Imagine the Return to a Revolutionary Ideal

 

Once upon a time there was the Black Robe Regiment which was the name given by the British to the Colonial Preachers who supported American independence. Not only did they preach independence, they very often were officers in the militias against the Red Coats. The British did all they could to murder these preachers and many gave their lives for the Revolution but the danger did not curtail the Black Robe Regiment preachers who refused to be cowed and were one of the main inspirations of the American revolution. Their sermons inspired and often their brash and brave actions kept the Revolution alive and brought a number of victories against the odds with their bravery and words motivating their fellow congregants often at the most crucial of moments. The United States owes much of the founding in the fighting and the religious basis of the Founding Fathers and the state legislators whose input and approvals were required in the formation of both the federation of America and then the Constitution which was the foundation for the United States of America. There is a possibility that the Revolution could have failed without the local inspiration and organization which was often centered around the churches and their Black Robe Regiment preachers.

 

Black Robe Regiment

 

All that changed in 1954 at the behest of Texas Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson’s proposed legislation to amend the tax codes affecting houses of worship such as churches, synagogues, mosques, or temples and other nonprofit organizations with 501(c)(3) tax exemptions. The amended tax code limited the freedom of speech by members of organizations and entities who had tax exempt status under 501(c)(3) regulations making any political speech such as supporting a candidate, party or other specified political speech. The amendment to the tax codes was named for its presenter and is called the Johnson Amendment. Particularly prohibited was conducting political campaign activities to intervene in elections to public office or other sermonizing which may be perceived as backing a candidate or party. The language was vague and unspecific enough that many clergy were silenced from mentioning even certain Bible passages near election times as they might be construed as taking sides on a campaign issue and by doing so backing a particular candidate or party. Such brought to an end political preaching from the pulpit, at least in theory as some such still exists but as long as the parishioners are singing the same tune, nobody complains and such activity continues. This was specifically used to target and silence clergy from endorsing candidates. Over time this embargo on political speech became partisan in nature in too many locations as a ban against conservative politicking while backing leftist causes or progressive Democrat candidates. Still, care was taken to never mention any names and instead to often mimic campaign slogans working them into sermons or choosing verses carefully for recitation which would appear to back one candidate’s positions or damn the opposing candidate. Still, clergy still need be far more reserved and careful and a far cry from the history of clergy, especially when one remembers the Black Robe Regiment.

 

Texas Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson

 

Should Donald Trump as president keep his word and successfully repeal the Johnson Amendment thus freeing certain tax exempt institutions and their personnel from conducting any political activities, especially campaigning or endorsing candidates, imagine the consequences. We would witness the liberation of the clergy and the resultant rebirth potentially of a new Black Robe regiment preaching and supporting political positions more aligned with their religious beliefs. There need be no great fears from secularists as they won’t be in houses of worship forced to hear any sermonizing, especially political sermonizing. Rescinding this regulation, expunging it from the tax code, would be a strike for freedom of speech. Placing a political muzzle on the clergy and threatening their tax exempt status was a bad idea from the start, one might even say criminal. But then Lyndon Baines Johnson was not exactly known for tact or freedom of expression for anybody disagreeing with his views. He was better known for strong-arming political rivals by any and all means at his disposal. This was most evident during his time as President which also served to allow his passing every piece of legislation which became the backbone of his “Great Society” and a remaking of the social safety net and the start of an increased welfare system. Some have blamed this for many societal problems being faced by American society currently. Just maybe a little moralizing before Election Day voting would serve as a positive influence. Just Maybe.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

The West Which Cannot See Cannot Avoid this Future

 

Giulio Meotti’s article Another 9/11 is on the horizon was unfortunately as likely as prescient as was the George Bernard Shaw 1903 quote he used which postulated a future where the survival of Western Society would come into doubt due to the insipid and foolish value system which would have replaced faith in Hashem and placing pleasure above family. George Bernard Shaw had written the following:

The day is coming when great nations will find their numbers dwindling from census to census; when the six-roomed villa will rise in price above the family mansion; when the viciously reckless poor and the stupidly pious rich will delay the extinction of the race only by degrading it; whilst the boldly prudent, the thriftily selfish and ambitious, the imaginative and poetic, the lovers of money and solid comfort, the worshippers of success, of art, and of love, will all oppose to the Force of Life the device of sterility.

Those who have read, or especially followed, BTC have read many an article on similar predictions, observations and desperate calls for our societies to awaken to their destructive practices and to turn towards the now seeming ludicrous ideals and cherished ideas of our forefathers from simply two or at most three generations back when family was the measure of a man and the dedication of both men and women. We referenced to such yesterday; so we will endeavor to take a different approach and tack and simply request you read the article from yesterday if you wish a different angle. Of course George Bernard Shaw knew well from what he spoke as he was alive during the peak of the Eugenics Movement, the perfection of the human race through selective breeding. Such a concept would in and of itself lead to a vast and hurried decrease in the size of society as with those determined to be genetically deficient, which would mean the poor, minorities, Jews, and all who would be determined by an elite group not to be as elite or perfect as the few selected to reproduce as they had the superior genetic makeup. These were the same as the envisioned Nazi supermen of the SS who chose males at least six feet tall (two meters), females of an attractive figure and above average height, all with clear blue eyes, blonde hair and an adequate mind and they would be required to reproduce prodigiously and required to change partners after each successful pregnancy so as to maximize genetic diversity with what would be obviously a smaller than optimum population to provide such diversity. Reducing the acceptable qualifying genetic properties by selecting only blonde hair and blue eyed specimen, the gene pool was already intentionally reduced drastically, as both are recessive traits requiring both genes to have that trait be the result, thus those genes will be repeated in all offspring. Further, by espousing eugenic principles one is determining who is permitted to have children and thus will necessarily reduce the population.

 

There are others who are also calling for a reintroduction of a form of eugenics and a limit on the numbers of offspring permitted in their society and would apply their restriction worldwide given half an opportunity. These people are not so much calling for an improved human race though they add that as long as the reduced population growth was being controlled to allow a merely ecologically sustainable population which would have sufficiently slight demand on the planet, this would permit the planet to heal and remain pure instead of blighted by the expansive destruction of human society with such wasteful things as highways, cities, populations centers and a planet dedicated to people over nature. To these fanatics, the human society is a disease to be wiped clean or reduced to a sustainable level so small as to have little if any detrimental destructive effects. The least strident of these are the Zero Population Growth (ZPG) who believe that the numbers of human beings on planet, or should we say starship, Earth must be frozen if not decreased over time but must never ever be allowed to grow. As this movement has existed since the 1950s and perhaps before, who knows how far before as there were likely such people believing such back in ancient Greece as this unfounded fear that the humans have used up all the space on the planet is a result of people residing their entire lives in cities where people are stacked ten deep or more. There is a reason the main ZPG movement existence is the San Diego to San Francisco California area and the Washington D.C. through Boston corridor along the East Coast and none exist in central Nebraska, well, almost nothing exists in central Nebraska other than a half dozen families on their farms. Perhaps these excitable ZPG movement members should be granted a free trip east to west and back again across Nebraska allowing them to feel comfortable at the start and finish in Omaha, a fair sized city, as there is nothing even close across the rest of the state of Nebraska, trust us.

 

The numbers of different groups over the long history of missing predictions, probably the most overestimated problem has been population of the entire planet. Thus far every last attempt to mitigate the dire predictions with real and implemented solutions have simply proven far more destructive and disastrous than the predicted problems would have caused. One of the most problematic and unfortunate results of any population control experiment would have to be the recently terminated China one child policy. This policy had exactly the result any sane person could have pointed out, the over propensity to have that one child be a male, which was the exact result. China now finds themselves with a massive imbalance between young male and female population. The obvious old school and historic means for resolving such an imbalance had always been to have a large scale and prolonged war until the imbalance was mitigated through casualties. This may have been one of the factors in the near continuous wars throughout history between the separate Chinese provinces or, after the unification of China, between India and China. Granted that most wars have far more earthly motivating factors such as desires for the neighboring tribes’ women, cattle, fire starter, cave or other valuable item from times so distant that we could never discern their motivations any more than they could have understood our working for pieces of worthless paper which only have value because everybody agrees to honor the worthless pieces of paper, well, cloth actually.

 

The Crusades were a response to the loss of Jerusalem and the Holy Lands to the expansive colonialist armies surging out from the Arabian Peninsula initially centered around Medina and Mecca after its conquest. This surging of the young religion of Islam in its initial two centuries eventually spread forth across all of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) finally tuned back at Tours, France as they continued forth from Spain and again at the opposite end at Vienna which withstood a siege which was lifted by the combined armies of Poland, Hungary and the Holy Roman Army over a century later. Christianity’s loss of Jerusalem was a bitter and challenging reality which resulted in numerous Crusades, military expeditions, to retake Jerusalem and the Holy Lands with their all meeting with varied levels of success or failure. Eventually the Christian world had to necessarily eventually accept this loss until their retaking the areas from the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Those soldiers who liberated the Holy Land and took Jerusalem did not necessarily have any reaction that these lands were at all special as religious values of the lands; even Jerusalem was at best a secondary thought, as the Great War was a brutal and all-encompassing horror that has dragged for years and introduced carnage beyond any previous war, a carnage which had been intimated by the horrors half a century earlier in the American Civil War. World War I is difficult to understand by the nations of Europe as the assassination of a leader would be treated largely as a criminal event than an act sparking a world conflict. The Crusades would be even more difficult for modern Europeans to understand as religion has become but a puff of smoke wafting away on the winds of time and of as little concern in the world today as they were the motivating factor of all of society those few centuries ago when the many Crusades had gripped a pair of continents.

 

Crusader Routes I through IV spanning 1095 through 1289

 

Those on the other side of the Crusades have not progressed as has Europe, and the lands of Islam still hold the lands of MENA as they had during the times of the Crusades. The Byzantine Empire was the Islamic Caliphate at the onset of World War I and had sided with the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and Germany much due to their fears and challenges of Russia to their north who were their mortal enemy at the onset of the war. After World War I the Allied powers made a decision to return rule to the peoples residing within the lands taking caretaking positions under the League of Nations approved Mandate systems. Nations were set with borders which either had carelessly ignored tribal boundaries or intentionally set the borders to prevent the nations from uniting behind a leader and once again forming the Caliphate which they blamed for their entry into World War I against the Allied powers. That system known as Sykes-Picot also redrew the lines of borders in Eastern Europe dividing up the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and shrank German borders in an effort to prevent another empire forming in the east and threatening France and Britain in the future. Obviously both presumptions are proving to have been erroneous. Germany partly due to restrictions and punishing debt leveled against Germany partly led to World War II and the disintegration across the nations of MENA and the rise of groups attempting to unify the people under their banner exclaiming their claims to be the new Caliphate.

 

Islamic Expansion

 

The Western World and especially Europeans have strayed so far from their dedication to religious underpinnings in their societies that they are absolutely clueless to the reasoning and motivations behind many Islamic forces and the violence against them. The fact that there has also been many violent terrorist strikes in the Islamic World just as there has in the Western World has only increased the misunderstanding of the motivations in the increasingly violent actions between the two very different regions of today’s world. The inviting into Europe, Canada, the United States and the remainder of the Western World of “Syrian refugees” when Saudi Arabia refuses to accept a single refugee, the Gulf States with all their oil wealth refuse to take a single refugee, Jordan holds the refugees in hastily constructed camps refusing to permit a single refugee to resettle in Jordan and Turkey has a very similar policy as Jordan is confusing beyond normative reasoning. One would reason that as these refugees are Arabs and mostly Muslims that Arab and Muslim nations would be granting them entrance to assist these troubled individuals who have the same religion and similar if not near identical histories. Obviously there is something amiss about these refugees and the complete refusal of the entirety of the Arab and Islamic worlds for permitting even family unification or any reason no matter how seemingly rational is the strongest reason that the nations accepting these “refugees” should probably take greater precautions. One has to think at some point that the Arab Islamic World knows something that the Western and formerly Christian World does not know but should be concerned and figure out what the big secret must be. Their survival may just depend on figuring out why their own people refuse to assist them just as they refuse to ever assist or permit a single Palestinian “refugee” to leave their camps and reside in their lands, even in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority areas where Hamas and Fatah rule over the Arab Islamic communities have refugee camps of fellow “Palestinian” Arab refugees where members of the same family reside within and just outside the fences around the camp and they refuse to allow unification. Why is it once an Arab Muslim becomes a refugee is it incumbent on Western nations to take them in and the Islamic and Arab worlds refuse any responsibility for their brothers and sisters. Apparently Islam has little compassion for their own people, their own brothers and sisters suffering and take no responsibility to alleviate such suffering while Christian nations plus Jewish Israel have allowed some of these refugees to live a normal life and even take them in even when there are questions about their actual motives and why the vast majority are military age men without anywhere near a concomitant female populations and children also joining them.

 

This coming at a time when the Western World has all but lost their ties to religion is even more ominous as there could be a religious underpinning to this possible invasion and with religion all but dead in the Western World which makes the coming times if there should be difficulties and societal trauma, the next generation will look to anybody offering a different path, a new approach as they will see their parent’s methods as the reason and incapable of addressing the problems it is claimed they were causing and these children will become very open to Islam should it be presented as welcoming, open and liberating religion, just the picture that many Imams are selling. Sharia is not being brought into the relations attempting to convert Western liberal liberated youth who feel empty and lost and have no faith in Christianity which their parents have at best observed as an empty set of actions without meaning or any faith in Hashem. This will push their children to seek out those who honestly believe and believe deeply and such holding to faith will be attractive to the children being raised now in the Western World, especially if there are financial crises and political upheavals with collapse of the currencies and the society will be primed to be taken afield by Islam which will blame Christianity for letting the people down and not only allowing but contributing to these calamities. They will point to every fallen Priest, Rabbi, Minister or Christian religious or other leaders from the faith as the reason that Christianity has become a dead religion which has been replaced and that Allah is the one true god, the new face of the singular deity and that Islam is the replacement of Christianity just as Christianity replaced Judaism and that Muhammad was the final prophet who brought the new deity, Allah who is the last name, Allah who is the deity of Jesus, the same Jesus who will now be the messiah in a new manner of coming to ready the world for the return of Muhammad and who will serve as Muhammad’s servant and dedicated follower.

 

Islam defines itself as the final replacement religion of Abraham. There is a problem with their story for the discerning and true believer will realize the difference immediately. Where Hashem, the deity of the Judeo-Christian religious family, Hashem is of Abraham along with Isaak, and Jacob; Allah is the god of Abram, before Hashem made his covenant and altered his name to Abraham and making his name now holy, Ishmael, and Muhammad. Different lineage even including Abram rather than Abraham and instead of the gentle Isaak and the most noble and nearly free of sin Jacob we have Ishmael and finally Muhammad. Ishmael was prophesized in Torah in the verse of Genesis 16:12 by the words,

וְהוּא יִהְיֶה פֶּרֶא אָדָם יָדוֹ בַכֹּל וְיַד כֹּל בּוֹ וְעַל פְּנֵי כָל אֶחָיו יִשְׁכֹּן  

“And he will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be upon all, and everyone’s hand upon him, and before all his brothers he will dwell.”

 

Hashem and Allah are not the same and this makes the religions very different and not honestly all Abrahamic religions as Islam is an Abramic religion before Abram was renamed by Hashem into Abraham as a sign of their covenant and Abraham becoming the truth of Hashem. Abram became an entirely different person after making his covenant with Hashem and receiving his altered name adding new letters becoming Abraham and thus now being the individual capable of generating a just religion which would lead to the Messiah. These facts will not be explained nor are they even understood or known to the majority of wayward Jews and Christians who have lost their path walking with their religion. Many of these families may remember a few stories and quaint remembrances but other than a casual smattering of truths they know nothing. They know not the Bible, Torah, Proverbs, Psalms or the New Testament or that the United States was based on many biblical writings as well as common law, the Magna Carta and the most liberal political writings of their times. With a world failing and in utter confusion can we blame our children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren if they take to the seeming caressing arms of Islam if it be proffered as the salvation they seek rejecting that which they believe had forsaken their parents, grandparents and back as it had obviously failed when it had not failed, we had failed. Is there time to repair the damages and return and rebuild our society and give back to life meaning beyond carnal pleasures. Carnal pleasure is a poor base for a society and even less of a base for an entire society, let alone the world. Carnal pleasures will not long remain the basis for Western society and unless something is offered before Islam takes a foothold deeper than it has already established as we discussed yesterday, then our future youth will not be capable of refusing their sirens’ swan song as the Imams call them five times a day and they bow to Allah forsaking Hashem, then where will things go. We know the answer and we must see to it that they are steered to a religion which raises the soul and not darkens life.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Where Again Are Six-Million Jews to Go?

 

The anti-Semites, anti-Zionists and anti-Israel forces are still at it claiming that the Jewish State must be dissolved and the Jews of Israel, well; they never really quite say what they are supposed to do. Often we hear that false adage that they can simply go back where they came from. That ignores the nearly four-million born right here in Israel as they came from here. Ah, right, they are supposed to return to where their parents or grandparent or back as far as necessary to find a forefather who came from elsewhere. For some that would be Babylonia, a place somewhat difficult to find in the modern world. How about the approaching half whose lineage came from the Arab world, they are supposed to return where again? Their former home nation if followed back is in the Middle East or North Africa, not exactly the garden spot for Jews these days. Even those who came here from Europe are not exactly going to be permitted back into those nations; they are too busy finding homes for displaced Syrian refugees. The ones who can from the former Soviet Union and others from Russia cannot return to a nation which does not even have sufficient economy to support its dwindling population. The United States made their position on where does one place six-million Jews whose lives would otherwise be forfeit quite clear with the SS St. Louis which they not only had forbidden landing in any American port even to take on fuel lest a single Jew escape over the side and instead sent the ship and its nine-hundred plus Jews back to Germany. Canada, same story. Then there was that other nation suggested by some Muslim spokesperson, Alaska, which apart from not being a nation would have the nativists in the United States claiming the native Inuit People were being displaced and we do not need to start all over with a real native population this time as the false claims of a Palestinian Peoples is bad enough. And what of the small but still related to tens of thousands of native Jews whose parents can trace their lineage back to the tribes arriving from out of Egypt, an Egypt which is nonexistent today? The problem is nowhere near as simple as they can go back where they came from. Nowhere from which they came from wants them either. So, once again, where do we place over six-million Jews?

 

We could go from nation to nation and give the logistics as to why an influx of six-million people, let alone six-million of the world’s most notoriously unwanted people, would be an imposition making such a transfer impossible. To be entirely honest, the transfer of the Arabs residing in Judea and Samaria would be less problematic as for them as refugees, if it were not for the desire to abuse them as a bludgeon to destroy Israel and murder her Jews, would be readily accepted throughout the Western World with open arms as are the Syrian refugees, or at least the Syrian refugees were being accepted until some legal difficulties arose. Now accepting even the Syrian refugees is proving to be quite difficult. The one continent which would not have a voice from its native population would be Antarctica as the penguins are a fairly affable lot. Still, does the world really want to risk turning Antarctica into the next Garden of Eden when the Jews turn it into a garden like environment? Oh, wait, the nativists’ ecological wing of the world would really be upset and would start screaming climate change. And the world’s oceans might be upset with all that melting ice but I presume the Jews might be persuaded to keep a frozen ring around their new Garden of Eden and store the water within just as long as they did not permit it to spill into the oceans. Face it, wherever the Jews would be placed would become the next garden spot on the planet and somebody would immediately claim it was their peoples’ native land and demand the Jews be sent elsewhere. That is what happened here in Israel.

 

Early American and European Zionists
Returned and Rebuilding the Holy Lands

 

Early Zionists Working the Land,
Digging Irrigation Channels, Removing Tree Stumps
and Other Structures Needed by the Community

 

Perhaps we should refresh everybody’s memories, and for some inform them for the first time. Before 1850 the lands between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea was where people were sent as a punishment all the way back to before the Roman Empire. When Pontius Pilate was sent to Judea, yes, Judea as it was not named Syria Palaestina a Roman province around 135 AD; he was sent off into oblivion hoped never to be heard from again as Judea was where the romans sent people as a punishment. The same with the Greeks and the sole people ever to want to come to this region were the Jews and whenever they did they were sent gleefully as those remaining behind snickered. The strange thing is the heat and lack of rain for much of the year and flooding the other three months and some fetid swamps and rocky terrain were viewed as a curse. Even the British sent their unkind here to perish in the heat and swamplands. Yet, as soon as the Jews have returned to these lands they would blossom and some empire would sweep in and conquer them, remove the Jews and then puzzle as to what it was they ever saw in this forbidding land. After a while when the Jews screaming and kicking up a fuss to return to their homeland became too much of a headache, the Jews (originally called Hebrews) were sent packing with the blessings of whichever empire wished to be rid of them. The Jews would return, refurbish and rebuild as the busy little beavers they appear to emulate and rebuild the land. The newest empire, not knowing the heartache that awaited them, would sweep in, remove the Jews and the land would spit them out and cry for the Jews to return. Yes, the land wanted the Jews and the Jews wanted the land and they too were always happy with one another. Read the Bible, the Old Testament.

 

This cycle is still true to this day. Ask yourselves exactly what do you think the Arabs, there are no real people called Palestinians and were none before 1964 when Yasser Arafat and the KGB invented them and before that was a phrase used to describe the Jews. What do you think the Arabs will do once they are given Israel? Yes, that’s right, kill the Jews and take the land for themselves. And exactly what do you expect to happen then? Right, the land will grow wild and inhospitable and the Arabs will flee back from whence they came and the land will be empty again just as Mark Twain, almost every British historian and so many others including the leader of the Muslims who ruled from Damascus found even Jerusalem to be inhospitable and gave up attempting to make it into a fun park for vacations and ran back to nice, civilized and temperate Damascus. When one compares Damascus favorably to a land, that land is not a nice place to live, but we Jews love it here and the land loves our being here, so why not save everybody a real load of difficulty and trouble, leave the Jews alone here for a change and allow everyone else to go on their merry way. Those Arabs who really want to remain here and live in peace with the Jews, wonderful, they can sign a loyalty oath and we will design some path to full citizenship and the rest can return where their ancestors came from as the vast majority arrived after 1900 anyways, and that is documentable by simply reading the British census information going back to just after World War I and the Ottoman census information for centuries before that. Can we try that for a change instead of allowing everything the Jews have built to go into ruin again and eventually sending the Jews back and the next “indigenous peoples” to claim it was all their land before the Jews came despite everyone knowing it was a lie but stealing Israel from the Jews only to have it turn to rubble within fifty to one-hundred years as this cycle will need to be broken eventually, why not now?

 

Beyond the Cusp