianity calls for a boldness and directness of expression — the yea that is yea. However, Islamic doctrine is less straightforward. For example, the Islamic doctrine of taqiya means concealing or disguising one’s beliefs, convictions, ideas, feelings, opinions, and/or strategies at a time of imminent danger, whether now or later in time, to save oneself from physical and/or mental injury. It is impossible to imagine Barack Obama bravely leading soldiers in battle, but he has demonstrated an affinity for drone weapons. Does this affinity reflect his psychological incorporation of taqiya?

This theme of “otherness” in Obama is nothing new. But when you consider taqiya against the backdrop of Obama’s presidency so far, there are some interesting parallels. Twenty years of Jeremiah Wright had to have some effect.

So, Mubarak has fled Egypt and a military council has been left in charge. Mubarak was a general, or so I’ve heard. The military has been in charge of the country all along. With Mubarak gone, it’s a little like rearranging deck chairs, isn’t it?

It’s very interesting how Obama got in front of the protesters and demanded Mubarak cede power “yesterday” (according to Obama’s mouthpiece, Gibbs), yet did nothing to help the protesters in Iran some months ago. Obama is very selective about the protests he supports.

One thing is certain – Obama does not care for the TEA Party. Not one bit. But something about the protests in Egypt compelled Obama to do something. What was it?

It certainly wasn’t a love of liberty. Egypt has no history of Jeffersonian democracy, Constitutional republicanism, or any form of government TEA Partiers would identify with.

Egypt has always been a repressive regime. It wasn’t a socialist utopia before Mubarak. The fact that Mubarak had his boot on the throats of the Muslim Brotherhood and their supporters should have been a clue to the media that perhaps Mubarak was simply trying to keep a lid on what could become an explosive situation.

Get this:

In July of last year, the University of Maryland commissioned Zogby to poll the people of Egypt. Here are a few of their findings:

85% of Egyptians hold an unfavorable attitude toward the U.S.

87% of Egyptians have no confidence in the U.S.

92% of Egyptians believe the U.S. is one of two nations that is the greatest threat to them (the other nation the Egyptian people hate is Israel)

52% of Egyptians hold an unfavorable opinion of American people

65% of Egyptians believe that Islamic clergy must play a greater role in the Egyptian political system

79% percent of Egyptians believe that it would be positive if Iran is able to acquire nuclear weapons

The Zogby poll results back up a similar project conducted by Pew in April and May of last year.  Among Egyptian Muslims polled, 85% felt that Islam’s role in politics was a positive one.  In a struggle between modernizers and Islamist fundamentalists, 59% of Egyptians who foresaw such a conflict stated they would side with the Islamists, while only 27% stated that they would side with the modernizers.

Another Pew poll last June revealed that only 17% of Egyptians hold a favorable view of the United States, while 20% hold a favorable view of suicide bombing.  Yes dear readers, Egyptians like suicide bombing more than they like you.

Pew also revealed that 82% of Egyptian Muslims support stoning human beings to death for having sex outside of marriage and that  77% of Egyptian Muslims support public whippings and cutting people’s hands off for theft.  In addition, a terrifying 84% of Egyptian Muslims support the death penalty for anyone who has the good sense to leave the religion of Islam.

As much as we may not like Hosni Mubarak, there are many worse people who could be in power in Egypt — and they are very likely to be in power before the end of the year.   We would all like to believe that the protesters in the streets of Egypt are all fighting for freedom — but that is not what they say about themselves.  By their own admission, they prefer Islamic fundamentalism to modern civilization by more than 2 to 1.  They don’t want a modern democracy; they do want to murder people for having sex outside of marriage.  They don’t want freedom of religion — in fact 84% of them want to establish the death penalty for it.

What does this sound like?  It sounds a whole lot like Iran in 1979.  Westerners with common sense should be leaving Egypt as quickly as possible, with no plans to ever return. We would like to hope for the best, but we must plan for the worst.

(Source: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2672357/posts)

So I ask myself, Why does Obama hate TEA Party protesters and love Egyptian protesters? He knows everything that needs to be known about TEA Partiers, yet knows next to nothing about the Egyptian protesters other than their desire for “change.” Obama is either a fool, or a radical.

Perhaps he is a foolish radical. Or a radical fool.

Investor’s Business Daily

•  Editorial: Terror In Waiting  - Mideast: As the radical Muslim Brotherhood schemes to oust a pro-American despot in Egypt, U.S. pundits have cheered the move as a boon for freedom. This is dangerous pablum.
•  Egypt’s Kerensky - Succession: As talk of deposing Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak grows, one name keeps popping up: Mohamed ElBaradei. If he takes over, it’ll be a disaster not just for Egypt, but also for the U.S. and the West.
•  The Newest Nation - Africa: Far from the rage in the streets of Cairo, there’s joy in the air in the tiny cities of South Sudan. A referendum’s results there should lead to creation of a new nation. It holds some lessons.
•  Egyptian Plagues, American Policies - Diplomatic Ineptitude: Western diplomats were long ago planting poisonous seeds in Egyptian soil. All it took to make them grow was for the U.S. to send some well-intentioned but misguided signals at the wrong time.
•  ObamaCare Can’t Be Reconciled - Health Care Reform: Another federal judge has declared the Democrats’ overhaul to be unconstitutional. A law that should have never been passed is that much closer to being dismantled.
•  Kill The Internet ‘Kill Switch’ - Censorship: Virtually the first thing an authoritative Egyptian government did to quell dissent was to shut down its Internet. So why are we debating a bill to give our government the same power?
•  America’s Next Financial Crisis Is Already Here - In spite of talking about freezing government spending, President Obama reminded everyone during the State of the Union just how out of touch he is about the defining issue of our time — the fiscal dysfunction that threatens to rob future generations of today’s living standards and jeopardizes the global financial system.
•  Middle East Is On The Verge Of Convulsing - Things are about to go from bad to worse in the Middle East.  An Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement is nowhere in sight. Lebanon just became a Hezbollah state, which is to say that Iran has become an even more important regional power, and Egypt, once stable if tenuously so, has been pitched into chaos.

Laura Ingraham

• Gov. Mitch Daniels on China’s rise and a social issues ‘truce’ – January 31, 2011 (mp3)

Mark Levin

01/31 The Mark Levin Show

American Thinker

• Obama’s Ongoing War on Inspectors General - One after another, inspectors general have been reporting that Obama’s stewardship of taxpayer money has failed.
• Overachievers with Low Self-Esteem - America is up to its eyeballs in people concerned with saving us from their demons.
• Obama’s Rathole Moment - President Obama got matters exactly backward when he addressed education last week before a joint session of Congress.
• Obama’s Standing Army of Regulators among Us - The victims of today’s excessive government regulatory zeal face the same enemy confronted by the nation’s Founders: unconstrained centralized power.
• Stop the Fraud — Freeze the Debt Ceiling - The debt ceiling is a key to stopping the political insanity.
• What Reagan Meant to America - Seven years ago, when Reagan died, millions of Americans waited for hours to share a brief moment with this greatest of contemporary Americans.
• China’s Insight into Human Nature - And why President Obama misunderstands China’s rise.
• America and the Middle East Food Riots - Obama policies have driven up food prices, triggering riots.

Frontpage Mag

• Middle Eastern Moment of Truth - Israel soberly prepares to stand alone in a sea of hate.
• 1979, 1989 or 2009? - Gauging the nature of Egypt’s Revolution — and the urgency for America’s response.
• Why Coptic Christians Fear a Revolution - If the Muslim Brotherhood takes power in Egypt…
• Inside Egypt - The growing cancer I witnessed during my recent visit…
• To Destroy Israel - A member of the Army of Islam escapes from an Egyptian jail amidst the chaos — and shares his top priority…
• ObamaCare Inches Closer to the Fall - Florida judge rules that the president’s signature legislation is unconstitutional — what’s next?
• Free Speech Victory: Lars Hedegaard Acquitted - The battle for freedom is far from lost…
• The Middle East’s Intifada - The Muslim Brotherhood shrewdly maneuvers its way to power in Egypt.
• The American Left and the Crisis in Egypt - The Unholy Alliance rears its head once again.
• Dictatorships and Revolutions - As an Egyptian Muslim raised during the generation of the 1952 Egyptian revolution, I see history repeating itself.
• Egypt’s False Prophet - Mohamed ElBaradei’s disturbing affinity for the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian Islamic Republic.
• Why They Hate Mubarak - “He is supporting Israel. Israel is our enemy…”
• The Criminal Truth in Denmark - In defense of Lars Hedegaard. . . .and our civilization

Good read. My favorite excerpt:

You cannot have “Islamophobia” in the real world, because a “phobia” is an irrational fear. You can’t have an irrational fear of somebody pointing a gun at you. That is a rational fear. “Islamophobia” is an imaginary word from people who never check an English dictionary.

For Libs Who Just Got Scared

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By John Barham

The second in a series of articles on Saudi Arabia and its place in the Middle East.

As a newly arrived expatriate in Saudi Arabia in 1978, I could not escape a feeling of newness. Owing to the construction that one encountered almost everywhere in Riyadh, the skyline of the city was distinguished by enormous cranes that were utilized in the raising of a modern city in the middle of an oasis surrounded by desert terrain.

Along with the erection of multi-storied office buildings and outsized shopping malls that would rival the dimensions of any in the United States, it seemed that practically overnight an infrastructure was being put into place, with super-highways and high-speed rail transportation taking form. Oil revenues were having a decided impact in a few years time, while previous centuries had tended to bypass the tribal people who inhabited the vast expanse of the Arabian Peninsula that was thought by most Europeans and Americans to be an arid wasteland.

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By John Barham

The first of a series of articles on Saudi Arabia and its position in the Middle East.

It was the late summer of 1978, and, after six weeks of traveling through Turkey and Iran, I had just returned to the university town in the South where I taught as a tenured associate professor of history. I had almost forgotten that I had passed through New York on the way home and had glanced at the higher education employment section in the New York Times and had, purely on a lark, forwarded my resume to an address in Houston that was soliciting faculty and administrative staff for King Saud University in Saudi Arabia.

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From NewsMax

One of the leading groups representing families who lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks blasted President Barack Obama Saturday for supporting the construction of a mosque near the site of the attack.

The group 9/11 Families for a Safe & Strong America said it was “stunned” by the president’s remarks.

Obama “has abandoned America at the place where America’s heart was broken nine years ago, and where her true values were on display for all to see,” the group said.

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Read Charles Krauthammer’s piece Sacrilege at Ground Zero for a level-headed, rational analysis and rationale for why the “Victory Over Infidels” Cordoba Mosque should not be built near Ground Zero.

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By John Barham

As a wet-behind-the-ears undergraduate during the 1960’s, there were certain theorists, historians and philosophers that together had the effect of forming my understanding of history and how events – from one generation to another, one century to another, and even one millennium to another – often reveal shared qualities that account for their successes and failures.

Writing during the early 1930’s, a time when the Western world was still striving to come to grips with the slaughter and carnage of World War I, Arnold J. Toynbee, in his multi-volume work, A Study of History, equated the advancement of societies and civilizations to the interfacing of challenge and response, and how groups of human beings would either be brought to the fore or diminished by the quality of their reactions to the challenges of existence.

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FROM MY ARRIVAL IN THE KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA TO A MOSQUE BESIDE GROUND ZERO: 30 YEARS OF OBSERVING ISLAMIC PEACE AND LOVE
By John Barham

Although the nearly 13-hour flight out of New York’s JFK Airport was uneventful, I found myself somewhat apprehensive as my Saudia Airlines flight prepared to land in Riyadh. Despite having spent a few weeks during the previous summer in Iran and Turkey, I had no idea what to expect in the Muslim land which considered itself to be the guardian of the pilgrimage cities of Mecca and Medina.

After landing, all passengers were subjected to a painstaking inspection by the Saudi Arabian customs service, during which my Bible was confiscated. Thus, I was introduced to the country where I would reside for the next six years.

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Message from Frank Gaffney: The Center for Security Policy today unveiled a powerful 1-minute video opposing the construction of a 13-story, $100 million mega-mosque near the hallowed ground of the World Trade Center. The Twin Towers were destroyed on 9/11 by adherents to the barbaric, supremacist and totalitarian program authoritative Islam calls “Shariah.” And the imam who is promoting this mosque has publicly declared that he seeks to “bring Shariah to America.”

As the ad makes clear, Shariah’s followers have long built mosques on the most sacred sites of those they have conquered — for example, on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, at Constantinople/Istanbul’s St. Sophia Basilica and in Cordoba, Spain, the capital of the occupying Moors’ Muslim kingdom.

A growing chorus of New Yorkers and other Americans — including, notably, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin — have expressed outrage at the prospect of a similar, permanent beachhead for Shariah being use to defile Ground Zero, and symbolize America’s defeat at the hands of her enemies. We say, “No Mosque at Ground Zero.”

WILL THE UNITED STATES TREAD THE PATH OF EUROPE?
By John Barham

The Islamic Republic of Iran, which had been lobbying hard earlier this year to join such steadfast defenders of liberty and freedom as the Russian Federation, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the Kyrgyz Republic on the United Nations Human Rights Commission, has recently touched off an international furor over its judicial system’s sentencing of 43-year-old Sakineh Mohamedi Ashtiani to death by stoning, owing to her alleged crime of adultery.

A widow with two children, Ms. Ashtiani was charged with adultery, even though her offense occurred after the death of her husband. Originally sentenced by a lower court in Azerbaijan during 2006, Ashtiani was punished with 99 lashes, in the presence of her teenage son.

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(From CatholicVoteAaction.org)
by Joshua Mercer on May 4th, 2010

Man, this guy is fearless. Chris Christie is the bravest and boldest governor in America right now. He’s taking on the sacred cows like no one else.

He says New Jersey needs a voucher system that allows any child in New Jersey to go to any school, public or private, calling it the “final solution” to bloated and overly expensive public school system that he says is failing too many children.

“They are trapped by a self-interested, greedy schoolteachers union that cares more about putting money in their own pockets and pockets of members than they care about educating the most vulnerable and needy children,” Christie said.

In his speech to the American Federation for Children, Christie talked about the anguish parents and children felt when their school didn’t win a charter school lottery. Christie said that he wanted to provide the same opportunities that his family has enjoyed. Christie, who is Catholic, sends his children to Catholic schools.

“A single mother in Newark working two jobs to keep a roof over her child’s head should have no less ability to make that choice than my wife and I had.”

Indeed. Justice demands we radically alter this failing institution.

And why are teachers’ unions afraid of competition? If their schools were so good, no one would leave once they received vouchers. Right?

By Pat Boone

“We’re no longer a Christian nation.” – President Barack Obama, June 2007

“America has been arrogant.” – President Barack Obama

“After 9/11, America didn’t always live up to her ideals.”- President Barack Obama

“You might say that America is a Muslim nation.”- President Barack Obama, Egypt 2009

Thinking about these and other statements made by the man who wears the title of president. I keep wondering what country he believes he’s president of.

In one of my very favorite stories, Edward Everett Hale’s “The Man without a Country,” a young Army lieutenant named Philip Nolan stands condemned for treason during the Revolutionary War, having come under the influence of Aaron Burr. When the judge asks him if he wishes to say anything before sentence is passed, young Nolan defiantly exclaims, “Damn the United States! I wish I might never hear of the United States again!”

The stunned silence in the courtroom is palpable, pulsing. After a long pause, the judge soberly says to the angry lieutenant: “You have just pronounced your own sentence. You will never hear of the United States again.. I sentence you to spend the rest of your life at sea, on one or another of this country’s naval vessels – under strict orders that no one will ever speak to you again about the country you have just cursed.”

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The article below (highlights added) is another disturbing, yet unsurprising, assessment of the systemic failure by those in the military, intelligence, and counterterrorism communities to recognize the warning signs of a jihadist poised to act.

Dr. Walid Phares, during his presentation at the American Congress for Truth webcast conducted on November 7^th (and available for viewing here), made the point that, eight years after 9/11, our nation’s leaders have still failed to adequately identify and define the jihadist enemy.

Sources we have within the government confirm this appalling reality.

As Brigitte Gabriel notes in her recent video message, the politically correct driven fear of offending Muslims and the apologists for radical Islam has crossed the line from being exasperating to being deadly.

Monday, November 16, 2009 
The Washington Times 
How military missed signs – Failure to grasp threats from those in uniform
by Joel Mowbray

As Sen. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut independent, officially begins his inquiry this week into the disturbing failures that enabled Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan to stay in uniform, it must go beyond the normal excuses related to bureaucratic bungling.

With the discussion last week devolving into interagency finger-pointing, lost was the simple fact that the failures were systemic. Although the military has done valiant work fighting in Muslim lands, it doesn’t seem to grasp how to assess when Muslim personnel could pose an internal threat.

It’s easy to rely on hindsight to second-guess after the fact, but based on what we already know, Maj. Hasan had openly embraced Islamic jihadist ideology. Apparently no one who learned of his online screeds or his verbal rants to colleagues understood this, however.

What officials knew about Maj. Hasan was neither trivial nor inconsequential.

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