Reasons for Hope – from 1979

Bruce Walker is one of many solid contributors at American Thinker. He has an outlook grounded in Christian faith—which results in an astute grasp of evil in our midst, but also allows for the hope and expectation that good will overcome the evil. His latest post finds reason for hope in 2009 based on the world as it appeared in 1979. For those of you for whom Obama-despair is approaching overwhelming levels, here’s a bit of an antidote.

We don’t believe—and doubt that Bruce Walker believes—that the arrival of Maggie Thatcher in 1979 is assured to have a counterpart in 2009. We all have a role to play—standing up in our own way in defense of America, via tea parties, blogging, local votes, state votes, national votes, etc. Every awakened American counts; every heart in protest matters; every person willing to say NO, and Hell, NO to the Obama destruction of America is going to bring about the Maggie Thatcher of 2009. So get to work!

Posted May 4, 2009

As Obama and his radical leftists continue to apologize for America, and reach out to build bridges of understanding with the Muslim world, and confer a moral equivalence on Islam and Christianity and their great positive influences for the betterment of the world, and are no doubt cheered along by academics in American universities across the US, may they please take a moment to read the article and view the accompanying clip of a public flogging of a 17 year old girl in Muslim Pakistan. This isn’t a made-up movie. This is reality in a society controlled by Muslims. Now, surely not all Muslims applaud this behavior, but who were the ones stopping it? Where is the society-wide Pakistani movement to eliminate this insanity once and for all? Is there really a legitimate question of whether Western society is better than this?

As we say in Brushfires, “religion matters”, and Americans had better wake up to preserve, protect and defend their Judeo-Christian heritage.

Thomas Lifson at American Thinker asks the question no one wants to really think about, here: exactly why did Obama go out of his way to bow before the Saudi King?

Apologists can say all they want about inconsequential gestures and 'silly' symbolism. Let's all agree that speculation from the punditry is not helpful. So we'd like Obama to be asked, and to personally and publicly answer: What did your bow before the Saudi King mean?

We’re always amused by the latest proclamations of ‘how things have changed’—which often gives rise to a back-of-the-hand dismissal of all the wisdom of the past since it has so obviously been rendered irrelevant by all of the change.

We think the material accessories of life change constantly. But the spiritual substance of life—and the wisdom that nurtures and strengthens it, and the foolishness and beguilements that defile it—doesn’t.

Here’s an interesting scene: a man sought to take over the government. He was a smooth and clever talker; he feigned interest in the common people; he claimed to be a protector of the oppressed; and tried hard to make clear that his efforts on behalf of the oppressed weren’t about him. If he only had just a little more power, he would confer great benefits on the people. For awhile, at least some of the people were fooled by him and supported him. But he took advice from supposedly wise men who were completely devoid of genuine faith. His downfall soon followed.

Kind of ironic that you can literally find the name O-b-a-m-a in Absalom.

The orchestrated attempt to bring down America proceeds apace; the George Soros' inspired left-wing throngs are no doubt admiring their handy work and expecting all to go according to plan—to wit, economic collapse followed by civil unrest followed by martial law followed by government takeover of huge portions of the private economy followed by silencing of all dissent, including not only talk radio but the closing or intimidation of all synagogues and Christian churches in the country.

We think the moral fiber of this nation is stronger than Mr. Soros knows or is capable of understanding. Soros doesn’t think there is a God, and therefore doesn’t think there is such a thing as moral fiber, or if there is, it certainly can’t withstand an all-out assault on the material wealth that Soros cynically believes is the only real end game of moral obedience. But he’s one sick, sick man. His billions have made him think he’s all-wise and infallible, and he’s feeling pretty smug right now. It’s not going to work out the way he hopes.

There is a God; in fact, there is only one God. There is such a thing as moral fiber and moral order—they derive from God and the existence of truth. There is a sense of substance that comes from following what is right, regardless of whether there is a corresponding material payoff. This moral force sees, smells and intuits lies and evil, and rejects them, just as it sees, smells and intuits truth and good. We all have it within us—it comes from our Creator.

The disgraceful Congress believes it is having a raucous positive impact stirring the American people to act like Nazis and demanding that some subset of American citizens, for crying out loud—for now, we’ll call them the evil AIG employees—be marked with a scarlet letter (or maybe a Star of David) so that their neighbors will vandalize their homes, insult their spouses, threaten their children. The disgraceful Congress is doing this for the calculated purpose of diverting the spotlight from their own gross corruption and incompetence in bringing about the whole economic crisis. In the media bubble in which the disgraceful Congress lives, it’s all working—the people are following their puppet masters in Congress and are giving a free pass to their noble and gallant Representatives and administration officials.

As with all bubbles, it’s fostering delusion, and it’s going to burst, big time. This act is not playing well in flyover country, which increasingly is every part of the country except the Beltway and the liberal, elitist conclaves of the nation’s largest cities. In this flyover country, moral order and modesty still prevails. Within this moral order, there is not a native hatred of the successful; there is not a native yielding to all-powerful government and elitists. There is a native love of freedom; a native understanding that freedom comes from God and not from government; and a native love of the America that is built on the ideal of individual freedom and responsibility under God. These ‘natives’ are being aroused like never before in the memories of all living Americans. They are not going to be stopped; they are not going to be denied. They are you—the children of a loving God, with inalienable rights ordained of God, and enshrined in the American Constitution. You just have to rise to the calling of the American patriot that you are. Join a tea party! Demand Obama's resignation! Take back control of this disgraceful government. NOW.

Economic travails remain today’s black hole of news and commentary, but the war with radical Islam continues. We’ve been on record for more than two years urging pro-active steps to get ahead of the Islamic threat in America, here. Part of our view is that Islamic leaders must actually lead away from the violent texts of the Koran and establish a higher and more civil interpretation—just as Christians evolved away from the more brutal teachings and interpretations of the Old Testament. The Wall Street Journal includes a fresh echo of this point, here.

“Evil is powerless if the good are unafraid. That’s why the Marxist vision of man without God must eventually be seen as an empty and a false faith—the second oldest in the world—first proclaimed in the Garden of Eden with whispered words of temptation: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’ The crisis of the Western world, Whittaker Chambers reminded us, exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God... This is the real task before us: to reassert our commitment as a nation to a law higher than our own, to renew our spiritual strength. Only by building a wall of such spiritual resolve can we, as a free people, hope to protect our own heritage and make it someday the birthright of all men.” —Ronald Reagan

"In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man—these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world. Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish. We cannot continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth and their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress."Calvin Coolidge

The Obama administration is planning to spend $900 million of US taxpayers’ money for the reconstruction of Gaza following the Israeli effort to stop the rockets being fired from Gaza into Israeli cities. This coincides with Hillary Clinton’s anti-Israel rhetoric, and the unbelievable appointment of Charles Freeman to chair the National Intelligence Council. (All of this from an administration reportedly supported by 75% of American Jewish voters in the 2008 election).

Let’s not pull punches. The Obama administration is a godless, intellectual, anti-Christian, anti-Judaism bunch that is unable or unwilling to understand the difference between values and actions that emerge from a Judeo-Christian civilization, and the hatred, violence and anarchy that emerge from a territory controlled by Islamists. From this ignorant or convenient or malicious standpoint of moral equivalency, foreign policy issues become matters of power and money, not good and evil, or right and wrong.

The Saudis are the largest donor to the Bill Clinton presidential library; if they keep the money flowing, they will call the shots. Hillary Clinton should never have been confirmed as Secretary of State in the face of these obvious and continuing conflicts of interest.

The Israelis tolerated rocket assaults on innocent civilians from Hamas-controlled Gaza for months without retaliation. They did so after forcing their own Gaza settlers to relocate, putting considerable strain on the Israeli democracy, but in the intellectual hope that a long-advocated ‘land-for-peace’ deal would buy them peace. It did not, and it never will, when the result of the deal is to leave in authority a government and governing philosophy that pledges the destruction of Israel in the name of Allah.

Hamas is a Islamic terrorist organization sponsored by Iran; it seeks to destroy western civilization, and Israel is the closest target. That there is an American administration willing to commit nearly a billion dollars American taxpayer money to help Hamas pay for damage they brought on innocent residents of Gaza through their barbaric rocket-launching against Israeli civilians—this is morally indefensible, it is unconscionable, it is insane. Absolutely nothing good will come out of it, and very probably there will be thousands and maybe millions of innocents who will die in Israel and elsewhere as a result of this foolish appeasement of implacable enemies driven by a violent ideology and theology.

No sane people would have tolerated rocket attacks from a neighboring country for even two days; that the Israelis did for so long shows just how cowed they are by the opinion shapers of the BBC and CNN. We hope incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will stay firm, clear and direct in reminding the world of what is really at stake in the Middle East, and will not be cowed by the delusional left-wing ideologues in the Obama administration. Like it or not, Prime Minister Netanyahu is now the leader of the free world.

Inspect Daniel Pipes' chronology of the Muslim founder of “Bridges TV”—who has now beheaded his wife in Orchard Park, New York. Mark Steyn adds perspective, here.

"I only say that there are limits to humanism and beyond those limits God and only God can work. The phrase “fear of God” conjures up the vengeful God of parts of the Old Testament. But “fear of God” means really obedience to God; humility before God; acceptance through God that there is something bigger, better and more important than you. It is that humbling of man’s vanity, that stirring of conscience through God’s prompting, that recognition of our limitations, that faith alone can bestow.

Hamas-controlled Gaza seeks the destruction of Israel, and has wantonly fired rockets into Israel for no reason except to terrorize and kill civilians, and this, after Israel forced its own settlers out of the area to 'settle' so-called grievances. The entire world should support Israel until the insanity of Hamas is stripped of authority and weapons. Period.

Like it or not, this is about religion. The God of Hamas is an authoritarian, arbitrary tyrant, and the minions of Hamas profess to be 'godlike' as they hate, maim, torture, and kill innocents because these innocents are infidels or unbelievers (the Jew being among the worst forms of infidel). The God of Judaism honors life, and the Israeli army places its own soldiers in great danger by insisting on the minimizing of risk of civiilian casualties as it goes about the business of dismantling the rocket-launching apparatus that is killing its citizens.

This isn't a close call. Israel is on the side of civilization. Hamas is barbarity.

It was interesting to see one of Brushfires' favorite columnists, Dennis Prager take up the moral issue with Alan Dershowitz a left-wing Harvard law professor who definitely gets it.