"Submit" or "Choose"

Patrick Richardson has a fine essay on our war with radical Islam

‘Protests’ just one more phase in war


I’ve watched with dismay the events of the last week as the Middle East has erupted in flames. 

I’ve watched with even greater dismay the response, or lack thereof, from the U.S.

The continued insistence on blaming a — bad — movie for the region-wide, indeed world-wide, “protests” is disingenuous at best.

The attack on the Benghazi consulate was well executed, involved heavy weapons and was obviously well timed as the attackers knew the ambassador would be there and would be only lightly defended.

That the administration continues to kowtow to the “Arab Street” and it’s perpetual victimhood is to be expected. While this administration’s record of dealing with the whackjobs in the Middle East is pathetic, the record of previous administrations dating all the way back to Carter is hardly better — with rare exceptions such as Reagan bombing Libya into submission in the 1980s — indeed Western Civilization’s record with radical Islam is execrable ever since we decided those crusade things were a bad idea.

I’ve said it before, we’re dealing with a 12th century mindset in the 21st century.

Islamic culture does not make so fine a distinction between noncombatants and combatants as we do. Nor do they worry overmuch about “civilized tactics,” particularly when dealing with “infidels.”

To the radical Muslim, anything done to an infidel is permissible. The restrictions on warfare in the Koran apply only to fellow believers.

Moreover the radicals — and make no mistake they are the ones really in charge — have no fear of us.

In Arab culture loyalty is to family first, clan second, then tribe and finally — and only notionally — to something as abstract as a nation. Anyone who is not a member of your tribe, clan or family, is a potential enemy — and taking advantage of enemies is simply good sense. Indeed there is no concept of the peculiarly Western and particularly American idea of “fair play.”

Weakness is not something to be protected but despised — and taken advantage of.

We have seen this over and over again. Any perception of weakness on the part of the West has been ruthlessly exploited. From the weak responses to the first World Trade Center and USS Cole bombings to the unilateral pullout of troops after we took minor casualties in Somalia, and on to laws across the Western world criminalizing anyone who speaks out against radical Muslims we have repeatedly shown the radicals we are weak.

Despite their rhetoric, if they truly thought we were as evil, as ruthless, as bloodthirsty as they say we are, they would not dare to attack us.

And here, finally, I come to the point.

We must finally wake up and realize we are in a war. Have been in a war for decades. Indeed this is simply the latest phase in a war which started in the 7th Century when Muhammad and his followers boiled out of the Arabian Peninsula a’conquering and to conquer.

Islam as currently extant and Western Civilization are simply incompatible.

Over the weekend I watched again Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven. In it is perhaps the best — and starkest — description of the difference between Islam and Christianity I’ve ever heard “Allah says ‘Submit’ and Jesus says ‘Choose.’”

Until we understand that stark difference. Until we stop showing weakness, we will face an ever escalating series of attacks, both violent and rhetorical.

Until one civilization or the other changes — and in so doing ceases to exist.

We are indeed in a war. It is the latest salient in a 1400 year old war of a demented theocracy against Christian civilization and freedom. It is an asymmetrical war-- the West could conquer Islam in a week if it chose-- but we are fighting terrorism and political correctness and cultural infiltration and demography.

We could lose this war. I fear that some parts of Europe already have, and don't even know it.

 I love this synopsis of the difference between Islam and Christianity:

“Allah says ‘Submit’ and Jesus says ‘Choose.’”

God respects our freedom, as we are spiritual beings created in His image. Christ asks us to choose, but never commands us to submit, because he is our true Lord.

"Submission" is the command of a secular dictatorship, cloaked in pilfered monotheism stolen like booty in a caravan raid.

Muslim outrage

From Michael Ramirez

Riots break out in scores of cities over "Gospel of Jesus' wife"

From the National Catholic Reporter:

Dozens injured, thousands confused by riots over "Gospel of Jesus' Wife"

President Obama:

 The future must not belong to those who slander the Bachelor of Christianity!

... but won't Obama's movie about killing Bin Laden really piss them off?

                   Mr. President: Take down this film!

The Obama administration has been very helpful in the production of Zero Dark Thirty, the film about the killing of Osama Bin Laden.

It flatters the President.

Do you think Mr. Obama will ask the theaters not to show it, to avoid inflaming the Muslim world?

; )

Obama: "The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. "

But it does.

How so?

There is, in the West, a 1400 year epic of Prophet exalting and Prophet slandering.

For the first 1000 years, Prophet exalting had a good run. Prophet exalters on horseback with scimitars invaded peaceful Christian, Jewish, and pagan lands, slaughtering and conquering. Within a century of the first Prophet exaltations, the Prophet exalters enslaved more of the earth than any Roman emperor. Medieval science and arts flourished in the conquered lands-- the genius of the infidels and dhimmis was expropriated by their new masters, who stole ideas and bequeathed only submission.

There were a few missteps in the run-- Charles Martel at Tours, Richard the Lionhearted-- but Prophet exaltation was the growth stock.

By the fifteenth century, the Prophet exalters had sucked the dhimmi dry, and the genius, cut off from its Christian and Jewish roots by the arid Islamic soil, withered.

The Prophet slanderers rose.

They defended their lands from the exalters, at Lepanto and Vienna, twice. They flushed the Prophet exalters from Iberia, and reclaimed their civilization. And the transformation followed.

In the lands of the Prophet slanderers-- and only in the lands of the Prophet slanderers-- real science dropped roots and flourished. Within a few short centuries the Prophet slanderers had opened the book of the physical world-- the heavens and the earth-- and divined the mathematical laws of God's own creation. In the lands of the Prophet slanderers, philosophy and painting and government and technology and literature and music flourished, as learning and art and philosophy and science withered and rotted in the lands of the Prophet exalters.

By the 18th century, the Prophet exalters were consumed with impotent rage, and maniacs who thought the Prophet insufficiently exalted founded garish kingdoms in the sand.

By the 20th century, the sick remnant of the Prophet exalters picked the wrong team in the Great War, and the Prophet exalters were laid waste by civilization-- civilization then, as now, synonymous with Prophet slandering.

Today, the civilized world is that of Prophet slanderers. All science, all technology, nearly all of the West's literature, art, and music are the work of Prophet slanderers, not Prophet exalters. It is astonishing how little Prophet exalting does in the world, except violence.

The only product of the Prophet exalters today, besides rage-- is discovered, drilled, refined, and consumed by the Prophet slanderers.

So, Mr. President, the future does belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.

Nearly all of that which mankind can be most proud-- science, and philosophy and technology and art-- is the creation of the Prophet slanderers.

Prophet slanderers have created the West. Why, now, should Prophet slanderers submit to Prophet exalters?

Raw anti-Semitism from AP, Reuters

The Associated Press just published this photo of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking at the UN:




Reuters just published this photo:



There were thousands of photos from Netanyahu's speech. The AP and Reuters chose these to publish.

It's hard to know what to say. AP and Reuters are bastions of the world-wide media. Anti-Semitism-- raw Jew-hatred-- is shamelessly mainstream.

There is something very evil growing in our world.

(HT Weekly Standard)

"the tribe of barbarism doesn’t get to lecture the tribe of liberty about what freedom means"

Johah Goldberg has a great post on our need to stand together against Islamofascists and other totalitarians who would take away our freedom.

Goldlberg:

What got me thinking about all of this is the effort by various Muslim leaders at the United Nations to lecture us about free expression. Leaders who abuse and torture their own citizens for expressing their ideas or faith seem to think they have standing to lecture us about the limits of freedom.

Well, the tribe of barbarism doesn’t get to lecture the tribe of liberty about what freedom means...

Because the moral superiority of liberty is irrefutable, totalitarians often feel the need to wrap barbarism in the language of freedom. For example, North Korea calls itself the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Similarly, the Muslim Brotherhood stooge running Egypt doesn’t care about free speech or tolerance; he cares about his own theocratic will to power — and making Americans grovel.

There are more practical reasons not to allow our liberties to be held hostage to the bloodlust of a foreign mob, but underneath them all is the instinctual tribal refusal to let marauders tear down what we’ve built.

Goldberg also points out how quickly liberals have sold out on defending freedom. For the left, old habits die hard.

What to do with all these underutilized Predator drones...

Fatwa-issuing Pakistani Railways Minister Ghulam Ahmed Bilour

You can't make this up:

A Pakistani government minister has put a $100,000 price on the head of the man who made a film mocking Islam, which has sparked protests around the world. 

Railways minister Ghulam Ahmed Bilour told reporters in the northwestern city of Peshawar: "I announce today that this blasphemer who has abused the holy prophet, if somebody will kill him, I will give that person a prize of $100,000. 

"I also invite Taliban and al Qaeda brothers to be partners in this noble deed. 

"I also announce that if the government hands this person over to me, my heart says I will finish him with my own hands and then they can hang me."

So a government official of our "ally" Pakistan makes a public offer to fund the murder of an American for exercising his right to freedom of speech. Pakistan, which funds the Taliban and hid Osama Bin Laden for years, has received $20 billion in aid from the United States since September 11, 2001.

There is a simple fix for the problem of Islamofascists putting bounties on the heads of Americans.

The act of proclaiming a fatwa on an American needs to be countered by a fatwa on the fatwaer. Call it 'fatwa reciprocity'. We have a whole squadron of Predator drones, and it's boring just flying them around with nothing to do. Note to Islamo-thug: the fatwaee's life is your life. We know who you are and where you are.

A government official of a foreign nation suborning murder of an American citizen is an act of war. We need to cut off all aid to Pakistan, and quite publicly beef up our security alliances with India. We need to demand this Islamist scumbag's arrest and extradition to the United States for conspiracy to commit murder. If an American is actually murdered because of this fatwa, Imam Railway-Minister needs to understand that his own Seventy-Two-Virgin time is now.

We need to get off our knees. We need to take the war to these monsters. 

'Everybody in Cleveland got Obama phone ...!'

Pray for America. 

“I think this is freedom of expression, just as this is freedom of expression.”

Hmmm...

CNN and MSNBC Pundit Arrested for Vandalizing Anti-Muslim Ad In N.Y. Subway System 

The New York Post reported Egyptian-American columnist Mona Eltahawy has been arrested for defacing an anti-Muslim ad in the New York subway system. The video shows her spraying pink paint on the ad while a supporter of the ad tries to block her. She's a journalist for censorship. 

Eltahawy, a former Reuters correspondent, has been a recent favorite of CNN and MSNBC’s weekend morning shows to discuss Egypt...

The journalist-cum-jihadi defender confronted a woman who was trying to prevent her from spray-painting the poster, which says "In any war between the civilized man ad the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad".

Not much to argue about there.

This is the exchange between Ms. Eltahawy and a the woman protecting the poster:

“Mona, do you think you have the right to do this?” said Pamela Hall, holding a mounted camera as she tried to block the barrage of spray paint. 

“I do actually,” Eltahawy calmly responded. “I think this is freedom of expression, just as this is freedom of expression.” 

Hall then thrusts herself between Eltahawy’s spray paint and the poster. 

Eltahawy -- an activist who has appeared on MSNBC and CNN -- engaged her in an odd cat-and-mouse dance, spraying pink every time she had an opening. 

“What right do you have to violate free speech,” Hall pleaded. 

“I’m not violating it. I’m making an expression on free speech,” an increasingly agitated Eltahawy shot back. 

“You do not have the right!” Hall said. 

“I do actually and I’m doing it right now and you should get out of the way! Do you want paint on yourself,” Eltahawy shot back. 

As the poster defender bobbed and weaved to get in the paint’s way, Eltahawy mocked: “That’s right, defend racism.”

Oh... where to start. 

1) Spray-painting over someone else's speech is not freedom of speech. It's censorship by vandalism. Free speech is if you make your own poster.

2) Ms. Eltahawy actually doesn't even need to make her own poster, to get her opinion out. She is a CNN-MSNBC pundit and columnist (for heaven's sake). She has an audience of millions, and she could have expressed her opinion with reason and clarity. She chose spray paint.  

3) The poster denounced jihadists, who are savages. Is Ms. Eltahawy angry because jihadists are being insulted? Do we need to be courteous to jihadists? 

4) Ok. Ms.Eltahawy no doubt believes that "savages" and "jihadists" means all Muslims. But of course that is not at all what the sponsors of the poster have said. They denounce only jihadists. Ms. Eltahawy is the one equating jihadists with all Muslims. 

5) Note to Ms. Eltahawy: Jihadis, or Islam, or whatever, aren't a race, so the poster is not racism. 

The irony is delicious. Ms. Eltahawy can reach millions of viewers with her commentary, yet she chooses vandalism and censorship to express herself. And the poster she is defacing in the name of Islam denounces... savage jihadists who use uncivilized means to express themselves. 

;)

Pop Quiz on the First Amendment in America

Today's First Amendment Pop Quiz: use #2 pencils only.

Please compare these two men:



Chicago City Council Alderman Proco "Joe" Moreno



Nakoula Bassily Nakoula

Question:

One of these guys is a man who exercised his First Amendment right to freedom of speech by making a video insulting a religious figure.

The other guy is a Chicago government official who violated federal law by denying a man a license to open a chicken restaurant based on the man's political speech-- speech which is protected by the First Amendment.

Title 18, U.S.C., Section 242:

Deprivation of Rights Under Color of Law

This statute makes it a crime for any person acting under color of law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom to willfully deprive or cause to be deprived from any person those rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution and laws of the U.S...

Acts under "color of any law" include acts not only done by federal, state, or local officials within the bounds or limits of their lawful authority, but also acts done without and beyond the bounds of their lawful authority... This definition includes, in addition to law enforcement officials, individuals such as Mayors, Council persons...

For 20 points extra credit on our "First Amendment in America" quiz, please answer:


Which guy is the one getting arrested?

I feel better knowing this...

This just in:

Ahmadinejad meets with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrahkan

In case you have forgotten, in 2007 Minister Farrahkan was the recipient of the "Rev. Dr. Jeremian A. Wright, Jr Lifetime Achievement Trumpeteer" award (is it just me, or does naming awards after living people seem a bit creepy?).

Rev. Wright on Minister Farrahkan's singular talents:

“When Minister Farrakhan speaks, Black America listens,” says the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, likening the Minister’s influence to the E. F. Hutton commercials of old. 

“Everybody may not agree with him, but they listen…His depth on analysis when it comes to the racial ills of this nation is astounding and eye opening. He brings a perspective that is helpful and honest. 

“Minister Farrakhan will be remembered as one of the 20th and 21st century giants of the African American religious experience,” continues Wright. “His integrity and honesty have secured him a place in history as one of the nation’s most powerful critics. His love for Africa and African American people has made him an unforgettable force, a catalyst for change and a religious leader who is sincere about his faith and his purpose.” …

Reverend Wright was President Obama's pastor and spiritual advisor for 20 years, and the good Reverend baptized Obama's daughters.

Have a good night's sleep.

Romney: "It's almost like Obama doesn't want Americans to know what happened...'

Yep.

Fred Singer on climate science

Fred Singer is professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and director of the Science and Environmental Policy Project. He is one of the nation's leading climate scientists, and he has long been a voice of sobriety and good science in the climate science maelstrom.

He has a great essay summarizing the current state of climate science and climate politics.

Please read the whole thing. 

It's a sad day when...

...the Muslim Brotherhood President of Libya tells Americans the truth, unlike the President of the United States.

Libyan president to NBC: Anti-Islam film had 'nothing to do with' US Consulate attack

Why would Obama lie so shamelessly?

Reasons:

1) He's covering incompetence that is so egregious that it's better to lie flagrantly than admit the truth.

2) His concerns are short-term: after he gets reelected in 6 weeks, he need not concern himself with public opinion.

3) The mainstream media will not call him on it.

Recall when the open microphone caught Obama telling the Russian President that he will have much more room for maneuver after the election? 

Res ipsa loquitur

It seems that Chicago alderman Joe Moreno isn't quite satisfied with Chick Fil A's CEO Dan Cathy's apparent relinquishment of his First Amendment rights in order to open a restaurant in Chicago.

Alderman Moreno released this statement.

Dan Cathy decided to make a PUBLIC statement to Mike Huckabee that, at the least, muddied the progress we had made with Chick-fil-A and, at the worst, contradicted the documents and promises Chick-fil-A made to me and the community earlier this month. Since Mr.Cathy made a PUBLIC statement, I am PUBLICLY asking him to confirm and support what I was told and shown by his company representatives. 

1. For the FIRST TIME in the company’s history the company wrote and distributed a document to all of its employees titled, “Chick-fil-A: Who We Are” that guarantees that the company and its employees will “treat every person with honor, dignity and respect- regardless of their beliefs, race, creed, sexual orientation or gender.” 

2. I am asking him to PUBLICLY confirm and support a letter that was voluntarily given to me by his company executives earlier this yearthat states the future behavior of Chick-fil-A’s not for profit arm, The Win Shape Foundation. The letter states that, “The WinShape Foundation is now taking a much closer look at the organizations it considers helping, and in that process will remain true to its stated philosophy of not supporting organizations with political agendas.” We were told that these organizations included groups that politically work against the rights of gay and lesbian people. 

3. I am also asking him to PUBLICLY confirm and support what Chick-fil-A executives voluntarily told and confirmed to me earlier this month— that Chick-fil-A, and its not for profit arm WinShape, in 2012 has not and will not donate to entities with political agendas, including organizations that politically work against the rights of gay and lesbian people.
Mr Cathy continues to not confirm to the press what his company executives have told and showed me. This is disturbing. Since Mr. Cathy wants to confuse people, he needs to publicly confirm the three components described above, which allowed us to move forward. I am simply asking Mr. Cathy to confirm statements and documents that HIS company exectuives provided to me. It is pretty simple, Mr. Cathy. Do you acknowledge and support the policies that your exectuives outlined to me in writing or do you not? Yes or no? If not, Chick Fil A is a business that practices irresponsible, and potentially illegal, business standards. 

Perhaps Mr. Cathy felt that he could make these public statements to Mike Huckabee because I had provided a letter of support for his restaurant to the City of Chicago earlier this week. I provided this letter based on the progress we had made with Chick-fil-A. I still need to introduce legislation to make the Chick-fil-A in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago a reality. I will wait to see what Mr. Cathy’s next PUBLIC statement is, and reflect on that statement before moving forward with appropriate legislation.

So let's get this straight: Alderman Moreno, a government official, is telling Dan Cathy, a private citizen, that the only way he can get a license to open a chicken restaurant in his district is to cease "working politically" against a cause that Alderman Moreno supports. The nature of the cause-- in this case LGBT "rights"-- is irrelevant to the issue, and of course is irrelevant to any legal and constitutional issues regarding opening a chicken restaurant. Alderman Moreno is simply-- and quite unabashedly-- violating Mr. Cathy's First Amendment right to freedom of speech. The Alderman is using government coercion (the withholding of a business license) to force Mr. Cathy to stop speaking.

:0

Res ipsa loquitur. This is a violation of Mr. Cathy's First Amendment rights by a government official. 

With a freakin' public confession. 

In a constitutional republic governed by the rule of law, Alderman Moreno would be arrested by the Justice Department like yesterday, and charged with conspiracy to violate the constitutional rights of Mr. Cathy. This is a very serious crime-- an explicit willful public violation of the First Amendment rights of a citizen by a government official-- and Alderman Moreno would, in such a republic, be facing prison. 

*Sigh*. 

If we only lived in a constitutional republic governed by the rule of law...

U.N. to Jews: Happy Yom Kippur

Today is Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement.

To mark the occassion, the United Nations has invited Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to address the General Assembly. He could have spoken on any of several days this week, but the U.N. chose Yom Kippur.

Ahmadinejad, for readers emerging from a 10-year coma, is the President of pre-nuclear Iran and the world's preeminent anti-semite. He is a Holocaust-denier who has pledged the extermination of Israel.

You don't need one of those fancy U.N. interpreters to understand the message the U.N. is sending to Jews on this solemn day.

Yom Kippur

On this most sacred of Jewish holidays-- a solemn Day of Atonement marking the 40 days that began with the first of Elul, Jews around the world fast in repentance for their sins. The Book of Life is closed and sealed, and those who have repented their sins will have a good and happy year.

I am told that one should not actually wish a "Happy Yom Kippur", but rather an easy fast. Yom Kippur is not a happy day.

May our Jewish friends who read this blog and our Jewish brethern In Israel and around the world have an easy fast and a safe and happy year.

In this treacherous time, may they be blessed with good will from all men.

Indian lawyer Elizabeth Warren is neither

It seems that Harvard Law Professor and Democrat Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, who has faked Indian ancestry to scam the affirmative action scam at Harvard, now admits that she... hasn't had a license to practice law for a while, despite... practicing law.

From Breitbart:

Does Elizabeth Warren Have a Law License Problem?

Elizabeth Warren, who is running for U.S. Senate from Massachusetts and has taught law in Massachusetts for nearly two decades, may never have obtained a license to practice law there, and may be unlicensed to practice anywhere at the moment, new evidence suggests.

The surprise issue to emerge from last Thursday's Massachusetts Senate debate between incumbent Republican Senator Scott Brown and Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren was Brown's charge that Warren's legal work for Travelers Insurance put her squarely on the side of the "one percent" she has attacked so vigorously throughout her campaign.

The Boston Globe reported that Warren was paid $212,000 over three years from 2008 to 2010 for "of counsel" legal work for Travelers in a case that the company won when it reached the Supreme Court in 2009. Travelers' attorneys persuaded the Court that their client did not have to pay a number of asbestos claims.

Now, as William Jacobson reports at Legal Insurrection, the Travelers Insurance issue may have legs. 

Jacobson notes that, though Warren operated a law practice from her Cambridge office for more than a decade, she never obtained a license to practice law in Massachusetts.

Earlier in her career, Professor Warren was licensed to practice law in New Jersey, where she lived briefly after graduating from Rutgers School of Law in 1976, and Texas, where she lived from 1978 to 1987 while teaching at the University of Houston and University of Texas. In a 2008 resume, Professor Warren stated that she was a member of the Bar in both New Jersey and Texas. However, she is currently not listed as eligible to practice law in either state.

Breitbart News asked Jennifer Nash, the Communications Director at Simpson, Thacher, and Bartlett, the New York law firm that defended Travelers in its Supreme Court case and hired Professor Warren to act "of counsel" in their brief to the Court, to comment on Professor Jacobson's story, but we have not received a response yet.

Specifically, we asked Ms. Nash if she could tell us in which state Professor Warren had beenlicensed to practice law when she provided legal services to Simpson, Thacher, and Bartlett and Travelers Insurance.

Jacobson reports that Warren voluntarily withdrew from the practice of law in the State of New Jersey on September 11, 2012. That tactic merely prevents anyone from finding out when her eligibility to practice law in New Jersey ended.

Jacobson concludes his carefully researched article by stating that if Warren was practicing law from her Cambridge office, she violated Massachusetts law:

"[T]here is no authority which exempts from the licensing requirements an attorney domiciled in Massachusetts using a Massachusetts office but who offers legal advice and services only to out-of-state clients and as to non-Massachusetts law."

Jacobson notes that the Warren campaign has offered no comment on his report.

The Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers grants law licenses to practice in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and enforces penalties against attorneys who violate its rules. Breitbart News left a voice mail message on Monday with Karen O' Toole, Associate General Counsel at the Board of Bar Overseers for comment on whether the Board intends to investigate Ms. Warren's conduct, but has not yet received a response.

Oh my...

What a supercilious fraud. Ms. "99%" made mega-bucks as a lawyer, apparently without a law license. Of course, practicing law without a license is a felony, but behaving feloniously is part of running for office as a Democrat, especially in Massachusetts. One doubts that the Massachusetts AG-- Martha Coakley-- will be issuing an arrest warrant anytime soon. She's the sap that Scott Brown beat for the Senate last time around, and she's not about to apply the law to another patrician Democrat.

Warren makes my skin crawl. She's an empty shell-- all for the 'public' on the outside, nothing but a self-serving fraud on the inside. Telling the truth about your chalk-white ancestry and bothering to get a law license before you practice law is for little people, not for Harvard Democrats.

Don't Democrats vet these people before they inflict them on the electorate? Perhaps a fake Indian/fake lawyer is the best they could do. All of the Kennedys must be in detox for this election cycle.

"... In any war between the civilized man and the savage... "

I love it.

The ads-- sponsored by Pam Geller of Atlas Shrugs-- will go up shortly in the New York City subway system. A judge in NYC has overruled New York's transit authority's refusal to run the ad.

The war with Radical Islam (and it is a war) is genuinely a war between civilization and savagery. We need to tell the truth about it.

No doubt the Islamofascists will threaten and bluster, but I pray that they will not respond to free speech with violence, which would, of course, be an obvious instantiation of the point the ad is making.

From Powerline:

Note that the poster contains no reference either to a religion or to an ethnic group. It contrasts “Israel” with “Jihad.”

Abdul Yasar, a New York subway rider who considers himself an observant Muslim, said Geller’s ad was insensitive in an unsettling climate for Muslims.

“If you don’t want to see what happened in Libya and Egypt after the video — maybe not so strong here in America — you shouldn’t put this up,” Yasar said.

So the threat is explicit. But toward whom is the ad insensitive? Jihadists, evidently. Are we really supposed to be sensitive to the feelings of jihadists?

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York initially refused to run Geller’s ad, saying it was “demeaning.” But U.S. District Court Judge Paul Engelmayer ruled last month that it is protected speech under the First Amendment.

“Demeaning”? Again, demeaning toward whom? Jihadists. Are jihadists now some kind of protected class?

Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, backed publication of the “patently offensive” ads.

But aren’t they offensive only to jihadists, which is to say, mass murderers and their supporters? If you advocate mass murder, shouldn’t you expect to be offended? At a minimum?

Opponents say the ads imply that Muslims are savages.

But wait! Aren’t we constantly told that jihadists aren’t really Muslims? That Islam is staunchly opposed to terrorism? So how are all Muslims encompassed within the term “jihad”?

“We recognize the freedom of speech issues and her right to be a bigot and a racist,” said Muneer Awad, the executive director of the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. But he said he hopes the MTA and elected officials “take on a leadership role in denouncing hate speech.”

So now jihadists are a race? I am so confused! And does CAIR really think that denouncing jihadists constitutes “hate speech?” If jihadists can’t be denounced, then who can be?

This is the sort of confusion that is, in its own way, clarifying.

A key to fighting the Islamofascists is to name them for what they are, without fear. We must overcome political correctness and self-censorship. Totalitarians of all stripes-- Nazis, Communists, Islamists-- use reticence and fear to gain a foothold, and then strip away rights and civilization by force when they have acquired enough power through intimidation.

There is an adage (attributed to Freud, about unconscious thoughts) that demons retain their hold on us only until they are named. When we name them, they lose their power.

We need to name the jihadi savages for the demons that they are.

Great ad.

Perhaps it wasn't really the You Tube video that pissed them off...

(Please pardon the graphic pics-- my apologies to Ambassador Stevens' family, but we need to know what the Muslim mob did that night, and why, and hold those responsible for this atrocity-- in our government and in Libya-- to account. )

Muslim mob offering "medical assistance" to Ambassador Stevens,
according to Obama Administration

The "medical assistance" offered by the mob seems to have involved
 an uncommonly thorough physical exam. 

This is hard to believe, but if it is true, it is an astonishing scandal.

According to Lebanese intelligence sources and other foreign journalists, US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was raped prior to his murder at the hands of Muslim militants who had already gotten inside the US Embassy in Benghazi, Libya prior to the outbreak of violence. The question begs for an answer, who let them in, thus compromising US compound security, and why did our embassy security contingent allow the embassy grounds to be breached?

As the militants who had raped, brutalized, and murdered Ambassador Stevens paraded his half naked body jubilantly through the streets of Benghazi, Libya the US media was putting out a story that a photo depicting J. Christopher’s battered half nude body being carried by one of the militants was somehow being rushed to the nearest hospital?... Already the American mainstream media was looking for a way to cover for President Obama’s blatant ineptitude and failed foreign policy by making a sickening excuse for a brutal image that gave us a candid insight into the savagery of the Muslim intolerance for any ideology but their own.

The Obama Administration and their court eunuchs in the mainstream media have portrayed this murder of our ambassador as the result of spontaneous outrage from a You Tube video, although recently the Administration has admitted that it was a carefully planned pre-meditated military-style attack.

There are many credible reports, and accompanying photographs, to suggest that Ambassador Stevens was sexually assaulted by the Muslim mob at the time of his death. 

Why? 

Why was he raped by the Muslim mob?

Perhaps this is why:

Two sources in Chicago diplomatic circles identify Ambassador Chris Stevens as gay (meaning State Department sent gay man to be ambassador to Libya)

"Ambassador Chris Stevens in the 70s with male companion Austin Tichenor, whose Facebook profile has been displaying photos and remembrances of Stevens the last few days including references to the gay-themed novel..."

Wow.


From Breitbart:

REPORT: SERBIAN CONSULATE CLAIMS AMB. STEVENS GAY, SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN SENT TO LIBYA 

In the report, not written in a way derogatory toward the ambassador, the Serbian consulate is questioned and he alleges that Stevens' homosexuality was common knowledge: he also says that because of it, Stevens should have been sent somewhere other than a Muslim country.

The report contains pictures of Stevens and an alleged male romantic interest from the 1970s, and is based largely on conversations with gay Chicago city officials and consulates in Chicago. 

Here's the question: If Stevens was a homosexual, as the Serbian consulate and others claim, why was he sent to Libya, especially if officials there knew of his homosexuality? It just seems like one more way the Obama administration needlessly enraged the passions of protesters in that part of the world.

From American Vision News:

You won’t hear any of this in the media, no doubt, but in Chicago’s diplomatic circles at least there is no doubt that Chris Stevens was gay and that pretty much anyone in the diplomatic world knew that. That includes the Libyans who were hired as security at the consulate in Benghazi who betrayed Ambassador Stevens and assisted in his murder. 

Which raises the question of why Hillary Clinton and the State Department would make him America’s ambassador in a viciously anti-gay Muslim environment. 
[emphasis mine] 

Kyle Rogers writing for Examiner.com explains:

Hillary Clinton has been spending US taxpayer dollars to fund homosexual pride events in foreign countries. Her actions have prompted backlashes against the US in Italy, Russia, Pakistan, and other nations. Last year, Barack Obama made it official US policy to fund homosexual rights groups overseas with US tax-dollars. 

In Pakistan, the staff of the US embassy in Islamabad was placed in serious danger after being ordered to host a homosexual pride event. Pakistanis rioted outside the embassy and burned American flags. 

Friends of Christopher Stevens in Chicago say he was gay. A member of the Serbian diplomatic team based in Chicago told HillBuzz.org that the State Department knowingly sent a gay man to be the ambassador of Libya. HillBuzz.org reports ”in Chicago’s diplomatic circles at least there is no doubt that Chris Stevens was gay.” 

The question is, did Hillary Clinton know this? If so, she knowingly sent him into an environment where his presence would be considered a provocation. Hillary Clinton’s track record in North Africa is absolutely dismal. The US State Department has successfully turned Libya and Egypt upside down and placed militant Islam in charge of those nations. . . . 

According to leading Arab media outlets, the murder of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens was even more horrible than what was reported in on the US media. The Arab media reports that Stevens was beaten, gang raped, killed, and then his body was publicly displayed in a manner similar to Gaddafi.

HillBuzz writer Kevin DuJan got the scoop on the brutal killing:


The Serbian consulate employee identified himself to me as “Dino” and wouldn’t give me any more of a name than that, but told me it was no secret that Chris Stevens was gay and that “it was stupid to send him to Libya as the ambassador when he was a known homosexual”.
Dino explained in great detail that the brutal sodomizing of Stevens’ corpse was something that Muslims do to show the “utmost disrespect to the body” and that this is “a great insult in Islam” reserved for homosexuals. ”It is like making him a woman in death and he will be a woman now after life” the Serbian explained to me. There’s a good chance this guy was Muslim too, and gay, which makes my head spin more than a little since he seemed to have no anger at all in his voice that Muslims in Libya assassinated the American ambassador and then sodomized his corpse. 

“He should not have gone there” was the general consensus from this man.

If this story is true, it explains why the Obama administration appeared panicked and has dissembled in such an amateurish way.

It boggles the mind. This is a news story of astonishing gravity-- the allegation that an American ambassador was murdered and raped by a Muslim mob in Libya because he was gay, and that the Obama administration sent him to Libya knowing he was gay-- perhaps they even sent him to Libya knowing his presence would be a provocation, and that the State Department gave him a Muslim-Brotherhood security detail that would know that he was gay, and that the Obama administration has lied about  the circumstances surrounding his rape and murder, and that the Obama administration staged the unconstitutional 'show arrest' of the filmmaker to cover their own ass, and that the mainstream news media is cooperating in the coverup of this story.

Is the Obama administration in a lying frenzy to cover-up the fact that their incompetence and their idiotic effort to add a little Gay Pride to our foreign service in Islamic countries just got four innocent men-- including our Ambassador-- killed?

Why aren't these rather obvious questions being asked by the mainstream media?

Totalitarians of all sorts are watching, and learning.

Yale Law professor Steven Carter has a fine essay on freedom of speech and the violent efforts by Islamists to suppress criticism of Islam.

Carter:

I have said before that I am a near-absolutist on the subject of free speech. I defend the right of imbeciles to express themselves in ways that are offensive and wounding to people who have done nothing to deserve it. Naturally one would prefer to defend free speech in the name of such once-banned classics as “Ulysses” and “1984.” One would prefer to defend a free press that is ferreting out the Pentagon Papers. 

Those opportunities rarely arise. If our culture instead produces offensive junk, then that is where the ramparts must be built -- not because offensive junk is a positive good, but because the power to censor is far too dangerous to be placed in the hands of government... 

The best statement of our constitutional rule remains the one announced by the U.S. Supreme Court 40 years ago in Police Department of the City of Chicago v. Mosley: “To permit the continued building of our politics and culture, and to assure self-fulfillment for each individual, our people are guaranteed the right to express any thought, free from government censorship.” The government, said the court, “has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content.”
That’s why the American Nazi Party couldn’t be prevented from marching in Skokie, Illinois, in 1977. That’s why the members of Westboro Baptist Church were free to picket the funeral of Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder in 2006. That’s why protesters have the right to burn the U.S. flag. 

None of these actions is admirable. What’s admirable is the broad respect for liberty that protects them. 

Of course, there are exceptions. But they don’t apply here. For instance, a remarkable number of commentators, borrowing from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, have compared the “Innocence of Muslims” video to falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater. Others have drawn analogies to Brandenburg v. Ohio, the 1969 case in which the Supreme Court suggested (“held” would egregiously overstate the case) the possibility that speech directed to inciting and likely to incite “imminent lawless action” might not be protected under the First Amendment. 

...These are dangerous arguments. Consider how we would respond if an anti-abortion group were so furious at a pro- choice film that it blew up the theater. I very much doubt that we would be accusing the filmmakers of incitement, even if they knew in advance that the terrorists were lurking.

One might object that there is a difference between insulting an individual and insulting a religion. There is indeed -- and our sympathies should be with the individual. Followers of a religion can turn to their fellow believers for solace. Often, they can turn to a tradition that has survived centuries or millenniums of mockery and abuse. Believers don’t turn from God because God has been mocked; they turn from the mocker.
The individual, by contrast, must bear the insults. The more public the individual is, the greater the abuse that the Constitution allows us to heap on his or her shoulders. The cost of freedom is indeed terrible. But the cost of restrictions on that freedom is more terrible still. 

That a video or a cartoon offends many devout Muslims is surely a fact, but it isn’t an argument. I frequently hear the Lord’s name taken in vain. For some of us, the name of God remains sacred, and hearing it profaned is painful. But the First Amendment wisely denies us legal recourse. (That’s why the Obama administration was wrong -- very wrong -- even to ask YouTube, which hosts the video, to “review whether it violates their terms of use.” A chill is a chill.) 

In the U.S., we routinely deride religions. We make best- sellers of books launching often-uninformed attacks on the very idea of God, and give rave reviews to a Broadway show making crude mockery of Mormonism. The insensitivity and boorishness of those who enjoy attacking the faith of others does not strip them of their rights of freedom of expression... 

When we remember the periods of censorship in our history, we remember them, as we should, with embarrassment. There are censors today... and the impulse is always tempting. Words and images do wound. Wounds untended do fester. But aside from simply turning away, the only antidote the Constitution allows is arguing back -- in short, more speech. 

In much of the world, governments have taken on the responsibility of protecting their people from unpleasant images. In the U.S., we have gone a different way, choosing a more genuine freedom of speech. But speech is only free if we protect it when we hate it.

I am an absolutist on freedom of speech. The situations in which speech may be prosecuted are exceedingly rare. Slander, extortion, 'yelling fire in a theatre' are exceptions, but there are really very few exceptions. Even the claim that speech should be banned when it incites violence must be approached with a gimlet eye. We must never ban speech merely because the hearer of the words chooses violence, when there is no explicit exhortation to violence in the words themselves. Mocking Mohammed does not explicitly suborn violence. There are whole sectors of the internet devoted to mocking Christ, with no violence. We Christian taxpayers are even forced to fund His immersion in urine. No one has died, thank God, because of it.

Violence in response to mere mockery, no matter how caustic, is that of the hearer, not the speaker. To ban such mockery merely gives the Islamofascists a mob's veto over our free speech rights.

The wide acceptance of legal or even social limitations on our freedom of speech about Islam-- particularly by the Left-- is chilling. It's more chilling in many ways than a mob of psychos in Islamabad. It suggests that many Americans are willing to trade freedom for a pittance.

It's submission, really-- submission to any violent ideology whose adherents are willing to put on a bloody show. It means that we can be made slave to any totalitarianism, not just the totalitarianism of the Prophet. It bodes a nightmare.

Perhaps that's why the Left is so accommodating to Islamic demands for submission. Totalitarians of all sorts are watching, and learning.   

Jihad and Sati, and coexistence

The cry of many in the West to mute our criticism of Islam in the interest of peace and coexistence reminds me of a story about Charles James Napier, the British Army's commander-in-chief in India in the mid-19th century.

The British outlawed the traditional Indian practice of Sati, which is self-immolation of widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Such practices were often abetted by Hindu locals.

When Hindu priests complained to Napier that Seti was a venerable traditional Hindu custom, Napier replied:

Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.

Coexistence between civilizations means compromise. The devil is in the details: some compromises are betrayals (Quisling in Norway and Vichy France), and some compromises are noble and work to the benefit of both civilizations.

"Coexistence" is neither evil nor good. The compromises made to achieve it stamp it so.

So I believe in coexistence with Islam. Coexistence on emphatically Christian terms.

Here are the Christian terms:

1) Nonviolence. The resort to violence to settle religious differences must be utterly repudiated.

2) Human rights, most emphatically freedom of religion and freedom of speech. No exceptions. No one has the right to force religious practice on another person, and no one has a right to threaten or use violence against another because of the expression of an opinion.

Those are the terms of coexistence between Christianity and Islam. Freedom is the indispensable foundation for that coexistence. Islam reveres their prophet, and we revere our freedom-- a gift to all men by God-- which we hold to be self-evident.

If the Islamists insist, then let us each act according to our customs. Muslims will kill innocents and demand submission, and we will fight for our freedom, again.

Salman Rushdie to Islamofascists: 'Hey, why don't you concentrate on that other guy...'

Sniveling weasel:

Salman Rushdie: "Actually, no, I don’t sympathize with the Mohammed filmmaker who’s now being threatened"

Rushdie green-lights the fatwa on filmmaker Nakoula Bassely Nakoula, who made the recent "Innocence of Muslims" video. As you may know, Rushdie is a leftie, so his pretense of supporting freedom of speech stops pretty much at his own skin. The sun rises, water is wet, and lefties don't really give a shit about other people's freedom.

The video-delicti obviously had nothing to do with the violence in the Arab Spring New Caliphate. The 9-11-12 murder of our ambassador and the three other Americans was a carefully planned assassination, not a spontaneous sally of indignantly righteous film critics.

The purpose of the Islamofascists in connecting the obviously premeditated terrorist attacks on our embassies with a cheesey sub-Borat video is merely to coax us a bit further toward dhimmitude. They kill our folks, and we respond by violating the constitutional rights of our folks. A jihad two-fer.

The video is quite amateurish, but it portrays the Prophet Profit as an avaricious deluded homicidal pedophile, so it has the virtue of accuracy.

Note to Rushdie: the issue is free speech, which is a fundamental human right, endowed by our Creator. I know that you, as an atheist, don't believe in our Creator, but you live under the remarkably free and tolerant Christian civilization that was built by people who do believe in our Creator. Succinctly: our Christian civilization is the only thing between you and a Religion of Peace™C4 suppository. Your low opinion of the Mohammed video, or the opinion of a Kaba-full of hypertensive Islamic jackals, or the opinion of a White-House-full of Obama Administration dhimmi, does nothing to mitigate the absolute fundamental right of the man who made the video to make the video.

It's the same absolute fundamental right-- exactly the same right-- that you had to write The Satanic Verses.

Another note to Rushdie: a Iranian religious foundation from the Religion of Peace™just upped the reward for murdering you to $3.3 million, from $2.8 million.

Groveling doesn't work, pal. Join the resistance.

Does quantum physics support a belief in God?

Physicist Stephen Barr has a superb post titled Does quantum physics make it easier to believe in God?

Excerpt:

Not in any direct way. That is, it doesn’t provide an argument for the existence of God. But it does so indirectly, by providing an argument against the philosophy called materialism (or “physicalism”), which is the main intellectual opponent of belief in God in today’s world.

Materialism is an atheistic philosophy that says that all of reality is reducible to matter and its interactions. It has gained ground because many people think that it’s supported by science. They think that physics has shown the material world to be a closed system of cause and effect, sealed off from the influence of any non-physical realities --- if any there be. Since our minds and thoughts obviously do affect the physical world, it would follow that they are themselves merely physical phenomena. No room for a spiritual soul or free will: for materialists we are just “machines made of meat.”

Quantum mechanics, however, throws a monkey wrench into this simple mechanical view of things...

Barr goes on to provide an elegant and fascinating explanation of the role that mind plays in quantum theory, and he points out that if the reality of the mind is denied, one is forced to accept a bizarre understanding of reality.

He concludes:

[I]f the mathematics of quantum mechanics is right (as most fundamental physicists believe), and if materialism is right, one is forced to accept the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. And that is awfully heavy baggage for materialism to carry.

If, on the other hand, we accept the more traditional understanding of quantum mechanics that goes back to von Neumann, one is led by its logic (as Wigner and Peierls were) to the conclusion that not everything is just matter in motion, and that in particular there is something about the human mind that transcends matter and its laws. It then becomes possible to take seriously certain questions that materialism had ruled out of court: If the human mind transcends matter to some extent, could there not exist minds that transcend the physical universe altogether? And might there not even exist an ultimate Mind?

Please read the whole thing.

I agree with Barr's take. There seems not to be any 'Schrodinger's Sixth Way' by which quantum mechanics demonstrates God's existence.

No surprise there. Demonstrations of God's existence are rigorously logical, not empirical. The Lord transcends the nature He creates. Primary Cause creates secondary cause, and is not reducible to it nor limited in it.

But quantum mechanics is a catastrophe for materialism, which is the modern metaphysical framework for atheism. Quantum mechanics makes it very hard to be an intellectually-fulfilled materialist.

Admittedly the standards for materialist gratification have never been high.


(H.T. Ed Feser)

L.A. Times dhimmi on the Murderers' Veto

From a Los Angeles Times Op-Ed (quoted on Hot Air):

The current standard for restricting speech — or punishing it after it has in fact caused violence — was laid out in the 1969 case Brandenburg vs. Ohio. Under the narrower guidelines, only speech that has the intent and the likelihood of inciting imminent violence or lawbreaking can be limited…
As for imminence, the timeline of similar events after recent burnings of religious materials indicates that reactions typically come within two weeks. Nakoula’s video was deliberately publicized just before the sensitive date of Sept. 11, and could be expected to spark violence on that anniversary.
While many 1st Amendment scholars defend the right of the filmmakers to produce this film, arguing that the ensuing violence was not sufficiently imminent, I spoke to several experts who said the trailer may well fall outside constitutional guarantees of free speech. “Based on my understanding of the events,” 1st Amendment authority Anthony Lewis said in an interview Thursday, “I think this meets the imminence standard.”

Have no illusion: the Left gives not a shit for your Constitutional right to freedom of speech. Nada. It is difficult to imagine a more open-and-shut exercise of Constitutionally-protected freedom of speech. A guy makes a video that satirizes Mohammed in order to express his opinion about the "prophet". People who don't like the video are free to 1) Not watch it 2) Make a video presenting their own view. Freedom of speech, 101.

Now this L.A. Times dhimmi (the author is a former assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) actually tries to make the case that the video mocking Mohammed is not Constitutionally-protected free speech.

:O

There is no debate here. The Islamofellating Left can wrap 'Brandenburg vs. Ohio' in a tight wad and shove it. To advocate giving Islamic murderers a veto over the free speech of Americans is so low that it shocks even me-- and there is little the Left can do that shocks me.

Laws censoring criticism of Islam are always and everywhere a denial of basic human rights, and, in America, government censorship of criticism of Islam is obviously unconstitutional.

The proper response to murder committed by Islamic monsters isn't ordinance, but ordnance.

'Aren't you doing babies a favor by aborting them?'

In a video charmingly titled "Atheist bitchslap", a young woman makes atheist talking points at a discussion about the existence of heaven.

Her points, with my reply:

'If heaven exists, and aborted babies are in heaven, then people who abort babies are doing the babies a favor'.

Her argument is no more rational than the assertion 'suffering exists, and aborted babies don't suffer once they're aborted, so aborting them does them a favor'.

The idiot argument can be applied to any metaphysic, secular or Christian.

Where it fails is revealed by the Principle of Double-Effect, which is a traditional principle of Christian morality. The PDE states that an act that has some bad consequences is ultimately good if and only if it meets all of the following four criteria:

1) The intent is good.
2) The bad is not intended.
3) The good is not a consequence of the bad. That is, the bad is not the means by which the good is accomplished.
4) The magnitude of the good is substantially greater than the magnitude of the bad.

Killing a baby to send him to heaven is an explicit violation of the second and third criteria of the PDE. The baby's death is intended, and the good-- going to heaven-- is a direct consequence of the bad-- killing him.

By ancient Christian morality, aborting a baby, even to send that baby to heaven, is intrinsically evil.

But if the atheist young lady were smart enough to understand the PDE, she wouldn't be an atheist.

"Faith by definition is believing in things without evidence"

 No. That is not the definition of faith.

Faith is not credulity. Faith is fidelity. Faith is our decision to act consistently in accordance with the  conclusions we draw from incomplete evidence. Faith is not belief in things without evidence. Faith is diligence in following truth as we know it. Fidelity to the belief that atheism is true is no less faith than is fidelity to the belief that Christianity is true. Faith is the decision to weigh the logical, empirical, emotional, and intuitive evidence and to act in accordance with our best understanding of truth.

The truth is that we all lack conclusive evidence, in the sense of empirical proof of ultimate metaphysical reality.  We all believe things without conclusive evidence, atheists and scientists no less than theologians. We have no other choice but to rely on an incomplete understanding of the truth. All of us-- atheist and Christian alike, see through a glass darkly.

Faith is the firm decision to follow the evidence where it leads, even though we don't always like where it leads because it thwarts some of our desires.

Fidelity and diligence are what Christians mean by faith.  But Christian faith does entail an aspect of faith not present in atheist faith. For Christians the truth is a Person. We have faith in Someone, not just in something.

We love and obey Christ, because we have come to understand Him in our limited way, and we mean to follow Him.

Faith is fidelity to truth, as we understand it Him. 

JT Eberhard on abortion: "Even human life has varying values..."

Atheist JT Eberhard discusses abortion on Patheos.

Eberhard:

My position is that the destruction of a zygote is little more worrisome that the destruction of a dandelion. Richard Carrier, I think, said it best:

“From a point of view outside of this affair, the killing of a neurologically inactive fetus is no greater a harm than the killing of a mouse, and in fact decidedly less–a mouse is neurologically active, and though it lacks a complex cerebral cortex, it has a brain of suitable complexity to perceive pain.” 

Things that cannot suffer their own loss, though alive, have never really concerned us, whether they are trees, insects, mice, etc. I see no reason to believe a zygote or a fetus is different in any meaningful way up until they reach that point.

Any human being who dies unaware of the fact that they are dying "cannot suffer their own loss". A person in a coma who dies does not suffer their own loss. They suffer nothing at all by dying, because being in a coma is to be, by definition, incapable of suffering. When your wife is sleeping beside you, she would not "suffer her own loss" if you reached over and shot her in the head. She wouldn't know anything, including her own loss. If you drop your newborn off a cliff, your child wouldn't "suffer her own loss".

Eberhard asserts that it is morally licit to kill people who are unaware that they are being killed, whether they are zygotes, or people in coma, or sleeping wives, or unwanted newborns.

He certainly deserves credit for candor.

The reason it is wrong to kill human beings is not because they will suffer if you kill them. The reason that it is wrong to kill human beings is that they are human beings.

Eberhard:

An argument that inevitably comes up in the abortion debate is that a zygote will one day become a child (perhaps the next Beethoven!) if left unchecked. ... do you not realize that every sperm in the male body is a potential human being (it just needs the female egg, itself a potential unique, glorious human being). Yet the prospect of this lost potential does not seem to frighten you into promiscuity... Don’t you worry that that particular sperm might have cured cancer one day, and you just let it slip away?

The abortion debate has nothing to do with "potential" human beings. It has to do with the protection of actual human beings.

Human life begins at conception, and at every stage thereafter-- zygote, embryo, fetus, child, adult-- this individual is a human being.

Each stage of human life has actuality and potentiality. An embryo is actually a human being with three germ layers, etc, and is potentially a fetus, child and adult. A child is actually a human being who is immature, learning to walk and read and write, etc, and is potentially an adult.

An individual is a human being at every stage of life, from conception to death.

Eberhard:

Don’t you worry that that particular sperm might have cured cancer one day, and you just let it slip away?... Why then do we care about a particular set of cells in the female because they share a similar potential?

An unborn child in the womb isn't a potential human being. He or she is an actual human being-- just as actual as his/her mother.

Instead of hating this lost potential, which could never even come close to being realized in reality, why not love the fact that an unwilling mother was not burdened with an expensive and lifelong roll of the dice she didn’t want, with equally small chances of making the next Richard Dawkins or the next Torquemada?

No human being should be killed because he/she is a "burden". The mother's reluctance to carry the child to term is regrettable, and in some situations understandable (e.g. after rape), but that is not a justification for killing a human being.

I can be happy for the women who experience tremendous relief that they were not saddled with the responsibility for a child they did not want or for which they were unprepared. Could you look me in the eye and tell me that you hate the ruining of somebody’s life less than you hate the loss of a some incognizant cells? Would you even want to? That would tell me all I need to know about the compassion of Christianity.

No woman is forced to raise a child. She simply has no right to kill her child.  Adoption is always an option.

The whole idea of post-abortion trauma is mostly fabricated anyway.

What a callous ignorant thing to say. Millions of women (and men) suffer horribly after abortion, often for the rest of their lives.

The average cost of raising a child is almost $227,000. And that’s just the money, this is not including the time you spend raising a child. In this case, for women who do not wish to raise a child, the convenience of getting an abortion is similar to the convenience of not losing all your worldly possessions in a fire several times over. At what point does “Holy fucking shit this is potentially life-destroying!!!” become differentiated from “convenience?” Why would destroying a wad of unthinking cells for the “convenience” of not incurring these costs not be ok? 

And even if it was just a matter of convenience, why wouldn’t it be ok then? Potential? That argument sucks. God? That argument also sucks.

Not even worth a comment. Just depraved.

You do not get to dictate what other people do with their bodies unless you’re protecting a conscious being from harm. Often, it doesn’t even matter that the life form is conscious (this is why you can kill mice).

Killing unconscious human beings, or even insufficiently conscious human beings, is fine with Eberhard. It's like killing mice.

Look, lots of things are alive that we do not give the first damn about. Even human life has varying values (if you doubt this, imagine you had to direct a missile to either a kindergarten or a prison).

That is precisely the difference between the pro-life view and the pro-abortion view on the sanctity of life. In the pro-life view, slaughtering prisoners is every bit as immoral as slaughtering children.

It is immoral to kill human beings. Period.

I admit that a zygote has some worth (I think dandelions do too), but I think that worth is obviously negligible. And if you’re going to suggest that the value of those unthinking, unfeeling cells is worth more than that of the conscious mother who has memories, a life she has built, love, and the ability to suffer the loss of all of it, as well as the ability to feel resentment at being forced to raise an unwanted child, you need to get a new definition of “twisted.”

The mother and the child have exactly the same "value". Both have an inviolable right to life. Both lack the right to kill others.

You know what I hate? I hate that there are some people who think they have enough ownership over someone else’s life to dictate that they bear a child. And I hate the religion that hands them that privilege as though it’s god’s will.

The basis for a lawful society is protection of innocent life. No one has a right to kill.

Eberhard expresses the depravity of the pro-abortion movement with uncommon clarity.