Report Warns Of Christian Genocide
Former Congressman Frank R. Wolf and his new group, 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative, has just issued a disturbing report entitled "Edge of Extinction." Its message: If ISIS is not defeated, Christians and other religious and ethnic minorities face a genocide.
The report comes after a fact-finding mission to Iraq by the Wilberforce delegation, including Wolf, Wilberforce President Randel Everett and my daughter Elyse, who is a key member of the new group's staff.
While collecting information on the carnage, the delegation came within 1.5 miles of the ISIS frontlines. They interviewed dozens of displaced Christians and other religious minorities. Among their findings is that Iraq's Christian population, once 1.5 million, has been reduced to a remnant of just 300,000 without homes, jobs or churches.
The full report can be accessed at 21wilberforce.org. I urge you to download the report and share it with your church leaders. The 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative is a welcome new force in the fight for religious liberty around the world. It is worthy of your prayers and financial support.
Obama "Unrestrained" Against Israel
More revelations are coming out of David Axelrod's new book about his time with Barack Obama. First we learned that Obama misled the country about his opposition to same-sex marriage when he ran for the White House in 2008. (He supported men "marrying" other men as far back as 1996.)
Now Axelrod tells us that throughout Obama's first term, he "had been pulling his punches with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for fear of antagonizing some elements of the American Jewish community." Pulling his punches? Seriously?!
Was Obama pulling his punches in March 2010 when he walked out of a White House meeting and refused to have his picture taken with Prime Minister Netanyahu?
Was he pulling his punches in May 2011 when he delivered a speech demanding Israel return to its pre-1967 "Auschwitz borders"?
Was Obama pulling his punches in September 2012 when he refused to meet with Netanyahu in New York during a U.N. conference?
But since Obama has been reelected, Axelrod told CNN's Jake Tapper this week that he believes Obama "feels very much unrestrained."
Now a "fully unrestrained" Obama is "begging" Iran for a nuclear deal that would allow the mullahs to become a "threshold" nuclear power and a deadly threat to Israel.
ISIS In America?
In previous reports, we have mentioned Denver teenagers and Muslims from Minnesota who have tried to leave America and wage jihad with ISIS overseas. U.S. intelligence agencies estimate that as many as 150 Americans have or have attempted to travel to Syria to fight with ISIS.
What do we know about these people? How well are we tracking them? How many have returned to the U.S.? That issue came up during a hearing this week on Capitol Hill featuring testimony from Michael Steinbach, a top official in the FBI's Counterterrorism Division.
Steinbach was asked by Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) whether we have the issue of foreign fighter travel "under control." Steinbach answered:
"We don't have it under control. . . . If I were to say that we had it under control, I would say that I knew of every single individual traveling. I don't, and I don't know every person there, and I don't know of everyone coming back. So it's not even close to being under control."
God Or Man: Who Gives Us Liberty?
Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore was on CNN yesterday explaining his position in the ongoing dispute over same-sex marriages in the "Heart of Dixie." When Moore commented that our liberty come from God, his interviewer, Chris Cuomo, cut him off and vehemently disagreed. Consider this exchange:
MOORE: I believe that's a matter of law because our rights contained in the Bill of Rights do not come from the Constitution, they come from God. It's clearly stated. . .
CUOMO: Our laws do not come from God, your honor, and you know that. They come from man.
MOORE: Let me ask you one question. Let me ask you one question, Chris. Is the Declaration of Independence law? . . .
CUOMO: Our rights do not come from God. That's your faith. That's my faith, but not our country. . . .
At that point, Justice Moore schooled Cuomo by quoting the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
Unlike a lot of news anchors, Cuomo is not just a teleprompter reader. He is a licensed attorney with an undergraduate from Yale and a law degree from Fordham University. Yet he is ignorant of our founding documents.
And he couldn't be more wrong. If our rights come from man, then man can change them or take them away. By the way, what did Thomas Jefferson, the man held up by the left as a leading example of "enlightenment," say about our rights? Jefferson said this:
"God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever."
Please, my friends, take time to talk to your children and grandchildren about the critical issues confronting our country. Teach them about America's deep religious heritage -- from the Pilgrims to the Declaration of Independence, from Franklin Roosevelt's D-Day Prayer to Martin Luther King's Letter From A Birmingham Jail.
Sadly, our history is not being taught in our public schools or our elite institutions of higher learning. That is a betrayal of what America was and what our founding fathers intended America to be -- a shining city upon a hill.