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By Jack Kinsella, The Omega Letter

I was watching Glenn Beck’s program on CNN the other day. He said something that bothered me when I first heard it, and it bothers me even more today.

He mentioned how devastated he had been following the Columbine shooting in 1999.

But then he noted that the Virginia Tech massacre didn’t seem to have such a devastating effect on him. Or, it seemed, on most of America. Not because it wasn’t as terrible as Columbine — the VT massacre claimed more than twice as many lives — but because it isn’t as shocking as it used to be.

Shortly after the crazy little whack-job in Virginia (I refuse to honor him by repeating his name — he’s gotten enough publicity) murdered thirty-two students at Virginia Tech, some guy at NASA shot his boss because he thought he might lose his job.

Afterwards, the guy shot himself in the head while the police ‘closed in’. (I set that off in quotes because it seems the police no longer ‘close in’ until AFTER the gunfire stops.

There was a murder/suicide in Woodland, California (that you probably didn’t hear about) where a 54 year-old guy shot his 52 year-old girlfriend and then killed himself.

Fifteen hundred miles away, another guy shot his girlfriend to death and then killed himself in Houston. There was another three days ago in Portland, Texas. Two more the next day, one in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and one in Murrieta, California.

In Queens, NY, Jimmie Dawkins killed his mother, her boyfriend and his health care attendant before putting the barrel of his .40 cal pistol in his mouth and pulling the trigger.

Another murder suicide in Michigan the same day also claimed four lives. And yet another; a man in Lake Havasu City, Arizone killed his girlfriend, his baby, and then himself.

This morning, I heard of a truck bomb that went off in Baghdad that killed 25 Iraqi policemen and wounded 125 Iraqi bystanders. Twenty-one members of a religious minority in Mosul, Iraq were dragged off a bus and shot dead, execution style.

In Laguna Beach, a woman and her husband were shot dead during a confrontation with police. At press time, the police weren’t sure if they killed the couple, or if it were yet another murder-suicide.

One week’s time. Rivers and rivers of blood.

Assessment:

Seriously, how did the news that 32 students were murdered at VT affect you?

Or the news of the 125 people maimed by an Iraqi car bomb? Or the 21 Iraqis in Mosul pulled from a bus and executed? What about the litany of murder-suicides across the US in the past seven days that you just read about?

That list is by no means a comprehensive one — those were just the murder suicide cases that popped up on Google’s first page when I queried it. Are you shocked?

I wish that I were, but I am not. Not particularly. I thought about what Glenn Beck said about it on his program, and I realized that the calluses on my soul were even thicker than his.

The last time I can remember being truly shocked was the OKC bombing of the Murrah Building back in 1995. And I was less troubled by that event than I was the destruction of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco two years before that.

I was moved by the horror that must have permeated the Waco compound as the flames claimed the lives of 83 men, women and children. By the time of the OKC bombing, the horror was mixed with a sort of clinical detachment.

By the time the Columbine killers went on their rampage, I had already become desensitized to the evil of children murdering children. Eight blood-soaked years later, I realized my first thought at hearing of the VT shootings wasn’t horror.

The first thing that came to my mind was the logistics. How did one guy carrying only two pistols manage to kill that many people? It wasn’t until I caught Glenn Beck’s program that I realized just how scarred my soul has become.

I used to be shocked by evil. My reaction has morphed from, “How could anybody do such a thing?” to “Not again!” to musing about the logistics involved in the commission of mass murder.

When asked of the signs of His return, among the signs Jesus gave was the “sign of Noe.” (Noah)

“But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.” (Matthew 24:37)

“And as it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man.” (Luke 17:26)

Genesis 6:5-6 give us the Lord’s perspective on the ‘days of Noah’:

“And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”

When we aren’t confronting actual evil in the form of crazy little gunmen and rivers of blood on our campuses, we seek it out for entertainment. Television and movies can rightly be called “the imagination of thoughts of our hearts” — indeed, what is a movie if not our imagination brought to life?

And the more violence and sex a movie contains, the more popular it is. No wonder we are so desensitized to evil.

The most popular video games are also the most violent. I confess that enjoy the WWII action games like “Medal of Honor” and “Call of Duty” and even admit to downloading the latest ‘blood patch’ to make the game even more gory. What in the world is wrong with ME?

“And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.”
(Matthew 24:12)

The more acceptable iniquity and sin becomes, the colder our love of righteousness gets.

The Bible teaches that the Tribulation Period is a period set aside for the judgment of a Christ-rejecting world and to effect the national redemption of Israel. But what of the Church?

In the days of Noah, God decided to judge sinful man, but he saved Noah and his family alive out of the flood by making a way of escape via the ark.

Jesus said His return would be like the days of Noah. Wickedness, evil and the promise of judgment.

Genesis 6:8 says that “Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.” The Bible also says that the Church is the recipient of God’s grace.

“For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:” (Ephesians 2:8)

“Even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference:” (Romans 3:22)

Noah was found righteous in the eyes of the Lord and he was spared the judgment that came upon the whole earth. Later, when God purposed to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham pleaded with God not to destroy the cities if even five righteous men could be found within.

Only Lot was found righteous, and a way was made for he and his family to escape the judgment that was reserved for the unrighteous.

Of His return, Jesus also said;

“Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all. Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed.”
(Luke 17:28-30)

The Church, like Noah and Lot, have found grace in the eyes of the Lord and we are clothed in the imputed righteousness of Christ. God views the imputed righteousness of Christ as being no different than that of Noah or Lot.
(Romans 3:22)

God didn’t judge Noah for the sins of his neighbors. Neither did He judge Lot for the sins of his neighbors. And since the Church is clothed in the righteousness of Christ, it follows that He will not judge the Church for the sins of a Christ-rejecting world.

I can find no other understanding of these passages that makes logical sense, apart from the promise that the Lord will return for His Church BEFORE the judgment of the Tribulation Period.

If the Church goes through the Tribulation Period, then the Lord’s references to Noah and Lot are puzzling. Why refer to the only two historical instances in which God saved the righteous from being included in mass judgment in conjunction with the events that lead up to His second coming?

The only logical answer is that provided by the Apostle Paul:

“For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.” (1st Thessalonians 4:16-17)

As we wade through rivers of blood, our souls callused over by a constant barrage of unspeakable evil, it seems only logical that either judgment is due this old world, or God owes an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah.

The Bible promises “there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love His appearing.” (2nd Timothy 4:8)

If His appearing comes at the conclusion of seven years of judgment and death for the Church, then “loving His appearing” is an act of spiritual perfection that is unfortunately a bit above my paygrade. And Paul’s final words about the Lord’s return for those who are ‘alive and remain’ would seem to make little sense.

“Wherefore, comfort one another with these words.” (1st Thessalonians 4:18)

By Susan MacAllen, www.familysecuritymatters.org

First, it was the Smithsonian and now it is the Public Broadcasting System. When liberals meddle in institutions that traditionally have been associated with public education - using public tax dollars - the outcome should alarm you.

The Liberal Left may be the greatest threat to freedom of speech in America. While in the past, many of us cringed as the ACLU advocated for the right of “artists” to display obscene photographs of homosexual foreplay and obscene paintings of Christ, we could not have imagined that within a few short years the same liberal philosophy would be responsible for the squelching of other deliberately selected ideas… despite our tax dollars.

Filmmaker Martyn Burke has learned just how leftist the powers at PBS are. The road to the inclusion of his film Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center in the popular PBS series America at a Crossroads has been rocky from the beginning. The film means to explore the ways in which moderate Muslims in the U.S. are threatened and silenced by radical Islamists. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting fully funded the film with federal grants but, early on, PBS and project managers at an affiliated station demanded that Burke fire two colleagues that had brought him into the project in the first place. In a February formal letter of complaint to the corporation and to PBS, Burke stated that the demand was on political grounds: Frank Gaffney and Alex Alexiev were vocal conservatives and both have written on the threat of Islamofacism to the West. They also are president and vice-president, respectively, of the Center for Security Policy, a conservative think tank.

Burke says that before filming began, a Crossroads project manager, Jeff Bieber of WETA TV in Washington, D.C., said to him, “Don’t you check into the politics of the people you work with?” This is an ironic question, given that WETA created an advisory board to deal with the making of the film; the board included Aminah Beverly McCloud, director of World Islamic Studies at DePaul University. McCloud took segments of the film which she considered objectionable (insulting to radical Islam) and showed them to a Muslim journalist and to Nation of Islam leaders. This action led to outrage in the Muslim community over the film, and the Nation of Islam has threatened to sue. In other words, McCloud instigated the very thing the film tried to portray; the tendency of radical Islamists to use threats and lawsuits to silence moderate Muslims and others who object to their ideology.

Burke’s letter cited various other incidents of tampering with the film, including Crossroads managers beginning a new film after grants were already made which used the same interview subjects Burke had used, and overlapped with his material. WETA openly wanted a key theme in Burke’s film eliminated: the claim that Islamists work to establish parallel societies in the Western societies they inhabit, setting up Sha’ria law, and “Islamic Courts.” The evidence that this has been attempted repeatedly in Europe and America is extensive, but WETA apparently feels that this fact is too inflammatory for the general public to handle.

Martyn Burke is concerned about the hold radical Islam is taking in the West, and he is concerned about the silencing of moderate Muslims. He claims that the documentary asks, “Where are the moderate Muslims?” and explores ways in which they are “reviled and sometimes attacked” by radicals. He is also concerned that journalistic freedom and integrity is impossible in the atmosphere of censorship that is present at PBS and at liberal-bias news organizations across the country. America at a Crossroads was conceived only three years ago, originally in an effort to enhance public knowledge around issues of terrorism and homeland security in the wake of 9-11. The collection of documentaries it features is financed with $20 million in federal grants (taxpayer – our own - money) from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Filmmakers are asked to submit film proposals for consideration. Competition is stiff: there have been 430 submitted proposals. Burke’s proposal was one of the 21 chosen, and he received $700,000 to make Islam vs. Islamists.

There are really two alarming issues in play here. The first is the increasing liberal bias in journalistic media; it has become so blatant that it will readily compromise its own integrity to keep a conservative view silent. In the case of Burke’s film, those holding the purse strings are making decisions about how to use our tax dollars to push a liberal agenda and silence a conservative view, regardless of how balance plays, regardless of truth. When Newsweek was forced to apologize for its published lie that U.S. soldiers at Guantanamo were throwing Korans on the floor, flushing them down toilets, and otherwise degrading them, we should have been amazed and outraged. Millions get their news from such news magazines, and the American public and those around the world assume that they print the truth. When major U.S. newspapers favor liberal editorial over hard news, we should be worried. And when institutions use federal taxpayer money to mold public opinion according to their own worldview, we should be scared.

The second issue at stake is the reluctance of the liberals in the U.S. to recognize the very real threat of radical Islam. Their reluctance is not only uninformed and unrealistic, but when they take steps to silence an opposite viewpoint, they put our future in jeopardy. We can confront radical Islam now by exposing its more sinister activities in the West - public education can go a long way toward stemming its increasing influence. Or, we can close our eyes and remain uneducated about it, and have a bigger, more violent conflict with it in the future, right on our shores. Just ask the Europeans.

It is core to the American character to be reviled by the idea of having one’s views molded by anything but truth. Yet, in a nation where non-partisan research organizations repeatedly warn that our news media is left-biased, and where our educational systems present Islam as equal to other religions, we are in fact having our thinking molded.

When one takes a look back through history at the dynamics in play when fascist movements took hold in peaceful societies, the patterns are always the same: well-meaning people downplay the dangers of a radical movement, and people with radical agendas downplay the dangers too. Those who speak out against the growing menace are shouted down, threatened and made to feel paranoid and crazy. This works to the advantage of radicals. In a society committed to “inclusion” and “fairness” and “understanding”, a radical ideology can easily take root.

A fascist ideology creeps into a society slowly, not overnight and in front of one’s face; it never announces its presence. It creeps in as it always has - through newspapers and books, into classrooms and the halls of universities until one day a public awakens and can hardly bear to remember the way it once was, and look at the way it has become, without its heart breaking.

FSM Contributing Editor Susan MacAllen writes a political blog, http://askew.blogharbor.com, and has written on an extensive array of subjects for over 20 years. She has lived overseas and been intimately involved in the French culture since the Muslim immigrant population emerged in the south of France. A Certified Veterinary Technician, she currently resides in the American West.

By Phyllis Chesler, www.TimesOnline.co.uk

Once I was held captive in Kabul. I was the bride of a charming, seductive, and Westernized Afghan Muslim whom I met at an American college. The purdah I experienced was relatively posh but the sequestered all-female life was not my cup of chai — nor was the male hostility to veiled, partly veiled, and unveiled women in public.

When we landed in Kabul, an airport official smoothly confiscated my U.S. passport. “Don’t worry, it’s just a formality,” my husband assured me. I never saw that passport again. I later learnt that this was routinely done to foreign wives — perhaps to make it impossible for them to leave. Overnight, my husband became a stranger. The man with whom I had discussed Camus, Dostoevsky, Tennessee Williams and the Italian cinema became a stranger. He treated me the same way his father and elder brother treated their wives: distantly, with a hint of disdain and embarrassment.

In our two years together, my future husband had never once mentioned that his father had three wives and 21 children. Nor did he tell me that I would be expected to live as if I had been reared as an Afghan woman. I was supposed to lead a largely indoor life among women, to go out only with a male escort and to spend my days waiting for my husband to return or visiting female relatives, or having new (and very fashionable) clothes made.

In America, my husband was proud that I was a natural-born rebel and freethinker. In Afghanistan, my criticism of the treatment of women and of the poor rendered him suspect, vulnerable. He mocked my horrified reactions. But I knew what my eyes and ears told me. I saw how poor women in chadaris were forced to sit at the back of the bus and had to keep yielding their place on line in the bazaar to any man.

I saw how polygamous, arranged marriages and child brides led to chronic female suffering and to rivalry between co-wives and half-brothers; how the subordination and sequestration of women led to a profound estrangement between the sexes — one that led to wife-beating, marital rape and to a rampant, but hotly denied, male “prison”-like homosexuality and pederasty; how frustrated, neglected, and uneducated women tormented their daughters-in-law and female servants; how women were not allowed to pray in mosques or visit male doctors (their husbands described the symptoms in their absence).

Individual Afghans were enchantingly courteous — but the Afghanistan I knew was a bastion of illiteracy, poverty, treachery, and preventable diseases. It was also a police state, a feudal monarchy, and a theocracy, rank with fear and paranoia. Afghanistan had never been colonized. My relatives said: “Not even the British could occupy us.” Thus I was forced to conclude that Afghan barbarism was of their own making and could not be attributed to Western imperialism.

Long before the rise of the Taliban, I learnt not to romanticize Third World countries or to confuse their hideous tyrants with liberators. I also learnt that sexual and religious apartheid in Muslim countries is indigenous and not the result of Western crimes — and that such “colorful tribal customs” are absolutely, not relatively, evil. Long before al Qaeda beheaded Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and Nicholas Berg in Iraq, I understood that it was dangerous for a Westerner, especially a woman, to live in a Muslim country. In retrospect, I believe my so-called Western feminism was forged in that most beautiful and treacherous of Eastern countries.

Nevertheless, Western intellectual-ideologues, including feminists, have demonized me as a reactionary and racist “Islamophobe” for arguing that Islam, not Israel, is the largest practitioner of both sexual and religious apartheid in the world, and that if Westerners do not stand up to this apartheid, morally, economically and militarily, we will not only have the blood of innocents on our hands; we will also be overrun by Sha’ria in the West. I have been heckled, menaced, never-invited, or disinvited for such heretical ideas — and for denouncing the epidemic of Muslim-on-Muslim violence for which tiny Israel is routinely, unbelievably scapegoated.

However, my views have found favor with the bravest and most enlightened people alive. Leading secular Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents — from Egypt, Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, and Syria and exiles from Europe and North America — assembled for the landmark Islamic Summit Conference in Florida and invited me to chair the opening panel.

According to the chair of the meeting, Ibn Warraq: “What we need now is an Age of Enlightenment in the Islamic world. Without critical examination of Islam, it will remain dogmatic, fanatical and intolerant and will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality, originality and truth.” The conference issued a declaration calling for such a new “Enlightenment”. The declaration views “Islamophobia” as a false allegation, sees a “noble future for Islam as a personal faith, not a political doctrine” and “demands the release of Islam from its captivity to the ambitions of power-hungry men”.

Now is the time for Western intellectuals who claim to be antiracists and committed to human rights to stand with these dissidents. To do so requires that we adopt a universal standard of human rights and abandon our loyalty to multicultural relativism, which justifies—even romanticizes—indigenous Islamist barbarism, totalitarian terrorism and the persecution of women, religious minorities, homosexuals, and intellectuals. Our abject refusal to judge between civilization and barbarism, and between enlightened rationalism and theocratic fundamentalism, endangers and condemns the victims of Islamic tyranny.

Ibn Warraq has written a devastating work that will be out by the summer. It is entitled Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Will Western intellectuals also dare to defend the West?
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Phyllis Chesler is a Professor Emerita of Psychology and Women’s Studies at the City University of New York.

By Moriah Zeltzer Wallstein, www.ynetnews.com

When Hava Mond wakes up in the morning she washes her hands, says her morning prayers and only then gets ready to go to work. Her daily routine is tough and demanding, and being far from home doesn’t make it any easier. She usually doesn’t have the time to pray during the day, so in order to fulfill the religious laws she recites the evening prayer at the end of her working day.

In the hours between reciting the Morning Prayer and fulfilling the mitzvah of Kri’at Shma at night, Mond, 23, faces the camera modeling for leading international fashion companies. As a religious girl, Mond has very strict red lines which she will not compromise on, yet this doesn’t prevent the flow of international modeling offers from pouring in. Mond, for those who are not familiar with her, is among Israel’s top 10 models working in Israel and abroad.

Mond is currently modeling in Europe and over the past three years she participated in fashion shows by top designers such as Channel, Yves Saint Laurent and modeled for top notch designers such as Armani and L’Oreal, as well as appearing on the covers of Vogue and Glamour. She has succeeded in doing all this without having to pose in swimwear or underwear, without working on Shabbat and holidays and with eating only kosher food.

Mond was raised Safed and as a daughter of a religious family was enrolled at the city’s religious girls’ school. She never dreamed of becoming a model, but rather hoped to study law and become an attorney. Yet, at 16-years-of age while traveling in London with her aunt she was approached by an agent from the Select modeling agency who offered her a job.

She refused, saying that she was religious and that she hadn’t completed her high school studies. The modeling agency waited until she turned 18. Mond completed her national service and only then embarked on her meteoric modeling career.

How does a religious girl make the switch to a life of glamour?

“For me it doesn’t really make a difference, I have stayed who I am. I was always in the middle, and if I don’t feel at ease or good about something, I don’t do it.”

You are often asked to pose with low cleavage, is that a problem for you?

“No, my appearance is very misleading, I have my red lines. On the one hand I manage with low cleavages and I even wear short skirts, but on the other hand I pray in the mornings and usually in the evenings as well. The fact that a girl is covered from head to toe doesn’t make her better or more religious than I am . Ultimately, what counts is your conduct and what’s inside. Who knows, perhaps I am more diligent than other girls in some things.”

Does the society you come from accept your lifestyle and the fact that you are a top model?

“My friends obviously do. But I get a lot of negative responses. At first I used to take offense, but I got used to it. To say “she isn’t religious” is easy, but it stems from lack of understanding. They don’t know what it’s like to turn down a high paying campaign because I don’t model on Shabbat, and when everyone eats I don’t touch a thing all day because it’s not kosher.

What would you say to religious girls who would like to enter the modeling world?

“Parents of girls who wanted to model contacted me, and I think it depends on the girl’s personality, how strong she is and how she can withstand the numerous temptations. But if you really want something in life, it’s possible.”

Mond spoke of how she turned down a campaign for a perfume by Rimmel because it was filmed in Turkey on a Saturday, Kate Moss ended up getting the campaign. She also spoke of how her mother used to accompany her on photo shoots when she first started out – just to keep an eye on her. As to the frequent flights that are part of the business Mond says she has an apartment in London where her grandparents live, her agent is there and so is her boyfriend. Yet nonetheless, she says, she comes to Israel for every religious holiday, to meet friends and to celebrate with the family.