Finding God in the Mirror

How Ayn Rand, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Roe v. Wade made me a Christian 

By Jason Scott Jones

http://www.nationalreview.com/

January 22, 2015

The first rule in living introspectively is to avoid falling into rapt contemplation of ourselves. I’m sure you’ve met the kind of person, or seen him in Woody Allen movies, who treats life as fodder for his therapy or his autobiography. Breathe easy — I won’t do that here.

But what I would like to do is recount the story, as best I can understand it midstream, of how grace has worked on me.

I am a filmmaker and an activist, a husband and a father of seven, a worker on behalf of the most embattled, most important cause on earth: the dignity of the human person. By “dignity” I don’t mean harrumphing self-importance, and by “human person” I don’t mean some dry philosophical abstraction.

I mean that I see something very unusual in the people whom I encounter in my areas of activism: a 57-year-old ex-factory worker living on the streets of Los Angeles; a 15-year-old girl who was sexually exploited by a 30-year-old drug dealer and is now carrying a child that the culture tells her to abort; an eleven-year-old Christian living in southern Darfur, whose community is being deprived of water because his family will not convert to Islam.

What I see in these people is the image of the infinitely powerful eternal spirit Whose essence is His existence, the God who strung the cosmos with galaxies. This is not a hallucination, a superstition, or a pious wish. It is something I see, as clearly as I can see the screen in front me now while I’m typing. And it’s my entire task in life to help more people, and finally the culture at large, to see this reality, too.

I was led to this epiphany by the nose, on the string of my own narcissism, through the medium of a murder.

I grew up with no particular religion, unless you count the influence of my grandfather, a zealously heterodox Scientologist. That left me a default agnostic and an unreflective relativist. I never studied the books we were assigned in school, and I paid the price in terms of my grades.

But I did read, and one work I came across was Kurt Vonnegut’s classic short story “Harrison Bergeron.” This pithy story imagines a future where absolute equality is imposed by a total State — which comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable, weighing down talented athletes with sandbags, equipping intelligent people with brain-buzzing headgear to dumb them down, and hiding beautiful faces with hideous masks. The story’s hero, the teenager Harrison Bergeron, is handsome, brilliant, and rebellious, and at the climax he seizes a television studio to stage a magnificent, doomed revolt: He sloughs off the weights, tears off the mask, and issues a proclamation:

“I am the Emperor!” cried Harrison. “Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!” He stamped his foot and the studio shook. 

“Even as I stand here,” he bellowed, “crippled, hobbled, sickened — I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!”

Harrison uses his moment of absolute power not to harm anyone or avenge himself. Instead, he chooses a beautiful dancer, frees her of her weights and mask, and together they perform a single, exquisite dance — before the forces of equality seize the studio and shoot him dead.

I didn’t want to be Harrison Bergeron. I looked inside and knew that I already was. I was the Emperor. My sovereign self rejected the stale conventions that society tried to hang on me like crippling weights.

So I did the next logical thing: I started to read Ayn Rand. What I loved most among her works was the novella Anthem, whose suffocating, stagnant dystopia was surely an influence on Vonnegut’s (not to mention more recent young-adult classics such as The Hunger Games and The Giver). Anthem’s hero casts off the name imposed upon him, Equality 7-2521. He rejects the collectivist hive society that has abandoned progress and knowledge, and has forbidden the use of words such as “I,” “me,” and “mine.” He rediscovers electricity, renames himself Prometheus, and goes off into the wilderness with a beautiful spouse and fellow-rebel to found a new future in freedom.

My own life plan was starting to take its shape. I would use the mighty gifts with which fate had entrusted me in defense of freedom. I knew that the collective, the mob, was my mortal enemy — as was the God who allegedly said that I should sacrifice my reason and my ego.

Then something appalling happened. My unborn daughter was aborted without my knowledge or consent. (Or her mother’s consent — my teenage girlfriend’s father dragged her to the clinic.)

And everything changed. This person, who had been carelessly, recklessly murdered, had all the same dignity, grandeur, and significance that I had seen only in myself. Her death opened up for me a whole new moral world, one where every human being shone with radiance. And demanded protection. So I dived into human-rights work. I would avenge her death by promoting life — in every form. Each human being I saw now shone as a kind of mirror, reflecting the glory that I had seen first in myself, and then in my daughter.

I wanted to better understand this amazing thing, the human self, to know its powers, limits, and structure. I knew that its power and importance transcended the mere limits of matter. Rand had called this truth “axiomatic,” the self-evident starting point of moral reasoning. For me, it was more of a fact that I had experienced firsthand. I was an accidental, reluctant eyewitness to human dignity.

To learn more, I started reading Sartre. His plays’ heroes reject the stifling orthodoxies that press down from the past. They turn their backs on the herd and strike off boldly to face the truth. But as I read more deeply, I saw something disturbing. The following passage in Existentialism and Human Emotion cut me to the bone:

The existentialist . . . thinks it is very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him. There can no longer be an a priori Good since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. Nowhere is it written that the Good exists, that we must be honest, that we must not lie; because the fact is we are on a plane where there is only man. Dostoevsky said, “If God does not exist, everything would be possible.” That is the very starting point of existentialism. Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to.

Rand’s axiom — that man is unique and important — was merely a dogma, the fruit of an act of faith. For Sartre, the self is really nothing — nothing at all. It is a crack or void in the vast, unconscious stuff of Being. Its vaunted dignity and freedom are only boasts made in a vacuum, where no sound can resonate. Even the freely chosen relationships of one self to another are really a dance of sadism and masochism, a power game whose stakes are finally zero, since “hell is other people.”

Sartre’s individual is an intrinsically lonely, power-hungry monad. No wonder that Sartre could make excuses for Joseph Stalin. The death of a million Sartrean selves really would be just a statistic, the winking out of nothings into Being, like matches dropped in the ocean. Such selves might as well be organized, equalized, collectivized, and rendered uniform, as the villains had done in Vonnegut and Rand. There was nothing sacred or special about anyone — not me, and not the girl whose death still haunted me.

And that was intolerable. The nonexistence of God was an insult to me. I could not reconcile it with my fundamental experience, the passionate joy I took every day in simply existing, the sense of purpose and joy that got me up in the morning — or the mystery of dignity that I saw in other people.

So I determined to find the One who was patiently leading me home. I was no longer merely an individual. I had blossomed into a person. And I knew what I had to do.

— Jason Scott Jones is a filmmaker, human-rights activist, and co-author of The Race to Save Our Century: Five Core Principles to Promote Peace, Freedom, and a Culture of Life.

Remembering the Last Lion

Victor Davis Hanson

http://townhall.com/

January 22, 2015

Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965) gives his famous v-sign as he opens the new headquarters of 615 (County of Surrey) Squadron of the RAAF (Royal Auxiliary Air Force) at Croydon, 1948. (Photo by Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) | Getty Images

Fifty years ago this Saturday, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill died at age 90.

Churchill is remembered for his multiple nonstop careers as a statesman, cabinet minister, politician, journalist, Nobel laureate historian, and combat veteran. He began his career serving the British military as a Victorian-era mounted lancer and ended it as custodian of Britain's nuclear deterrent.

But he is most renowned for an astounding five-year-tenure as Britain's wartime prime minister from May 10, 1940, to June 26, 1945, when he was voted out of office not long after the surrender of Nazi Germany.

Churchill took over the day Hitler invaded Western Europe. Within six weeks, an isolated Great Britain was left alone facing the Third Reich. What is now the European Union was then either under Nazi occupation, allied with Germany or ostensibly neutral while favoring Hitler.

The United States was not just neutral. It had no intention of entering another European war -- at least not until after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor a year and half later.

From August 1939 to June 1941, the Soviet Union was an accomplice of the Third Reich. Russian leader Josef Stalin was supplying Hitler with critical resources to help finish off Great Britain, the last obstacle in Germany's path of European domination.

Some of the British elite wished to cut a peace deal with Hitler to save their empire and keep Britain from being bombed or invaded. They understandably argued that Britain could hardly hold out when Poland, Denmark, Norway the Netherlands, Belgium and France all had not. Yet Churchill voiced defiance and vowed to keep on fighting.

After the fall of France, Churchill readied Britain's defenses against a Nazi bombing blitz, and then went on the offensive against Italy in the Mediterranean.

As much of London went up in flames, Churchill never flinched, despite the deaths of more than 40,000 British civilians.

By some estimates, the Soviet Red Army eventually killed three out of four German soldiers who died in World War II. The American economic colossus built more military ships, aircraft, vehicles and tanks than did any other country during World War II.

In comparison to such later huge human and material sacrifices, the original, critical British role in winning World War II is often forgotten. But Britain was the only major power on either side of the war to fight continuously the entire six years, from September 3, 1939, to September 2, 1945. Britain was the only nation of the alliance to have fought Nazi Germany alone without allies. Churchill's defiant wartime rhetoric anchored the entire moral case against the Third Reich.

Unlike the Soviet Union or the United States, Britain entered the war without being attacked, on the principle of protecting independent Poland from Hitler. Unlike America, Britain fought Germany from the first day of the war to its surrender. Unlike Russia, it fought the Japanese from the moment Japan started the Pacific War to the Japanese general surrender.

Churchill's Britain had a far smaller population and economy than either the Soviet Union or the United States. Its industry and army were smaller than Germany's.

Defeat would have meant the end of British civilization. But victory would ensure the end of the British Empire and a future world dominated by the victorious and all-powerful United States and Soviet Union.

It was Churchill's decision that Britain would fight on all fronts of both the European and Pacific theaters. He ordered strategic bombing over occupied Europe, a naval war against the German submarine and surface fleets, and a full-blown land campaign in Burma.

He ensured that the Mediterranean stayed open from Gibraltar to Suez. Churchill partnered with America from North Africa to Normandy, and he helped to supply Russia -- even as Britain was broke and its manpower exhausted.

In the mid-1930s, Churchill first -- and loudest -- had damned appeasement and warned Europe and the United States about the dangers of an aggressive Nazi Germany. For that prescience, he was labeled a warmonger who wished to revisit the horrors of World War I.

After the end of World War II, the lone voice of Churchill cautioned the West that its former wartime ally, the Soviet Union, was creating an "Iron Curtain" and was as ruthless as Hitler's Germany had been. Again, he was branded a paranoid who unfairly demonized communists.

The wisdom and spirit of Winston Churchill not only saved Britain from the Third Reich, but Western civilization from a Nazi Dark Ages when there was no other nation willing to take up that defense.

Churchill was the greatest military, political and spiritual leader of the 20th century. The United States has never owed more to a foreign citizen than to Winston Churchill, a monumental presence 50 years after his death.

The Attkisson File

The reporter’s computer was hacked, possibly by the feds, but the DOJ and the media turn a blind eye. 

By Scott W. Johnson

http://www.nationalreview.com/

January 22, 2015

Sharyl Attkisson

Sharyl Attkisson was one of the most distinguished investigative journalists in television news, covering everything from the dangers of certain prescription drugs to mismanagement at the Red Cross to TARP to K Street. Over a career that spanned more than 20 years at CBS News, she received numerous awards for her work, including multiple Emmys.

In her memoir Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington, Attkisson looks back on the final years of her network career. One concludes from her book that Attkisson encountered more difficulty practicing her profession at CBS News during Obama’s tenure than at any other time. She reached an agreement for her departure from CBS News in March 2014, well before her contract was to expire.

The book’s subtitle refers to the difficulties Attkisson encountered in “Obama’s Washington.” The term is in part a euphemism for the Obama administration, but it also reflects the support for the administration within CBS News. The head of CBS News is David Rhodes, brother of Obama national-security adviser Ben Rhodes.

Attkisson is a dogged reporter, and Stonewalled is a gripping book, organized around the Obama-administration scandals she covered at CBS News. With the exception of the IRS scandal, she covered just about all of them: Fast and Furious, green-energy crony capitalism, Benghazi, and Obamacare. Attkisson devotes a chapter to her work on each one.

Each of the scandals falls into a larger pattern of scandal management practiced by the Obama White House. (The reader can infer how the IRS scandal fits the pattern precisely to a T.) Her book is invaluable for how it analyzes and exposes this pattern, combining her reportage and her behind-the-scenes work at CBS News.

The pattern begins with blatant denials — bald lies — and stonewalling. Attkisson deftly articulates one of the bona fide occupational qualifications for service as a spokesperson in the Obama administration. Referring specifically to HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters, whom Attkisson had caught lying to her, she writes: “It takes a certain kind of person to be untruthful and then display utter lack of contrition when caught.”

Next in the pattern, when the lies fail, comes the attribution of responsibility to the lowest level of bureaucrat. Also, rather than responding to straightforward inquiries, administration spokesmen pump reporters for the information they have so they can undermine it. Attkisson calls this technique “pump and mine.” The administration then plants slanted leaks to friendly bloggers and reporters; next, it characterizes any advances in the story as “old news.”

Attkisson also shows how the administration, using a technique she calls “controversialization,” disparages any sources and reporters who move the story forward. As she recounts in the book, Attkisson has extensive personal experience being at the receiving end of this technique.

She singles out Media Matters as the main outlet that moves administration spin into the mainstream media. As Attkisson demonstrates, however, the power of Media Matters derives from the complicity and cooperation of its many allies in the media, i.e., the many Obama allies in the media.

She writes:

Perhaps the greatest PR coup of all is that the administration’s expert spinners successfully lead the media by the nose down the path of concluding there’s no true controversy unless there’s a paper trail that lays blame directly on the president’s desk. Time and again, with each scandal and each damaging fact, Democrats and the White House read from the script that says, “there’s no evidence President Obama knew” or “there’s no evidence of direct White House involvement.” Anything short of a signed confession from the president is deemed a phony Republican scandal, and those who dare to ask questions are crazies, partisans, or conspiracy theorists. . . .  

Under President Obama, the press dutifully regurgitates the line “no evidence of White House involvement,” ignoring the fact that if any proof exists, it would be difficult to come by under an administration that fails to properly respond to Freedom of Information Act requests, routinely withholds documents from Congress, and claims executive privilege to keep documents secret.

Stonewalled covers two kinds of scandal: first, the various scandals within the Obama administration; second, the scandalous treatment of these White House scandals by CBS News. With each White House scandal, Attkisson demonstrates the success, more or less, of the Obama administration’s scandal management inside the newsroom at CBS.

Her account of CBS’s journalistic dereliction culminates in her description of how CBS suppressed a portion of the September 12, 2012, 60 Minutes interview with President Obama — the precise portion in which Obama clearly explained why he did not characterize Benghazi as a “terrorist” attack. The release of this interview might have been of interest, shall we say, in the aftermath of the second Obama–Romney debate, during which Obama successfully promulgated the line — the lie — that he had very quickly characterized Benghazi as a “terrorist” attack, with a timely assist from CNN moderator Candy Crowley, who broke with debate-moderator protocol and backed up Obama’s lie. It was only after Attkisson and others inside CBS News belatedly discovered the relevant portion of the 60 Minutes interview, and after they kicked up some dust about it, that CBS News posted the segment, online only, the weekend before the election — far too late to matter.

Attkisson bookends her accounts of the Obama-administration scandals she covered with the story of what she describes as coordinated intrusions into her telephones and computers. She was working on the Benghazi story when a friendly source “connected to a three-letter agency” offered a surprising observation. “The administration is likely monitoring you — based on your reporting,” the source advised her. She had, in fact, been having troubles with her phones and computers, which were behaving oddly.

Three sets of experts — including experts hired by CBS — examined her computers. All reached the same conclusion: She was the victim of computer intrusion and monitoring. One expert found classified government documents secreted in her hard drive, though she had not placed them there and had nothing to do with them. She believes that they were placed there by the intruders for use against her at an appropriate time.

CBS issued this statement on the intrusions:

Attkisson’s computer was accessed by an unauthorized, external, unknown party on multiple occasions in late 2012. . . . [F]orensic analysis revealed an intruder had executed commands that appeared to involve search and exfiltration of data. The party also used sophisticated methods to remove all possible indications of unauthorized activity, and alter system times to cause further confusion.

The experts retained by Attkisson concluded that the intrusion into her computers was probably perpetrated by a government agency with highly sophisticated software that is proprietary to the government.

The Department of Justice has issued two statements on Attkisson’s case. In response to Attkisson’s first public mention of her experience, in the course of a radio interview, the Department of Justice said:

To our knowledge, the Justice Department has never “compromised” Ms. Attkisson’s computers, or otherwise sought any information from or concerning any telephone, computer, or other media device she may own or use.

Attkisson has called this Justice Department statement “a quasi-denial.” Who is the “we” encompassed in “our”? she asks. She continues:

The entire Justice Department? Did officials really, in the blink of an eye, conduct an investigation and question 113,543 Justice Department employees? That’s impressive! I’m still waiting for answers to Freedom of Information Act requests that I filed with them years ago, but they’re able to provide this semi-definitive statement within minutes of the question being posed.

Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn, just retired, sent Attorney General Holder a letter making broad inquiries on behalf of Attkisson. Attkisson quotes the response submitted to him by the DOJ:

Your letter asks whether the Department is responsible for incidents in 2012 in which the computer of Sharyl Attkisson, a CBS reporter, was allegedly hacked by an unauthorized party. The Department is not. It also does not appear that CBS or Ms. Attkisson followed up with the Federal Bureau of Investigation for assistance with these incidents.

Coburn’s letter to Holder had sought information regarding actions taken “[d]uring your tenure as attorney general,” not during 2012. Attkisson drily observes: “Instead of answering the questions at hand, the administration had posed an entirely different question and chosen to answer that one.”

Coburn issued a follow-up letter to the Justice Department pointing out that none of his questions from the previous July had been answered in its December response. The Justice Department has provided no further response.

Attkisson has not let the matter rest. In January, she filed an administrative claim against the government as a predicate to bringing a lawsuit under the Federal Tort Claims Act; separately, she also filed a lawsuit against the government for violation of her constitutional rights.

One does not need to be a seer to predict that the Obama administration will do its level best to ignore Attkisson and her complaints through Obama’s last day in office. Attkisson will no doubt have to await a new administration before she can obtain legal resolution, but perhaps it would not be amiss for Congress to look for answers right now.

— Scott W. Johnson is a Minneapolis attorney and a contributor to the website Power Line.

Today's Tune: Future Islands - Swept Inside

Death of a Prosecutor

Posted By Kenneth R. Timmerman On January 21, 2015 @ 12:35 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 2 Comments

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

Dr. Alberto Nisman (AFP)


Alberto Nisman, the Argentinean prosecutor who indicted top Iranian regime officials for the July 1994 AMIA Jewish Center bombing in Buenos Aires, was found dead by gunshot in his apartment on Sunday night, in what initially was called a suicide.

Nisman was scheduled to address members of parliament the next day to reveal new information about alleged efforts by Argentinean President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and her foreign minister, Hector Timerman, to cover up the responsibility of the Iranian regime in the AMIA bombing that killed 86 people some twenty-one years ago.

Just days before his murder, Nisman publicly accused the President and her foreign minister of taking “the criminal decision to fabricate Iran’s innocence to save Argentina’s commercial, political and geopolitical interests.”

Police found arrayed on a desk in his apartment documents relating to his allegations, but no suicide note.

Nisman issued his initial 801 page indictment in the AMIA case in on October 25, 2006. He asked Interpol to issue international arrest warrants against eight current and former Iranian government officials, including then president Hashemi-Rafsanjani, his foreign minister, the intelligence minister, and the head of the Revolutionary Guards Corps.

He also accused Lebanese Hezbollah leader Imad Mugniyeh, who worked in tandem with the IRGC, of handling the logistics of the truck bomb plot.

Mugniyeh was assassinated in Damascus in February 2008, apparently by Israeli operatives.
Mugniyeh has a long pedigree of killing Americans and killing Jews, which I have written about extensively.

He murdered 241 U.S. Marines in Beirut in 1983, hijacked aircraft, murdered U.S. hostages in Lebanon, and helped recruit the al Qaeda terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attacks.

Early this past Sunday, Israeli helicopters reportedly attacked a Hezbollah outpost in Syria, killing four Hezbollah operatives – including Mugniyeh’s son and terrorist-operative heir, Jihad.

A senior Iranian official told reporters that Israel would be hit at “the right time and right place” in retaliation for the strike.

That same evening, on the other side of the world, the Argentinean prosecutor instrumental in revealing Mugniyeh, Senior’s involvement in the AMIA bombings, died mysteriously of a gunshot wound to the temple, fired from a .22 revolver he did not own, with no apparent powder burns on his hands.

Coincidence? Perhaps.

When police discovered Nisman’s bloody body behind the locked door of his Buenos Aires apartment, they treated the area as a crime scene, not a suicide, and immediately called in forensics investigators.

This and other indicators led the Daily Beast’s Christopher Dickey, a long-time aficionado of Iranian state terrorism, to speculate that Iran might have murdered Nisman to bury the evidence of bigger crimes.

My Iranian sources tell me there is no doubt of Iran’s efforts to coopt Argentinean president Cristina Kirchner, nor any doubt that Nisman’s death was a murder carried out by professionals.

I got involved in the AMIA investigation early on, and corresponded with Nisman’s first boss on the case, Judge Juan Jose Galeano, who eventually traveled to Washington, DC to meet with me. When Nisman ultimately took over the case and issued his indictment against the Iranian regime, he cited my evidence on more than a dozen occasions.

As I reported in 2003, a former Iranian intelligence officer, Abdolghassem Mesbahi, told the court that Iranian officials had paid $10 million into a Banque Degroof Luxembourg bank account in Switzerland that was controlled by then-president Carlos Menem, in exchange for his efforts to impede the AMIA investigation.

Menem’s denials were ultimately put to rest when the Swiss government froze the $10 million in his Banque Degroof accounts. One can only imagine what would have happened to Mrs. Kirschner’s denials had Nisman been able to testify on Monday to the Argentinean parliament.

Nisman has been under pressure from the Argentinean authorities for years. I contacted him again in 2007 to see if he would be willing to testify before the U.S. District for the Southern District of New York about what he had learned of Iran’s overseas terrorist operations, as part of the Iran-9/11 investigation I was involved in.

After several months of back and forth negotiations, he got back to me to say that his superiors had forbidden him from having any contact with the U.S. court, even though we merely wanted him to present the same evidence he had made public in the AMIA indictment.

Nisman had huge amounts of evidence that has not been made public, including transcripts of intercepts between the Iranian cultural attaché and Iranian expat taxi drivers in Buenos Aires who helped transport explosives used in the bombing, and other intercepts detailing the involvement of the Islamic Republic Shipping Lines and their local agents in conveying the explosives to Argentina.

The circumstances of Nisman’s murder – the dubious murder weapon, the door locked from the inside, the apparent absence of a struggle – remind me eerily of the November 2011 murder of Ahmad Rezai, the son of the former commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, Mohsen Rezai.

The younger Rezai was found dead in his room in a residence hotel in Dubai and was immediately declared a suicide by the Dubai police.

Because I had gotten to know him well (so well that he named his first child after my daughter), I flew to Dubai to investigate.

Although Rezai was a U.S. citizen, the U.S. consular authorities had no interest in investigating the case and provided no assistance to me or his U.S. family, who I was representing.

The Dubai authorities stonewalled but I went around them. From the medical examiner, I discovered that the cause of “suicide” – an overdose of anti-psychotic medicine – was not true: the amount found in Ahmad’s blood was normal.

Furthermore, upon interrogating hotel staff, I discovered that a known Russian mafia hitman had checked into a room just down the hall a few hours before Ahmad’s murder and disappeared the next day, even though he had paid a month’s rent in advance.

Needless to say, the Dubai police had never heard of the man, let alone interrogated him.

The morning of Ahmad’s death, an explosion rocked a huge missile facility west of Tehran, killing the father of Iran’s solid-fuel missile programs. I speculated in these pages that rivals of Ahmad’s father suspected father and son of seeking to reform the regime from within, an effort that is rejected by many Iranian opposition activists who believe that reform is impossible.

On Tuesday, an Iranian website controlled by the IRGC, identified the Foundation that I founded and chair as the regime’s Public Enemy #1.

It’s certainly not the first time the IRGC and their allies among the hardliners have identified me personally and my foundation as “enemies” of their revolution, because we support the right of Iranians to choose their form of government by democratic means.

But the timing of this latest version of the anti-jihadi hit parade seems no accident, coming on the heels of the assassination of Jihad Mugniyeh and the apparent murder of Alberto Nisman.

No one should underestimate the determination of the Iranian regime to use any means at its disposal to achieve its ends. Whether that means dispatching thousands of Revolutionary Guards fighters to Syria to prop up Assad, or murdering Americans in Iraq to hasten our departure, or providing safe haven and logistical assistance to al Qaeda, or funneling arms secretly to ISIS to stoke a fire they can boast to the gullible U.S. officials they are uniquely qualified to put out, the Islamic Republic of Iran is playing for keeps.

They have more case officers working for their intelligence services than we do in the United States, and have developed an entire branch of their military – the Quds Force – to carry out overseas terrorist operations.

They will not hesitate to murder people who get in their way, no matter their nationality or where they might be found.

They are playing hardball, and we are playing tiddlywinks. And yet, successive U.S. administration’s have thrown away advantages won by the blood of patriots – both Iranian and American – for empty promises made by known liars, assassins, and cheats.

When will we ever learn?

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The Demonization of Chris Kyle

Morally superior anti-American leftists can’t tolerate an unapologetic patriot willing to fight our enemies. 

By Ian Tuttle

http://www.nationalreview.com/

January 20, 2015

In case you didn’t​ know: “​The Real American Sniper Was a Hate-Filled Killer.”

So reads the first half of the headline to a January 6 essay by Lindy West at the Guardian’s website. It’s true that writers rarely pen their own headlines, but that one does an apt job of capturing the first part of West’s thesis.

Like other recent Kyle critics, West, a culture writer at GQ, wields quotes from the 2012 autobiography of the late Chris Kyle, America’s deadliest military marksman and the subject of Clint Eastwood’s biopic, American Sniper, to show what a loathsome, morally treacherous character he was. After revealing that she has not read Kyle’s book, West goes on to use misleading quotes, those same ones pounced on by all critics — “I hate the damn savages,” and “I couldn’t give a flying f*** about the Iraqis” — as proof that Kyle at a “bare minimum was a racist who took pleasure in dehumanizing and killing brown people.”

Her assessment was tame compared with that of Max Blumenthal, author at the left-wing blog Alternet, who tweeted in December that Kyle was “the perfect recruiter for ISIS.” Blumenthal likened Kyle to “John Lee Malvo, another mass-murdering sniper.” “John Lee,” for those who might not recall, was one alias of Lee Boyd Malvo, the 17-year-old who, with John Allen Muhammad, murdered ten people and wounded three others in the Washington, D.C., area in October 2002. (They also killed seven people and wounded seven across the country in the months beforehand.)

Others have piled on: Rania Khalek, a freelance journalist, called Kyle an “American psycho” (alluding to novelist Bret Easton Ellis’s fictional serial killer), while filmmaker Michael Moore tweeted that snipers were “cowards.”

“Why,” then, asks the second part of the Guardian’s headline, “Are Simplistic Patriots Treating Him as a Hero?” Why is “the US right wing . . . treating [American Sniper] with the same unconsidered, rah-rah reverence that they would the national anthem or the flag itself?” asks West.

The answer is simple: because the Right is just like Chris Kyle.

West thinks the similarity is racism: The Right has latched on to Kyle “because Chris Kyle is good, and brown people are bad, and America is in danger, and Chris Kyle saved us.”

For Laura Miller, senior writer at Salon, the similarity is stupidity: Kyle was, she writes, afflicted by his “steadfast imperviousness to any nuance, subtlety, or ambiguity, and his lack of imagination and curiosity” — and in that he was “all-too-emblematic of the blustering, tragically misguided self-confidence of the George W. Bush years.”

For the Daily Kos, writing back in 2012, admiration of Kyle is Freudian projection:

Chris Kyle was feted by Bill O’Reilly last week: His deeds were recounted, and killing admired by the Fox News faithful. There is an odd homoeroticism (or is it homosocial worship?) in this interview, where O’Reilly as an archconservative is channeling a deep fascination with the “how” of death, and a type of hyper-masculinity that is the bleeding heart of Right-wing authoritarianism. Here, O’Reilly reminds the viewer of why straight men enjoy watching the freakishly large penises that dominate much of American pornography. Hero worship, with no small amount of projection, is, and remains, the thing – it is the means for a visceral thrill.

The above is not satire.

So this is not a new phenomenon. Since Vietnam, the only military men the Left has found to like are those who return to the U.S. and roundly repudiate the war in which they fought. They think the highest form of patriotism is marching before Congress to “blow the whistle” on horrors, real or imagined, being committed by Uncle Sam’s legions against innocents overseas. The only veterans worth honoring with medals are those who will turn and chuck those medals over the Capitol fence, à la John Kerry. The Left has no love — or even tolerance — for unapologetic servicemen who write about “savage, despicable evil” and declare their fidelity to “God, Country, Family,” in that order.

Now, in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the reflexive anti-war sentiment of the progressive Left has mutated, in certain corners, into full-blown derangement — the sort that can straight-facedly link American military policy with porn-viewing habits. As the Kyle critics have made clear, it is now nothing short of an unassailable truth on the left that the act of criticizing America’s military ventures is in itself an indication of moral and intellectual superiority.

Which is what all of this armchair psychologizing-cum-political commentary about Chris Kyle is really about: He is important because, as a racist, rapacious killer, he is a representation of racist, rapacious America, and how it exported its bloodlust to Iraq and Afghanistan, slaughtering innumerable women and children in the quest to seize Iraq’s oil fields or to expand Dick Cheney’s stock portfolio or to satiate George W. Bush’s Oedipal complex. By pointing this out, West and Miller and Blumenthal and all the others show that they are not fooled. They announce how attuned they are to “moral ambiguity” and “emotional complexity,” how “deeply” they think about war and peace and life and death, how much more sophisticated they are compared with trigger-happy, redneck rubes such as Chris Kyle — or the simpletons who think he might have served his country admirably.

In his autobiography, Kyle wrote of taking the deadly shot: “You do it again. And again. You do it so the enemy won’t kill you or your countrymen. You do it until there’s no one left for you to kill. That’s what war is.”

Yeah, but what did he know?

— Ian Tuttle is a William F. Buckley Jr. fellow at National Review.

All Christians Rely on Tradition Rather than Scripture Alone

Evangelicals are more Catholic than they think

PHILIP JENKINS 

http://www.aleteia.org/

January 19, 2015

The Trinity (oil on canvas), Tintoretto, Jacopo Robusti (1518-94) / Galleria Sabauda, Turin, Italy / The Bridgeman Art Library

Tradition matters.
 
As a statement about the making of church doctrine, that comment might not sound too startling, and it is quite obvious to Catholic and Orthodox believers. But it does point to a major paradox in the thinking of that numerous and influential section of the world’s Christians who are evangelicals. Surprised, and even shocked, as they might be to hear it, they are in fact far more Catholic than they might ever have thought.
 
Evangelicals pride themselves on their reliance on Scripture alone, the core Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura. If you look at evangelical debates, the question will soon arise: how do you ground this in scripture? Give me chapter and verse!
 
But here’s the problem. Evangelicals believe absolutely in core doctrines of faith that cannot be derived simply from scripture, but rather grow out of church tradition. Once you have formulated the belief, you can if you wish cherry-pick Biblical verses to support it, but you would never have reached the position through scripture alone.
 
The obvious example is the Trinity itself, which evangelicals regard as a fundamental belief for anyone claiming Christian credentials. Yet it is not found in the Bible. The only scriptural support it ever had was the so-called Johannine Comma, an explicitly Trinitarian line in 1 John 5: 7-8, which is consecrated in the text of the King James Bible of 1611. Unfortunately, scholars have known for centuries that those words were inserted much later into the original text, and no serious writer would today cite it as authentic.
 
Losing the Comma poses no difficulty for anyone believing in the Trinity, which is an idea very deeply rooted indeed in church tradition. The doctrine was certainly held by Christian believers in the second century, especially by Apostolic Fathers such as Ignatius and Justin Martyr. To speak of church tradition does not, of course, mean that such later figures invented doctrines for their own sinister purposes. Rather, as Catholic and Orthodox theologians have always held, the church was, and is guided by the Holy Spirit. But without such a belief in the power of continuing tradition, how can anyone justify the doctrine of the Trinity?
 
No church tradition, no Trinity.
 
Scarcely less fundamental for evangelicals is the belief in Christ’s Incarnation. The New Testament certainly allows us to form ideas of Christ’s divinity, and his becoming human. Relying on those Biblical texts, though, gave early believers huge leeway in how they defined the relationship between human and divine. Was Christ literally God walking on earth in human guise? Did divinity descend on Jesus at some moment in his earthly life, presumably at his Baptism, only to leave him at the Crucifixion? Christians argued about these complex doctrines for centuries, and settled them only at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD.  In other words, the doctrine was settled by debate within the Church, on the basis of scripture and tradition, but under the guidance of the Spirit.
 
No church tradition, then, no doctrine of Incarnation.
 
Protestants have always held the early church in high esteem, and distinguished evangelical scholars publish learned works on the early Fathers. The evangelical press IVP has, for instance, presented a wonderful series of volumes under the title Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture.  Having said this, evangelicals still balk at using the wisdom of the early Church to establish doctrine.
 
But suppose they do acknowledge reality, and admit that key doctrines like the Trinity are in fact grounded on the traditions of that early Church. How do they define “early”? Do they see the workings of the Spirit still in action before the Council of Nicea in 325, or might they extend that latitude to the time of Chalcedon in 451, as they must if they are to accept the Incarnation? If they accept the ideas of St. Augustine as authoritative, then that takes us well into the fifth century.

If they venture into the fourth and fifth centuries, though, they are looking at a church that might, to them, look disturbingly medieval and even Catholic. This was very much a hierarchical church with strong ideas about the status of clergy, and definite rules about clerical celibacy and monasticism. From the second century, moreover, ideas about the exalted role of the Virgin Mary were becoming ever more popular and mainstream in the church. Are they then any less authoritative than doctrines like the Trinity?
 
So why not Mary?
 
Evangelicals, then, should be more explicit about how they are prepared to use tradition. In raising this point, I am not seeking to embarrass evangelicals, but rather to suggest that Christians of all shades are already far closer to doctrinal unity that they might think.



Philip Jenkins is a Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University and author of The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade.

Why 'American Sniper' Is One of the Greatest War Movies Ever

The film is a triumph for Eastwood, Cooper, and America. (Also read: Feminist Mag Complains American Sniper Unfair …to Babies?)


By David Forsmark
http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle
January 19, 2015





With all due respect to Lone Survivor and Zero Dark Thirty (and I have paid mad respect to both), Clint Eastwood’s amazing American Sniper is the film for the war on terror.

But it’s more than that. It is a timeless American war movie that explores the necessity of having men who are–and bear the burden of being–really really good at killing bad guys.

In fact, this is easily one of the ten best American war movies of all time. (I won’t place it any higher than that until I’ve had the chance to see it again and let the initial emotional impact wear off; but right now, I can’t think of three I would rate above it.)

When I reviewed Chris Kyle’s book American Sniper, I called it the most unapologetic account of war since George S. Patton. But it’s not all swagger.

Eastwood both allows the character of Chris Kyle to speak to that unabashed pride in doing a necessary job — his warts-and-all honesty about how he neglected his family while letting the job consume him — and uses the tragic events that followed the publication of the book to show us how doing that job takes a toll.

The result is a shining example of material finding the perfect director. In many ways, Eastwood’s whole career has been leading up to this statement. It’s what Unforgiven couldn’t quite get to because it was merely about a previously vicious man sliding back into his old ways, even if his cause was just.

The film — like the book — opens as newly minted Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle takes a bead on a small Iraqi boy whose mother has just handed him a grenade and sent him running toward a squad of American Marines.

Then, while Kyle is waiting for that space between breaths, between heartbeats, that still moment of the trigger pull, we flash back to how he got there.

This is a perfectly executed and superbly made bio-pic. Despite the heroism it shows, it never lapses into hagiography or sappy preaching. Eastwood is clear-eyed throughout, and confident at letting his story tell itself.

American Sniper lives up to its title. This is an intensely American film. Everything about Chris Kyle’s background, from hunting with his father, to the little country church, to wanting to be a cowboy, is not just Texas, it’s America.

From Sergeant York, to Audie Murphy, to Dick Bong (WWII’s ace of aces who also left combat only to die serving on the home front), to Chris Kyle, small-town, do-for-yourself America has produced these men for whom taking up arms to protect their country just comes naturally (even, eventually, for the Quaker, York).

The motivation is summed up in a talk Chris Kyle’s father gives at the dinner table — a speech many American fathers have given their sons (and many more should), but rarely with this perfect an analogy.

Chris has had trouble in school for beating up the bully who was picking on his younger brother — but he is not in trouble at home. His father explains there are three kinds of people in the world: Sheep, who can’t protect themselves; wolves; and sheepdogs, who protect the sheep. He expects his son, who has the ability, to be a sheepdog  – and if he ever becomes a wolf, he will get an ass whooping he will never forget.

Later, when drinking away the memory of a cheating girlfriend and the Khobar Towers bombing news story comes up on television news, a hitherto aimless Chris Kyle knows exactly what he is supposed to do.

While American Sniper takes no firm position on the wisdom of the war in Iraq — various characters express varied opinions on that — it is very clear-eyed about the nature of the enemy, or, as Kyle refers to them as, “the f***ing savages.”

Not since The Deer Hunter has the enemy been as accurately portrayed in an American film as the bestial evil that they are, and without over-the-top Hollywood histrionics. The good guys have their flaws, but these bad guys have to be opposed — and killed in as large a number as possible.

There are four great battle-set pieces in American Sniper that are breathtakingly effective — and, thankfully, Eastwood knows how to give immediacy and a you-are-there feel to the scenes without the herky-jerky handheld camera gimmicks and incoherent quick-cut edits that lesser directors use to pull off a complicated scene.

At one point, Kyle’s sheepdog instincts take him off the rooftops — against orders — and down into the streets with the Marines. He knows his SEAL training has prepared him better for house-to-house combat and he can’t sit by without teaching them how to do it better.

Eastwood has been exploring these themes for years, imperfectly in Heartbreak Ridge, much better in The Outlaw Josey Wales, of course in Dirty Harry, and most recently (showing he understands the protective impulse of the American soldier) in Gran Torino, where this really was the under-explored theme.

The performances are all first rate (I’ll rave about Cooper in a minute) and it’s really about time that people realize the beautiful Sienna Miller is an actress of grit and grace.

So in the pantheon of great American war movies, where does American Sniper place? It’s more personal and emotionally shattering than even The Deer Hunter, because that great film spread its emotions around to the effect of the Vietnam War on a whole town.

It does an even better job of portraying the sacrifices and effects of war on the family of a warrior than We Were Soldiers.

And of course it is a more realistic look at a highly decorated soldier who performed at an almost superhuman level than either Sergeant York or To Hell and Back – and not just because of the allowances of modern filmmaking.

It’s hard to explain the greatness of Bradley Cooper’s performance, unless you have seen Chris Kyle’s interviews. But Cooper does not just inhabit his role, or give a great interpretation of a character — he disappears into it.

Sure, the muscle gain helps, because it keeps us from remembering this is svelte Bradley Cooper who has given so many memorable performances the last few years (and was the softer male character way back on TV’s Alias).

But watching American Sniper, you feel as though Chris Kyle was allowed to play himself — maybe better, since this is a more convincing portrayal than even Audie Murphy gave playing… Audie Murphy.

Which makes the tragic ending of this story all the more shattering. Eastwood’s choice at the end of American Sniperis almost as important as the one he makes at the beginning. At the screening I attended, there were gasps as a credit announced what happened to Kyle, muffled sobs during the real footage of his funeral that ran over the credits, and no one — and I mean no one — moved until the credits were done. As people filed out, it was as quiet and somber as if we had attended the funeral ourselves.

Seeing American Sniper is an American experience. Don’t miss it.