Smoky Mountains Sunrise

Saturday, June 7, 2008

Buddy Witherspoon's Latest TV Ad - "Saving America"

Replace Senator Grahamnesty with a conservative voice for South Carolina! Vote for Dr. Buddy Witherspoon in the Republican primary for U. S. Senate on June 10.



Christianity 'Discriminated Against by Gordon Brown's Government'


Christianity is being discriminated against by the Government in favour of Islam and other minority faiths, according to a landmark Church of England report.

From The Daily Telegraph
By Jonathan Wynne-Jones

The Archbishop of Canterbury has endorsed the report.

The damning critique of Labour, which is endorsed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, says ministers are only paying "lip service" to the Anglican Church while "focusing intently" on other religions.

It claims Gordon Brown's Government is failing society and lacks a moral vision for the country.

And in an end to decades of tension between the Church and the Conservatives, the comprehensive study praises the Tories for their "strident" approach to combating poverty.

Instead it says it is Labour which is failing to acknowledge the breakdown in society and excluding vital religious voices.

The report urges the Government to appoint a minister for religion, who would serve as the Prime Minister's faith envoy and utilise the untapped reserves of volunteers in churches and charities.

It states: "We encountered on the part of the Government a significant lack of understanding, or interest in, the Church of England's current or potential contribution in the public sphere.

"Indeed we were told that Government had consciously decided to focus...almost exclusively on minority religions."

The highly critical report, titled Moral, But No Compass - a twist on Mr Brown's claim to have a "moral compass" - carries significant weight as it has been endorsed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and expresses the views of three-quarters of the Church's bishops.

It echoes claims made by the Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, last week that the decline of Christian values is destroying Britishness and has created a "moral vacuum" which radical Islam is filling.

The report, which has been seen by The Daily Telegraph, says that while the Government has tried to improve social cohesion, it has failed to appreciate the potential contribution of Christian groups to the "civic health and wellbeing" of society.

"We were told that while capacity studies had been undertaken by Government with regard to British Islam, similar studies had not been carried out for any of the UK's largest faith communities.

"If what we were told is correct, the churches simply do not register on the policy-making radar in serious terms.

"The Government has focused so intensely on minority faiths that it has failed to develop a coherent evidence base for the largest religious body in the UK, the Christian church."

The report adds: "The government is planning blind and failing parts of civil society. The government has good intentions, but is moral without a compass.

"Every participant in our study from the Church agreed that there was deep 'religious illiteracy' on the part of the Government."

A report published in 1985 damned Thatcherism for the growing spiritual and economic poverty in Britain.

But now, in a remarkable shift in the stance of the Church, the Conservatives are praised for their "genuine thirst to understand and combat poverty".

The new study, commissioned by the Church and written by academics based at the Von Hugel Institute at Cambridge University, states: "Despite many voices in the Church telling us, 'there is no difference between any of the parties on these issues,' the reality is otherwise.

"Of all our interviewees, Conservative advisors and politicians were among the most comfortable and enthusiastic regarding involving faith groups in this renewal of the third sector, and believed that Christian churches had something 'unique' to bring to the table as strong local leaders."

Eric Pickles, shadow secretary for communities and local government, said: "David Cameron's Conservatives recognise that we have to tackle a damaged society and that poverty can't be cured without the help of voluntary organisations, such as the Church which plays a vital part.

"The Church has not retreated from the difficult problems faced by many communities."


The Execution of Britain

From The Brussels Journal
By Fjordman

I will defend all Western and indeed infidel countries against Islamic Jihad, but I admit I feel especially close to Britain, not just because of the long cultural and historic ties between Scandinavia and the British Isles, but also because I appreciate the good that has come out of British culture. It makes me all the more sad to see how humiliated this great nation is today, and how many natives feel forced to leave what once was their country.

In May 2008, 18 year-old Ben Smith was stopped in a routine check. The police officer noticed an English flag on the parcel shelf and ordered him to remove it because it was "racist towards immigrants." One of the first things foreign powers usually do when they invade a country is to ban its national symbols. The fact that you can no longer run your flag in parts of Britain – and the Netherlands, Sweden, France, etc. – shows that the country is de facto under occupation, not just by Muslims, but by Multiculturalists and Globalists of all kinds.

In an essay entitled Put away the flags, Howard Zinn, the Leftist author of the best-selling book A People's History of the United States, writes that "On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed. Is not nationalism – that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder – one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?" He concludes that "We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation."

The problem is, rights can only be protected by sovereign states upholding their territorial integrity. How is "the global community" or "the human race" going to protect Mr. Zinn's liberties? For a free society to function, the state has to pass laws in the best interest of its citizenry and enforce these within its territory. Otherwise, self-government is impossible. In order to defend this territory from outside aggression, people need to identify with it as something more than just a random space on a map. By removing sovereign states, you remove the very foundations of a free society. Maybe some groups actually desire this?

The British Foreign Minister Milliband stated late in 2007 that the European Union should expand to include Muslim nations in North Africa and the Middle East. The French President Sarkozy and the German Chancellor Angela Merkel confirmed this early in 2008. Since the EU involves the free movement of people across borders, European leaders are thus opening the floodgates to tens of millions of Muslims at a time when native Europeans already feel like aliens in their own cities. It's the greatest betrayal in the history of Western civilization and it has been planned for many years, as those who have read Bat Ye'or's writings about Eurabia will know.

I believe native Europeans should seriously consider creating a European Indigenous People's Movement to protect our interests. Our authorities currently reward those who use violence and punish those who don't. Native Europeans are ignored if we protest peacefully against mass immigration or the expanding pan-European superstate. Muslims get concessions while we are treated with increasing hostility from those who are supposed to be our leaders.

Muslims in Jordan, a country that takes part in the Barcelona process of "Euro-Mediterranean cooperation" and thus a likely future EU member, recently sued the Danish cartoonists who drew Muhammad for "blasphemy" against Islam, a "crime" that potentially carries the death penalty according to sharia law. Not too many years into the future, we could face a situation where citizens of, say, Denmark could be arrested by their own authorities and handed over to be tried for "crimes against Islam" in one of the Arab "partner countries" of the EU. If this sounds unthinkable to you, look at the case of the Dutch cartoonist who was recently arrested by a dozen police officers for the crime of publishing cartoons insulting immigrants.

PM Tony Blair expressed "profound relief" over the end of a hostage crisis in 2007 where British soldiers had been kidnapped by the Islamic Republic of Iran, telling the mullahs that "we bear you no ill will." Blair will be remembered as one of the worst leaders in history. Even Chamberlain didn't flood his country with enemies and present this as something positive. Mass immigration has been going on for decades but showed a spectacular increase under Blair's and Brown's Labour regime. The spike was so powerful that it is tempting to speculate whether the authorities had deliberately set out to dismantle their own nation.

According to newspaper columnist Leo McKinstry, the English are being turned into second-class citizens in their own country: "England is in the middle of a profoundly disturbing social experiment. For the first time in a mature democracy, a Government is waging a campaign of aggressive discrimination against its indigenous population."

Similar things are happening all over the Western world, not just in England or Britain, but Britain is definitely one of the worst countries, yes. I've been debating with people which country is most likely to get the first Eurabian civil war triggered by mass immigration. There are several possible candidates, but my money is on Britain, because the anger among ordinary citizens is only rivaled by the brutal political repression tactics.

In a survey published in April 2008, one in three medical doctors in Britain said that elderly patients should not be given free treatment if it were unlikely to do them good for long. At the same time, Muslim men with multiple wives have been given the go-ahead to claim extra welfare benefits. The "welfare state" now means that the natives should watch grandma die because she's getting old anyway and we need the money to pay Muslims with multiple wives and numerous children so that they can feel comfortable while colonizing the country.

Also in April 2008, David T, a stunned dad and his little boy, were banned from swimming at a popular public sports center in east London because this was a "Muslim men-only swimming" session. Several Christian priests have been physically attacked by Muslims in east London, leading one bishop to worry about "no-go-zones" for Christian in some parts of the country. In early June, a Muslim police community support officer ordered Christian preachers to stop handing out gospel leaflets in a predominantly Muslim area of Birmingham. They were threatened with arrest for committing a "hate crime" and were told they risked being beaten up if they returned. In March 2008, two Islamic terrorists were moved to different prisons after complaining that their fellow inmates were "too white." Dhiren Barot had masterminded a radioactive bomb plot involving limousines packed with nails and explosives and Omar Khyam plotted to blow up the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent.

How do native Brits react to this? Well, some get angry, as they should. Bryan Cork, 49, was jailed for six months for "racist slurs" after he had shouted insults at Muslim worshippers outside a Cumbria mosque, including "proud to be British" and "go back to where you came from." This was after the London Jihadist bombings in 2005. Judge Paul Batty told him that racism in any form would not be tolerated. I hear much talk about "national suicide" these days, but Mr. Cork apparently had no desire to commit national suicide, he was held down by his own authorities for refusing to accept the organized destruction of his nation. What we are dealing with here isn't suicide; it's an execution of an entire nation, perhaps an entire civilization, the greatest civilization ever created by man.

Even children face this kind of ideological intimidation. Codie Stott, a teenage British schoolgirl, was forced to spend hours in a police cell after she was reported by her teachers for "racism." She had objected, in the mildest possible terms, to being placed during class with a group of South Asian immigrants who talked among themselves in a language she didn't understand. For this, she was dragged to the local police station and had her fingerprints and photograph taken. 18-year-old Jamie who has Down's syndrome and the mental age of a five-year-old was charged with "racism" after an argument with an immigrant. Meanwhile, the UK is being brought to its knees in an epidemic of violent crime and white native girls get raped by immigrants in spectacular numbers, just like all over Western Europe.

Why do people still take this lying down? I wonder about that sometimes. Maybe they feel that their votes don't matter and have resigned into a state of quiet apathy. Since many are dependent upon government support and being branded a "bigot" could cause you to lose your livelihood, people still have too much to lose by openly opposing these policies. Such subtle blackmail can be quite effective in suppressing dissent. This could, however, change rapidly in the event of a serious economic downturn. Another crucial element is confusion. People are deliberately kept in the dark by the media and the authorities regarding the full scale of what they are facing. Combined with Muslim violence and intimidation of critics, we have a climate of fear and confusion. People who are scared and confused can be easily controlled.

I've recently been re-reading the books of American evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond, especially Guns, Germs, and Steel. He has some points, but his most important flaw is his complete failure to explain how the Greater Middle East went from being a global center of civilization, which it was in ancient times, to being a global center of anti-civilization. This was not caused by smallpox or because zebras are more difficult to domesticate than water buffaloes. It was caused by Islam. Diamond, with his emphasis on historical materialism, fails to explain the rise of the West and especially why English, not Arabic, Chinese or Mayan, became the global lingua franca. What's so special about those rainy and foggy islands?

As Australian author Keith Windschuttle told a New Zealand audience, "The concepts of free enquiry and free expression and the right to criticise entrenched beliefs are things we take so much for granted they are almost part of the air we breathe. We need to recognise them as distinctly Western phenomena." He warns that the survival of this great achievement now depends entirely "on whether we have the intelligence to understand their true value and the will to face down their enemies."

No other civilization on earth ever created an equivalent of the European university system. One of the most important reasons why Europe surpassed China during the early modern age is more political freedom and free speech. The reason why English became the dominant language is because Britain and its offspring enjoyed great political liberty even by Western standards, and a corresponding economic dynamism.

Probably no empire in world history has been more benevolent than the British Empire, yet a report from February 2008 recommended that patriotism should be avoided in school lessons because British history is "morally ambiguous." I suppose Islamic history isn't, with almost 1400 years of brutal Jihad warfare on several continents?

I'm sure the British are being told that the ongoing mass immigration is a result of their "colonial history." I live in a country with no colonial history, yet we are still subject to mass immigration. We are also being told that we should allow Pakistani or Nigerian flags to celebrate our Constitution Day because this will be "good for integration." This has nothing to do with colonialism. So what does it have to do with? Well, I'm starting to wonder whether it has something to do with the Western love affair with free speech and political liberty. Those who desire a world where society is regulated and everybody does what the authorities tell them to do fear this Western preference for political self-determination.

If we look at the West during the past thousand years, we have generally enjoyed an unusually high degree of freedom and power sharing. This has been the case more in some periods and countries than in others, but in the big scheme of things this remains true. However, although this arrangement has been good for our civilization as a whole, some of our elites apparently are jealous of the more authoritarian system in other cultures. They want to turn the West into a "normal," meaning more corrupt and less free, civilization, aided by the forces of globalization. We are witnessing rising nepotism, and perhaps those at the top desire this.

The political elites no longer believe in stupid things such as borders, cultures and national sovereignty. Islam upsets their world-view, so they ignore it and move on with their project of globalization, anyway. The most hardcore Leftists actively side with Islam because its hatred of the West and its concept of a global umma coincide with their own globalist outlook. Yes, I know that Socrates stated "I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world," but I don't think he meant it quite as literally as Western elites do now. Socrates didn't have an entire village of Muslims transplanted to his street during the space of a single generation, and he didn't have his daughters or female relatives raped by Muslims in his own country.

Our traditional freedoms were the result of a specific culture, developed over centuries of hard struggles. Maybe other cultures have to go through similar struggles of their own to achieve this, and some will perhaps never be able to do so. We should protect our freedoms at home before we try to export them, and we should protect them by preserving the European-derived culture which created them.

Our enemies, internal and external, want to destroy the Western world because we represent liberty, and they want to destroy Britain in particular because it gave birth to the most powerful pro-liberty culture within the Western tradition. I hope the British can regain their strength and throw off their traitor class, but they need to do so soon. We cannot allow the greatest nation in human history to be destroyed by the planet's most barbaric cultures. The British people, like their Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish and Danish counterparts, have every right to desire self-determination and self-preservation, and limit or even completely halt immigration as they see fit to ensure this. Those who say otherwise are evil, and need to be exposed as such. The Western world is under attack by a global Islamic Jihad. To support continued mass immigration of Muslims in this situation should be regarded as high treason, and punished as such.

See also:
Creating a European Indigenous People’s Movement, 6 April 2008


Fjordman is a noted Norwegian blogger who has written for many conservative web sites. He used to have his own Fjordman Blog in the past, but it is no longer active.



Friday, June 6, 2008

A D-Day Tribute

Phony Pflegerism

From The American Spectator
By George Neumayr

The very left-wing Catholic clericalism from which Obama hopes to derive votes in the fall served as the pretext for his leaving the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Just as Jeremiah Wright's over-the-top sermons could not have come as a surprise to Obama, so Father Michael Pfleger's hyper-partisanship would have been known to him as well.

But Father Pfleger's timing and choice of a target were poor: his antics hit the Internet just as the Wright furor had begun to dissipate and instead of attacking a Republican for racism he selected Hillary Clinton. Maybe at another moment in the campaign this wouldn't have mattered -- Geraldine Ferraro's comments saying Obama had an unfair advantage due to race might have even lent the sermon some plausibility -- but as Obama began his courting of Hillary's support he found it all very annoying.

Yet normally the Democrats encourage priests and religious to misuse their office, to treat the binding teachings of their church as debatable while treating the platform and causes of the Democratic Party as doctrine; to put on their religious garb at political meetings, then take it off for catechesis.

The Drinans and Pflegers can't muster up much enthusiasm for the magisterium of the Church but left-wing politics brings out their zeal. Disagree with Church teaching? That's okay, they think.

But disagree with the Democratic Party's specific proposals for this or that tricky, prudential issue on which reasonable people could disagree? That's not. Dissenters inside the Church brook little dissent when it comes to left-wing politics.

SO WHILE OBAMA severs his association with Trinity Church on the pretext of offense at left-wing Catholic clericalism, he plans in the coming months to recruit practitioners of it.

Obama has formed a "Catholic advisory committee." Among the national co-chairs of his committee are Sister Jamie Phelps, O.P., Professor of Theology at Xavier University, and Sister Catherine Pinkerton with the Congregation of St. Joseph, standard issue leftists both.

As long as priests and religious in the mold of Pfleger aim their partisan arrows at the right targets, Obama won't mind. He needs them to choose fidelity to the Democratic Party over fidelity to the teachings of the Church -- to treat the former as absolute and the latter as relative.

And if John McCain, as is likely, blurs the moral differences between the parties, Obama's task will become all that much easier. Look how little it takes to get a Douglas Kmiec to come over to his side. That McCain finds religious talk off-putting while Obama gravitates to quasi-religious rhetoric won't help matters either.

WHAT COMPLICATES Obama's project is that Pope Benedict XVI has asked the bishops to knock off the clericalism and restrict their political participation to "non-negotiable" principles that represent not personal opinions but moral truths.

Some bishops are following his lead, if only incrementally. They are taking steps to end open scandals, starting with the immediate one of Catholic politicians who support abortion.

A more spiritually serious Catholic Church is bad for the Democratic Party but critical to the common good. The clericalism of the last four decades marginalized the moral authority of the Church at the very moment American society needed it most. It made the American Church seem like just one more irrational special interest group clamoring for attention over the din of democracy.

This model of political participation was justified on the spirit-of-Vatican-II grounds that without it the Church couldn't speak to the "whole world." But as Pope Benedict understands, that model ensures it never will.

In the end the world isn't interested in the erratic opinions of men but the voice of God. It is only when the Church restricts its political participation to the articulation of universal moral principles rooted in the reality God made that it can speak to all men authoritatively.


George Neumayr is editor of Catholic World Report and press critic for California Political Review.