Letter From America (About Islam)

Islam is the Most Violent Religion in the World

But Let’s Keep Calling it ‘Peaceful’ Anyway

And here we are again. You might recognize this place. We’ve been here frequently over the past, say, 1,500 years or so. It’s the place where the whole world stands in dumbfounded shock after witnessing unspeakable brutality at the hands of Islamists. Maybe we should stop being so surprised.

This time around, three masked gunmen stormed the offices of a French satirical newspaper, executing 12 people in cold blood, including two police officers. This is the same newspaper that infamously published a cartoon poking fun at the Prophet Mohammed a few years ago, and was promptly greeted with death threats and a Molotov cocktail for their troubles. In fairness, there’s still a lot we don’t know about this attack, but it seems very certain that this was another case of Muslim terrorism. The gunmen took out 12 people while shouting “Allahu Akbhar” and “the Prophet has been avenged.” All of this over some jokes in a magazine.

Can you imagine Christian radicals committing mass murder at The Onion offices because they’re upset about something they found on its website? Can you even fathom such a thing? Probably not, because it never happens. It just never happens. And it’s not like Christians don’t have plenty of provocation. I still remember stumbling upon this lovely little gem from The Onion last year. It’s a hysterical article imagining that Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God, became a prostitute to make ends meet. Haha?

In this Sept.19, 2012 file photo, Stephane Charbonnier also known as Charb , the publishing director of the satyric weekly Charlie Hebdo, displays the front page of the newspaper as he poses for photographers in Paris. Masked gunmen shouting “Allahu akbar!” stormed the Paris offices of a satirical newspaper Wednesday Jan.7, 2015, killing 12 people including Charb, before escaping. It was France's deadliest terror attack in at least two decades. (AP Photo/Michel Euler, File)

In this Sept.19, 2012 file photo, Stephane Charbonnier also known as Charb , the publishing director of the satyric weekly Charlie Hebdo, displays the front page of the newspaper as he poses for photographers in Paris. Masked gunmen shouting “Allahu akbar!” stormed the Paris offices of a satirical newspaper Wednesday Jan.7, 2015, killing 12 people including Charb, before escaping. It was France’s deadliest terror attack in at least two decades. (AP Photo/Michel Euler, File)

This is the kind of thing Christians encounter all the time. Brutal mocking and ridicule dressed up as “humor,” but designed only to offend. There’s no wit, no punchline, just scorn heaped upon people of my faith. Kind of like this “Family Guy” episode, featuring an adulterous Jesus looking to have sex with a man’s wife. Or that hilarious “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episode a few years back where Larry David peed on a picture of Jesus. Or of course the famous “Piss Christ,” a crucifix dunked in a bottle of urine and passed off as art. Or the painting of the Virgin Mary smeared in elephant dung. Or “Dogma.” Or “The Da Vinci Code.” Or a thousand other examples.

Yet nobody ever died because of any of that.
And, oh man, if anyone did, can you imagine the backlash? Can you imagine the media reaction if just one Christian murdered just one person as a reprisal for some offensive joke or provocative cartoon? We’d be ready to ban the entire religion in this country. Progressives are so desperate to prove that Christianity is just as violent as Islam that they frequently cite the murder of abortion doctors as an example. Only, none of those attacks were carried out in the name of Jesus. As far as I’m aware, none of the murderers shouted “Praise be to Christ” when they pulled the trigger. And how many incidents are we even talking about here? I’ll tell you: eight. Eight abortionists and abortion clinic workers have been killed in the U.S. in the past 40 years. It’s happened once in the last decade and a half. Once.

Yet Christians are held to such a high standard that even these extraordinarily rare killings, not even done in the name of the faith, and always condemned by nearly every prominent Christian, are cited in almost every conversation about religious violence. Meanwhile, Muslims just gunned down 12 people over a cartoon this morning, and what do we immediately hear? Islam is a religion of peace. 

A White House spokesman came out within hours of the attack and spent about 40 seconds condemning the violence before immediately repeating this same slogan. While another dozen bodies lay dead in the street, we’re told that it all happened at the hands of a “peaceful” religion. (But at least he didn’t repeat Obama’s quote from 2012: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”) This is a sick joke. Islamist militant wreak havoc across the globe, and the best our simpering, kowtowing, politically correct leaders can do is continuously suck up to the religion that produces these travesties like it’s operating some kind of terrorist assembly line. It’s pathetic. It’s shameful.

(Source: YouTube)

(Source: YouTube)

You’ll soon hear, if you haven’t already, that this latest bout of Islamic violence should be “put in context.” That these murderers are “in the minority.” I’m even being informed that the people who provoke Muslims are partly to blame themselves. But I’ll know we’ve finally progressed as a people, and grown some semblance of a collective spine, when we stop putting Jihad into context and when we stop making excuses for it. These are bloodthirsty barbarians. They don’t have a point. They don’t need to be understood. They don’t deserve any considerations at all.

I don’t know where we go once we’ve reached that point. I don’t have an easy solution to the kind of animalistic behavior that has infected Islam since its inception. But I do know that it starts with honesty. It starts with having the fortitude to say, without qualifier, without equivalency, that Islam is the most violent religion in the history of the world. You can ask why or how, but the “what” really isn’t up for debate.
I didn’t say that all Muslims are violent, or even that most Muslims are violent. I didn’t even say that Islam is the most destructive religion in the world — that title belongs to progressivism, which murders babies, destroys families, and damns souls.

Yet it is the most violent, and we all know it.

Does Islamic law call for its followers to slaughter the innocent? Certainly that’s how a fair number of them throughout history have seen it, but I don’t claim to be an Muslim theologian. I assume there are different ways to interpret Muslim scripture, same as Christians argue over interpretation of the Bible. What’s the “correct” interpretation? I have no idea. But my religion’s Holy Book tells me that by their fruits you shall know them. I am looking at the fruits of Islam, and I see something that so often blossoms into death and terror. That’s the reality. It’s right before my eyes. All I have to do is open them to see it.

But even now, as the news tells us of another Muslim atrocity, and as Islamists continue their thousand year war against every other religion on Earth, and as they violently persecute Christians across the Middle East and Africa, and as they visit death and misery upon millions worldwide, we here in the West are still too afraid to notice that which cannot be avoided.

And when we do notice, we don’t say, “look, Muslims are executing blasphemers, crucifying Christians, and beheading children.” Instead, we use meaningless qualifiers to stipulate that these are “radical” Muslims or “fundamentalist” Muslims. Then we quickly bury even that observation in a bunch of wimpy babble about how all religions have these sorts of “violent elements.”

Video screenshot reportedly of gunmen. (Image source: YouTube/Sky News)

Video screenshot reportedly of gunmen. (Image source: YouTube/Sky News)

Hopefully we soon come in contact with a dictionary, or any book actually, because if we do we’ll see that a “fundamentalist” is simply someone who follows the fundamentals of a religion. Saying that “Islam isn’t the problem; fundamentalist Islam is the problem” is the same as saying “Islam isn’t the problem; the basic, fundamental nature of it is the problem,” which is the same as saying “Islam isn’t the problem; Islam is the problem.”

And although it might make us feel better to assume that no culture and no religion carries its own unique flaws and pitfalls, the fact remains that Christians and Jews are not often found brutalizing innocent civilians in the name of their religion. And if such an anomaly were to occur, it would be quite easy to tell that the murderous Christian is not a fair representative of his Creed. After all, his Savior spoke rather extensively about the need for peace and mercy. His Savior also wasn’t a militant figure in His own right, killing infidels and taking child brides along the way.

Rather, our Savior told us to turn the other cheek, and that’s what Christians have consistently done. They were pursued, captured, beaten, killed, and made into lion’s food for 300 years before they finally emerged as a dominant religion. If Christianity is inherently violent, it would have been born in violence and spread through violence, but it wasn’t. Unlike Islam.

These are the simple facts, and I’ve pretty well had my fill of these friendly people, with their polite ways, who are so terribly tolerant that they feel like they have to pretend that, somehow, mysteriously, the impression every rational human being on Earth has — that Islam is more violent than other religions — is off-base. They can’t explain why it’s off-base, they can only offer some trite platitude about how the violent Muslims are not “true” Muslims.

Bull crap, you cowards. There is disagreement about the “true” nature of every religion. Put 100 Christians of different denominations in a room and they’ll argue over virtually every aspect of their faith. What they won’t do, however, is debate whether they’re supposed to be out killing cartoonists, shooting up schools, murdering soldiers at the Canadian parliament, or taking hostages at a cafe in Sydney. Only one religion has to even entertain that discussion. And that, to me, clearly indicates some very serious and inherent flaws.

And, please, don’t tell me that Muslims tend to be violent because they’re a historically oppressed people. All religions have been oppressed at one time or another, but Muslims have also always controlled wide swaths of the globe. Ever hear of the Ottoman Empire? And don’t try to work the Crusades into this conversation, unless you want to prove my point for me. The Crusades were waged against Muslim aggressors after several hundred years of persecution at the hands of Arabic forces. The Crusades were a war of defense, sparked, as usual, by Muslim conquest.

No, there’s no way around this. Islam is more violent than any religion that’s ever existed anywhere.

We have to face that fact. Muslims especially have to face it.

And then we can take the next step, whatever that is.

More Infanticide

The Tip of the Iceberg?

We have profiled the case of Dr Kermit Gosnell, the doctor convicted of murdering babies of the poor.  The media pretty much ignored the story because it would have brought disrepute to the noble trade of abortion.  A “woman’s right to choose” is not to be impugned by a few murdered babies.  In all struggles, collateral damage occurs.  Nothing to see here.  Move along.

But word did get out.  The alternative media did a stirling job.  Those who care about such things all know the name Kermit Gosnell now–what he did, and what he represents.

As expected, other cases are now coming to light.  This, from Justin Taylor:

Meet Douglas Karpen: The New Kermit Gosnell

 Justin Taylor 3:39 am CT

Douglas Karpen of Aaron’s Women’s Clinic Texas Ambulatory Surgical Center (Aaron’s Women’s Clinic)

Evidence is emerging of another abortion mill where illegal abortions are performed and where full-term babies are regularly born alive and brutally murdered. This one is run by Dr. Douglas Karpen, who appears to be a doctor in good standing with the state of Texas.  The Texas Department of State Health Services plan to investigate.  Three women have come forward to testify about what they witnessed there as workers. 

 The story has now made the Mail Online:

Second ‘house of horrors’ abortion clinic where doctor ‘twisted heads off fetus’ necks with his bare hands’ is investigated in Texas

  • Houston doctor Douglas Karpen is accused by four former employees of delivering live babies during third-trimester abortions and killing them Witnesses said he would either snip their spinal cords, stab a surgical instrument into their heads or twist their heads off with his hands Texas Department of State Health Services is using in its investigating of the doctor Accusations come days after Dr Kermit Gosnells was found guilty of murdering newborns at his Philadelphia abortion clinic

By Helen Pow

A second ‘house of horrors’ abortion clinic is being investigated in Texas, just days after Dr Kermit Gosnell was found guilty of murdering newborns at his Philadelphia termination center.

karpen
Dr. Douglas Karpen, seen here in court, is accused of killing babies aborted in their third trimester.

Houston doctor Douglas Karpen is accused by four former employees of delivering live fetuses during third-trimester abortions and killing them by either snipping their spinal cord, stabbing a surgical instrument into their heads or ‘twisting their heads off their necks with his own bare hands’.

Other times the fetus was so big he would have to pull it out of the womb in pieces, Karpen’s ex-assistant, Deborah Edge, said in an Operation Rescue video, which has prompted a criminal investigation into the doctor.

‘Sometimes he couldn’t get the fetus out… he would yank pieces – piece by piece – when they were oversize,’ Edge explained. ‘And I’m talking about the whole floor dirty. I’m talking about me drenched in blood.’

Two of Edge’s colleagues, Gigi Aguliar, and Krystal Rodriguez, also described the hellish scenes which took place at the Aaron Women’s Clinic in Houston in 2011, and possibly two other abortion clinics run by Karpen in Texas. Another staffer, who remains anonymous, filed an affidavit with her account of events, which the Texas Department of State Health Services is using in its investigation.

‘We have several people looking into the allegations,’ Harris County District Attorney spokesman Sara Marie Kinney told Chron.com.  Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst said he had read the allegations ‘with disgust’ before calling for a full investigation into Karpen and his clinics.

Meanwhile, our challenge to all abortionists and their supporters and fellow travellers stands–get out there and defend these guys.  They are only being consistent with your perverse ideology.  These guys are only taking a “woman’s right to choose” and have “control over her own body” seriously.  Stand up and explain to us all why the killing of aborted children born alive is a holy, righteous, and just act.  

Your silence to date is starting to look suspiciously like hypocrisy or cowardice or both. 

You Shall Not Pass!

We Will Never Surrender

We have posted recently on “slippery slope” arguments (here, and here).  One of the points made by Jonah Goldberg about slippery slope arguments is that they discount the human factor, where people rise up to say “enough” and the slippery slope becomes less slippery.

Here is an example of what he means.  The slippery slope in this case is abortion and its increasing availability by chemical means.  Take the pill, kill your baby.  In a terrible case in the United States a “boyfriend” tricked his pregnant “girlfriend” into taking an abortifacient drug, causing the death of the infant.  The slippery slope argument would reasonably predict that as a result of such drugs an inevitable situation is arising where abortion will be as widespread and common as drinking a glass of water. 

Turtle Bay covers the case:

Unwanted Abortion: Man Slips Misoprostol to Woman with Wanted Child

Posted on | May 16, 2013 by Wendy Wright |

A woman is suing her boyfriend for tricking her into taking misoprostol to kill her unborn baby. Here is the lawsuit filed in Florida.

Remee Jo Lee was thrilled to be pregnant. Her boyfriend Andrew Welden took Remee Jo to his father, a doctor, to confirm the pregnancy. Andrew then claimed she had a bacterial infection and gave her a bottle of pills labeled Amoxicillin, an anti-biotic.  Andrew had filled the bottle with misoprostol pills. The drug can treat miscarriage, induce labor, or cause an abortion.

Remee Jo took one pill. She became seriously ill and went to the hospital. Doctors determined she has suffered a miscarriage caused by misoprostol.  Andrew admitted to her – and to law enforcement – that the pills were misoprostol. 

She is suing for $15,000.  Misoprostol is a favorite of international abortion advocates. Several groups are working to make misoprostol easy to obtain – by anyone. The World Health Organizations added misoprostol to its “essential medicines” list after being lobbied by abortion groups. 

Pro-life advocates warn that easy access to misoprostol will result in women with wanted pregnancy being forcibly aborted.

Where is the one crying “enough”?  Are people rising up?  Yes, but not solely in response to this case in isolation.  The first thing is observe is that the amoral Welden has been arrested and is facing justice.  This, from the Tampa Tribune:

Now Welden, 28, is facing the possibility of life behind bars without parole, charged with murder under a rarely used federal statute known as the “Protection of Unborn Children Act.” He also is charged with tampering with a prescription “under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference” to the risk of death or injury.

The “Protection of the Unborn Children Act” was already on the statute books.  Of course in the lunatic asylum that purports to be the highest stages of human enlightenment, this statute sits alongside the “woman’s right” to choose whether to kill her unborn child or not.  Nevertheless the statute is there, albeit rarely used. 

The prosecutor appears righteously riled up:

“In my years as a prosecutor, this case is one of the most shocking and premeditated cases I’ve seen,” Assistant U.S. Attorney W. Stephen Muldrow told U.S. Magistrate Anthony Porcelli during a hearing Wednesday. . . . “Quite frankly, your honor, this case shocks the conscience,” Muldrow told Porcelli. “This was a senseless crime. He had no reason to kill the baby – his baby. She had a name for the baby… This case is solid. The crime is heinous.”

Were the accused to be sentenced to life without parole we are pretty confident that would go a long way toward making the slippery slope far less slippery.  All it takes is people consistently and persistently standing up and saying, “Enough”. 

We belong to the Lord. We must never, ever surrender.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

When He Walks Contrary to Us 

Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, 11 May 2013 11:51

Schizophrenia is no less schizophrenia if one of the voices happens to be talking sense. Hard schizophrenia is no less difficult if murderous insanity is linked up tight with weird, pathetic, and arbitrary scruples. In fact, if such an arbitary pattern is applied long enough, one may detect a method in the madness.

I am talking about our erratic public policy when it comes to protecting human life. Gosnell is a disgrace because he killed babies in this spot instead of the officially-approved that spot. As one observer noted, he is apparently being charged with murder because he enjoyed himself and because his place was dirty. If he had only kept his slaughter hygienic and had been snipping spinal columns for the sake of the Constitution, instead of doing it for his own jollies, and had done his work before that magic and metaphysical week after which responsible medical professionals cease dismembering their clients’ babies, he could have served as a witness for his own prosecution.

In the meantime, the kidnapper of three women in Cleveland is facing murder charges for brutally causing a miscarriage, and for doing so without a medical degree.
Ah, someone will reply, that was because what he was doing was violent and coercive — the mother of the child had been kidnapped, raped, and was subjected to this treatment against her will. Right . . . as though the unborn child ever volunteers for an abortion? It was unacceptable coercion because he was forcing two people to submit to his twisted desires instead of limiting himself to just one person?

His brutality is to be sharply distinguished from our constitutional and noble practice of applying the same kind of lethal coercion to the kind of people who never have any hope of escaping next door. Our constitutional and hygienic methods insist that we limit ourselves to those who cannot speak, who cannot get away, and who have no advocate. Actually, we delude ourselves in thinking they have no Advocate. They do, and He will speak to us about them soon enough, when He walks contrary to us in His fury (Lev. 26:28).

This erratic behavior on the part of our civil magistrate — filing murder charges for doing here what was just fine over there — is not simply insanity. When the law makes no sense, and is capriciously applied in a lottery-like fashion, the underlying logic of the whole system is totalitarian. The government becomes completely identified with the law, and the people learn to live with it the way a battered woman learns to live with an abusive boyfriend. Somedays he is in a good mood, and you think you can get by.

After a while, the Stockholm syndrome develops. We have good reason to believe that the American people have a bad case of it. After all, we have been locked up in this awful house in Cleveland since 1913.

Sanitized Language

From Dehumanizing Word Games to Gosnell 

By Andrew C. McCarthy
April 13, 2013
National Review Online

In Philadelphia, at a human abattoir on Lancaster Avenue, is where it ends, not where it starts. It starts with the perversion of language. It starts when the icons of a dissipated culture reduce a baby to a “fetus.” From there, Yeats’s blood-dimmed tide rolls rapidly in. Before long, a baby is not a person but a punishment, as President Barack Obama framed the matter in his familiar off-the-cuff iciness.

Of course, to describe newborn children in their boundless possibilities and wonder would be to acknowledge, foremost, their humanity. That is why, instead, abortion enthusiasts must grope for words when circumstances force them to speak publicly about their gruesome business.

“That fetus, or child — however way you want to describe it,” Mr. Obama once stammered. This was back when, as a state senator, he was unnerved by the natural resistance of babies to the unnatural insistence of their mothers — of the culture — that they just disappear. If you’ve ever watched a hit man testify, you’ve heard the same stammer: the faint glimmer of a long-forgotten but stubbornly indelible line between right and wrong.

It is the line that makes killing much easier to do than to talk about. It is the line that now impels a self-imposed media embargo against news about the shocking trial of Kermit Gosnell. 

Gosnell is a 72-year-old abortionist. The formal charges against him — the murders of a woman and seven babies — are but drops in a sea of carnage. Mounting evidence reveals him to be a mass murderer of epic scale and Mengele methods. It also spotlights the evil — the apparently unspeakable evil — of legalized abortion in all its coarsening gore. Plainly, the vaunted journalists of our debased mainstream have determined that there must be no meaningful coverage. No time in the 24/7 cycle to notice the inexorable path from dehumanizing the vulnerable through word games to mass-murdering them with casual sadism.

Better to shove the evidence into a dark closet. That’s what they did in Chicago. There, despite the best efforts of “physicians” (they of the “do no harm” oath), many “however way you want to describe its” were “not just coming out limp and dead,” as Obama haltingly put it. The abortionists’ answer was to stick the helpless survivors in a utility closet where they could die, out of sight and out of mind. Obama, in the pitiless logic of legalized abortion, labored to preserve this oft-practiced but never discussed form of infanticide against the Illinois legislature’s proposed “Born Alive” ban. (See senate transcript, April 4, 2002, beginning at page 29.)

A decade later in Philadelphia, “it would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place.” So said Stephen Massof, one of Kermit Gosnell’s fellow butchers, as he described for the jury the chamber of horrors that was the “Women’s Medical Society” on Lancaster Avenue. There, scores of babies — perhaps hundreds of them — were willfully mutilated after being born alive.

Standard fare was the “snip.”

“Snip” is a terse, antiseptic word. Like “choice,” it is tailored to those rare, discomfiting occasions when the intentional killing of a “however way you want to describe it” must be spoken of rather than silently done. It is an effort, as much mentally as verbally, to evade the monstrousness we abide in the United States, where nearly 60 million children — a population roughly equal to that of France or the United Kingdom — have been aborted since the Supreme Court’s 1973 fatwa in Roe v. Wade.

In a “snip,” the abortionist, sharp scissors in hand, grasps the squirming and sometimes squealing baby he has just delivered. He stabs the child in the back and then, snapping the blades, severs the spinal cord from the brain. Massof described the snip as “literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body.”
He was testifying in exchange for a plea bargain that discounts his participation in numerous such “procedures” to a mere two instances of third-degree murder. After all, most of what he did at the “Women’s Medical Society” was perfectly legal.

The euphemistic “snip” calls to mind the Supreme Court’s opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart, another case about “choice.” Like Gosnell, LeRoy Carhart was an abortion “physician.” In the high court, he joined his progressive friends at Planned Parenthood and the City of San Francisco to defend the “choice” known as “partial birth” abortion — a name soothingly rebranded to “late term” abortion once it became clear that “partial birth” conveyed too much information.

In an uncharacteristically de trop outburst, the five justices in the narrow Carhart majority described varying abortion procedures with startling clinical precision. Most common is the first-trimester “suction curettage,” in which the “physician” vacuums the unwanted “embryonic tissue” from the womb. By the time the second trimester is reached, this “tissue” has matured into the unmistakable shape of a child. Thus the “dilation and evacuation” procedure is often called for.

Employed millions of times in this most civilized country over the last half century, “D&E,” the court explained, involves the “physician’s” use of forceps “to tear apart” the “fetus” by “ripping” it from the cervix and then “evacuating the fetus piece by piece . . . until it has been completely removed” from the mother. Often, the justices observed, the D&E “physician” finds it more congenial to “kill the fetus a day or two before performing the surgical evacuation,” since “medical” experience has shown that, “once dead . . . the fetus’ body will soften,” becoming “easier” to dice and remove. Oh, another helpful tip: “Rotating the fetus as it is being pulled decreases the odds of dismemberment.”

By the time Carhart was decided, Roe v. Wade had been on the books for over a generation — the generation, to be more specific, that is now ruling the roost. It goes without saying — for we wouldn’t want to say it — that, in a nation that has absorbed this generation’s preening “values,” D&E already enjoyed the stamp of judicial approval. The only question before the Carhart Court was whether “partial birth” abortion — “intact D&E” — was beyond the pale.

This “medical procedure” is triggered by an advanced stage of maturation, in which the child’s well-developed head tends to “lodge in the cervix.” Relying on the instruction of Martin Haskell, another experienced abortionist, the justices related:

The right-handed surgeon slides the fingers of the left [hand] along the back of the fetus and “hooks” the shoulders of the fetus with the index and ring fingers (palm down). While maintaining this tension, lifting the cervix and applying traction to the shoulders with the fingers of the left hand, the surgeon takes a pair of blunt curved Metzenbaum scissors in the right hand. He carefully advances the tip, curved down, along the spine and under his middle finger until he feels it contact the base of the skull under the tip of his middle finger.
The surgeon then forces the scissors into the base of the skull. . . . He spreads the scissors to enlarge the opening. . . . The surgeon [then] removes the scissors and introduces a suction catheter into this hole and evacuates the skull contents. With the catheter still in place, he applies traction to the fetus, removing it completely from the patient.

“Evacuates the skull contents” may be more bracing than “snip,” but it doesn’t quite do justice to the process and the frightful insouciance behind it. That was left to a nurse who had watched Haskell perform the “procedure” on a six-month-old “however way you want to describe it.” She recalled that, once all but the head had been delivered,

the baby’s little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out, like a startle reaction, like a flinch, like a baby does when he thinks he is going to fall.
The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening, and sucked the baby’s brains out. Now the baby went completely limp. . . . He cut the umbilical cord and delivered the placenta. He threw the baby in a pan, along with the placenta and the instruments he had just used.

Four justices of the United States Supreme Court would have upheld this barbarism. They would not have described it. It is not to be spoken of, only done. After all, to speak of it would infringe upon “choice.”
Speaking of “choice,” if President Obama has the opportunity to choose one more Supreme Court justice over the next four years, the Carhart dissenters will be the majority. Welcome to Philadelphia.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy.

Gosnell’s House of Horrors

 Gosnell Should be Given a Medal, Right?

The trial of Dr Kermit Gosnell is now making headlines around the world.  Consider, for example, the article below, which today appeared in the NZ Herald in New Zealand.  The piece makes for difficult reading.  The first response is to extend compassion towards the medical assistants who are now facing up to what they did.  They know they have murdered children.  For at least some of them their grief will be inconsolable and their guilt will be unable to be expiated.  May God have mercy upon them and draw them to the Lord Jesus Christ. 

But this trial and all its horrors is important for other reasons.  There are plenty of effete liberals who propound all kinds of abstract ratiocinations to justify the evil of abortion (the child is not a human being until it has been born; the child has no legal rights; the pregnant female’s rights to control their own body trump any other human rights, and so forth.)  To them we would simply ask them once again to get on their soap boxes and justify why they believe what was taking place in the Philadelphia’s House of Horrors was perfectly acceptable, moral, and right.  For in principle they all do.  Most, however, are afraid to face up to the position they hold.  That is why we call them effete liberals.
 

The fact that the law was being broken in this case is irrelevant, for these effete liberals ought to go on to argue that the law in this case is an ass.  When a tumour is growing in the body, society does not codify rules which declare that once the tumour has passed a certain age or size it is illegal to operate upon the tumour and kill its cells off.  That would be absurd.  If the unborn child is nothing more than a tumour growing in the body (which, since it is declared by our liberal protagonists to be non-human, there are no other categories or options) Gosnell and his assistants have done nothing morally wrong.  It is the law, therefore, which is immoral. 

We are aware that there is a certain class of libertarians who propound a dichotomy between potentiality and actuality.  The unborn child is potentially a human being, but not actually.  Therefore, until its potential becomes actual, the unborn thing is not a human being and has no rights as such.  This precious piece of Aristotelian rationalising, of course, proves too much, lumping the argument with far too much weight to bear.  Since all human beings consist of a mixture of actuality and potentiality at what point does the actual trump the potential, so that human rights and protections–in particular, the right to life–apply?  Does a two day old baby after birth have more actuality than potentiality?  Does a three month old baby?  How about a 75 year old?  How about a child born with Downs Syndrome?  However these libertarians answer that question the answer will always be with prejudice and answer will be nothing more than a artificial, arid ratiocination. 

The Gosnell trial is important.  We are glad it is getting headlines and exposure.  For far too long we have tolerated the most cowardly form of murder imaginable.  We have industrialised it.  We have created national killing floors.  And it is acceptable in polite circles.  We have even had the audacity and the chutzpah to declare this industrialised slaughter a fundamental human right. 

But come, one and all, you who would defend this horror.  We challenge you to stand in solidarity with Dr Gosnell.  Don’t be cowardly in his hour of need.  Get out on the streets, get on the net, get into the media and defend the man and his clinic.  No doubt you view him as one of the great heroes of our generation.  Let’s hear from you.  Let’s hear why snipping baby’s spines and cutting their necks is a great, moral, ethical, and righteous deed.  Let’s hear about the implicit racism in his prosecution.  Let’s hear about solidarity with the poor.  Let’s hear the calls for Gosnell to be given a medal–maybe the Medal of Freedom.  That would be apt.

Worker admits cutting 10 babies at abortion clinic

7:17 AM Wednesday Mar 20, 2013
 
Dr. Kermit Gosnell, an abortion doctor who catered to minorities, immigrants and poor women at the Women's Medical Society. Photo / AP
Dr. Kermit Gosnell

A medical assistant told a jury Tuesday that she snipped the spines of at least 10 babies during unorthodox abortions at a West Philadelphia clinic. And she said Dr. Kermit Gosnell and another employee did the same to terminate pregnancies.

Adrienne Moton’s testimony came in the capital murder trial of Gosnell, the clinic owner, who is on trial in the deaths of a patient and seven babies. Prosecutors accuse him of killing late-term, viable babies after they were delivered alive, in violation of state abortion laws.

Gosnell’s lawyer denies the murder charge and disputes that any babies were born alive. He also challenges the gestational age of the aborted fetuses, calling them inexact estimates.

Moton, the first employee to testify, sobbed as she recalled taking a cellphone photograph of one baby left in her work area. She thought he could have survived, given his size and pinkish color. She had measured him at nearly 30 weeks.  “The aunt felt it was just best for her (the mother’s) future,” Moton testified.

Jurors saw Moton’s photograph on a large screen in the courtroom, which took on a bizarre look Tuesday as she testified near a hospital bed with stirrups and other aging obstetric equipment. Denied the chance to bring jurors to the shuttered inner-city clinic, prosecutors are instead recreating a patient room in court.

Moton, 35, sobbed as she described her work at the clinic. Because of problems at home, she had moved in with Gosnell and his third wife during high school, and she went to work for him from 2005 to 2008. She earned about $10 an hour, off the books, to administer drugs, perform sonograms, help with abortions and dispose of fetal remains. Workers got $20 bonuses for second-term abortions on Saturdays, when a half-dozen were sometimes performed.

She once had to kill a baby delivered in a toilet, cutting its neck with scissors, she said. Asked if she knew that was wrong, she said, “At first I didn’t.”

Abortions are typically performed in utero. In Pennsylvania, abortions cannot legally be performed after the 24th week of pregnancy.  Moton has pleaded guilty to third-degree murder, which carries a 20- to 40-year term, as well as conspiracy and other charges. She has been in prison since early 2011, when Philadelphia prosecutors released the harrowing grand jury report on Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Center and arrested the doctor, wife Pearl and eight current or former employees. Most of them are expected to testify.

Women and teens came from across the mid-Atlantic, often seeking late-term abortions, Moton said. She recalled one young woman from Puerto Rico who did not speak English and appeared to be 27 weeks pregnant.

One patient, a 41-year-old refugee, died after an overdose of drugs allegedly given to her during a 2009 abortion.

Defense lawyer Jack McMahon told jurors in opening statements Monday that Gosnell, now 72, returned to the impoverished neighborhood after medical school when he could have struck it rich in the suburbs. He called the prosecution of his client, who is black, “a lynching.”

But prosecutors believe Gosnell made plenty of money over a 30-year career using cheap, untrained staff, outdated medicines and barbaric techniques to perform abortions on desperate, low-income women.  And they say he made even more on the side running a “pill mill,” where addicts and drug dealers could get prescriptions for potent painkillers. Authorities found $250,000 in cash at his home when they searched it in 2010.

Letter From America (About A Woman’s "Right" to Murder)

‘So What if Abortion Ends Life?’: Pro-Choice Writer Says Some Babies Are ‘Worth Sacrificing’

 
Abortion continues to be a highly-contentious issue, even as this week marks the 40th anniversary since the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court verdict was handed down. It’s a never-ending battle, typically colored by raw emotion. While one polar side traditionally argues that life begins at the moment of conception, the other tends to shy away from any recognition that the unborn qualify as human lives.
This pro-life versus pro-choice dynamic often leads to intense clashes in the public sphere, with both sides accusing the other of restricting rights and advocating damaging policies. In a new piece that was published this week, Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams, a pro-choice adherent, decides not to steer clear of the “life” issue and asks: “So what if abortion ends life?”

The question, itself, is enough to send anti-abortion advocates into a tizzy. Williams, who identifies herself as pro-choice, takes a divergent route from others on the left who have staunch views about abortion rights. Rather than denying the fact that fetuses are human lives, she, like pro-lifers, fully embraces this ideal. However, Williams differentiates between the rights that the unborn have from those that belong to women.
“Yet I know that throughout my own pregnancies, I never wavered for a moment in the belief that I was carrying a human life inside of me. I believe that’s what a fetus is: a human life,” Williams wrote. “And that doesn’t make me one iota less solidly pro-choice.”
Salons Mary Elizabeth Williams Asks: So What if Abortion Ends Life? 
She went on to decry the “semantic power” that is inherent within the modern-day debate, taking particular aim at those who oppose abortion by using the word “life” to win the debate. But rather than cowering to what the writer says are the “sneaky, dirty tricks of the anti-choice lobby,” Williams proposes that pro-choice advocates should not cower when the word “life” is brought into the discussion. Instead, she believes that pro-choicers should double down and explain why women should have more rights than fetuses.
“Here’s the complicated reality in which we live: All life is not equal,” she wrote. “That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers.”
See, Williams believes that a fetus, while it is a human life, does not need to be afforded the same rights as the woman who it resides in. She goes on to say that the woman is the “boss” and that it is her right to decide whether having that baby fits in with her life circumstances and health. In the end, Williams argues that this personal decision — predicated upon a woman’s individual situation — should always take precedent over the fetus that is inside of the female.
As for the semantics surrounding abortion, Williams calls for pro-choice advocates to be less squeamish, especially when it comes to avoiding whether or not an unborn baby should be considered a “life.”  “When we try to act like a pregnancy doesn’t involve human life, we wind up drawing stupid semantic lines in the sand: first trimester abortion vs. second trimester vs. late term, dancing around the issue trying to decide if there’s a single magic moment when a fetus becomes a person,” she continued. “Are you human only when you’re born? Only when you’re viable outside of the womb? Are you less of a human life when you look like a tadpole than when you can suck on your thumb?”
At the end of the piece, Williams notes that she believes that women’s lives can be saved in certain circumstances and that the life of a mother should always be put before a fetus. In these complicated scenarios, she said the unborn life being aborted is, “A life worth sacrificing.” 
Read the entire piece over at Salon.

Sclerotic Incompetence

In Memory of Murray Wilkinson

The Justice system in New Zealand has some huge holes in it.  On the eighth of January, NZ police arrested an 18 year old man and charged him with the murder of an expat Kiwi, who had returned for his summer holidays to Waihi, together with his family.  It had all appearances at the time of a random, senseless murder.

For the victim, Murray Wilkinson and his family it still appears that way.  But now it emerges that the accused was, at the time, out on bail.  Once again we see the devastation that can arise when people arrested and bailed for serious criminal are allowed out on the streets, prior to their trials.  Lawyer and former politician, Stephen Franks documents some of the inanities and failings and blameshifting of our judicial system:

The 18 year old charged with murdering Murray Wilkinson outside his Waihi caravan applied for bail again yesterday. Bail was denied but I’m told that his QC indicated he would try again.  The accused has name suppression so we can’t learn the truth about him but if today’s judges had half the common sense of previous generations’ such an application would be unthinkable. . . .

Judges could at least make it clear that offenders who show their lack of remorse with stupid applications will have that insolence reflected in the eventual sentence. Lawyers, whose duty it is to make such applications whatever their personal view of them, could then explain that offensive procedures are only worth the risk for defendants who are confident of being acquitted. . . .

 The accused in Waihi can’t be blamed for expecting courts to be indulgent – he was apparently free to hurt fresh victims on New Year’s Eve because he was out on bail on charges for incidents some weeks earlier and six months ago.

Judges have allowed our system to become so constipated that a six month old charge remained unheard. Even our generation’s judges should feel they can’t justify giving bail on a third charge (of murder) but who knows?. Mr Wilkinson may have paid the price for previous indulgence, not the judges.

Judges are using the constipation of the court system to justify granting bail to those accused of violent crimes.  Sitting around six to nine months in prison waiting for a trial amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.  Fair enough.  Then judges ought to do what they can to ensure that the system does not get clogged with the repeat offences of violent criminals whilst out on bail–by making frivolous applications for bail have a cost to the one being charged. 

Moreover, bail should be far, far harder to get granted, particularly when people are before the courts charged with violent crimes.  There is now in New Zealand a long litany of victims, some now dead, who have suffered at the hands of people charged with violent crimes, yet allowed out on bail–freely to roam and devastate others at will. 

The judicial system and the parliamentarians have demonstrated repeatedly that they are incapable of changing the system for the better.  Its time for the people to apply their common sense and demand change via the ballot box and all other lawful means.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

And Slew the Little Childer 

Liturgy and Worship – Church Year
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, 15 December 2012

Whenever you have to deal with something like the Connecticut shooting, something that simply crushes the heart, it is important to think carefully before speaking or writing. This is not the time to be debating gun control, drone attacks in the Middle East, and it is certainly not the time to be drawing ham-fisted comparisons to the abortion carnage. The reason for this is that the parents who are broken over this were parents who had chosen life, not parents who hadn’t. This does not mean that abortion is irrelevant to this tragedy, for it certainly is not, but we want to make sure we locate it as a clear point of gospel relevance.

Otherwise we just come off as opportunists who are just looking for a chance to haul the topic of conversation over to a particular hobby horse. But in the aftermath of something sick like this, we need to reconnect with the permanent things. If we don’t point to transcendental realities in a time like this—gospel truths—then we might as well sign a peace treaty with the darkness now.

I have often said that nativity sets should include a set of Herod’s soldiers—that is as much a part of the Christmas story as the shepherds, or the star, or the wise men.
These traditional figures all glorified Christ in His coming, but the reality of such bloody soldiers was the reason He came. Nothing illustrates the need for His mission to us better than that appalling loss to Ramah. An early English carol, “Unto Us is Born a Son,” has a verse that understands this juxtaposition of humility and adoration over against the haughtiness of pride and blood.

This did Herod sore affray,
And grievously bewilder
So he gave the word to slay,
And slew the little childer,
And slew the little childer.

And Rachel wept for her children, for they were no more.

Two things should stand out about this. First, while I noted that this is not the time to call out those who would use the tragedy to promote gun control—or to call them names on the Internet—we must confront those who would continue their lockdown policies of gospel control. And by gospel, I mean the whole counsel of God for a lost and sinful race—the restored order of things, repentance for sin, and true faith in the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus. If you want a society which refuses to name the name of Jesus, and yet is somehow free from these sorts of outrages, you want something that this sinful world cannot ever provide. We can have no salvation without a Savior. God sent a Savior to us, and we have no saviors of our own, just a lot of pretenders. His invitation to our generation is the same as it has been for every generation, and it is “come with me.” We cannot be saved unless we do.

It is not possible to build a culture around a denial of God-given standards, and then arbitrarily reintroduce those standards at your convenience, whenever you need a word like evil to describe what has just happened. Those words cannot just be whistled up. If we have banished them, and their definitions, and every possible support for them, we need to reckon with the fact that they are now gone. Cultural unbelief, which leads inexorably to cultural nihilism and despair, is utterly incapable of responding appropriately to things like this, while remaining fully capable of creating them. In the prophetic words of C.S. Lewis, “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

This shooting was horrendous, but far worse is the fact that our blind seers have no idea what to say about it. The horror happened, and it was immediately followed by the horror of countless individuals saying wildly inappropriate things about it. We have monsters in our midst, and vapidity in our highest council chambers, not to mention the monsters there too, and all of them want to slouch toward Bethlehem. God have mercy.

And so this leads to the second point. The reason we need to have fixed and God-given standards is not so that we might climb up some moralistic ladder, rebuilding a mythical past where these sorts of things didn’t happen to us. No, these sorts of things have always happened. We live on a screwed-up planet. We must have a God-given, fixed standard so that we may know why we need forgiveness so much. God’s law is not to pat us on the back and tell us what fine fellows we are. God’s law is given to provide a proper shape for our repentance. In moments like this, we are aghast, but our “repentance” is formless and void. We need the shape of God’s holy Word so that we know how shapeless we have become. We need the Spirit of God to move on our waters.

And here is where abortion really is relevant, along with all the other awful things we do to children. We do not need to talk about these things as political issues—however appropriate and necessary that may be in its time and place. But before we can even think about that, we need to come to grips with the fact that, at the personal level, it is plain that an aching bloodguilt rests upon our nation. I am not talking about our officials, though they are included. I am talking about the millions of us who have occasioned it, paid for it, obtained it, provided it, and funded it. According to Scripture, blood is something that returns to those who shed it. It also returns to the land where it was shed. And our vast reservoir of guilt is larger and deeper than it has ever been.

The only blood that does not return with compounded guilt is the blood of Jesus. His blood comes to us for cleansing, and not for condemnation. His blood does not return with guilt, and it is the only way that all the other guilt can be prevented from returning to us. An old gospel song points the only way to our salvation—“nothing but the blood of Jesus.” Nothing.

So we must confess that while the spirit of Christ is alive in the world, the spirit of Herod is not yet gone. And the only way to expel that kind of darkness is to boldly proclaim that Jesus came into this world precisely to destroy this kind of darkness through His death and resurrection. He was born in Bethlehem from Mary, and He was born again in Jerusalem, the first born from the dead. His grave, just like Mary, was full of grace.

This is a darkness that must be confronted, and it can only be confronted by believers who are prepared to wield the gospel—not as a sectarian talking point, but as real gospel for real sin, real balm for real pain, real light for real darkness. So go find your children, hug the little childer, thank God for the life that is in them, and teach them the Christmas story. We need it so much.

Letter from the US (About Child Murder in the UK)

State Infanticide in Britain

We are all too familiar with the murder of helpless babies within the womb.  Now it is being extended.  New born babies are being murdered in the UK–all “legally” of course, under the loving embrace of the National Health Service. One UK doctor has become a whistleblower.

This report is republished from The Blaze:

UK Doctor’s Horrifying Admission Reveals How Sick & Disabled Babies Are Put on ‘Death Pathways’, Deprived of Food & Fluid for 10 Days 

Sick children and even disabled newborn babies, are reportedly being discharged from NHS hospitals in England only to die  slowly at home or in hospices in an unfathomable manner. The innocent children are being put on controversial “death pathways,” once only thought to have involved elderly and terminally ill adult patients.

The Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), an organization that facilitates end-of-life treatment, is behind the inhumane program. The Daily Mail has learned the process of “withdrawing food and fluid by tube is being used on young patients as well as severely disabled newborn babies.” In other words, patients — young and old — are slowly starved and dehydrated to death.

UK Doctors Horrifying Testimony Reveals How Sick & Disabled Babies Are Put on Death Pathways

(Photo credit: Getty)

One doctor, acting as a whistle blower, admitted to starving and dehydrating ten babies to death in the neonatal unit of one hospital in a leading medical journal. The doctor describes it as a 10-day process, during which the baby becomes “smaller and shrunken.”

Roughly 130,000 elderly and terminally ill patients reportedly die on the Liverpool Care Pathway, or “death pathways.” LCP is now being independently investigated at the orders of ministers in England.
The Daily Mail has more details on this tragic story:

The investigation, which will include child patients, will look at whether cash payments to hospitals to hit death pathway targets have influenced doctors’ decisions.  Medical critics of the LCP insist it is impossible to say when a patient will die and as a result the LCP death becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They say it is a form of euthanasia, used to clear hospital beds and save the NHS money.

The use of end of life care methods on disabled newborn babies was revealed in the doctors’ bible, the British Medical Journal.  The previously mentioned doctor wrote of the pain of watching the slow, forced deaths of newborn babies. One baby’s parents decided to put their infant on the “pathway” because of a “lengthy list of unexpected congenital anomalies,” according to the doctor.

Here’s some of what the doctor wrote in the medical journal [emphasis added]:

The voice on the other end of the phone describes a newborn baby and a lengthy list of unexpected congenital anomalies. I have a growing sense of dread as I listen.  The parents want ‘nothing done’ because they feel that these anomalies are not consistent with a basic human experience. I know that once decisions are made, life support will be withdrawn.

Assuming this baby survives, we will be unable to give feed, and the parents will not want us to use artificial means to do so.  Regrettably, my predictions are correct. I realise as I go to meet the parents that this will be the tenth child for whom I have cared after a decision has been made to forgo medically provided feeding.
[…]
Like other parents in this predicament, they are now plagued with a terrible type of wishful thinking that they could never have imagined. They wish for their child to die quickly once the feeding and fluids are stopped.  They wish for pneumonia. They wish for no suffering. They wish for no visible changes to their precious baby.

Their wishes, however, are not consistent with my experience. Survival is often much longer than most physicians think; reflecting on my previous patients, the median time from withdrawal of hydration to death was ten days. 

After reading the article in the British Medical Journal, Dr. Laura de Rooy, a consultant neonatologist at St. George’s Hospital NHS Trust in London, wrote on the BMJ website: “It is a huge supposition to think they do not feel hunger or thirst.”

“The LCP was devised by the Marie Curie Palliative Care Institute in Liverpool for care of dying adult patients more than a decade ago. It has since been developed, with [pediatric] staff at Alder Hey Hospital, to cover children. Parents have to agree to their child going on the death pathway, often being told by doctors it is in the child’s ‘best interests’ because their survival is ‘futile’,” The Daily Mail reports.

Obviously, not everyone agrees. Bernadette Lloyd, a hospice pediatric nurse, wrote to the Cabinet Office and the Department of Health and blasted the use of death pathways for young children. “The parents feel coerced, at a very traumatic time, into agreeing that this is correct for their child whom they are told by doctors has only has a few days to live,” she wrote. “It is very difficult to predict death. I have seen a reasonable number of children recover after being taken off the pathway.”

She went on: “I have also seen children die in terrible thirst because fluids are withdrawn from them until they die…I witnessed a 14 year-old boy with cancer die with his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth when doctors refused to give him liquids by tube. His death was agonising for him, and for us nurses to watch. This is euthanasia by the backdoor.”

For now the inquiry into the death pathways is ongoing. A Department of Health spokesman said that “End of life care for children must meet the highest professional and clinical standards, and the specific needs of children at the end of their life.”  But as Teresa Lynch, a spokeswoman for the Medical Ethics Alliance, points out: “There are big questions to be answered about how our sick children are dying.”

To read more of the anonymous doctor’s testimony in the British Medical Journal, click here.

Extenutating Circumstances

” Honour” Murders and Islam

“Honour” murders are in the news again.  In Canada.  The nation is reportedly shocked. Here is a summary of the case:

Zainab Shafia’s crime was to run off to marry a man her parents hated. Middle sister Sahar’s crime was to wear revealing clothes and have secret boyfriends. Youngest sister Geeti’s crime was to do badly in school and call social workers for help dealing with a family home in turmoil.  The punishment for all three teenage Canadian sisters was the same: death.

Their executioner: their brother, acting on instructions from the father to run their car off the road.  Another family member, their father’s first wife in a polygamous marriage, was also killed.

Hamed Shafia, his father, Mohammed, and his mother, Tooba Mohammed Yahya, were sentenced to life in prison for murder, with Judge Robert Maranger excoriating their “twisted notion of honor, a notion of honor that is founded upon the domination and control of women, a sick notion of honor that has absolutely no place in any civilized society.”

CNN and other media outlets are rushing to assure everyone that honour murders are not Islamic.
  One of the more positive things is that some Islamic scholars are denouncing the practice.

Leading Muslim thinkers wholeheartedly endorsed the Canadian judge’s verdict, insisting that “honor murders” had no place and no support in Islam.  “There is nothing in the Quran that justifies honor killings. There is nothing that says you should kill for the honor of the family,” said Taj Hargey, director of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford in England.

“This idea that ‘somehow a girl has besmirched our honor and therefore the thing to do is kill her’ is bizarre, and Muslims should stop using this defense,” he said, arguing that the practice is cultural, not religious in origin.  “You cannot say this is what Islam approves of. You can say this is what their culture approves of,” he said.  

Yes, and no.  The problem is that Islam struggles to be separated from its cultural manifestations.  There is no separation of church and state in Islam: there is no church, period.  Islamic traditions (hadith) are just as important as the Quran.  Sharia law and Islam and the culture that produced the Quran, the hadith, and sharia are pretty much inseparable.  Consequently, throughout much of the Islamic world, honour murders are treated more lightly–almost as justifiable homicide, or murder with extenuating circumstances. 

Several Arab countries and territories, including Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, Yemen and the Palestinian territories, have laws providing lesser sentences for honor murders than for other murders, Human Rights Watch says. Egypt and Jordan also have laws that have been interpreted to allow reduced sentences for honor crimes, the group says.

The is a direct reversal of the Christian legal tradition where killing family members is regarded as a particularly aggravated and heinous form of murder. 

 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Al-Awlaki and the Smell of Boiling Cabbage

Culture and Politics – A Second Battle of Tours
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, October 01, 2011

A few days ago, a predator drone took out Anwar Al-Awlaki, an all-round bad guy, and American citizen. The ACLU (and Ron Paul and Gary Johnson) complained about it, saying that this was a violation of due process. Those who maintain we are in a state of war against terrorists are exasperated by the claim, saying, as Charles Krauthammer did, that the rebel soldiers at Pickett’s charge were not being served papers, even though (according to the Union account) the rebels were still all American citizens. The two sides were not divided by a cluster of attorneys swinging briefcases at each other.

A third position, neither fish nor fowl, is that of the Obama administration.
When it comes to things like Gitmo, the administration wants terrorists to be treated like criminals, to be tried in civilian courts, etc. But on the other hand, it was the Obama administration that ordered this strike. This is one of those “you can’t have it both ways” deals.

This inconsistency could be resolved by a “clear and present danger” argument. If a disturbed American citizen with a sniper rifle and twenty boxes of ammo climbs up on top of a water tower, and starts shooting at the citizenry, it is legitimate for law enforcement to take him out. His citizenry is irrelevant, and the processes that must be followed are those of a good SWAT team.

But in order to make this case, you have to make it. You can’t just assert that somebody on the other side of the world is being really bad according to (top secret) intelligence, and then show his photograph a number of times on the news in various scary ways. In order to do this legitimately, you have to show your people that an injustice is not being done, or they have to be able to see that for themselves.

From what I understand, this assassination of Awlaki is one that easily could have been justified, but which, for various reasons of political incoherence, has not been. Until such time as this incoherence is overcome, the protests are a healthy sign. A compelling explanation is necessary to justice, and not just necessary for PR reasons. And so I commmend two parties for a job well-done. I commend the military units that conducted the strike (and the ordering of the strike itself), and I commend those who are protesting the way it has been handled.

I condemn the attorneys in the White House and/or Justice Department for the smell of boiling cabbage that surrounds the whole thing.

Canada Spreads the Love

Molech Ovens Making a Comeback

Here is Mark Steyn on the Canadian version of the death penalty: suspended sentence for the murderer who committed infanticide on her child for the crime of being alive.

Posted on September 13, 2011
From the Court of Queen’s Bench (the appellate court) in Alberta:

The Wetaskiwin, Alta., woman convicted of infanticide for killing her newborn son, was given a three-year suspended sentence Friday by an Edmonton Court of Queen’s Bench judge.
Katrina Effert was 19 on April 13, 2005, when she secretly gave birth in her parents’ home, strangled the baby boy with her underwear and threw the body over a fence into a neighbour’s yard…
Effert will have to abide by conditions for the next three years but she won’t spend time behind bars for strangling her newborn son.

Indeed. As Judge Joanne Veit puts it:

“While many Canadians undoubtedly view abortion as a less than ideal solution to unprotected sex and unwanted pregnancy, they generally understand, accept and sympathize with the onerous demands pregnancy and childbirth exact from mothers, especially mothers without support,” she writes… “Naturally, Canadians are grieved by an infant’s death, especially at the hands of the infant’s mother, but Canadians also grieve for the mother.”

Gotcha. So a superior court judge in a relatively civilized jurisdiction is happy to extend the principles underlying legalized abortion in order to mitigate the killing of a legal person — that’s to say, someone who has managed to make it to the post-fetus stage. How long do those mitigating factors apply? I mean, “onerous demands”-wise, the first month of a newborn’s life is no picnic for the mother. How about six months in? The terrible twos?
Speaking of “onerous demands,” suppose you’re a “mother without support” who’s also got an elderly relative around with an “onerous” chronic condition also making inroads into your time?
And in what sense was Miss Effert a “mother without support”? She lived at home with her parents, who provided her with food and shelter. How smoothly the slick euphemisms — “accept and sympathize . . . onerous demands” — lubricate the slippery slope.

Sadder, But Wiser

Macsyna King, “Breaking Silence”

OK, so it’s time to fess up.  We have read the book.  Yes, the book.  The banned book–banned by the Star Chamber of New Zealand public opinion. The one some are calling the most appalling book ever to be written (even though it has yet to be released).  You know, the one a Facebook instant crowd of 40,000 New Zealanders tried to ban when news of its imminent publication surfaced.  We are referring, of course, to Ian Wishart’s Breaking Silence: the Kahui Case, subtitled Macsyna King and the Real Story of the Murder of Her Twins.

A notorious woman, Macsyna King has been arraigned, tried, and condemned in the hallowed court of public opinion. Continue reading

US Responsible for Atrocity

The Deadly Long Bow

It’s clear.  There is no doubt about it.  At least if you are equipped with one of the very long bows that the useful idiots in the media all seem to possess.  The United States is responsible–to some degree–for Breivik’s murderous rampage in Norway.  It is high time that the US scrapped its founding documents.

OK, so the very long extended bow of the media did not quite stretch this far–but it needs to, to maintain a shred of credibility.  Over the weekend, the logic of the media in the US ran like this: Continue reading

>How Has It Come to This . . .? Part I

>Murder Most Academic

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest piece in City Journal provokes the lament of Theoden facing the destruction of his realm, “How did it come to this?”

We have broken the piece into two parts.  The first deals with sadistic murders committed by a PhD candidate in the UK and the academic establishment which facilitated his crimes.  The second, which we will publish tomorrow, deals with the academic treatment of his victims. Continue reading

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>

Absolutely Anything

Written by Douglas Wilson

An assassination has occurred in Arizona. A Democratic congresswoman has been shot, and is still struggling for her life. A federal judge is dead, along with some other people. The perpetrator initially appears to fit the profile of a conspiracy nut — his favorite books include Mein Kampf, The Communist Manifesto, and Siddhartha.

I found out about the shooting coming back from a wedding rehearsal, when a fellow elder in our church emailed me that he and I had been held responsible for it by one of our local Intoleristas. The responsibility was assigned to us in this way. 

“And yeah, I hold people like Courtney and Wilson responsible — not accountable, but responsible — for this and all other acts of terror whose increase, I’m afraid, is assured in the climate they encourage, revel in, and profit from. No way in hell will I ever stop fighting them.”

The climate that actually encourages this kind of thing is a climate of hyper-politicalization, when absolutely anything is used against your political adversaries, provided you think you can make some points with it, whether or not all parties are able to join together in condemning whatever it is.

In the meantime, responsible Christians ought to pray for the recovery of Congresswoman Giffords, the families of those slain, and that justice for the murderer will be swift.

>Hollywood’s Gloss Over Very Ugly Realities

>Dr Death and Hollywood Hagiography

Several years ago, Hollywood decided to make a movie that would glorify Dr Death, Jack Kervorkian. It has just been released on cable.

At the time, NationalReviewONLINE published a piece by Wesley J Smith, exposing the truth about Kervorkian. It is deeply troubling.

A View to a Kill
Is Jack Kevorkian headed to a theater near you?

By Wesley J. Smith

According to recent showbiz news, jailed murderer Jack Kevorkian may soon be the subject of a laudatory movie biopic. (No, it is not intended as a horror movie.) Unfortunately, this seems to be a serious project. The announced director is Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple. The screenwriter is Barbara Turner (Pollock). Stars touted as potentially playing the lead include Ben Kingsley and Daniel Day Lewis.

The producer is an unknown named Steve Jones, whose Bee Holder Productions owns the rights to an unpublished biography co-authored by Kevorkian acolyte Neal Nicol — a man so devoted to his mentor that he once allowed Kevorkian to infuse him with cadaver blood, resulting in a nasty case of hepatitis. Any thought that the movie might be an accurate portrayal vanished when Jones claimed in a press release that Kevorkian “walks in the footsteps of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.”

Nicol’s unpublished book is entitled You Don’t Know Jack. Here, at least, is a kernel of truth: If those connected with this movie project would only take the time to learn about the real Jack Kevorkian, they would have nothing whatsoever to do with lionizing him.

Let’s start with Kevorkian’s motives. He is ubiquitously portrayed in the media as the doctor who helped terminally ill people end their own lives. No doubt, that is how he will be portrayed in the movie — as the iconoclastic visionary whose compassion induced him to test the boundaries of the law to help the actively dying achieve a gentle end.

But this view of Dr. Death — who received the moniker when, as a medical student, he haunted hospital wards to watch people die — is a blatant, media-driven myth. In reality, Kevorkian’s notorious assisted-suicide campaign, which dominated the headlines throughout most of the 1990s, was driven by a ghoulish desire to conduct human vivisection, or “obitiatry,” as he liked to call it. Yes, you read right. Kevorkian’s primary motive in all that he did was to create the social conditions that would permit him to experiment on the people he was putting to death.

Kevorkian explained this yearning in his 1991 book Prescription Medicide: The Goodness of Planned Death, where on page 214 he admitted that assisting “suffering or doomed persons kill themselves” was “merely the first step, an early distasteful professional obligation.” Instead of wanting to help the dying, Kevorkian candidly acknowledged, he was actually pursuing his own obsession. “What I find most satisfying,” he wrote, “is the prospect of making possible the performance of invaluable experiments or other beneficial medical acts under conditions that this first unpleasant step can help establish — in a word obitiatry.”

Why conduct invasive experiments on people being euthanized? On page 34, he expressed an intense desire to “study all parts of the intact, living brain.” Why? On page 243, Kevorkian explained — and it was pure quackery:

If we are ever to penetrate the mystery of death — even superficially — it will have to be through obitiatry…Knowledge about the essence of human death will of necessity require insight into the nature of the unique awareness or consciousness that characterizes cognitive human life. That is possible only through obitiatric research on living human bodies, and most likely by concentrating on the central nervous system…to pinpoint the exact onset of extinction of an unknown cognitive mechanism that energizes life.

Kevorkian’s first targets in his quest to slice and dice people were not the ill, but the condemned. He spent years visiting prisons and corresponding with death-row inmates, seeking permission to conduct “obitiatric research” on those being executed.

Only after Kevorkian was thrown out of every prison he visited did he hit upon another angle. If condemned people were not going to be made available for “unfettered experimentation on human death,” perhaps he could gain access to experiment on sick and disabled people. His front would be assisted suicide. But his goal would remain human vivisection.

Kevorkian appears to have pursued a three-step plan toward achieving his dream: First, popularize assisted suicide and make it seem acceptable; second, give society a utilitarian stake in assisted suicide by using the victims for organ procurement; and finally, gain permission to conduct his death experiments on the sick and disabled people he would be allowed to kill.

Kevorkian started by placing classified ads in newspapers offering “death counseling.” To ensure that he would not be charged with murder, he jerry-rigged a suicide machine that required those whose suicides he was assisting to flip a switch to release deadly potassium chloride or other toxic chemicals into their veins. (When he lost his medical license and access to prescribed drugs, he turned to carbon monoxide as the killing agent.)

It is important to reiterate here that, contrary to the usual media descriptions, most of Kevorkian’s victims were not terminally ill. Of the known 130 or so suicides that Kevorkian facilitated, about 70 percent of the people involved were disabled and depressed, the majority of them women. This is not surprising given Kevorkian’s disdain for disabled people. He once called quadriplegics and paraplegics who were not suicidal “pathological,” and exposed his sympathy for eugenics in a court document, asserting:

The voluntary self-elimination of individual mortally diseased and crippled lives taken collectively can only enhance the preservation of public health and welfare.

Ironically, it was Kevorkian’s serial assisted suicides of disabled people (to general public applause) that roused the disability-rights community to become the nation’s most effective opponent of legalizing assisted suicide and euthanasia.

Not only were most of Kevorkian’s victims not dying, five weren’t even sick. These included:

Marjorie Wantz, age 58, Kevorkian’s second hastened death, whose emotional and mental difficulties once led to her hospitalization. Wantz sought assisted suicide from Kevorkian, complaining of severe pelvic pain. But her autopsy revealed that she was in splendid physical health.

Rebecca Badger, age 39, sought out Kevorkian to help kill her because she believed she had MS. Her autopsy proved that she did not. Further investigations revealed that Badger was a recovering alcoholic who was suffering from depression and was addicted to pain pills.

Judith Curren, age 42, was an obese woman who abused prescription drugs and was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, but her autopsy showed no illness. Shortly before her husband flew her to Kevorkian, she had reported him to the police for violent spouse abuse.

But these facts were barely reported and for years, he got away with it. Emboldened by his successes, feted by a fawning media — Andy Rooney declared Kevorkian a “nutty” but “courageous pioneer,” Time invited him to its 75th anniversary party, Larry King offered him repeated softball interviews — and convinced after several juries refused to convict him that he was above the law, Kevorkian implemented phase two of his plan. He assisted the suicide of a quadriplegic man named Joseph Tushkowski, age 45, and then removed his kidneys. After the mutilation Kevorkian called a macabre press conference, admitting his part in the deed and offering Tushkowski’s organs to the public: “First come, first served.”

Nothing came of it. The Tushkowski organ harvest created a brief furor, but it soon died down. Kevorkian had become old news. No Michigan prosecutor would file charges against him, even in the Tushkowski case, and stories about his assisted suicides were soon relegated to small mentions deep within the news pages.

Kevorkian was now essentially free to assist suicides to his heart’s content, but that did not make him happy. As he wrote in Prescription Medicide, assisting suicides had never been his goal. If he was ever going to be able to engage in obitiatry, he would have to push the envelope to the point that he could do the actual killing.

Kevorkian decided to graduate from assisted suicide to very public murder. If he could successfully defy the law against active killing, he would be close to achieving his goal. In late 1998, he videoed himself lethally injecting Thomas Youk, age 52, a man dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease, and took the tape to mega-reporter Mike Wallace, for airing on the always Kevorkian-friendly 60 Minutes.

But this turned out to be a step too far. Prosecuted by the man who, ironically, was elected on a promise to leave Kevorkian alone, the killer was convicted of murder and sentenced to prison. The presiding judge told him, “Consider yourself stopped.”

Kevorkian often threatened that if he were ever imprisoned, he would martyr himself for the cause in a hunger-strike protest. Instead, he lives on as a forgotten man, occasionally issuing pathetic requests for clemency.

It would be best for the country if Kevorkian’s imprisonment were the end of this stranger-than-fiction story. But now, clueless Hollywood seems intent on resurrecting the ridiculous myth of Jack the Valiant. How typical. How misguided. How wrong.

— Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, an attorney for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, and a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture. His updated Forced Exit: Euthanasia, Assisted Suicide, and the New Duty to Die will be released in February.

>The Logic of Sanctioned Bloodshed

>Blood on the Trail

Every society sheds blood. Modern societies shed heaps of it. It’s a bloody, bloody world. We do not say this with disgust or protest–although there is plenty to be disgusted about over modern bloodletting. We do not say this because we wish to protest the killing of any human being–although there is much ground for godly protest. Neither do we say it because we are squeamish.

We simply want to drive the point home that every human society sheds blood, some more than others. Once we have understood this, the discussion can move on to whose blood is being shed at any one time, and whether it is moral, ethical, or lawful.

Why does every society shed lots of blood? The answer, of course, lies in what led Cain to kill his brother. Hatred possessed Cain, leading him to murder Abel. Cain hated because his father’s sin had been imputed to him, and his nature was corrupted by evil. Every human being, descending from Adam by ordinary generation, bears the guilt of Adam’s sin and his sinful nature. Hatred of others is an inescapable component of our evil natures. Thus, all societies experience murder and bloodshed. Every society sheds blood.

But, murder aside, why do all human societies officially sanction the killing of human beings? And every society does, regardless of whether it finds it impolite to discuss at dinner parties. In every society there is blood on the trail. Officially sanctioned blood. Approved, endorsed, sanctioned, bloodletting. Every society has a particular version of the death penalty in one way, shape, or form. Every society endorses and promulgates officially the shedding of blood and the taking of life. These are inescapable realities–and the only question or debate is over whether the blood being shed ought to be innocent blood, or the blood of the murderer.

God alone has authority over life and death. Only God can command life and command death. But when sinful man rejects God and rebels against Him, a palace revolution always takes place. The palace is not left vacant. Rejecting God means that man is attempting a coup: man, the usurper, is setting himself up as the determiner of good and evil for himself. Man is setting himself up as a god. And it is the inevitable and inescapable nature of deity that it commands life and death.

So, when society as a whole officially rejects God it takes the power of life and death to itself. All unbelieving societies wield this power relentlessly–determining who will live and who will die.

But there is something else–something far more sinister and depraved. When Unbelief conducts its “palace coup” it also rejects the statutes and laws of God, and replaces them with its own determinations of good and evil. The inevitable result is that good now becomes an official evil, and evil becomes an official and sanctioned good. Consequently, not only are the non-guilty killed, but they are killed in endless seried ranks for no just reason. The bloodletting becomes a ceaseless aroma of sacrifice to man, the god who claims authority to command life and death.

Thus, abortion–the bloodshed of innocent and defenceless human beings–is without doubt a religious sacrifice at the altar of man-as-god. The state officially sanctions the right and authority of one human being to take the life of another, because the one is considered more human that the other. Man is exercising the prerogatives of his claims to deity, calling and determining life and death for himself, as it seems fit to him.

Another prerogative of deity is providence–that is, providing and caring for subjects and creatures. Thus, man’s palace coup against the Living God, leads him to take over the prerogatives of providence: he begins to determine who shall be cared for and who shall be left exposed to die. Thus, the Romans used to throw unwanted children on to the town rubbish dumps, withdrawing providential care, having determined that the child was not sufficiently worthy to be granted care. The law granted this prerogative and authority to Roman fathers.

In our day, the modern equivalent of death by exposure, by the withdrawal of providential care, takes place at the instigation of the “plan” by which the state and its agencies decree that those outside the “plan” are to left to die. The Daily Mail reported the following case:

Doctors left a premature baby to die because he was born two days too early, his devastated mother claimed yesterday.

Sarah Capewell begged them to save her tiny son, who was born just 21 weeks and five days into her pregnancy – almost four months early.

They ignored her pleas and allegedly told her they were following national guidelines that babies born before 22 weeks should not be given medical treatment.

Miss Capewell, 23, said doctors refused to even see her son Jayden, who lived for almost two hours without any medical support.

She said he was breathing unaided, had a strong heartbeat and was even moving his arms and legs, but medics refused to admit him to a special care baby unit. . . .

A midwife said he was breathing and had a strong heartbeat, and described him as a “little fighter”.

I kept asking for the doctors but the midwife said, “They won’t come and help, sweetie. Make the best of the time you have with him”.’

She cuddled her child and took precious photos of him, but he died in her arms less than two hours after his birth.

The great bureaucratic plan marshals (extorts) resources, determines for itself where the lines of inclusion and exclusion fall, then sheds innocent blood when a person is defined as being beyond the pale or the line for providential sustenance and care.

Unbelief is a bloodthirsty god; the streets of Athens are an open trench of sacrificial blood; it is a bloody and bloodthirsty city. It can be nothing else: it is the inevitable logical outcome when man demands the right to be a god, determining good and evil for himself.

There is blood on the trail. Lots of it. And there will be more. Unbelief has to have its altar of blood sacrifice.