A “high value ISIS target” believed to be Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been killed by U.S.-led forces in Idlib, Syria, a well-placed military source told Fox News on Saturday night.
The U.S. military cannot yet confirm the identity of the deceased target.
But at 9:23 p.m. Saturday, President Trump posted a Twitter message hinting at “very big” news.
Soon after, the White House issued a statement that major news would be announced from the White House at 9 a.m. Sunday.
Newsweek reported late Saturday that Baghdadi was killed during a special operations mission that President Trump approved about a week ago.
In September, an audio recording purportedly by Baghdadi included a call for members of the extremist group to use any means necessary to free Muslims who were being detained “by Crusaders and their Shiite followers.”
The U.S. had reportedly posted a bounty of $25 million for information leading to the capture of Baghdadi.
We got our money’s worth, apparently.
Update: @Newsweek can report Baghdadi’s two wives killed in operation. Children were not harmed. A small firefight broke out when U.S. Special Operations arrived. BaghdadI detonated a suicide vest when he could not escape. This article is updating. #Syriahttps://t.co/Fpr1dOSWBV
A stunning finding about American Jews polled in the U.S. on the threat of antisemitism: more Jews believe that the “extreme political right” poses a bigger threat than Islamic “extremism,” according to an American Jewish Committee (AJC) poll:
Almost 90 percent of Jews who responded said that the extreme political right presents an anti-Semitic threat. Less, though, said the same about “extremism in the name of Islam” — only 85 percent said it represents an anti-Semitic threat in the United States.
This despite the fact that Islamic antisemitism has had a huge impact, all the way up to Congress. Even a Washington Post article identified Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar as open antisemites. Their partnership with “vicious antisemites” who also aim to destroy Israel is well known.
In reality, there is no organized “extreme political right” today. The entire Palestinian resistance is based on obliterating Israel “from the river to the sea,” and the movement has managed to gain worrying traction over the decades, a movement which began in 1948 among surrounding Arab nations, as the Jewish state declared its nationhood. Yet still denial prevails.
Why this paranoid fear of the “extreme political right”?
Start here: American Jews are overwhelmingly Democrats. For example, in 2016, Jewish voters chose Hillary Clinton (71%) by more than a 2-to-1 margin over Donald Trump (23%). This leftist tendency among Jews has long been remarked. Despite their higher-than-average incomes, Jews continue to vote as if they were impoverished immigrants. “Jews earn like Episcopalians, and vote like Puerto Ricans,” Milton Himmelfarb said. The cultural roots of this political bias were examined in Norman Podhoretz’s 2009 book, Why Are Jews Liberals? My conservative Jewish friends are often exasperated by this tendency among their fellow tribesmen, particularly because of a circular logic that the Jewish-Democrat alliance often employs: Whatever cause is currently supported by Democrats must “good for the Jews,” and therefore Republican opponents are motivated by anti-Semitism. This tautology has been employed for decades, and arguably originated with the Communist Party during the “Popular Front” era of the 1930s. Because Republicans were generally opposed to U.S. intervention in Europe, this was portrayed by the Communists (and their various front groups) as indicative of pro-Nazi sympathies in the GOP. This libel persisted even after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, whereby Stalin formed an alliance with Hitler to carve up Poland between them, a cynical agreement that should have permanently disillusioned anyone who ever imagined the Soviet Union represented a “progressive” ideal (e.g., “the right side of history”).
After World War II, when it became apparent that Communist infiltration was a national security threat, Communists responded with a propaganda campaign smearing their antagonists as “fascists” motivated by anti-Semitism. This propaganda yielded a distortion that has warped the teaching of Cold War history. Even though Stalin was, in the final years of his dictatorship, engaged in anti-Semitic purges in the Soviet Union, and even though many Jews (including ex-Communists) were active in the anti-Communist cause, nevertheless “McCarthyism” is portrayed as anti-Semitic. A simplistic formula seems to have taken root among liberal Jews: Because the Nazis were a “right-wing” phenomenon, therefore all right-wingers were Nazis and, by logical obverse, all left-wing movements were good for the Jews. This formula of pas d’ennemis à gauche (“No enemies to the Left”) was more or less explicitly codified in Herbert Marcuse’s 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance.”
The Republican Party has never been able to undo the damage of this old Communist libel, in part because I don’t think most Republicans have ever studied the problem in depth, but mainly because of the general incompetence of Republicans when it comes to cultural politics. The mythology of Republicans-as-Nazis has by now become so deeply embedded in liberal Jewish culture that we are shocked by any Jew who forthrightly rejects it. And this myth is inescapably intertwined with a specifically Jewish form of “social justice” ideology, expressed by the Hebrew phrase tikkun olam (“repairing the world”). Without presuming to write a thesis on this subject, I’ll just say that tikkun olam seems to result in a stark binary division of mankind into two groups: On the one hand are the oppressors and on the other, the victims of oppression. White people oppress black people (“racism”), men oppress women (“sexism”), straight people oppress gay people (“homophobia”) and so forth, with no uncertainty as to the pervasive nature of oppression as the most meaningful fact of human existence. From this uncritical belief stems a tendency to view any social or political conflict as the result of oppression; merely figure out which side of the conflict represents victimhood, and you thereby know which side to support, with their opponents being automatically demonized as oppressors.
This is how, since 9/11, so many left-wing Jews have embraced the idea that “Islamophobia” is a worse danger than Islamic terrorism. Because “Islamophobia” is believed to inspire people to vote Republican, therefore Muslims are sympathetic victims of oppression, and never mind how often Islamic leaders express their hatred of Jews. According to the “social justice” mythology embraced by left-wing Jews, everything must be done to oppose the Republican/Nazi menace, even if that means supporting Jew-haters like Ilhan Omar. Thus, “social justice” becomes an ideology of mass suicide, like the Jonestown cult.
Paranoid fantasies about the “extreme political right” as the all-purpose bogeyman encourage the left-wing Jew to ignore any possibility that there are dangers far worse — and far more numerous — than a comparative handful of neo-Nazi kooks. And as with other identity-politics beliefs, one finds that it is impossible to persuade such people by rational argument. Because the appeal of this mythology is essentially emotional, no amount of facts or logic can suffice to refute it.
The Amazon Synod has been full of scandal. It started when the opening ceremony in the Vatican garden was full of earth worship and what appeared to be idol worship happening right in front of the pope with his blessing. One doesn’t have to be an art major to recognize ancient fertility goddesses.
The ensuing outrage that occurred among traditional Catholics went unanswered by Rome. In the face of this silence, unidentified Catholics took matters into their own hands and walked into the church next to St. Peter’s where the images were displayed and removed them and threw them into the Tiber.
This is exactly what the prelates who refused to explain themselves to the faithful deserved. The responses given to questions about the idols were completely incoherent. . . .
Pachamama, or Mother Earth is a pagan idol. Period. There is no argument otherwise. It is the same fertility goddess to which ancient cultures sacrificed children. . . .
The Catholic Church has been thrown into a state of total confusion since Pope Francis ascended to the seat of St. Peter. His silence and the silence of Church leaders and crucial issues of the faith have created chaos and division between the left-wing and traditional Catholics. George Neumayer wrote a terrific opinion piece in The Spectator that is a must-read relating to these issues.
Because I’m not Catholic, I don’t pay much attention to such things, but Pope Francis is obviously so left-leaning as to be promoting the crypto-Marxist heresy of “Liberation Theology.” That the Vatican is now also promoting pagan fertility goddesses is scarcely surprising.
Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar filed for divorce Friday, just over a month after she denied to a local TV reporter that she was separated.
Omar sat for an on-camera interview with WCCO reporter Esme Murphy on Aug. 27, who asked “Are you separated from your husband? Are you dating someone?”
Omar replied: “No, I am not. And like I said yesterday, I have no interest in allowing the conversation about my personal life to continue.”
The question came the same day that the wife of Tim Mynett, her campaign consultant, filed for divorce in Washington, D.C., saying that Mynett told her he was having an affair with the congresswoman and was leaving her for Omar.
Five weeks later, Omar filed for divorce from her husband, Ahmed Hirsi, in Minnesota.
An anonymous source told the New York Post in early September that Hirsi and Omar had allegedly been living apart since March.
In the interview with Murphy, Omar also declined to answer questions about her brief marriage to another man, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, which occurred while she already had children with Hirsi and while she allegedly continued to live with Hirsi, according to public records. . . .
In 2015, Minnesota blogs began publishing extensive Instagram and Facebook posts by Omar, her family and her alleged family that indicate Ahmed Nur Said is her brother, but the posts were deleted.
Every word Ilhan Omar says is a lie. She is pervasively dishonest, which of course is why she’s a Democrat.
According to a 2018 gathering of exorcists at the Pontifical University of Regina Apostolorum in Rome, the number of requests for exorcisms has tripled over the past decade to about 500,000.
While exorcisms are considered the preserve of the Roman Catholic Church, in recent times there has been a growing interest in Protestant circles over the practice.
In May, the Roman Catholic Church announced that they were opening up their annual exorcism course at the Pontifical University to major Christian denominations, in response to a reported rise in demonic possessions.
A non-profit is fighting back against a lawsuit from the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which has forced its closure and shut down its crowdfunding platform. Arthur Goldberg has been a target of SPLC since 2012. He and non-profits with which he is affiliated have been sued twice, once as the co-director of Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH) — which offered counseling for those struggling with unwanted same-sex attraction — and most recently as co-director of Jewish Institute for Global Awareness (JIFGA), the parent organization for Funding Morality.
On Thursday, Hudson County, New Jersey Superior Court Judge Peter Bariso, Jr. slapped Goldberg and JIFGA with over $3.2 million in punitive fines and legal fees for allegedly violating a 2015 injunction and settlement agreement against JONAH that forbids him from providing counseling referrals.
In a move meant to “deter and punish,” he also barred Goldberg from serving as a director of any nonprofit organization in the state of New Jersey —–a condition that may violate Goldberg’s rights. As a result, JIFGA and the crowdfunding site, Funding Morality, will have to suspend operations. . . .
“We expect to appeal the decision, which we believe is at odds with the facts and infringes upon our constitutional rights to freedom of speech, religion, and association,” [Goldberg] said.
“Our appeal seeks to vindicate our constitutional right to promote biblical values,” he said. “Today’s politically correct progressive ideology seeks to eliminate the free exchange of ideas whenever certain views may be antithetical to current prevailing opinions.”
“This is part of the left-wing agenda to cut off conservative speech and shut down voices that disagree with them,” Goldberg said.
Anyone with an iota of common sense can see that New Jersey’s law against “reparative therapy” (a/k/a “conversion therapy”) is an unconstitutional infringement of First Amendment religious liberty, when such counseling is provided through the auspices of a religious institution. Careful examination of the SPLC’s role in this case demonstrates how these tax-exempt totalitarians are endangering free speech, seeking to limit “acceptable” opinion and, in effect, to make it illegal to express disapproval of homosexuality.
“There shall be no whore of the daughters of Israel, nor a sodomite of the sons of Israel.”
— Deuteronomy 23:17 (KJV)
Do the courts of New Jersey intend to declare the Word of God illegal?
Normally, I ignore church scandals, but the apostasy of Josh Harris hurts at a personal level. My wife and I began homeschooling our children in 1996, and so we were — indirectly, but in a real way — part of the same Christian community that produced Josh. When we lived in Gaithersburg, my wife and daughter attended a weekend women’s conference at Covenant Life Church, where he was youth minister before becoming senior pastor, replacing C.J. Mahaney. Some commentary about Josh’s apostasy suggests that it was somehow a predictable sequel of the child-abuse scandal that hit Mahaney’s Sovereign Grace Ministries in 2011. However, I was more reminded of the downfall of Doug Phillips, an eminent figure in Christian homeschooling who was destroyed by a 2014 sex scandal. Christian leaders who make themselves national spokesmen for an ethos of sexual purity are, necessarily, forfeiting their privacy and exposing themselves to destruction if they stray from the narrow path. Paula Bolyard summarizes feelings I share:
Many Christians (homeschoolers, in particular) are familiar with the Harris family — Josh’s mother and father, Gregg and Sono Harris, were pioneers in the Christian homeschooling movement of the ’80s and ’90s and Josh’s book advocating the view that dating should be avoided in favor of a courtship model sold more than a million copies . . . Many of us were understandably shocked and disappointed by Harris’ apostasy (the Greek word means simply a defection or revolt). An individual whom many of us admired and learned from has chosen to forsake Christ and embrace the world — he’s denounced the faith of his childhood, one that he has embraced very publicly over the last two decades. . . .
Besides being a warning about dangers of Evangelicalism Inc.’s celebrity culture, these incidents also serve as a warning about how Satan prowls about like a roaring lion “seeking whom he may devour.” Make no mistake: The prince of this world revels over each and every one of these stories.
Indeed. This son of eminent church leaders, a bestselling author whose message made his name familiar to millions of young Christians, must surely have been a target of Satan’s most fiendish demons, who now dance in delight at his downfall. We have been warned that the kingdom of God shall not come “except there come a falling away first,” and that we “be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled” by such apostasies.
What happened to Josh Harris? Honestly, I don’t know. He quit the pulpit in 2015, and by 2017 was promoting himself as a consultant offering businesses “branding and content strategy.” He announced his separation from his wife in sensitive blue-pill language (they “will continue our life together as friends . . . to create a generous and supportive future for each other and for our three amazing children”). We don’t know what we don’t know, but we may speculate that his wife — who had fallen in love with him when he was a evangelical superstar — lost interest in her husband once he ceased to be a celebrity. The Mahaney scandal must have inflicted collateral damage on Josh’s reputation and status as a leader, and what is the church to such a Christian celebrity except a source of status, an adoring audience for his performances? Necessarily, the celebrity pastor’s wife becomes part of the performance, playing the role of Perfect Christian Wife, and what happens when the show is over? What happens when the pastor leaves the pulpit and there is no longer an audience for this performance?
Maybe Josh Harris could learn something from Rollo Tomassi, but as I say, we don’t know what we don’t know. In his Instagram apostasy announcement, Josh Harris went out of his way to apologize to “the LGBTQ+ community.” My hunch is that this was not a coincidence, but I’ll avoid sharing my other hunches about the significance of this.
There are probably many lessons to be learned here, but I’ll skip the didactic approach and simply mourn Josh Harris’s apostasy.
One should not speak ill of the dead, and so I will not name the person whose death at age 37 prompted commentary from Greg Smith, Seth Dunn and Elizabeth Prata. While this person was alive, I never commented about her because I did not wish to publicize her existence, and now that she no longer exists, I have nothing good to say about her.
Clearly it is wrong to call yourself a Christian and advocate teachings that directly contradict the Bible. It’s heresy, and would not have been tolerated by previous generations of Christians, but nowadays anything believed by liberals will find some “Christian” advocates, who will be showered with praise (and book contracts, etc.) by all those institutions that promote liberalism. So if you want to advocate abortion, homosexuality and socialism, and claim to do this as a “Christian,” you’ll be applauded for doing so by, e.g., the New York Times and CNN.
The 21st-century church has many problems, including an appetite for innovation and entertainment. Just preaching the Gospel won’t do anymore. No, you need a rock band and a light show in your megachurch, with lots of different ministries and “outreach” programs. Folks have “itching ears” and “will not endure sound doctrine.”
Meanwhile, Dalrock calls attention to an apostate named Dave Gass, who was pastor of a Southern Baptist church in Missouri until last year. Gass used Twitter to publish a long rant about how his whole life was a lie; he harbored doubts about Scripture for the entire 20 years of his career as a pastor and is now an atheist. Gass’s rant might have been the last word on the subject, except that a deacon in the church told the truth — the real reason Gass left the church was that he had an affair with a married women in the congregation. Gass then deleted his Twitter account.
Hypocrisy, it has been said, is the tribute vice pays to virtue. Sinners don’t want to be recognized as such, so they try to act like saints. Ordinary sin is bad enough, but heresy and apostasy? These are quite strongly condemned, because they constitute an attack on the church as such. It would be smarter, really, for people like this to just quietly leave the church, rather than to teach perversity (the heretic) or to openly denounce their former belief (the apostate). But we can’t expect fools to act wisely, and so these scandals happen from time to time.
