What’s interesting in the news today?
We’ll start with the good news…..
1. The man who helped save others from the Paris gunmen is being rewarded.
From TheIndependent “The Malian national who was hailed as a hero for helping hostages to safety during the kosher supermarket siege in Paris is to be given French citizenship, French media have reported.
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2. Good Kitty!
From TheNYPost “Eat your heart out, Lassie!
Masha, a long-haired tabby cat, saved the life of a baby abandoned in the streets of Russia — after she climbed into the box he was discarded in and kept him warm, health officials said.
“The baby had only been outside for a few hours and thanks to Masha … he was not damaged by the experience,” a hospital spokesman told Central European News.
The whiskered hero even meowed to get the attention of a passerby.
“She is very placid and friendly, so when I heard her meowing, I thought that perhaps she had injured herself,” said Obninsk city resident Irina Lavrova. “Normally she would have come and said hello to me. You can imagine my shock when I saw her lying in a box next to a baby.””
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3. Police have foiled another terrorist plot in Belgium.
From ABCNews “Two suspects died in a gunfight as authorities searched locations they believe are tied to a terror plot in Belgium, an official said.
The deaths occurred after individuals at a location in Verviers, Belgium, opened fire on police with automatic weapons, Magistrate Eric Van der Sypt said. Besides the two suspects killed, a third was arrested, he said, adding that no police or civilians were injured.
A neighbor at the apparent site of the confrontation in Verviers, near the city of Liege, told ABC News he heard two explosions and dozens of gunshots over about five minutes, and that four or five police cars remained on the scene afterwards.”
“”These search warrants were executed in an investigation concerning several people who we think are an operational cell concerning certain people who came back from Syria,” Van der Sypt said. “During the investigation, we found that this group was about to commit terrorist attacks in Belgium.”
Operations were ongoing into the evening in multiple parts of Belgium, including in Molenbeek, Brussels and Vilvoorde, a federal police official told ABC News.”
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4. Islamic threats and terror training centers in the US? Yep. But don’t worry, our govt. says they’re watching them. I feel safer already… 🙄
From FoxNews “Mauro discussed five top organizations linked to Islamic extremism that are located in the United States.
One such example is the hamlet of Islamberg in the Town of Hancock, New York. Located 145 northwest of New York City, the secluded community is home to an unknown number of Muslims inspired by Sufi cleric Sheikh Syed Mubarik Ali Shah Gilani. Mauro said the compound is spread across 60-70 acres.
He showed O’Reilly a video given to him by a law enforcement source that shows members marching with rifles in apparent guerilla warfare training. As the group, Muslims of the Americas, is not designated as a foreign terrorist organization, they are able to operate in the United States with little more than FBI ‘monitoring’, Mauro said.
Another notable location is the Dar-al Hijrah mosque in the Seven Corners section of Falls Church, Va. The mosque was once led by Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen killed overseas after joining al Qaeda. The mosque, near Washington, D.C., is now led by an imam who Mauro noted has said ‘Muslims shall be first in line for the arms for jihad.”
Siraj Wahhaj, a radical imam whom O’Reilly discussed earlier this week, runs the Masjid At Taqwa mosque in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Wahhaj will be speaking at an upcoming conference in Texas. Mauro called him “one of the most radical imams in the country.”
That last mosque in Brooklyn should sound familiar. It’s the one attended by the man who recently assassinated two NYC policemen before killing himself.
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5. Duke University must’ve had a moment of clarity.
From MSN “Duke University has canceled its plan to use the tower of its chapel for a weekly, amplified call to prayer for Muslims.
In a release Thursday, the university said Muslims will instead gather on the quadrangle before heading into a room in the chapel for their weekly prayer service.
“Duke remains committed to fostering an inclusive, tolerant and welcoming campus for all of its students,” said Michael Schoenfeld, vice president for public affairs and government relations. “However, it was clear that what was conceived as an effort to unify was not having the intended effect.”
Under the canceled plan, members of the school’s Muslim Students Association would have recited the call lasting about three minutes from the bell tower. However, the plan drew the ire of evangelist Franklin Graham, the son of the Rev. Billy Graham, who urged Duke alumni to withhold support because of violence against Christians that he attributed to Muslims. He wrote on Facebook that the decision is playing out as “Christianity is being excluded from the public square.””
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Wandering Views 
It is good that Duke got the pushback that made them cancel this.
But the fact that they thought of it is a bad sign.
This is not good, just better than it was.
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They’re getting more pushback the other way now.
Curious how the US came to such a place– was it really necessary to knock down the World Trade a Towers for radical Muslims to gain such momentum in the US and why?
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There are more of us than there are of them.
Problem is, two many of us think them are no problem.
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Duke’s was a bit silly for trying to be so inclusive. If nothing else, they would have gotten noise pollution complaints, as the call can get monotonous, especially if the caller doesn’t have a good voice.
However, Franklin Graham has used his influence wrongly. He has created a Christian over Muslim narrative. I know, Muslims consider themselves Christian’s enemies, but Christians cannot regard Muslims as their enemies. Not if we are followers of Christ, who breathed, in His last breaths, “Father, forgive them.” Not if we believe the Sermon on the Mount, with its famous statement, “Love your enemies”. Governments, as units set up for the protection of citizens, have an obligation to stop terrorism within their borders – as Sergeant at Arms Kevin Vickers did in Ottawa – but that is different than using Christian influence to stop what was a silly PR move on the part of a hair-brained university committee.
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Part of the philosophy of the Left is that if you have to offend or inconvenience 98 people to make 2 feel better than that is progress.
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Academia has backed itself into a corner (but doesn’t seem to realize it) when it comes to free speech issues.
Some speech is simply more free than others on college campuses. Wonder if they’ll ever realize their missteps through the last few decades? Conservative speakers, when they’re even invited & their talks don’t get cancelled beforehand, are often shunned & shouted down.
Seems like our campuses have been turned into no-free speech zones.
Liberalism ruled the day when I was in college in 1970s — I don’t remember having a conservative professor in any of the social/political science classes I took.
But now the “group think” sounds almost draconian.
The whole concept of “hate speech” that has been so embraced in the U.S. is, at its heart, very dangerous.
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Some good quotes from this piece:
“Thomas Jefferson wanted what he considered to be his three greatest achievements to be listed on his tombstone. The inscription, as he stipulated, reads ‘Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia.’
“Today we celebrate the 229th anniversary of one of those great creations: the passage, in 1786, of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom. …”
http://blog.acton.org/archives/75257-10-quotes-religious-freedom-day.html
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Donna, in all this ensuing discussion about free speech and blasphemy laws, I made an interesting discovery. Canada still has on its books, laws against blasphemous speech, relicts, probably, of the “Blue Laws” era, or perhaps, since our criminal code is based on English common law, from the church-state combinations of our European ancestors. As the law doesn’t specify the type of blasphemy, Muslims could use it as easily as Christians, if they had judicial authority. Needless to say, the law has not been used within my memory – or there would be a lot of people paying fines or in jail. However, it reinforces our need to know what laws are and are not it place (in my research on abortion, I found several Canadian laws about protecting the unborn which are still functional and are occasionally used, although not to shut down abortion providers). My family has a Balderdash game that has a Laughable Laws category, raking up old bylaws or state laws which no one has thought to take off the books – for example, in Fredericksburg, Virginia, it is a crime to yell, “Extra, extra, read all about it”. The one case where I agree with limiting free speech would be in libel and slander laws – after all, even Moses’ law forbade bearing false witness – nonetheless, those laws are curbing free speech. Free speech is an ideal, but in reality, it has always been curbed.
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Interesting. But a “blasphemy law” makes more sense when there is religious cohesion within a population. I’d suspect these are long since outdated. unenforced (and unenforceable), except in Muslim countries, of course.
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Some (a limited few) curbs make sense. But it becomes problematic (as we’re currently seeing) when a virtual “speech code” — that is more political in nature — begins to be enforced.
Constant vigilance is required on individual freedoms.
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It isn’t about treating Muslims as enemies.
It isn’t about using Christian influence to stop a silly PR move.
It is about not allowing Islam to establish a beach head in the culture.
That is the reason for the opposition to a mosque at the WTC site. The mosque was an “in your face” from Islam to us. We may not have recognize it; but they do.
From The Islamization of America, by Abdullah Al-Araby: p. ix
“During an official meeting on Islamic-Christian dialogue, an authoritative Muslim person, speaking to the Christians participating, stated very calmly and assuredly: “Thanks to your democratic laws we will invade you; thanks to our religious laws we will dominate you” (Boldface his)
This is what is already happening in Europe.
Some of their laws violate our laws and customs. We should not allow that.
e.g. A Muslim woman who wants to drive a car must have a full face picture on her license.
No matter how many wives a man had in Syria, he only has one in America.
A father who kills his daughter in an honor killing (this happened in Arizona.) is guilty of murder. (I don’t know the outcome of this.)
etc.
More etc’s will happen along the way. All of those dolts at Duke had PhD’s Not a one had good sense.
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I was interviewing a guy the other day who had worked for the CIA for 40+ years and who was kind of downplaying the terrorism threat we face right now.
But so interesting because he pulled a quote from Churchill (which I can’t verify) to make his point: something to the effect that “Never have so many been cowed by so few.” Maybe he was just turning a more popular quote into something else, I don’t know.
But I presume he was referring to the Nazis.
If so, then the point surely wasn’t that the Nazis did not pose a genuine threat; but rather, that the free world should not be cowed by them and should have the courage to stand up to the threat.
Anyway, lots of “if’s” in that post, and I can’t seem to verify the quote anyway. But I was thinking about the interview with that guy who seemed to be just brushing off how concerned the world is with terrorism right now as I was driving to my assignment.
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And I think we can differentiate between Islam as a whole as being a false religion and, as such, yes, an enemy of Christ (and, as it is practiced in some segments, a threat to free people and innocents as well); and individuals whom we may know who are Muslim (whom we are to love — even if they disparage Christianity).
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There is no circumstance in which Churchill would have said that, Donna.
Churchill made a famous statement concerning the RAF, re. The London Blitz.
“Never in the annals of history have so many owed so much to so few.”
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Chas, the U.S. guarantees free practice of religion. As the university is a private institution, they can choose what and what not to allow on their campus, but if a mosque buys land and builds a minaret, they do have the right to broadcast the call to prayer – provided they don’t violate noise bylaws. It doesn’t matter the construction that certain Muslims may put upon the broadcast of the call to prayer – they still have the freedom to practice their religion provided they do not endanger others. It is a test of Western ideas of humanism and pluralism, ideas which have been around since the Renaissance and Reformation, to see if society can both oppose Islamic extremism and allow Muslims freedom of worship. If we cannot allow Muslims to worship freely (I’m not talking about letting radical clerics preach here, as I would expect authorities to shut down a pastor who preached rebellion and violence) then it will signal that those hard won Western ideals, forged in the bloody conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, have failed and are not strong enough to stand the test of time.
Donna, he was plagiarizing Churchill and mangling the quote badly. The quote was, “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.” from a speech paying tribute to the gallant defense of the RAF in the Battle of Britain. As you can see, your interviewee got way out of context.
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Yes, I found that quote in my search — he may have purposely changed it and said that, but I missed it.
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And on this other topic that’s headlining the national news today:
http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/supreme-court-to-hear-marriage-challenge-how-should-christians-respond
” … What should we do in the meantime? Continue to assault the foundations of the Sexual Revolution, love your neighbor who may strongly disagree, build strong families, vote, get connected to a local church, worship weekly, and remember that Jesus, not Justice Kennedy, sits at the right hand of the Father. Remember also that a church in exile is never a church in retreat.”
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