East-Western Apocalypse: Israel in the Secular Image Trap

By Dr. Friedrich Hansen

Commentary by Julio Severo: Dr. Friedrich Hansen and I were in the recent pro-family conference in Moscow, and I am very glad that as a pro-life physician in Germany, he is also Christian who defends Israel! God has raised strategic Germans these days to confront lies against Israel. God bless Mr. Friedrich!

What connects Hamas with LGBT is the disproportionate visibility and media coverage of both which is due to the chock qualities of sexual transgression and terrorist aggression alike. Both lend themselves perfectly to our image-mad and scandal ridden media world. The road to success in the decadent West is paved with televised brutality (ISIS) and obscenity (LGBT).  Recent examples are the beheading of an American journalist by a British Muslim and the announcement of the first ever Gay Pride Parade in Gaza City. The latter was postponed at the nick of time yet the mass same-sex wedding ceremony under Hamas authority went ahead. In my attempt to explain the extraordinary sympathy of Western mainstream media with Hamas these two events are key for they are offering a particular line of argument. Not only queers are a product of Western decadent modernity spilling over to the traditionally minted Middle East but radical jihadists such as the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS and Hamas too. Think of the Hamburg cell that staged 9/11. The point is of Hegelian recognition for young adolescents, alienated by modernity and struggling with adulthood.

My intention is to give an intuitive explanation by turning to history and biblical philosophy. From there readily emerges the split between cultures of guilt and forgiveness on the one hand and those of shame and honor on the other. The first was historically introduced by Judaism and subsequently spread by the other monotheisms of Christianity and Islam. It is important to note here that the guilt culture is wedded to the audible sense and inward looking as opposed to the shame culture wedded to the eye and outward looking. This has important implications for the way religious Israelis and secular Palestinians conceive of themselves. 

The West now firmly in the grip of visual media and its deceptive images allows little patience for subtlety and reflection which is traditionally related to the ear, the voice and language — prime medium of religion, which also banned images. This sophisticated world is now being reduced to the 146 word Twitter standard chatting away aside the Moloch of international TV — a media mix seemingly by default biased toward demonization of the People of the Book a long forgotten label for the Jews. Images of destruction, child misery and war, arbitrarily wrought by Hamas in Gaza coalesce with the Western fancy for images in the short-lived pop culture. Any display of Hamas fighters would obliterate the magic of shame poured over Israel. And the alliance of liberal journalism and Hamas somehow managed to avoid those pictures.

The other news is that after centuries of punishment for sodomy we are now presented with images of same sex couples in Gaza, which is ample proof of the radical modernity of Hamas. The terror group might succeed as the tin opener for LGBT inroads to the Arab world. Hamas has chosen to jump on the powerful Western gender bandwagon that also happens to be prime agenda of the U.S. Department of State. Hamas and gays are both radical avant-gardist projects at the heart of Western liberalism aiming at obliterating religious Zionism as perhaps the last opposition to globalized liberal secularism. It was only a matter of time that they would close ranks and it was this what delivered to Hamas another media victory over Israel.

The media appeal of a Hamas-gay alliance is that it offers a re-enchantment, a mix of sex and violence, no matter how decadent and suicidal, to an utterly disenchanted modern West. Has anyone noticed that President Barack Obama's embrace of same sex marriage was in perfect harmony with his posturing against Israel? No wonder that addictive sodomites, called “bug catchers” for trying to catch as much STDs as possible, and addictive suicidal racists finally joined forces in the first Gay Pride Parade in the war zone of Gaza. This has been prefigured in the combined BDS-Turkish Islamist flotilla for Gaza that triggered the Mavi Marmara clash with the IDF. It is about to get a reboot soon. Both avant-gardist movements are heinous death cults who are bent to drawing many innocents with them into the abyss. Historically sexual inhibition and unrestrained violence are closely linked transgressions, notoriously so in the French and Nazi Revolutions. 

So what is the greater picture here with regard to the global clash between modernity and tradition that, unlike Huntington's prediction, is not fought between grand nations or cultures, but is fought asymmetrically informed by different religious backgrounds between desolate factions within modernity spilling over in the Middle East. Clearly Islamic culture is equally split between desolate neoconservatives such as Turkey, Qatar and Iran on one side and traditional societies such as Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Emirates, Jordan and Egypt. This seems to be the new divide in the Middle East and America seems to have sided with the desolate radicals. The Muslim Brotherhood, backed by Barack Obama recently is of the same kind that once perpetrated the Pearl Harbor assault: Japanese Kamikaze death squads. For not all cultures are equal. To believe the opposite is just extreme liberal hypocrisy. While Israelis serve God in life, the Palestinians claim to serve him in death, if only as a way to terrorize Israeli civil society.

This brings us to the link between biblical philosophy and modern science with regard to guilt versus shame culture provided by anthropologist Ruth Benedict. It was in Pearl Harbor at the sight of remorseless destruction that she re-discovered the difference between shame and guilt culture. Benedict explained why the Kamikaze pilots lacked any respect for the life of Americans. This same feature stand out with Hamas' attitude towards Israelis. In retaliation, American puritan culture respected life and attempted to limit the means of war even if they eventually succumbed to the Hiroshima Bomb that amounted to a sort of vengeance with mostly civilian casualties. Nevertheless, it saved tens of thousands of Americans by ending the war. In this sense Pearl Harbor and its replay at 9/11 explains why among Westerners only Americans overwhelmingly side in polls with Israel over Hamas.

Surely, the clash between guilt and shame culture has been actualized by Islamic suicide bombers in Israel and by Hamas heinous warfare indiscriminately firing Al Kassam rockets, with ever improving features, on Israeli civilians and using their own kin as hostages to protect their fighters. In addition, the terror group Hamas does not use its huge aid budget, supplied by the West, for the building of civilian infrastructure and shelters for the 1.8 million people in Gaza. Sources tell us that Palestinian civilians were not even allowed in the tunnels during Israeli air raids because this would expose the entries to the enemy. The crucial difference between guilt and shame culture is that the latter is prone to revenge fuelling endless bloodshed based on stubborn identity or honor issues. Only the former is able to achieve peace through compromise and a mechanism of repentance, forgiveness, change of mind and redemption. Thus the shame culture is a deprived state of the former that was always present underneath the latter since late antiquity. For centuries in Italy both have been close neighbors, represented by the Vatican and varieties of the mezzogiorno Mafia.

Now Hamas cynical exposure and sacrifice of civilians employs and manipulates the classical feature of the shame culture that is the scapegoat. For the scapegoat is the sacrificial transformation of guilt into shame. Hamas tactics are unprecedented and heinous because it is secretly sacrificing its own civilians by exposing them to Israeli fire and even hides their fighters behind them. This represents an unheard of transgression of the rules of warfare, relinquishing all limits between combatants and non-combatants. This means aggravating the war effect even against the fair intentions of the enemy - rendering any damage beyond his control. Thus Hamas invites the maximum damage on its own side abandoning responsibility and self-protection of their families. It can be called engineering of victim-hood which always reflects badly only on the enemy.

This existential inversion of the role of the scapegoat resembles the mechanism that Western liberals employed with their post WW II revisionism of the Shoah. In order to understand Hamas removal of protective boundaries and why therefore the German philosopher Martin Heidegger is somehow hovering over Gaza we need to turn to the concept of apocalypse.

Apocalypse in Greek means taking the lid off a pot or in other words dissolute boundaries. No doubt, transcending all limits has become the obsession of the post-modern West. For Christians the term signifies ultimate horror facing the day of reckoning, notoriously postponed or mediated by proxy as a the result of their “reform” of Judaism. This postponement of reckoning opened up vast windows of opportunity for transgression or if you wish sin, as the “holy sinner” Marquis de Sade was the first to exploit during the French Revolution. His more recent soul mate was the late Michel Foucault, the cardinal philosopher after Nietzsche with liberal Western academia and famously known as “The fucking Saint” in the gay community. 

Interestingly it was the free market economist Friedrich Hayek who immediately after the Nazi revolution astutely observed, I think it was in his “Road to Serfdom”, that whether the "apocalyptic lid" is taken off abruptly, as in a revolution or whether lifted gradually in a commercial way as in a free market society — the result could be pretty much the same: lowering the moral order and obliterating the family. Liberals are corrupting the moral order as efficiently as the fascists and to a lesser extent the communists did before them. It is irritating, to say the least, that the anti-Israel demonstrations are put up in the withering Christian West but not in orthodox Russia or in budding Christian Asia. This would suggests that the transformation of guilt into shame is at work more in liberal nihilism.

In this context, we might ask why both liberals and Hamas are obsessed with victim-hood? Well the answer is that attempts are under way with the help of the Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement to expand the rainbow coalition of minority groups on a global scale using the Israel-Hamas conflict as leverage. It amounts to a historical revision of the civilizational collapse still known as the Shoah. Here Martin Heidegger comes in who emphatically welcomed the collapse of Western civilization in 1929 at Davos. It happened at the dawn of Hitler's revolution and the “metaphysical lid” was among the philosophical issues of the controversy at Davos between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer. More in harmony with the Zeitgeist the soon to be Nazi philosopher Heidegger, undisputed as an outstanding thinker of the 20th century, won because he unreservedly voted for riddance of the repressive “lid”.

A few years later Hitler removed the lid and unleashed German furor into racial pogroms not least empowered by his same sex networks in Munich and Berlin that had cropped up during the Weimar Republic. Hitler himself, emphatically so during his adolescence — and like many of his comrades — was an active homosexual. This has been established by Lothar Machtan, historian at the University of Bremen, in his book “Hitlers Geheimnis (secret)”of 2001. The late Joachim Fest, more famous still as a historian, revealed in his voluminous biography on the "Führer" that until his last days Hitler had his bowels scoured by one of his many personal physicians. Sodomy and pederasty in pagan Nazi orders was much appreciated as stimulus for enhancing valour. The same is reported with Japanese soldiers favouring pre-combat heterosexual intercourse or rape with a frequency perhaps rivalled only by homosexual men (http://atimes.com/atimes/Korea/KOR-01-070814.html).

Men not moored in family life such as the SA and SS troopers, the Kamikaze or Jihads like Hamas and gay “holy sinners” live permanently “without a lid” and history has depicted them as extremely dangerous. Fittingly new medical research has revealed that they have considerable higher testosterone levels than family men (“The Future of the Family“, Tikvah Fund, New York seminary 15.7.14). Hamas terrorists, just like their Japanese predecessors, hit in their suicidal furor only about a fifth of their targets — with Kamikaze death pilots obliterating American ships and Hamas Kassam rockets targeting Israeli cities. The latter are mostly neutralized thanks to the Iron Dome.

The poor military performance of Japanese and Islamist death squads like ISIS and Hamas got compensated back then as now by a habit of brutal executions of traitors and decapitation of enemies in order to enhance their horrifying public media presence. This type of ritual murder is typical for the shame culture and is destined to become a re-import to radical pockets of desolates in the West. The shame culture incapable of forgiveness punishes misdeeds through bodily mutilation and exposure. Similarly, radical gay “Bug Catchers” are heroes of self- or mutual mutilation too. All of these are denying to themselves the blessings of human advancement toward a superior guilt culture that is capable of separating transgression from the person that committed it through repentance and forgiveness. Palestinian and rainbow identity politics are employing exactly the opposite rationale of melting transgression and personality to one inseparable identity or “honor” equally giving LGBT people and Hamas their schizoid edge — forever damned to dangle between irreconcilable "honor or shame”. The boastfulness of Hamas and the gay „bug catchers” priding themselves on emphatic transgression of limits is genuinely opposed to civil society because it knows not of remorse and atonement.

After all for both it is the whole point of being a transgressor, gay or Jihad, to melt a mere accidental habit into a personality trait in order to gain Hegelian recognition or honor. After all this is what identity politics is all about. Yet it is important not to overlook that it creates unstable personalities with weakened self-control — crying for government assistance and liberal tyranny. More importantly, it represents a regression from mature flexibility and tolerance toward radical stubbornness of “frozen adolescents”. It is for this reason that holy warriors and gender warriors tend to take offence easily and reject all compromise. For example Italy’s most famous philosopher Gian Vattimo, also from the Heidegger mold and openly gay, recently said on the radio, "he would like to personally kill Israelis and thinks Europeans should raise money “to buy Hamas some more rockets” (Haartez reported: http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.606698).

Yet it was not always like this, quite the opposite. For gay historiography about fascism kept trying to separate for the past what it wants to keep inseparable in the present: sodomy blown up as identity. Thus opportunist gay historians insist that the nasty habit of homosexual storm troopers and SA thugs was purely accidental and had nothing to do with politics and did not affect their personality (Alexander Zinn “Die Konstruktion Homosexueller Nazis”, 1997). Yet it is now completely forgotten that almost all liberal thinkers or left wing media in the 1930ies, many exiled from Germany, turned against gays because they blamed them for the rise of fascism. The heavy homosexual penetration of Röhm's SA, counting four million men in 1934, was all too visible through its open gay leadership. In addition the homosexual movement under the Nazis was the only “victim group”, powerful enough to actually challenge the dictator — still just another insane and failed rebellion that under normal circumstances would not entitle anyone to making claims on the consequences of their own stupidity. Would it have been more agreeable to have lived under a gay German dictator called Röhm?

It is precisely the opposite what LGBT activists want us to believe today in their new opportunistic turn to the powers that be, namely that gay emancipation requires maximum politicization and that to be gay matters a lot for the whole personality, in short that habit and person are inseparable. And yet just as binge drinking does not create a new species of human beings called alcoholics, so sodomy does not constitute a new ontological class called gays with all sorts of privileges. Gays and Palestinians have exactly the same human rights as everyone else, but no extra rights whatsoever. The abuse of human rights and the anti-discrimination industry has dried up Western cultural sensibilities toward anti-Semitism that once provided some semblance of security to the Jews.

The truth is however that addictive sodomy is a treatable condition just like drug and alcohol addiction or amenable through repentance and atonement. It is stunning that while we are living in a therapeutic society the only condition under the sun not amenable to therapy should be homosexuality (Phillip Rieff „The Triumph of the Therapeutic“). Among modern scholars who studied the metaphysical void of secular modernity was the French-Jewish sociologist Emile Durkheim who identified the result of the “removed lid”, i.e. the “yearning for infinitude”, as the main driver of male suicides, surging during rapid industrialization in Europe. In the 20th century, this morphed into the nihilism of pagan death cults with the axis powers: the Kamikaze, the genocidal SS and Turks and the Muslim Brotherhood.

The decapitation of pro-Islamic activist James Foley by a converted British Islamist and Hamas' celebration of same-sex marriage makes palpable a new converging Western-Islamist shame culture to be reckoned with, a culture driven by resentments, revenge and a lack of reason and compromise. This emerging coalition between radical liberals and Islamic jihadists is also reflected in the new Orwellian terms homophobe and islamophobe. They represent the seal of the revenge culture and inversion of the scapegoat again: anti-gays are denounced as disease stroke. For it was the removal of homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder in the 1970ies with a gay mob intimidating leading US psychiatrists that pushed the sexual revolution one screw further.

Fittingly the European commission, one of the main sponsors of LGBT and Hamas alike, has just ordered its member states to calculate their shadow economy. All activities like Mafia businesses, the sex- and porno-industries, contraband, people trafficking, illegal drug and weapon deals are to be reported to the EU central committee until 2016. Do not hold your breath, yes the idea is to dress up public depth and allow the ailing European economies to drop below the depth ceiling of 3% of output. The Guardian reported, based on Eurostat, illegal activities such as prostitution and drug trafficking could add about 1% to the GDP of Poland and Romania, 1%-2% of Italy, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Czech Republic, 2-3% of France, Germany and Belgium, 3%-4% of Austria, the Netherlands and the UK and as much as 5% to the GDP of Finland and Sweden (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/09/spain-prostitution-gdp-estimate). It seems the last resort for zero-growth Europe is to economically absorb the spoils of the shame and honor culture in order to “sex up” its balance sheet. Will anyone bother to register his business legally in the future? And will it now be counterproductive to carry on the war against drugs at all? Obviously not.

Liberal appeasement of Hamas

Hamas is determined to annihilate Israel, whereas Israel is simply trying to defend itself and to live. This unambiguous fact cannot be repeated often enough, as most recently explained by British Chief Rabbi Epharim Mirvis in the London Telegraph. Dead sure on 25th of July Hamas repeated what it has voiced many times in the past: “We will exterminate you [Jews], until the last one, and we will not leave even one of you.” Ephraim goes on: “In reality, one side is motivated to maximize civilian casualties and has an exterminatory agenda. The other side is motivated to protect its citizens from terror.” Hitler famously said with glee: “Guilt is an invention of the Jews.” Hamas could not agree more for they always get away without apologizing for any of their atrocities. To their merit, the Saudis recently blamed Hamas as responsible for their own civilian casualties. Yet this has been mostly ignored by the liberal media. They even stay mute to the fact that journalists who try to film Hamas in action or ask them questions get death threats. This is why we are spared pictures of Hamas warfare on Western TV.  

“Moral equivalence” extracted from Equality for Victims

To put it bluntly: moral equivalence emerges from a sentimental competition between victims in a shame and honor culture, not able to rise to a reasoned judgment informed by a superior guilt culture that was once the common heritage of the monotheist religions. The liberal commitment emerged after the Holocaust in a peaceable but ill-conceived attempt to create the motherboard of moral equivalence, victim “equality” between the Jews and the rest. Thus liberals have crowded out the moral high ground in the media with an agenda of a pantheist’ redistribution of victim claims. Liberal social engineering allocated a privileged place for the non-Jewish segment of the Semitic people to swerve the claim of anti-Semitism: the Palestinians represented by Hamas are the principal liberal fig leaf for the final stroke of the Enlightenment against religion in general and Judaism in particular. This is why the Palestinians are not allowed ever to give up their refugee status (http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/08/31/unrwa-is-a-hostile-organization-and-israel-should-treat-it-accordingly/#). Thus they became the great post-War exception of many millions of displaced people and refugees after WW II, including some 800 000 Jews expelled from Arab countries alone.

The first Gay Pride Parade in Gaza, of all places, is a crucial piece in the sinister propaganda war and meant to neutralize a poster child of Israel's liberal credentials. This is a major Hamas accomplishment over Abbas and Fatah. Clearly, Israel and the international community should ask LGBT advocates which side they are on. Would anyone think that something as superfluous as gay rights is what Palestinians would be yearning for in war torn Gaza? Even before Hamas' closing ranks with the aggressive gay culture aimed at destabilizing the secular Jewish state by denouncing Israel in typical shame-and-blame manner as “pink washing”. Think about the logic of this for a moment: Israel embraces the gay bandwagon in order to wash her hands and diluting guilt into shame?

The Russian emigrant Nathan Sharansky, presently head of the Jewish Agency, said recently: “I believe we are seeing the beginning of the end of Jewish history in Europe… For more than 12 years, rabbis and teachers in French schools have told Jewish children not to go out in the street wearing a kippah. That’s something that even Moscow and Kiev rabbis don’t say to children...” What has been pro-gay marches and Muslim youth riots in the Banlieu of Paris in recent years are fast becoming the new pogroms against Jews as the one recently seen at the Roquette Synagogue. Aggressive gays have meanwhile joined the anti-Israel protests in droves, such as seen recently in Chicago and London. Has anyone noticed that Western hate against Israel and Russia has coalesced recently. Revealingly Jews are again under attack in the West rather than East. Nevertheless, Benjamin Kerstein tells us: “It is a Pogrom undertaken by Muslims, Christians, atheists, and all those in between, all across the world”(http://www.thetower.org/article/the-global-pogrom/).

Now let us wrap up. History has taught us that if the Jews are expelled from Europe, as we have seen before in medieval Spain, 19th century Russia and 20th century Germany, this spells doom for the host countries. It just seems to confirm what we knew already: that the West is in decline. Yet what we are seeing is not only a shift of economic and cultural activity from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but also a re-alignment in the Middle East. Caroline Glick astutely observed that the West under its present liberal leadership, namely President Barack Obama seems to be irresistibly attracted by Hamas, Iran and Turkey, a predatory group, deranged by modernity, instigated by the Muslim Brotherhood and financed by Qatar. See also Jonathan Spyer's piece about Qatar's extraordinary rise (http://www.thetower.org/article/qatars-rise-and-americas-tortured-middle-east-policy/).

Coalitions are volatile in the Muslim world but there seems to be emerging a moderate, more conservative group cautiously siding with Israel, namely Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Column-One-Anti-Semitism-and-its-limitations-371172). This group potentially also includes Russia which as a leader of the emerging BRICS countries has recently aligned itself with Egypt. Now Israel is the only country in the Western hemisphere and the Middle East too with a sustainable demography and a healthy democracy. And it is thus perfectly poised to show other modern democracies where to set limits to the power of Western liberal tyranny by the way of taming the furor of the sexual revolution. And it has a strong incentive to do so because Hamas or LGBT galvanized by the Israel-Boycott alone cannot break the Jewish state, but if they join forces, they might succeed. Therefore Israel could reverse its presently poor international image by standing by religious Zionism and the Judeo-Christian culture of guilt and forgiveness.

Dr. Friedrich Hansen is a physician and writer. He has researched Islamic Enlightenment and Israeli history in Jerusalem and has networked on behalf of the Maimonides Prize. Previous journalistic and academic historical work in Germany, Britain published mostly online in the Brussels Journal, Asia Times in Hong Kong, On Line Opinion in Australia and Times of Israel. He is currently working in psychosomatic rehabilitation in Germany.

Source: Last Days Watchman

Recommended Reading:

The U.N. Year of Solidarity With the Palestinian Cause

Presbyterian Church USA Criticizes Israel, Ignores Christian Persecution

“Palestinian Messengers”: How Christ and Christians Are Used for the Palestinian Cause

Russian Media Trash Pro-Family Conference Held At The Kremlin

In all, about 1,000 delegates made the trip to Moscow to take part in the event.

B. Christopher Agee

While critics seemingly have an inexhaustible list of grievances against the nation, plenty of social conservatives are able to celebrate certain aspects of the Russian experience. This fact was evident during a recent conference held inside the Moscow Kremlin earlier this month.

As writer Julio Severo explained, the Sept. 10 forum featured speakers from around the world who agreed that sexual immorality has deeply damaged the family structure. Known as the Large Family and Future of Humanity Forum, 45 nations were represented – including Severo himself, who represented Brazil.

In all, about 1,000 delegates made the trip to Moscow to take part in the event.

The conference focused on several key issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage, and gay pride events, which participants felt have compromised traditional values in regions where such philosophies are prominent. Severo, however, noted that the host country is one place where a pro-family philosophy is still alive and well.

He wrote that “Russia represents hope for conservative fighters in a world increasingly corrupted by the Western debauchery of free sex, abortion imposition, comprehensive immoral sex education, population control [and] homosexual indoctrination via media and schools,” a view he said was shared by those who participated in last week’s forum.

According to Severo’s account, Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomed visitors to the conference with a personal message bemoaning the “erosion of moral values” across much of the globe.

Organizers of the event insisted their goals were only to protect “the natural family” and promoting advocacy “aimed at ensuring the integrity of human life from the moment of conception to natural death”; however, media within Russia and beyond have predictably labeled participants as bigots and hatemongers.

Traditional news outlets including the Moscow Times, for example, lambasted the event and its speakers – particularly Russian Parliamentarian Yelena Mizulina. During the forum, the conservative politician noted the exceptional openness her country has toward such events.

“I am sure that in contemporary Europe it would not be possible to hold a forum like this,” she said. “Even if they are held there, they are not hosted at the Kremlin, like in Russia, but somewhere on the outskirts.”

Plenty of other biased media properties, including Gay Star News, offered their own criticism of the event. The World Congress of Families, a group reportedly involved in putting the forum together, was recently targeted by Australians fighting to cancel a summit planned to take place in Melbourne.

Source: Western Journalism, via Julio Severo in English

Recommended Reading:

Kremlin Hosts International Meeting of Pro-Family Leaders and It is Accused by The Moscow Times of Throwing a Global Neo-Con Party

Learning from Russia's Return to Its Historical Roots

Main threat to U.S., Russia: Radical Islam, not each other

Exclusive: William Murray urges nations to work together 'before it's too late for civilization'

William Murray

The Russian Federation and the United States face an existential threat no less lethal than the two nations once faced from the Axis powers in World War II – a threat powered by an ideology that literally worships death, an ideology whose adherents literally love death more than the citizens of Russia and the United States love life itself. A threat consisting not of thousands or millions of those willing to die to bring about its final victory and domination over the world – but rather hundreds of millions.

This threat is not new. The first foreign war fought by the United States shortly after its founding was against just one element of this threat. One battle in that war is immortalized in the Marine Corps’ “Marines’ Hymn.”

For more than a millennium, raiding parties kidnapped women for polygamous marriages to support this enemy of civilization from as far north as Ireland and up the Volga River. The adherents of this ideology pirated ships and took American sailors as slaves, and invaded Slavic and Germanic lands several times. Even the Vatican was sacked to finance the terror of the onslaught of this ideology.

Today, this common enemy, believing that every word of a sixth-century warlord is the literal word of God, is massively armed with modern weapons of warfare. The bulk of these weapons are supplied by Western powers as were the cannons that brought down the walls of Constantinople in the 15th century.

During the last century, this threat has entered a new phase as civilians in Russia and the United States are slaughtered in sophisticated acts of terror including bombings of trains, planes, apartment buildings, schools and public squares. Russian children were slaughtered at Beslan, and American kindergarteners killed at the World Trade Center.

Astonishingly, these two great nations, Russia and the United States, have addressed this modern existential threat by supplying even more weapons to various elements of it. As recently as 2012 the United States was training and arming “moderate” elements of what is now the Islamic State. As entire nations cease to exist and become havens for jihadist training – such as in the case of Libya – Russia and the United States focus their attention on defending their nations from each other.

What happens when you’re raised by America’s most famous atheist? Read William Murray’s riveting and redemptive book, “My Life Without God”

As English and Russian speaking jihadists fighters behead young Christian boys, rape young Christian girls and use the heads of their victims as soccer balls, American spy planes and Russian Bear bombers test each other’s defenses.

Rather than stripping nuclear weapons from the dysfunctional Islamic government of Pakistan, which kills its Christian citizens for crimes of blasphemy against Islam, that nation receives even more American weapons, as Russia continues to arm Iran.

Let’s start with this one simple goal that both nations should be able to agree on – save the single most persecuted group of people in the world today – the Christians under Islamic rule.

Let’s start with compassion.

The Russian Federation can make a first move by opening its doors to some of the tens of thousands of Iraqi Christians whose homes and churches have been destroyed.

The first appearance of Jesus Christ after his Ascension was on the Road to Damascus. There he stopped Saul on his mission to Damascus to persecute and kill Christians.

America can also make a move to help the Christians of Syria by simply stopping the supply of weapons to the Saudi mercenaries who are using that same road Jesus stopped Saul on, to travel to Damascus to kill Christians.

The greatest common cause of Russia and the United States today, the greatest threat, the existential threat, is being ignored.

Yet, this existential threat cannot be whisked away with political correctness or by pretending that an ideology of hatred is peaceful.

This ideology gave the Christians of the Middle East who are fleeing the same three options it offers the Jews of Israel, the Christians of Russia and the secularists of the United States:

Convert, be enslaved or die.

But, for Russia and the United States there is still a fourth option that no longer exists for over one-third of the world – VICTORY.

That fourth choice cannot come about without true American and Russian mutual trust and cooperation.

Let’s at least examine that fourth choice before it is too late for civilization.

Note: William J. Murray is also the director of the Christmas for Refugees program, which provides Christmas dinners for Christian refugee children from Iraq and Syria each year. The program also supplies direct aid to Christian families year round.

Source: WND, via Julio Severo in English

Other articles by William Murray:

Religious Freedom Advocate: Saudi royal family will not allow Obama to defeat Sunni ISIL militants

Why do we hate Putin more than Islamic terrorists?

Learning from Russia's Return to Its Historical Roots

By Janice Shaw Crouse

Having swept all before them in the aimless societies of the west, the LGBTIQ crowd is in a howling fury with Russia’s pro-family movement for its refusal to capitulate to their gay marriage agenda. They are calling for federal investigations of Americans participating in what should have been a non-controversial international pro-family celebration, honoring an institution that has been the backbone of virtually all societies throughout thousands of years of history. The International Family Forum, convening in Moscow on September 10 at the State Kremlin Palace and continuing September 11 at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, drew more than 1,000 participants from around the world (including about a dozen individuals from the United States).

Many Western nations have kowtowed to the pressures of the LGBTIQ movement that seeks to destroy freedom of speech, religious liberty, marriage and the family. Emboldened by their political victories in the United States (more often than not at the hands of unelected judges), the protesters made global headlines by trying to shut down the World Congress of Families’ pro-family celebration in Australia. They succeeded in preventing American organizations -- especially the World Congress of Families -- from participating in the just-completed International Family Forum in Moscow; they threw up barriers and threatened retribution, but they could not shut down either the Australian or the Russian events. The most they could do was demand there be investigations of the American individuals who helped plan the Russian conference, but they could not stop free citizens from participating on their own.

The Russian forum in its “General Concept” preface succinctly identified the harms caused by the “sensate culture” (a term from Pitirim Sorokin, a famous Russian sociologist who knew well the deleterious effects of a man-centered, atheistic worldview), a modern-day post-Christian dimension in world history: “the destruction of moral standards such as Goodness, Truth, and Beauty and destruction of faith in a Created natural order that distinguishes good from evil.” Such attitudes -- “this modern-day ambiguity, relativity, and indeterminacy regarding family” -- “creates the threat to the civilized existence of societies.” The Russians declare that “it is high time to talk not only about the role of the family institution in the retention of humanity as a biological species but also about the vital role of [the] natural family in the preservation of civilized society and “ordered liberty.”  This transformation is “crucially important especially given the millennial battle between civil society and barbarism, where the latter appears in a highly technological and disguised progressive form contributing to the increasing moral chaos.”

The Russians, having experienced 70 years of the horrors and “moral chaos” brought about by the Marxist-Leninist experiment at creating the "New Man," are not about to give up their hard-won grip on reality, regained by going back to their historic Orthodox roots. Their clear unswerving vision of their recent past under Communism enables them to see progressivism as “a new tool of secular, post-modern humanists and sexual radicals to pursue not only their economic interests, but also, ideological, philosophical and political interests.”  Russian pro-family leaders recognize that the threats to “the meaning of family in the context of global ideological competition from self-interested post-modern humanists and challenges to the ensure the survival and sovereignty of modern states grows to such an extent that the protection of the classical notions of normative behavior, civilized man, the human family, and definition of marriage have to be enshrined in national constitutions.” Whatever critiques of Putin’s foreign policy you may have, the pro-family movement in Russia is a genuine and deep phenomenon, unrelated to foreign affairs.

Intellectual dry rot has made western intellectuals susceptible to every foolish fad -- neo-Marxism, feminism, genderism, humanism, environmentalism, etc. -- that has resulted from deconstructionism. Nowhere is this more evident than their inability to discern simple biological realities such as the difference between male and female. As the Russians noted, “Only precise and univalent definitions may permit us to understand that behind the fuzzy expectations of modern humanism and its jargon, there hides traits of degradation and deception that would lead to the death of humanity.” Such thinking, of course, is scorned by the elites who have produced our distorted Western intellectual condition.

Having chosen the mush of moral relativism and multiculturalism over the sterner more rigorous and demanding Judeo-Christian worldview, the leaders in the great universities, the media with the vast array of communications technology at its disposal, the business and government leaders of the western world from Washington to London to Paris to Frankfurt to Vienna, all have been easily swayed and finally subjugated by first one movement and then another –– including feminism's flimsy claims that men and women are interchangeable, the LGBTIQ's claims that gender is a social construct and thus we must give up everything from traditional/real-world designation of male and female bathrooms to father and mother on birth certificates.

We in the west have read a bit of Russian history, but know little of what is embedded in the DNA of the Russians from the first-hand experiences of generation after generation of those who struggled to survive one tragedy after another. Napoleon’s half a million strong army was able to reach Moscow but was turned back in defeat by the realities of the flames that consumed the city and the deadly cold of the Russian winter. Hitler learned nothing from Napoleon's folly. He had no comprehension of how tenaciously the Russians would defend their Motherland no matter how many millions of them he managed to kill with advanced German weaponry.

Now come Obama, Kerry, Clinton and the rest of the LGBTIQ's claque who bluster, sanction, and slander pro-family Russian leaders; these, however, are persons who see and understand the real threat to their homeland of the depopulation and demographic winter that follow when there is a failure of natural families to flourish. Now come the Human Rights Campaign and those who demonize and demagogue anyone who dares to speak Truth to power on these fundamental issues.

Meanwhile, the radical Islamist jihadist have taken the measure of the decadent West with its vast technological superiority (but moral and spiritual bankruptcy) and have decided they can with beat us with suicide bombers. And as long as we are led by thinkers who not only fail to recognize the importance of (but actively fight against) something as elementary and fundamental as the necessity to a society of having the foundational strength of families lead by a mothers and fathers, then perhaps the jihadist are right.

What western elites refuse to comprehend, the Russian cab driver taking us to the airport effortlessly grasps, (from practical, real-life experience), namely the importance of family and fidelity. We conversed even though his English was a faltering, rusty, classroom level of vocabulary. In response to my question about family, he told us that he had two children – a boy 21 and a girl 3 years old. Then, apparently in recognition that we were Americans, he wanted to make it very clear that he was married, had had only one wife -- had loved only one woman -- even though he “made” his son when he was only a lad of 17. Family was obviously very important to him as a man and he wanted it clearly understood that he was faithful to his vows to his wife.

Today, after 80 years of the horrors of life under communism, Russia is working to restore family and Orthodoxy as the foundations of its culture and the means of its survival as a nation. Meanwhile, it remains to be seen how much stomach the west has left for a fight for survival. Perhaps we will simply, once again, capitulate to Jihadism just as we have to LGBTIQism and so many other hollow “isms.” But if after witnessing the miracle of Russia's unblinking repudiation of the blight and sorrows of its own Marxist experiment, I wouldn't bet on the Russians capitulating to western LGBTIQ fascists without a fight.

Janice Shaw Crouse, Ph.D., was winner of the 2013 Global Leadership Award by the Leadership Institute and The World Congress of Families. She was one of about a dozen American participants in the International Family Forum in Moscow, September 10-11, 2014.

Source: American Thinker, via Julio Severo in English

Recommended Reading:

Kremlin Hosts International Meeting of Pro-Family Leaders and It is Accused by The Moscow Times of Throwing a Global Neo-Con Party

Kremlin Hosts International Meeting of Pro-Family Leaders and It is Accused by The Moscow Times of Throwing a Global Neo-Con Party

By Julio Severo 

In choosing conservative values and spearheading their defense in the United Nations, Russia represents hope for conservative fighters in a world increasingly corrupted by the Western debauchery of free sex, abortion imposition, comprehensive immoral sex education, population control, homosexual indoctrination via media and schools, participants of a forum agreed in September 10 in Moscow, Russia.

Julio Severo and Don Feder in the Kremlin

The Large Family and Future of Humanity Forum (LFFH Forum) opened inside the Kremlin, bringing together conservative politicians and activists from 45 countries, especially the U.S. This kind of event, especially in its international format as has been made by the World Congress of Families, was an original idea of Anatoly Antonov and Allan Carlson. In a dinner near of an old KGB headquarters, Antonov told me that he had been tortured by KGB and sent to the Gulag in the 1960s. He was then a 19-year-old dissident of the Soviet tyranny. Today he is a philosopher and professor in the Lomonosov Moscow State University.

Participants at the LFFH Forum lashed out against abortion, homosexual “marriage” and gay pride parades as threats to traditional values.

According to a LifeSiteNews report, Patriarch Kirill, the Russian Orthodox leader of Moscow, commenced the meeting with a strong endorsement of the family. Metropolitan Hilarion, the head of external relations for the Russian Orthodox, noted the repression against those who stand up for marriage, giving France as an example. He called attention to Europe’s “profound demographic crisis” and lamented that “legalized murder — abortion — is being permitted en masse and nobody says anything.”

Rabbi Berel Lazar, the Chief Rabbi of Russia, said that in the West there has appeared a “strange way of life” rejecting children. “Thank God this is not acceptable in Russia today,” he added.

Rabbi Berel Lazar, the Chief Rabbi of Russia

Remembering that the first law God gave to mankind was to “go forth and multiply,” Rabbi Lazar said, “We need natural families, with a father and mother and a large number of children.”

The president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Family, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, addressed the forum by video. He called the family a “cornerstone” of society rather than merely a building block and warned that there are many laws today weakening the family.

President Vladimir Putin sent a greeting to participants via an official from his administration. In his message, Putin spoke about the “large-scale demographic crisis” that civilization faces and “the erosion of moral values” around the world.

Yet, the largest English-language newspaper in Russia, the Moscow Times, lashed out at the Russian and international conservatives, saying that the Russian speakers were “corrupt” and attacking Yelena Mizulina, a conservative State Duma lawmaker who has championed laws banning the adoption of Russian orphans by American homosexuals and banning the promotion of homosexual propaganda to children and adolescents.

Mizulina has been specially targeted by the U.S. and EU sanctions against Russia over Ukraine.

“I am sure that in contemporary Europe it would not be possible to hold a forum like this,” Mizulina told the audience. “Even if they are held there, they are not hosted at the Kremlin, like in Russia, but somewhere on the outskirts,” she said.

The international pro-family leaders praised Russia’s role in defending moral and traditional values.

These leaders included:

Larry Jacobs (U.S.), a famous pro-family leader and member of the Assemblies of God. Jacobs defended pro-family values and attacked socialism. Reportedly, the Human Rights Campaign asked the Obama State Department to investigate Jacobs and his attendance to the Kremlin pro-family event. The Human Rights Campaign is the largest homosexual militant group in the U.S.

Don Feder, an American-Jewish pro-family leader, also attacked socialism and defended traditional values. He told me that he would never have expected such meeting in the Kremlin.

Austin Ruse (U.S.), president of Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute.

Babette Francis (Australia), Endeavour Forum.

Ignacio Arsuaga (Spain), president of HazteOir.org

Sharon Slater (U.S.), president of Family Watch International. From Moscow, Slater went directly to Geneva, where a UN measure to erode parental rights promotes more sexual freedom to children. According to Slater, Russia was sponsoring a measure to defeat this UN intent. She has produced the excellent documentary “Sexual Imperialism.”

Peter Westmore (Australia), president of the National Civic Council.

Jack Hanick (U.S.), ex-Fox News director.

Steve Weber (U.S.), regional director of the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) for Russia and Ukraine.

Christine Vollmer (Venezuela), president of the Latin American Alliance for the Life.

John-Henry Westen (Canada), editor-in-chief of LifeSiteNews.

Keith Mason (U.S.), president of Personhood USA.

Brian Brown (U.S.), president of National Organization for Marriage.

And many others.

Among the international pro-family leaders, there were evangelicals, Catholics and Mormons. About 1,000 delegates came from all over the world, including over 200 from the West.

The Gay Star News, a U.S.-based homosexual website, had the headline: “Moscow Large Families conference drafts resolution calling for global ban on ‘gay propaganda.’”

The leftist group People for the American Way and its Right Wing Watch also attacked the Moscow event with the headline: “Moscow Forum Attended By American Activists Ends With Call For More 'Gay Propaganda' Bans.” This is the same group that attacked me, Julio Severo, recently.

In contrast, the Manila Times, the largest newspaper in the Philippines, had a brighter headline: “A moral revolution in Russia.” The article said,

“Despite geopolitical problems in a number of fronts, Russia has tried to steal a march on the West in the area of family life and marriage, which have increasingly become major global concerns. Officially atheist from the 1917 revolution that created the Soviet Union until the end of the Cold War in 1991, Russia is now trying to lead the revival of Christian values in Europe by defending the natural family from the global ‘homosexual lobby.’”

Our pro-life meeting in an Orthodox church in Moscow

The final statement of the Moscow event said:

An Urgent APPEAL
To the Nations of the World

To all people of goodwill in the everywhere: To leaders of all faiths, To the architects of public opinion, To those at the helm of professional, women’s and youth organizations, To the UN General Assembly, To the heads of state and legislative bodies and To the mass media.

 We, the Participants of the Moscow International Forum “Large Family and Future of Humanity” (September 10-11, 2014), express our profound concern because certain countries are pursuing  tenacious policies and an unprecedented propaganda campaign, all of which is leading to the ultimate destruction of the Natural Family − an institution that in a civilized society is the foundation of order, state’s prosperity and social peace. 

The preservation of mankind is based on a system of family and kindred ties that are formed through the bonds of marriage between a male and a female and the children born to them.  This and only this alone, is capable of ensuring the reproduction, stability and continuity of human civilization. All other kinds of sexual relationships or alliances intentionally that exclude the birth of children are meaningless for they are devoid of the notion set down in the very definition of the word “family.” And no political or economic interests can serve as a pretext for replacing the true and time-tested concept of “family” by any kind of surrogate…

We appeal to all people who acknowledge the significance and values of the Natural Family for preserving human civilization:

·        To unite before the threat of total dehumanization of society, to set up a barrier on the road of ideology-lined, state-supported interference in the private lives of people, in an attempt to foist specific sexual lifestyles and preferences of the minority upon the majority;

·        To strive to set forth legislative initiatives in the laws and constitutions of all countries that clearly define the naturally predetermined relationships in the Family as relationships between the male and female, their children and their relatives;

·        To advocate and support the Natural Family as the sole source of preserving the civilization, the life of Mankind;

·        To make use of all thematic international Days (…protection of children, the family, etc.) whose slogans and mottos refer to traditional values, for demonstrating their disagreement with and dissent for State-supported destructive tendencies in the sex and family life, especially of the young people, and consolidating the understanding of a Natural Family as the foundation of human life at the level of the individual, society, state and civilization;

·        To oppose the cynical utilization of women as surrogate mothers in the interests of same-gender liaisons and alliances;

·        To uphold the interests of children and to work for the adoption of legislative bans on all types propaganda concerning homosexual relationships in the environment of children and juveniles;

·        To initiate and support scientific research to study the conditions  and prospects of developing a Natural Family, as well as studying the negative social and psychological effects of raising children in same-gender couples;

·        To support public efforts aimed at ensuring integrity of human life from the moment of conception to natural death, to protect children from influences taken against their individuality, and to uphold the child-rearing rights of parents – both father’s and mother’s;

·        To demand initiatives and directives from the governments and heads of state to ensure protection of the natural family, childhood, and motherhood in both, domestic and foreign policies.

We  urgently call upon the UN General Assembly, the UN Secretary General and the UN Supreme Commissioner for Human Rights that, while formulating the programs of the United Nations, to follow the letter and the spirit of Article 16 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which underscores the understanding of the Human Family as the only possible and acceptable notion to human civilization, and to proclaim in the foreseeable future a Special Year or Program in support of the Natural Family.

We call upon all people who agree with the given Appeal to sign it and support it for the sake of preserving life and civilization on our Earth.

But this noble motivation was not enough for enemies, among gay activists and socialists in the U.S. and among radicals in Russia.

Steve Weber of CBN and Julio Severo

The Moscow Times’ accusation that we were “Global Neo-Cons” intended to portray us as “neo-conservatives” who, according to Michael Savage in his WND column, have no relation to real conservatives. Savage said,

“The neocons, first in the form of the Trilateral Commission and more recently as the Carlyle Group, thrive on military conflict. When the world is at war, the neocons and the defense contractors who work with them make enormous amounts of money. The neocons don’t care which side you’re on, as long as they can work with you to create a political situation that they can grow into a war from which they will profit.”

Even though The Moscow Times tried to depict us as “inciters of wars,” Savage shows the example of Ukraine, whose intense crisis was not provoked by any of the international pro-life leaders in the Kremlin. He said,

“The Ukrainian ‘revolution’ was fostered and encouraged by Victoria Nuland, Susan Rice and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. These three were instrumental in staging a destabilization campaign. Working with Ukrainian neo-Nazis, they fostered the Ukrainian uprising.” Neocons, according to Savage, are avidly fighting for U.S. geopolitical expansion in Ukraine.

Kayla, a very beautiful American Mormon blonde young woman in the Moscow event, told me that she was a missionary to Crimea before the Russian annexation. She said that she learnt Russian in Crimea because everybody there speaks Russian. She was in the event representing pro-life Mormons in the U.S.

Neocons, who work to promote the supremacy of U.S. geopolitical interests, including the gay supremacy that is now top priority in the U.S. foreign policy, are no friends of American pro-family leaders and international pro-family leaders like me. So The Moscow Times’ accusation is plainly silly.

These geopolitical interests provoke confusion among some leaders.

Before my trip to Moscow, I consulted some pro-life leaders in Brazil and they were “sure” that the pro-life meeting in the Kremlin was a “Putin’s strategy to dominate the worldwide pro-life movement.” With this view, making us “Putin’s puppets,” I was afraid to go. But my friend Scott Lively, who knows Russia very well, assured me that I should go.

No international group gave more support to Russian pro-life leaders than Americans did. But even they suffered the same dilemmas and worries I did, being discouraged by other Americans intent on rejecting Russian pro-life efforts as just political maneuvers. Yet, when dealing with politics, every politician (whether Russian or Brazilian or American) uses us, and we should equally “use” them for pro-family objectives.

The pressure on us came from West and East. If in the West we faced being labeled “Putin’s puppets,” the Russian press treated us just as puppets of Obama and his neocon comrades.

Both charges are false, of course, because our motivation is to defend family values and life. While Russia keeps fighting the homosexual agenda in its own nation and at the United Nations, we international pro-family leaders will help Russia. If Russia backtracks in its pro-family stances, we will support any other nation, big or small, willing to defend the family against the international anti-family onslaught massively funded by Western organizations, foundations, institutions and nations.

If we had any resemblance to neocons, this massive funding, especially from George Soros, would be available to us too. Rather, our funding is often dependent on small and humble donations.

Thanks to my readers and supporters, I was able to represent Brazil in this historic pro-family event in the Kremlin. People from Brazil, the U.S., Romania, Guatemala and Bolivia sent me enough donations to allow me to attend this event. So by their support, I represented also, in a certain measure, these nations.

My gratitude also to Alexey Komov and all the other Russian pro-family leaders who took care of us in Moscow and to Monica Reissenweber for my short stay in a hotel in Frankfurt, Germany.

With information of The Moscow Times and LifeSiteNews.

Portuguese version of this article: Kremlin realiza encontro internacional de líderes pró-família e é acusado pelo jornal The Moscow Times de fazer a festa dos “neocons” do mundo inteiro

Source: Last Days Watchman

Recommended Reading:

Russia Bans Profanity — Why Don’t We?

In defense of Russia’s law on homosexual propaganda

Putin’s Olympic Controversy

People for the American Way’s Leftist Diatribe Against a Brazilian Conservative