Chairman’s Report for December 14, 2011

William J. Murray and Solomon Nour in the Hope School chapel (2010)

We have lost a dear friend. Solomon Nour, the director of Hope School in Beit Jala, was a good friend of mine whom I have known for decades. He arrived at Hope School as a teacher 36 years ago and for the last 16 years he has been the Director. The name “Hope School” was chosen by the pupils themselves in 1977.  The school motto is a verse from the Bible:  For you have been my hope, O Sovereign Lord, my confidence since my youth.  (Psalm 71:5)

Beit Jala is located next to Bethlehem and until the United States forced Israel to relinquish Bethlehem, the town was almost 100% Christian. After the takeover by the Palestinian Authority the school had many issues, including mysterious “back taxes” that would suddenly be owed. The Christian school was also required to use the “official” books sold to them by the Palestinian Authority.  Even the math books were anti-Semitic.  After many break-ins, the Religious Freedom Coalition paid for the installation of burglar bars for the windows and supported the school in many other ways. Steadfastly Solomon Nour used the school to instill the Gospel truth in his students.

Please join with me in prayer for Solomon’s family, including his daughter who has dedicated herself to Hope School as well. Please also pray for Hope School, its teachers and students who are now without the steady hand of our dear departed friend Solomon Nour. You can assist our Middle Easter missions!

THE PRESIDENT

STRANGE NEW ACTIVITIES –
I made my first trip to Washington, DC as a new Christian in 1982, about a year after Ronald Reagan was sworn into office. I had met Ronald Reagan in 1980 in Dallas, Texas before he was elected. Now, two years later, I was being invited to speak on Capitol Hill by Senator Jesse Helms, a great conservative who has since gone to be with the Lord. This was my first time in the Capitol Building as anything but a tourist. The issue Senator Helms requested that I speak on was school prayer, because of my history of being raised in the home of atheist and Marxist leader Madalyn Murray O’Hair.

Since that first trip to Capitol Hill, I have been in the Oval Office and I have met with three presidents — Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. I have worked with many presidential hopefuls, including Governor Mike Huckabee, over the last three decades. During that time I have worked on pro-family, pro-life and religious liberty legislation with dozens of Senators and congressmen. I worked very hard for the confirmations of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Scalia and have been in numerous State Department meetings on issues of religious freedom. I was even here in Washington, DC to watch liberal President Bill Clinton sign the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and Welfare Reform into law.

That said, in my three decades of work on Capitol Hill, with the White House and State Department, I have never seen anything as disorganized as the White House under President Barack Obama. The disorganization is a direct result of a government run by ideology rather than logic. Taxpayer money is tossed at “green projects” which all in the White
House have agreed in advance will fail. Obama’s EPA is passing regulations by the thousands of pages to shut down “carbon based” energy production not only in the USA, but in Canada as well.  Killing the Keystone Pipeline is just one of many examples. At the same time that the  economy of this nation is under attack by Obama’s minions in agencies bent on  strange ideological agendas, religious freedom and real human rights are being  assaulted by this White House as well.

These actions from the White House seem to have no logic behind  them because the liberal causes they support are based on “magic-thought,” the  idea that a utopia can be created on Earth, and that man by his intellect can rule supreme and solve all the problems of humanity. To achieve this impossible goal, many contradictions must be ignored.   For example Islamic terror must not exist, even as evidence for its existence literally explodes onto the news headlines every day.  The President has to pretend there is no link  between Islam and terror because if implacable Islamic enemies exist, the  utopia he dreams of cannot be created.

THUS:  The murders of thirteen innocent adults and  one unborn child at Ft. Hood two years ago by Muslim terrorist Nidal Hasan have  now been classified by the Obama Administration as “workplace violence.” What’s the point of this fiction?  By calling this terrorist act “workplace  violence,” the Obama Administration believes it will show Muslims our  “tolerance” for their beliefs and convince them to live together with us in  peace. The reason his approach to Islamic terror — that is, rebranding it as  something else — seems to be totally without logical foundation, is because it
is totally without logical foundation.

Unfortunately for Americans, politically correct words are  not the worst result of Obama’s logic.  President  Obama somehow believes, along with his base, that the United States needs more  Muslims and more homosexuals so it can become more diverse and peaceful. On December 6^th at a conference in Geneva,  Switzerland attended by diplomats from all over the world, including from Arab  nations, Secretary Clinton compared the struggle for “gay equality” to the difficult  struggles for women’s rights and racial equality. She said that a nation’s cultural  or religious “traditions” are not an excuse for discrimination against  homosexuals. “Gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay
rights,” she said.  “It should never be a crime to be  gay,” Clinton declared and concluded that, “Gay people are born into  and belong to every society in the world.”

At the same  moment in Washington, DC, President Barack Obama was directing U.S. agencies working abroad, including the  State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, to use  foreign aid to assist gays and lesbians who are facing human rights violations.  He ordered U.S. agencies to “protect” vulnerable gay and lesbian refugees and  asylum seekers. In a statement issued with the memorandum Obama said, “The  struggle to end discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender  persons is a global challenge, and one that is central to the United States’  commitment to promoting human rights.”

In effect President Obama ordered U.S. agencies to import  homosexuals from all over the world who are threatened. Thus anyone walking  into an embassy anywhere in the world where homosexual activities (including of  course “gay marriage”) are illegal, can claim to be gay and immediately be put  at the front of the line to immigrate to the United States.  How, after all, would officials disprove a  person’s “gayness?”

Back to the Muslims … at the same time President Barack  Obama is opening the floodgates to anyone in the world claiming to be gay; he  has already given the green light to import tens of thousands of mostly  illiterate Muslims from third world nations as refugees, using Nashville and  Atlanta as hubs. Obama wants to break the back of conservative resistance to  his agenda in the Bible Belt by dumping large numbers of Muslims into their backyard.

Keep in mind that no two groups could be further at odds than Muslims  and homosexuals. In both Saudi Arabia and Iran, homosexuals have in recent times been publicly hung. In sections of London where Sharia law is enforced signs are posted warning homosexuals to stay out, or face “justice.” Using his magic-think logic, President Obama plans
to import large numbers of gays along with large numbers of Muslims who believe that gays should be hung in public. This “diversity” somehow will bring peace and prosperity to our nation.

This utopian vision of a heaven on earth created by human reason was what gave to the world, in the 20^th Century, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Third Reich, Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Pol Pots’s massacres in Cambodia. Regardless of how sweet the sound of the Pied Piper of a utopian collectivist state may be, the end result of every attempt at achieving it throughout history has been mass murder and war.

Even before socialism reaches the point of forced collectivism, which by its nature it inevitably requires, socialism destroys the ambitions of the people. Under the yoke of collectivism the will to succeed is cut from the souls of men and women, as they accept the promise of having their basic needs met, but in return give up hope for anything beyond basic existence, either materially or spiritually. This is the promise of our “hope and change” president; what Barack Obama delivers is “change” but very little “hope.”

CLINTON TO BACK BLASPHEMY LAWS? – For more than 20 years, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has pressed Western governments to restrict free speech. The OIC charter states as its goal “to combat defamation of Islam,” and it wants “deterrent punishments” by all states to counter Islamophobia. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appears ready to buy into the idea of limiting free speech worldwide if Islam is the subject of discussion. Any statement critical of Islam or Muslims may be considered “slander.”

Islamic Sharia law defines “slander,” as saying “anything concerning a person [a Muslim] that he would dislike.” At
the OIC’s Third Extraordinary Session, held in Mecca, Saudi Arabia in December 2005, a “Ten-Year Program of Action” was devised to “adopt an international resolution to counter Islamophobia, and call upon all States to
enact laws to counter it, including deterrent punishments.”  This month in Washington, DC, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will host Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the head of the OIC, to discuss how the United States can assist the OIC agenda to criminalize criticism of Islam. Clinton and Ihsanoglu will discuss the enforcement of UN Human Rights
Council Resolution 16/18 adopted in April, 2011.

The UN Human Rights Council consists of human rights violators such as China, Cuba, Libya, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. Resolution 16/18 states that any criticism of a religion is religious discrimination. The resolution gives Islamic nations permission to persecute Christians and other non-Muslims because their professions of faith “blaspheme” Islam and hurt the feelings of the “true believers.” At the same time the resolution demands than anyone in a non-Muslim nation who is critical of Islam also must be punished.

These outrageous restrictions that Secretary Hillary Clinton is about to adopt are the exact reverse of the intent of the Founders of this nation. From the founding of Virginia through the signing of the Constitution in 1787, the intent was open discussion of religion with no punishment for the opinions or beliefs of others, particularly a minority religion. Under the Obama Administration it is becoming clear that this concept is being lost in their zeal to appease Islamic intolerance. By international treaty the rights we have as citizens in the United States could be buried, and religious expression criminalized.

WHITE HOUSE APPLAUDS ISLAMIST TAKEOVER – Since the “Arab Spring” saw revolts against secular governments in the Middle East supported by President Barack Obama, there have been elections in two nations. The first one, in Tunisia, brought a previously outlawed Islamist party to power. Now that Islamists have won 60% of
the vote in Egypt’s first ballot round, the Obama Administration has this to say: “I congratulate the Egyptian people for a peaceful, successful start to their election process.” A White House spokesman was equally upbeat about control of the Egyptian government going to Islamic religious parties. The lessons of the Taliban government in Afghanistan and the Islamist control in Iran have been forgotten.

MULTICULTURALISM AND ISLAM – If it doesn’t work in Europe, let’s do it here and see what happens. The Obama Administration loves multiculturalism and this is why Nashville and Atlanta have been set up as hubs for the mass immigration of Muslim “refugees.” What do these Islamic “refugees” bring to America?  Here is an example of “multiculturalism” at work when large numbers of Muslim workers are brought into a nation: There were nearly 3,000 “honor” attacks by Muslims in the U.K. in 2010, many of them fatal, and the perpetrators are treated as heroes in their communities. This stunning number was brought to light by the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organization by combing through local police records, despite the efforts of British officials to hide the facts.

THE CONGRESS ON
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND TERROR 

SENATOR DURBIN TRIES TO KILL U.S. COMMISSION ON
INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS FREEDOM – Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) wants the federal government to buy a bankrupt private prison in his home state of Illinois to “create jobs.” To get the bucks for the deal he has put a hold on
the funding for the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, the only body that spotlights abuses of religious minorities. The appointees of the USCIRF are not even paid! —and it is about the most efficient body associated with the federal government. Please contact Senator Durbin and ask him to remove his hold for funding of the USCIRF. If you do not live in Illinois his email system rejects messages. Call his office at 202.224.2152 or send a fax to 202.228.0400.

INTERNATIONAL

MUSLIM CRIME IN NETHERLANDS – When an individual is not a part of the culture he has no problem committing crimes against that culture. Forty percent of Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands between the ages of 12 and 24 have been arrested, fined, charged or otherwise accused of committing a crime during the past five years, according to a new report commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Interior.

WHERE ARE OUR PRIORITIES? – Pakistan’s Catholic Bishops and evangelicals are protesting a decision by the nation’s telecommunications authority to include “Jesus Christ” in a list of 160 words banned in text messages. This is the same nation in which numerous Christians rot in jail without trial, accused of “blasphemy.” The United States gives Pakistan more than a billion dollars a year in aid, yet at the same time the funding for the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom is in jeopardy.

POLAND’S FIRST HONOR KILLING – A prosecutor in Sieradz says that Poland has probably seen its first case of honor killing.  A 34-year old mother of four named Agnieszka was murdered two years ago in June. Prosecution has accused a 40-year old Pakistani called Naaem, who has lived in Poland for 10 years. The investigation, according to prosecutor Józef Mizerski, is not a typical one in Poland. It is known as “the honor killing”.  In Pakistan, in 2007 alone, 1261 women lost their lives and none of the perpetrators was held responsible”, says Mizerski.

LONDON’S MORE MODERATE MOSQUE – A speaker at the “moderate” East London mosque is responsible for the following statement: Sheikh Saad al-Beraik, who has reportedly stated: “Muslim brothers in Palestine, do not have any mercy neither compassion on the Jews, their blood, their money, their flesh. Their women are yours to take, legitimately. God made them yours. Why don’t you enslave their women? Why don’t you wage jihad? Why don’t you pillage them?” This is the moderate side of Islam in the United Kingdom today.

DIRTY JEW, GO TO YOUR COUNTRY – What happens when a young Jewish girl from Belgium is brutally attacked by Muslim schoolmates? Police fail to handle the incident, while the school and politicians turn a blind eye. A correspondent from the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth met with Oceane Sluijzer, whose assault has shocked Europe’s Jewish communities.

William  J. Murray, Chairman