Shoulder to Shoulder with Our Friend Israel

Since modern Israel's birth as a nation in 1948, the United States has been Israel's best and sometimes only friend. But in return, Israel has been our only true friend in the Middle East. As a result, we have promised to stand shoulder to shoulder with them and defend them. That is why, as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas rejected direct negotiations and showed up last week at the U.N. to demand that the United Nations vote to recognize Palestinian statehood, the United States had to say, "NO!"

Not that anyone objects to a Palestinian state. Even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, "If we have their recognition of Israel as a Jewish state and the security requirements, there's no reason that" we not recognize a Palestinian state.

But that's just the point. According to Netanyahu, "They're trying to set up a state to continue the conflict with Israel rather than to end it." Indeed, the stated goal of the Palestinian Authority is to drive Israel into the sea. This little country of Israel, occupying an area about the size of Rhode Island, has seen some 12,000 rocket attacks by their neighbors. Israeli children live in constant fear of suicide bombers targeting their school buses. And if they retaliate, they are called the aggressors by the world. The prophet Jeremiah said it well in Jeremiah 6:14, "Peace,peace, when there is no peace." Until there is, we must stand with Israel.

Why should we stand with Israel? We share a common heritage. Jesus Christ was a Jew. The prophets were Jews, as was Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses, David, Solomon, etc. The apostles were all Jews. It was through the Jews that we got our Bible. It was on the Law of Moses that we based our laws. Our Judeo-Christian heritage shaped our morals. We are what we are because of the Jews.

We share common ideals. Israel is the only true democracy in the Middle East. In the past few decades, Israel changed leadership at least a dozen times through peacefully contested elections. As we watch the Arab spring unfold, we see that changing leadership in the rest of the Middle East is a matter of bloodletting and people are kept under the iron fist of Sharia Law and women live in subjugation.

Yet, the United States and Israel both respect individual freedom and honor the rights of the individual. We tolerate dissent, and we practice religious freedom. Pat Robertson writes,

"Of course we, like all right thinking people, support Israel because Israel is an island of democracy, an island of individual freedom, an island of the rule of law, an island of modernity in a sea of dictatorial regimes, the suppression of individual liberty, and fanatical religion intent on returning to the feudalism of eighth century Arabia."

We share a common enemy. On September 11th, as we were in shock and horror watching the images on TV of planes crashing into the twin towers, we also saw images on TV of people throughout the Middle East dancing in the street in celebration. But not in Israel. In Israel, the Jewish people cried with us. They flew their flag at half mast. Quoting Gary Bauer, "They shared our grief." Then he adds, "On September 11th, many Americans came to understand what it is like to be an Israeli and to face barbaric terrorism that targets innocent civilians."

The great conflict of our time is between the west and radical Islam. Israel is the front line ally in the war. Israel is surrounded on all sides by Muslim nations and daily faces Muslim terror. Bauer writes,

"It is the same philosophy that motivates the government of Sudan to kill 5 million Christians in the last decade. It inspires the gunmen with AK47's who run into churches in Pakistan and open fire on women and children. It inspires the kidnappers of Daniel Pearl who tormented him on video tape, forcing him to say over and over again, 'I am a Jew,' before they decapitated him and sent pictures of his severed head throughout the Middle East as a recruiting tool. This philosophy causes the Palestinian mother to leap for joy at the news her teenage son has blown himself up as long as it assured that he killed Jews in the process."

That philosophy targets both the "Little Satan" Israel and the "Big Satan" United States for destruction.

Finally, we share a common blessing. From the day when God first made His irrevocable covenant with Abraham giving him the land of Israel, God included all who bless Israel in His blessing. In Genesis 12:3, we read God's promise, "I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you." God restored Israel to the land of promise. God will preserve them. But if we expect to continue receiving the blessings of God, we must continue to stand with Israel.

History bears this out. Egypt prospered as long as their Pharaoh blessed the Jews through Joseph. When they refused, their armies were drowned in the Red Sea.
Spain thrived and ruled the world until the Spanish Inquisition expelled the Jews from the land. Hitler was well on his way to building his thousand year Third Reich, but he ended as a suicide in a lonely bunker.

Quoting John Hagee,

"Where are the Babylonians? Where are the Romans? Where are the Greeks? Where are the Persians? Where is the Ottoman Empire? Where is that lunatic Adolph Hitler and his Nazi hordes? They are historical footnotes in the bone-yard of human history. Where is Israel? Where are the Jewish people? They are alive and well in the only democratic society in the Middle East. The Jewish people have survived pogroms and persecution. They have outlasted Pharaoh's slavery and Hitler's final solution. They are living testimony that there is a God in heaven who keeps His word."

Amen!

As I close, let me leave you with a question asked by Tom DeLay,

"We need to ask ourselves: Do we want the Middle East to look more like Israel, or do we want Israel to look more like the rest of the Middle East? In a lands largely barren of freedom, we must preserve the lone fountain of freedom."

Yes! We must stand shoulder to shoulder with our friend Israel.

Is Rick Perry a Knuckle Dragger?

In my last article, I looked at Rick Perry's big problem with the secular media - he takes his Christian faith too seriously. In this article, I look at why the media considers him deficient in natural intelligence. It goes way beyond being dumber than George W. Bush because Perry attended Texas A&M while Bush attended Yale. Perry is dumb, according to the media, because he believes in creation - proof enough that he is a knuckle dragging Neanderthal right out of the backwoods.

The media had a "gotcha" moment when Perry expressed doubts about evolution to a young boy, and it was caught on tape. He had the nerve to call evolution a "theory," not a fact, and he claimed there were "gaps" in it. Now, mind you, Perry isn't a young earth Biblical creationist as I am, but he does believe God had a hand in shaping this earth. That was enough to cause the famous atheist, Richard Dawkins, to call Perry an "uneducated fool."

Michele Bachmann received that same kind of treatment because she supported a Louisiana law allowing teachers to introduce supplemental textbooks to help students critique and review the scientific theory of evolution. No! Critiquing evolution is off limits, we are told. And how could she support such a thing? But isn't that what scientists are supposed to do?

That kind of intimidation has caused many in the church to dig a hole and crawl in. Or it has caused them to abandon their faith in the Bible as they try to reconcile the Bible to the most recent scientific theory. Shame on them.

Dr. Karl Giberson, a Nazarene author and theistic evolutionist, is an example of a "Christian" who drank the cool aid. In his HuffPost rebuttal to Bachmann, he as much as said scientists are not to be questioned. In other words, have blind faith in evolution or be a heretic. Giberson further stated that it is "disastrous" to allow high school students in Louisiana or elsewhere to critically analyze evolution. Really?

Isn't that what scientists are supposed to do - question and test their theories? Apparently not any more, at least not with evolution. We must meekly accept what we are told by these high priests of the religion called science. Funny, isn't it, that while scientists restrict inquiry, the Bible calls for it. First Thessalonians 5:21 says, "Test all things, hold fast to what is good."

There's a good reason the evolution "cult" refuses to tolerate argument. They can't win - the evidence is stacked against them. Their theory is a house of cards. Even Charles Darwin knew this. Recognizing that the fossil record showed no evidence for his theory, he faulted the "extreme imperfection of the geological record." The fossil record should contain vast numbers of intermediate species (missing links) if this theory of slow change over time were true. What we do find in the fossil record is vast numbers of species appearing complete and fully formed, but we find no intermediaries.

Darwin's excuse was that paleontologists would eventually find the intermediaries in abundance, and he encouraged them to get looking. But they never found any. According to David Raup, geologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, since the time of Darwin, "the situation hasn't changed much." Of course not. The evidence for evolution would have been found, if it were true. But there's no evidence for this false theory.

There are no transitional fossils showing animals in the process of evolution - NONE! ZIP! ZERO! This is why the late Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard, the nation's preeminent evolutionist, called the absence of transitional fossils the "trade secret" of paleontology. Indeed, it wasn't the theologians who first opposed Darwin, it was the paleontologists.

I was once a fervent evolutionist myself, totally indoctrinated by the educational system. I majored in zoology as an undergraduate and did post graduate work in the sciences. But it took a bright young girl, whom I later married, and her common sense questions to get me to think critically.

What I discovered from the evidence totally convinced me - evolution is a sham, a farce, a fraud built on theories totally misrepresenting the data. There is no way that the intricacies of even a simple single cell, or even part of a single cell, could ever have happened by chance no matter how many billions of years you give it to try. Even Antony Flew, the most prominent atheist apologist of all, announced that DNA research showed "almost unbelievable complexity," convincing him that "intelligence must have been involved." That intelligence was God. No thinking person could believe otherwise. The awesome design of life must have had a designer.

I became frustrated and angry at the hoaxes and frauds perpetuated as fact and taught in our schools, many of which are still in our children's textbooks - things like "embryology recapitulates phylogeny," or the horse evolution charts, or moths changing color from light to dark because of the amount of soot in the air in England, the Piltdown Man, Nebraska Man, and Java Man. All hoaxes. Who can believe liars and frauds to present the unvarnished truth? Rather, evolutionists are religious fanatics that will go to any extreme to explain their existence apart from God. They might have to admit their accountability to God if they did. Blind chance and billio0ns of years is the only answer they can come up, as totally impossible as that is.

The only answer that makes sense is the one presented in the first verse of the Bible, Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." I take my stand on the Word of the One who was there and gave us his eyewitness account - God.

So, no, it is not the closed minded scientist who have it right. Rick Perry makes immensely more sense by questioning evolution than they do with their blind faith. It won't hurt Perry or Bachmann with the Republican voters either. A Gallup poll showed that "just 8% of Republicans . . . said they believed in evolution without any other intervention." Most Americans can see through this theory of evolution.

Now certainly these articles have not meant to be an endorsement of Rick Perry's candidacy, but a way to point out the folly of the media that have attacked him and the other Christians running for public office. I hope you will see the foolishness of their attacks. If you too want to be opened minded and take a critical look at the evidence, I would recommend checking out the Answers in Genesis website at www.answersingenesis.org or the Institue for Creation Research web site at www.icr.org.

Rick Perry's Problem - He's a Christian!

First, let me set the record straight. I'm not the one who said that. Rather, it is the recurring theme the media continues to publish as they attack Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, and even Sarah Palin. These politicians take their Christian faith too seriously. How horrid, say the pundits.

An example would be the editorial by Dana Milbank in the Bangor Daily News this past week. Milbank made the direct accusation,

"Rick Perry is a theocrat. By his own account, he is a cultural warrior, seeking to save marriage, Christmas, and the Boy Scouts from liberals, gay people, and moral relativism."

That's supposed to be a bad thing? It is if you are a Dana Milbank, who goes on to chronicle Rick Perry's own statements of his Christian faith - statements, by the way, that I find refreshing - as proof that Perry is unfit to be President.

But this is just one example of the multitude of attacks on people of faith who dare enter public life. Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, argues it is time to stop being "squeamish" about "aggressively" digging into politician's religious convictions. He urges reporters to "get over" any "scruples" about the "privacy of faith in public life." That's why he can worry that Perry and Bachmann are "afflicted with fervid subsets of evangelical Christianity."

That kind of rabid, anti-Christian rhetoric is heard from coast to coast in the media. Collins English Dictionary defines a bigot as "a person who is intolerant of any ideas other his or her own, especially on religion, politics, or race." And they have the nerve to call us bigots after these kinds of diatribes?

Commenting on people like Keller, Jeff Jacoby writes,

"When they see Christian conservatives on the campaign trail, they envision inquisitions and witch hunts and the suppression of liberty. They dread the prospect of a President respecting 'any higher authority than the Constitution,' and regard ardent religious faith as the equivalent of space aliens."

But God and His Word is higher than our Constitution.

Oh, religion is OK with them if you don't take it too seriously or let it affect your life. President Obama claims to be a Christian, and that's perfectly OK; yet, he hardly ever attends church. He favors the destruction of unborn babies in the womb. He refuses to defend DOMA. He forgets Easter proclamations, but never forgets a Ramadan proclamation. He mocks Biblical passages and seldom quotes the Bible, but quotes instead from the "holy Qur'am."

In a 2008 interview with George Stephanopolos, candidate Obama spoke passionately about his Muslim faith. After a few moments, Stephanopolos corrected him, "Your Christian faith." Just a mistake, right? Just a slip of the tongue? How many other "Christians" would make that kind of a silly error. But Obama's kind of faith is OK.

And we aren't supposed to be concerned that Obama sat for twenty years under the teaching of rabid anti-Semite and racist Rev. Jeremiah wright and his hate filed "G__D__ America" rants. Shouldn't that be a concern to us? No. After all, Obama wasn't paying attention.

As David Limbaugh writes,

"Bill Keller's concern isn't with the religious beliefs of all candidates, only Christians; and not all Christians, only those who take the Bible seriously. He doesn't seem to have a problem with the religious beliefs of non-Christians or about the charlatans who opportunistically pass themselves off as Christians. Wouldn't an objective reporter have as much interest in someone fraudulently proclaiming a certain faith as he does in one who sincerely professes a faith he finds repugnant?"

So, it is perfectly legitimate, Keller thinks, to ask Michele Bachmann about her following the Biblical mandate of submission to her husband as found in Ephesians 5:22, or to ask them about their belief in Creation over evolution as they asked Perry, all so they can gloat over their back woods answers.

The goal, of course, is to get them to back down and slink away in shame. And so many of the "Christian-in-name-only" types do just that. Ah, but Christians who truly believe, what can you do with them? You have to discredit them as mind dead hicks from the sticks.

Since when did being a genuine Christian become a disqualification for public office? What they don't understand is that our founding fathers, most of whom took their Christian faith very seriously, were champions of individual rights. But they based those rights in the context of moral responsibility. George Washington in his farewell address stated,

"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports."

I guess Washington would be as unacceptable now as a Perry, Bachmann, or a Palin are. In the early days of this country, faith in God was necessary to get elected. Now, according to Bill Murchison,

"It's kind of fascinating, in a carnivalesque sort of way, the notion of religion as a force alien and dangerous to the American polity, hence to be regarded as fear."

The truth is, according to David Limbaugh, "Liberty has no greater ally than believing Christians of all stripes." Certainly, there would be no liberty under Sharia law. Limbaugh says,

"Ironically, it is the left who are far likelier to use the power of government to selectively suppress political and religious liberties."

Yes, we Christians are narrow minded. Yes, we Christians do think we have the truth. But that is only bad if we don't. Let me give you an illustration. When I go out at night when I am camping, I take my flashlight. As I shine the light, the beam spreads out and diffuses as it goes out along the path, getting weaker and weaker the further from the source. But the closer to the source, the narrower and more intense the beam becomes. Likewise, the closer one gets to the truth, the less room there is for deviation and the more narrow minded one becomes. Truth is very narrow, while error is broad and diffuse. Give me a genuine Christian candidate any time who believe in absolute truth.

But let them realize they will pay the price for their belief. Jesus told us in John 15:20,

"Remember the word that I said to you. 'A servant is not greater than his master.' If they persecuted Me, they will persecute you. If they kept My word, they will keep yours."

It is not you they hate, but the truth and the one who spoke that truth.

Let me close with this challenge from Perry Himself,

"We are close to a tipping point in American society, If we believe there is right and wrong, that there are acceptable standards of behavior . . . then you have a stake in this war. If the attackers win many more victories . . . the culture war may be lost before we kinow it. If that happens, we will find ourselves living isn a world where moral relativism reigns and individualism runs amok. Now is the time to enlist in this effort to stand up and be counted."

Amen!

The Case of the Missing Girls, and Joe Biden's Bungles

There is an amazing phenomena happening worldwide. There is a shortage of girls. According to a Fox News article by Debra Saunders,

"In China, the sex ratio is 121 boys to 100 girls. In India, it is 112 to 100. Sex selection is a force in the Balkans, Armenia, and Georgia."

How can this be happening? It happens through selective abortions.

In her book, Unnatural Selections: Choosing Boys Over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, journalist Mara Hvistendahl writes that ultrasound has allowed women to determine which child should be kept and which to abort. The result? She writes, abortion has "claimed over 160 million potential women and girls - in Asia alone." By the way, that is more than the entire population of females in the USA.

Recently, a mother told me her daughter couldn't find a decent, godly man to marry, claiming there weren't enough out there. But apparently worldwide it is the other way around, and it is the men who can't find wives. One would think it would make girls more valuable, and it does, but not in the way one might think. Saunders remarked,

"As surplus men have trouble finding mates, young girls are forced into prostitution. Others are forced into arranged marriages."

Hvistendahl writes that on Taiwan's eBay three Vietnamese women were on sale for $5,400.

But I thought abortion was a good thing for women? Isn't that what we've always been told? It looks like we've been sold a bill of goods. The truth is the feminist agenda has always done more damage to women than it has ever helped them, and abortion is one of the biggest culprits. Abortion has backfired on women.

Which brings us to Joe Biden, our less than eloquent vice-president, and his remarks concerning China's one child per family policy. On Sunday, August 21st, at the Sichuan University in Chengdu, Biden told his Chinese audience,

"Your policy has been one which I fully understand - I'm not second guessing - of one child per family."

He understands? Our own State Department in their latest human rights report has affirmed that China's one child policy "in some cases resulted in forced abortion or forced sterilization." The report also said,

"Female infanticide, sex-selective abortions, and the abandonment and neglect of baby girls remained problems due to the traditional preference for sons and the coercive birth control policies."

Didn't Joe Biden know that?

The London Sunday Times reported the trauma of Zhang Linla, the mother of a four year old daughter, who happened to get pregnant again. The paper quoted her account as follows:

"Six days before the due date, 10 strong strangers came to my house, forced me into a truck, then took me to the family planning clinic, where the doctor gave me the injection (a drug to induce labor). The child began to struggle in my womb and one of the scum kicked me in the abdomen. Then the baby came out and they threw it in the rubbish bin. I could even see it was still moving."

Didn't Biden know that over and over that kind of barbarism is repeated on woman after woman - on baby after baby? Even as a U.S. Senator, rather than vote present as he usually did, Barack Obama voted against a law that would have given protection to U.S. babies born alive from botched abortions. Obviously Obama would approve of China's policy too.

But wasn't the whole abortion issue about choice? No! It never was. Just take a few minutes some time to read the words or Margaret Sanger. She was the founder of Planned Parenthood and a prominent abortion advocate. On blacks and immigrants, she wrote, ". . . human weeds, reckless breeders, spewing . . . human beings who never should have been born." In her plan for peace, she argued that couples should be required to submit applications before being allowed to have a child. She wrote that the purpose of birth control was "to create a race of thoroughbreds." She wrote, "Eugenics is the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political, and social problems." Page after page the quotes could could go on and on. Adolf Hitler was a big follower of her ideas, with predictable results.

Thank you, Joe Biden, for showing us the true color of abortion advocates like you. Abortion has nothing to do with choice. It has everything to do with getting rid of unwanted human beings. It is a population control device first and foremost. And the ones who suffer most are the women.