Free Republic

Shouldering the Burden of War by: Paul Gottfried, September 21, 2009 ELIZABETHTOWN, PA—About three years ago, when antiwar panels and antiwar sloganeering were the order of the day at my college, I predicted such impassioned protests would end—not when American military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan was terminated—but when a Democrat, and preferably one on the social left, became president. I was right. These days, as I walk among my formerly pacifist colleagues and read their preferred news sources, I don’t hear a murmur of complaint about “the president’s strategy” for extricating our troops from military danger. It is as...

Jesus supports the IDF and he wants his believers to be the best soldiers they can be. That was the message conveyed by members of the local Messianic Jewish community via sacred texts, prayer and talks, to a group of 18-year-olds who took part this week in a premilitary program called Netsor. "I am a soldier of God," said Boris, an intense redhead accepted to an elite combat unit, who is one of the 28 young men and women who participated in Netsor. "I will do my best during my service in the IDF to serve God spiritually and physically....

“Pacifists are like sheep who believe that wolves are vegetarians.” Yves Montand In every age, there are those that believe barbarism can be defeated with civility. Occasionally, those with such views rise to power and not only express those views but act on their views. Too often, if not most often, their civility is less than requited. In recent days, Obama has resumed the role of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton with regard to those that would do us harm. No greater example of that is Obama’s decision to release only the more difficult portions of the previously classified interrogation...

Spain’s pacifist defense minister, Carme Chacón, has ignited a firestorm of criticism for her surprise announcement that Madrid will pull its 630 troops out of the NATO-led KFOR peacekeeping mission in Kosovo by the end of summer. During a visit to the Spanish base at Istok in Kosovo on March 19, Chacón unilaterally declared: “Mission accomplished. It’s time to go home.” Her decision, which came almost completely out of the blue, not only breaks solemn commitments that Spain has with NATO, it also leaves Spanish allies in the lurch and further reinforces Spain’s image as an unreliable partner. Chacón’s announcement...

Judaism And Warfare , Steven Plaut Dear Dr. H: You write about how Judaism is devoted to the pursuit of peace. You bring assorted citations from the Bible and Psalms about how nice peace can be. You emphasize that Judaism grants peace priority over competing goals. You find biblical quote after biblical quote about how good peace is. You then conclude that Israel is behaving in a manner that contradicts Jewish tradition when it wars against Hamas barbarism and Gaza terror. Israel must pursue "negotiations" with Hamas, you insist, citing the biblical desire for peace as the over-riding consideration. That...

"Everybody's got a plan until they get hit."  So said Mike Tyson some years ago in the most brilliant statement of political realism since Thucydides.  Bharat Mata, or "Mother India," the birthplace of the glorious Upanishads as well as Prince Siddhartha, has been sucker punched by 21st century monsters.  The blood from the innocent victims was barely dry when journalists published articles, not about the vicious killers, but about the dangers of a "rightward tilt" in India.  The rise of Hindu nationalism however began as a response to a perceived lack of "manliness" in the Hindu warrior the result of...

Who Will Guarantee the Peace? Written by The American TFP    Wednesday, November 19 2008 Since 1990, a crowd has gathered every year at Fort Benning in mid-November to protest against the activities of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly called the School of the Americas) and demand its closure. The annual event is not so much a protest, but rather a gathering of the remnants of the religious and cultural left who create a sixties-like carnival atmosphere around Fort Benning. The Army’s efforts to “dialogue� with the protesters by opening their doors to any who wish to...

Multicultural Censorship by: Emily Miller, June 13, 2008 Historian and author Victor Davis Hanson argued in a lecture addressed to the Heritage Foundation that there is a new narrative defining the debate between security and liberty that is more characteristic of a post-9/11-plus-hindsight world. Hanson suggested that the government is not infringing upon American individual rights, as was generally feared in the past, but rather Americans themselves pose the greatest threat to their freedom of speech by practicing self-censorship. This consequently stifles thought and discourages freedom of expression. “Right now at this time, there is a collective mood in the...

(CNSNews.com) - Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is facing renewed criticism regarding his national security policies as he continues his campaign for his party's presidential nomination. In a YouTube video Obama made for a liberal pacifist organization last year, the senator called for major cuts in defense spending, slowing the development of future combat systems, and cutting investments in America's ballistic missile defense program. Some conservatives have expressed surprise at the degree of Obama's proposals on the video, and this past weekend, Sen. Hillary Clinton's (D-N.Y.) campaign released an ad criticizing Obama's alleged national security inexperience and trumpeting her as the...

After staring into the abyss of nuclear war over Berlin and Cuba, Kennedy chose that June as the "time and place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and truth is too rarely perceived - yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace." That speech went beyond the reviled Neville Chamberlain ("peace for our time") by calling for "not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time." Instead of aiming, with Woodrow Wilson, to "make the world safe for democracy," the speech proposed to "make the world safe for diversity," a step...

I’m not going to name any presidential candidates in this column. But it is true that the question of whether or how we should conduct a war against terrorism is a part of the national debate now going on. Nor am I talking just about politicians. There is a discussion group in my church (Episcopalian) who read with favor the works of an Irish theologian who believes that Christianity’s purpose is the creation of a pacifist, secular government on Earth. This, however, is not a new concept. The same idea, that all war is “unChristian,” was present at the time...

Pacifism’s Utopian Heart by: Bethany Stotts, April 04, 2008 ... "At its heart, utopianism is the denial of radical evil. It is a naive vision of social and political life that ignores the realities of history and human nature,” writes Professor Joseph Loconte for JJI. The Pepperdine University Visiting Professor expressed his concern that “despite some good intentions, the utopians have absorbed a number of sub-Christian views about human nature and [the] mission of the Church in a fallen world.” Such attitudes lead to moral relativism, he argues, prompting strong anti-Americanism from figures such as Jim Wallis, Arthur Schlessinger, Jr.,...

Obama plans to disarm America

Matt Tiabbi, Commentator/House Leftist for Rollingstone.com, feels deeply perturbed. Perhaps leading Democratic political apparatchiks should grow perturbed that he’s perturbed. Tiabbi accuses the Democrats, in a polemic entitled “The Chicken Doves”, of having used the Iraq Anti-War movement for political gain. He appears shocked and amazed that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi haven’t ended the Iraq War and declared Glorious Dunkirk. He inveighs below that they have taken the movement to end the fighting in The Middle East and used it as an electoral bludgeon. Working behind the scenes, the Democrats have systematically taken over the anti-war movement, packing the...

"Harvey," said Eleanor Bope, handing her brother a cutting from a London morning paper of the 19th of March, "just read this about children's toys, please; it exactly carries out some of our ideas about influence and upbringing.""In the view of the National Peace Council," ran the extract, "there are grave objections to presenting our boys with regiments of fighting men, batteries of guns, and squadrons of 'Dreadnoughts.' Boys, the Council admits, naturally love fighting and all the panoply of war . . . but that is no reason for encouraging, and perhaps giving permanent form to, their primitive instincts. ...

A Simple Way to End the War on Terror by Yacka Jah Yacka Tue Oct 23, 2007 at 09:03:20 PM PDT While it appears from more than one point of view that the War in Iraq and the War on Terror are situations from which we may never be able to extricate ourselves, from the mountains of Pakistan comes a very simple solution: convert to Islam. Before we reject this out of hand, lets seriously consider it for a moment: Osama Bin Laden promised the wars would be over if Americans convert to Islam. This may sound like a lot...

Back in the 1950s, a southern journalist named Harry Golden became famous by turning out a series of best-selling books, the first of which he called “Only in America.” The title was a reference to a popular expression that reflected the feeling of most of his countrymen that America was special, a unique place that offered millions of people unlimited freedom to express themselves and to achieve dreams that were unimaginable anywhere else on earth. In the half century since Mr. Golden wrote his book, things have undergone a sea change in this country. Partly the change has come about...

The attacks of September 11 and the resulting war against terrorism have brought to the front once again the question of the Christian view of war. The question is particularly complex because it is hard to see how war can be consistent with the biblical emphasis upon forgiveness and forebearance and love. This emphasis is perhaps most pointed in the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus says: You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you...

I just saw this Monday. I do agree with the opinion that this movie wasn't all that good. It took too long to get to the main plot and put in a lot of unnecesary scenes...but I clearly got the message it was pushing. General George S. Patton once said "Better to fight for something than to live for nothing," and I think his quote applies directly to this movie. In The Invasion, a movie about alien organisms that come to earth and replace humans with emotionless clones, we see a world without violence, without war, without crime...and without purpose....

The Peace Racket Bruce Bawer An anti-Western movement touts dictators, advocates appeasement—and gains momentum. If you want peace, prepare for war.” Thus counseled Roman general Flavius Vegetius Renatus over 1,600 years ago. Nine centuries before that, Sun Tzu offered essentially the same advice, and it’s to him that Vegetius’s line is attributed at the beginning of a film that I saw recently at Oslo’s Nobel Peace Center. Yet the film cites this ancient wisdom only to reject it. After serving up a perverse potted history of the cold war, the thrust of which is that the peace movement brought down...

I don't know if this is a precipice from which there is any return for the party of Pelosi and Reid. These are turncoats in the truest form of the word. These are people who are secretly – and, now, not so secretly – praying for, hoping for and acting in the best interests of victory for Osama bin Laden and his cohorts who would chop off their heads just as fast as they would chop off yours and mine. Imagine political power meaning so much to you that you would sell out your own country – perhaps even the...

The main problem with pacifism is that it doesn’t work in all situations. The main problem with pacifists is that they’re convinced it does. Gandhi persevered for years and ultimately gained independence for India, but that was because, for all its faults, England was basically a civilized, Christian nation. It was possible to arouse the sympathy and good will of the British people. Had he tried it with Nazi Germany, he would have died in an oven. There’s no getting around the fact that being a pacifist has a nicer ring to it than being, say, a warmonger. But when...

History will record with severity the huge social, human and political cost of the activism of the erroneously named "pacifists" The so-called "pacifist" movements, articulated by leftists, and their silent accomplice, have decisively contributed to the protection of the most fierce tyrants of the XX and XXI Centuries, since Adolph Hitler and Stalin, Fidel Castro, Pol Pot and Kim Jong Il, to Saddam Hussein. With their harmful political formula of "giving in so as not to loose", they paved the way for several of those dictators to increment warmonger attitudes against countries and continents, in addition to enslaving their own...

As I see It: America’s Terminal Crisis of the Spirit? http://www.kjvonly.org/aisi/2007/aisi_10_2_07.htm Doug Kutilek Nineteenth century British philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) is credited with saying, “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. A man who has nothing which he cares more about than he does his personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance at being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.” (Cited from The Biblical Evangelist 38:1,...

Return to the Article November 25, 2006Officers, Soldiers, and GodBy James Arlandson According to the New Testament, is it possible to be honored by God and be a weapon-carrying soldier or law enforcement officer, at the same time? Does God approve of soldiers and officers of the State? Does he condemn the military? If not, may individual Christians serve, Scripturally speaking, in law enforcement and the military? This article, Part 3 in the series on pacifism and the sword in the New Testament, discusses lawful military and civil officers of the State. Some were soldiers who seek repentance from John...

I was in a recent discussion about the war on terror and the nature of the Radical Wahhabi sect of Muslims. One person felt that war is wrong and that a pacifistic approach would be more successful. To engage in war was to become like your enemy, and to retain our humanity we must be pacifists. This person cited Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Jesus as examples of successful pacifists. I agree that pacifism is preferable to war in instances where it is logical to follow that path. In other words, it has to work. In the case of Gandhi,...

Christians, Pacifism and the SwordNovember 11th, 2006 Are Christians permitted to carry the sword (or modern weapons)? What should the Church’s policy be on war and peace? Should it counsel the State to turn the other cheek? Are Christians permitted to join the police force and the military? How can they “love their enemies” and have to kill some of them?The Scriptural truth that answers those questions divides the world into two realms. On the one hand, we have the kingdom of Caesar, and on the other the kingdom of God. A failure to distinguish between the two will...

The day starts at Redmond Elementary School with students taking the Pledge of Allegiance, and then the PeaceBuilders Pledge, a promise that the children will build peace in school, at home and in the community... The PeaceBuilders program, which employs techniques and activities to promote nonviolence and prevent bullying, is built around a simple tenet, that students, teachers and staff members will be good to one another, won't hurt each other and will tell someone they trust when they have conflict with one another... "The school has adopted this as a way of life; it's an undercurrent in everything going...

A DEADLY KINDNESS AT GITMO, PC RULES LET QAEDAS PLOT ON By RICHARD MINITER September 15, 2006 -- GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA ON the military plane back from America's most fa mous terrorist holding pen, the in-flight film was "V for Vendetta," a screed that tries to justify terrorism. It was a fitting end to a surreal, military-sponsored trip. The Pentagon seemed to be hoping to disarm its critics by showing them how well it cares for captured terrorists. The trip was more alarming than disarming. I spent several hours with Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., who heads the joint...

Here's a puzzle: Why is it so frequently the case that the people who have the most at stake in the battle against Islamic extremism and the most to lose when Islamism gains -- namely, liberals -- are typically the most reluctant to fight it? ... yet after 9/11 at least a few old-time voices on the left -- Christopher Hitchens, Bruce Bawer, Paul Berman and Ron Rosenbaum, among others -- understood that what Islamism most threatened wasn't just America generally, but precisely the values that modern liberalism had done so much to promote and protect for the past 40...

Deadwood is one of my favorite programs. Set in a South Dakota gold mining camp in the 1870s, it grittily explores the way human beings organize themselves when consigned to a lawless territory that attracts miscreants, varmints and vultures. A recent episode had an especially insightful moment when all the leaders of the camp were called to an important meeting without an invitation proffered to the female owner of the camp's only bank. Alma Garret could have all the money in the world, but because she has two X chromosomes (a distinction more graphically described in the show), she wasn't...

Peace activist murdered by PalestinianAngelo Frammartino, a 24 year-old student from Italy who arrived in Israel as a human rights organization activist, was stabbed to death Thursday by an Arab knifeman. "He believed in what he did and was always ready to help others," a friend described him. The website of Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera reported that Frammartino was working for the setting up of a children's supper camp for Palestinians in Jerusalem's Old City, and was supposed to return to Italy on Friday. The youth was stabbed in the back while walking with four friends in the Sultan...

We have been discussing the problematic nature of pacifism over the last few days, in The Problem of Pulpit Pacifism, Part 1 and Part 2. We will finish that discussion today with an article that we think you'll find interesting. Within just a few days after the September 11th attacks, some people began forwarding emails with the inevitable pacifist pleas for "peace" and "restraint," decrying violence in all its forms. The idea, amazingly, was to encourage general opposition to action in Afghanistan. In addition to homegrown emails, many of us also had our inboxes graced with the vaunted but highly...

...is to fetishize the concept of "peace." This comes from what I consider to be the theological error of obsessing over the peace and love messages of the New Testament, while forgetting that the justice-heavy Old Testament even exists. (This error isn't made by all Christians, just some.) I am by no means a Bible scholar, but I do know that the Old Testament (or Hebrew Scripture), with its often juridical tone, offers us a profound and valuable way to understand concepts of Justice. Among other things, it gave us the Law. The New Testament brought us a message of...

Last week, Jack and Jill Pacifisto were walking home through the park after dinner with friends, during which they had spent a few hours discussing the immorality of violence and war and their commitments to send more money to progressive activists over the next year. Suddenly, Tony Thug stepped out of the shadows and pointed a pistol at Jack and said, “Give me your wallet,” and, pointing the gun at Jill, “Your purse.” “What?” asked Jack, incredulous, “Hey, we don’t want any trouble. We’re pacifists. We aren’t going to hurt you.” “Not my problem,” said Tony, “Gimme your money.” So...

Dear Editor, the Tribune:In his June 7 letter to the editor, peace activist Steve Jacobs asks, "Who would Jesus bomb?" then attacks Christians for not sharing his peacenik worldview.As a veteran and Marine parent, I ignore his ilk. But as a pastor, I sometimes find it necessary to respond to those who flagrantly misuse the Bible to support their biases. Conservative Bible scholars view Jesus as an eternally co-existent member of the Trinity. Therefore, Jesus participated in destroying Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19 and threatened Nineveh with the same in Jonah 3. King David, a soldier acclaimed for killing...

Apparently, being the parent of a child murdered by a Muslim terrorist gives one moral credibility. There is no other way to explain the vast attention paid to the ideas of Michael Berg, father of Nick Berg, the American who was slaughtered by the Islamic sadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. That is also the only explanation for the all the attention Cindy Sheehan has received. It is not because of the intellectual and moral depth of her worldview. But the attention paid to Michael Berg has been very helpful in enabling many more people to understand the thinking and values of...

THE Japanese judiciary today turned down for the second time a lawsuit seeking to pull troops from Iraq on the grounds that the historic mission violates the pacifist constitution. The Nagoya District Court in central Japan turned down the lawsuit by 3200 lawyers and residents who said the deployment was not in line with the constitution, which bars Japan from maintaining a military. The plaintiffs had sought an immediate end to the mission, recognition that it violated the constitution and Y10,000 ($115) each in compensation for mental anguish. A court in western Kofu district rejected a similar suit in October,...

This is something I found on a Christian forum written by an evangelical Christian: --------------------------------------------------------- "In 1992, I graduate high school and went off to the Marines. I grew up in a Baptist church, where we would say the pledge during church and honor veterans during Memorial Day and July 4th holidays. We believed in “just war”. I grew up believing it was God’s will to fight for America, we were one nation under God and it was honorable and Biblical to do anything and everything to defend God’s nation. I served my four years as an 1833. That’s the...

Cindy Sheehan is the new face of the antiwar movement. Her claim to speak with moral authority on this issue rests on her being the mother of Casey Sheehan, a Marine who was killed in action in Iraq. Her down-to-earth looks and her eloquence have made her a media darling as she set up her tent outside of President Bush's residence in Crawford, Texas, demanding to talk to him to ask him why did he "murdered" or "killed" her son. Then the hurricanes in the Gulf Coast blew Cindy away from the front pages until a couple of weeks ago,...

PARIS – Karen Hughes should be French - it would make her job easier. As the US undersecretary of State for public diplomacy returns home from her first foreign trip burnishing America's image in the world, she might feel a touch of envy at the glowing international reputation that France enjoys, highlighted in a recent study by the Project on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA). In the survey of people in 23 countries across the globe, a majority or plurality in 20 described France as exerting a positive influence on world affairs. The US, by comparison, is seen as having a...

Casey Sheehan was a re-enlistee with the Army's 1st Cavalry. He knew he was going to fight. He understood that. He embraced it. He fought like a soldier. And like a soldier he died, killed in April of 2004, in Sadr City, Iraq. Casey's mom, Cindy, doesn't quite get it. She is a mother who has lost her son to a war. Convinced she knows more about the costs of war than other parents who've suffered similar loss, she has parked herself outside President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. Full of judgment and hate, calling him "selected," not elected, blaming...

The US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was meant to kick-start the Cold War rather than end the Second World War, according to two nuclear historians who say they have new evidence backing the controversial theory. Causing a fission reaction in several kilograms of uranium and plutonium and killing over 200,000 people 60 years ago was done more to impress the Soviet Union than to cow Japan, they say. And the US President who took the decision, Harry Truman, was culpable, they add. "He knew he was beginning the process of annihilation of the...

Several commenters blamed the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London, in one way or another, on regime-change in Iraq. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (Daily Kos) described the attacks as consequences of the war. Professor Juan Cole characterized them as blowback. Paul Reynolds at the BBC said they were Britain's punishment. Only those who opposed the invasion of Iraq trot out this argument, though. Many of them either minimize or entirely ignore the fact that the invasion of Afghanistan and the toppling of the Taliban enraged Islamists as much if not even more so. The Taliban, after all, are fellow Islamists. The Baathists,...

Appeasement will only create bigger monsters By MAX BOOT Guest Commentary THE LONDON bombings have occasioned many comparisons with the 1940 Blitz. This is usually cited as evidence of British fortitude — the attitude exemplified by cockneys in the heavily bombed East End who told Winston Churchill, “We can take it, but give it ‘em back.” That is indeed the dominant British (and American) attitude, then and now, but it is important not to ignore a streak of timidity there (and here) that may get stronger in the years ahead and that was present even when civilization faced an existential...

There was a time when patriotism prevailed over political "correctness" in the media. During World War II, Americans sang a song about releasing flatulence in Hitler's face ("Der Fuehrer's Face," the title song of an Academy Award-winning Walt Disney cartoon). Now, the media tout the showing of Saddam Hussein in his underwear as a disgrace and downplay the horror of beheadings. The latter view spews from the mouths and pens of the socialists in our country (many commonly referred to as liberal Democrats) who are trying to render the United States impotent by promoting global pacifism ... the same ones...

(CNSNews.com) - Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign has hired a new director of religion outreach, who is being described by a Catholic group as "a curious choice." Mara Vanderslice, who formerly worked as religion outreach director for Democrat Howard Dean, was raised without any faith and didn't become an evangelical Christian until she attended Earlham College, a Quaker school known for its adherence to pacifism, the Catholic League said on Monday. According to Catholic League President William Donohue, when Vanderslice was in college she was active in the Earlham Socialist Alliance, a group that supports convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal and...

Stay home, you pathetic whining maggots By Ian Robinson -- Calgary Sun In the wake of the U.S. presidential election -- in which I cheerfully took a Sun assistant city editor, who figured Senator John Kerry couldn't lose, for $10 (a quick pause to gloat here) Americans disenchanted with President George W. Bush's re-election romp back into the White House, continue to deluge the Canadian immigration website. How anybody can be unhappy with the president's re-election is beyond me. Bush has my admiration in no small part because he manages to simultaneously annoy France and Germany, not to mention those...

The End of Illusions Religious Leaders Confront Hitler's Gathering StormBy Joseph LoconteReview by Ryan ZempelPaul L. Blakely declares that "[i]n the moment that this country goes to war, the guarantees of the American Constitution will be swept aside by a dictatorship."Georgia Harkness calls for an "international police force in a world federation of states.... involving some surrender of national sovereignty and much economic reorganization."Harry Emerson Fosdick asserts that "the all but unanimous judgment seems to be that we, the democracies, are just as responsible for the rise of the dictators as the dictatorships themselves, and perhaps more so."Are Blakely, Harkness,...