Black Community News News and Commentary for Christians
(BCN editor’s note: This is the first of two Ken Blackwell columns for Thursday.)
Editor’s note: Bob Morrison coauthored this piece.
The increasingly desperate attempts of the Obama administration to figure out what motivates ISIS and other Islamist terrorists are wearing thin. Now, even liberals think this administration has lost the bubble.
Take State Department Spokeswomen Jen Psaki and Marie Harf as two examples. They daily put us in graver danger by their juvenile responses to serious questions. Marie Harf was at pains to name the KONY rebels in East Africa as examples of Christian terror groups. So we shouldn’t single out Islamists, she was arguing.
KONY is about as Christian as Hungary’s Nazi-led Iron Cross in WWII or our own KKK was. As heinous as KONY is, the leader and his gang of outlaws cannot begin to compare with decades-long terror campaigns waged by al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Boko Haram, and a seemingly endless list of Islamist killers.
The recent attacks in peaceful Denmark are an indicator. In Copenhagen, a home-grown 22-year old Muslim yelled “Allahu Akbar as he first tried to kill a cartoonist who had depicted the Prophet Mohammed as a dog and then as he attacked a synagogue where a Bat Mitzvah was going on. Danish mourners gathered to remember the victims. They sang John Lennon’s popular song, “Imagine.” It contains these nihilist lyrics:
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one
To quote another English writer, William Shakespeare, “something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” And anyone who thinks we will be saved or even made safe by such thin gruel is deluding himself.
Several years ago, an Anglican Bishop of Rochester said England’s identity comes from English law and the Christian religion. Every day, Bishop Michael Nazir-ali said, England is yielding up her law and her religion before the demands of politically correct politicians, journalists and lawyers—all to accommodate the insatiable demands of Islamists.
Should the Muslim muezzins be allowed to give the call to prayer from minarets in Rochester, England, the Bishop asks? Of course—as soon as church bells can ring out in Mecca!
Bishop Nazir-ali should know about the dangers of cultural relativism and the hopeless idea of appeasing the Islamists’ demands: He was born and raised in Pakistan, where Christians are murdered for saying: Jesus is Lord. Bishop Nazir-ali receives death threats regularly for his outspoken opposition to cowardly self-abasement.
With the murders this week of twenty-one Coptic Christians on the beach in Libya, the world has seen an example of the cruelty and barbarism. The Obama administration regularly denies it has anything to do with Islam.
Egypt’s Gen. Abdul Fattah al-Sisi knows better. Gen. Sisi seized power from the Muslim Brotherhood’s man, Mohamad Morsi. Gen. Sisi went before the Muslim clerics at Al Azhar Mosque in Cairo. He boldly challenged them:
It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma [Islamic world] to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible!
That thinking—I am not saying “religion” but “thinking”—that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the centuries, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world. It’s antagonizing the entire world!
Is it possible that 1.6 billion people [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants—that is 7 billion—so that they themselves may live? Impossible!
Why can’t President Obama say this? Why can’t he be this courageous?
Christians and Jews must not be persecuted in every Muslim majority land. And above all, Islam must cease its drumbeat of hatred for the Jews.
Liberals hoped for much when President Obama came to office in 2009. And they published books and magazine articles showing him as the second coming of FDR.
But on one vital matter, the very liberal Franklin D. Roosevelt and Barack Hussein Obama are radically different—and it is not their race.
FDR’s son Elliott told Winston Churchill at the first summit meeting ever held “my father is a very religious man.” That was in August 1941.
Churchill already knew that. That’s why he chose Christian hymns for an emotional joint worship service on board the battle-scarred HMS Prince of Wales. As newsreel cameras showed both leaders singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” among thousands of U.S. and Royal Navy sailors, Justice Felix Frankfurter called it one of the most moving experiences of his life.
Justice Frankfurter was a secular Jew. He felt no threat from the Christian worship service. Justice Frankfurter knew that Hitler planned the annihilation of all the Jews—just as the jihadists do today.
FDR’s administration published war posters showing a Nazi dagger stabbing into the Christian Bible. “Our Enemy” was the caption. President Roosevelt’s personal message and signature was included in hundreds of thousands of Bibles—New Testament and Hebrew Psalms—distributed to our troops.
The Obama administration fawns before jihadists abroad, invites their apologists into the White House, and persecutes Christians in the military. He complains of Jews housing Jews in Jerusalem and shuns the Israeli Prime Minster.
Is it any wonder that FDR won World War II in four years and, after six years of desultory action this most anti-Israel, most anti-Christian administration in U.S. history is still groping for answers?
Jihad Johnny, the British-accented beheader of ISIS notoriety, put his knife to the throat of a poor young Syrian Muslim as he prepared to kill him. Jihad Jonny cried out:
Obama—Dog of Rome— we’re coming for you!”
Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Christian Byzantine Empire, fell to Muslims in 1453. ISIS calls the Byzantines the Cat. And they view Western Christians as Dogs of Rome.
Neither the Pope nor President Obama would claim that affiliation for him. But he had better soon claim something more than a “jobs for jihadists” program, a swap of our stimulus for their stilettos.
The whole world is watching. All the while, Islamist Iran is moving closer to the Bomb.
Ken Blackwell is a senior fellow at the Family Research Council and the American Civil Rights Union, and on the board of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.
