Free Republic

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...

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,...