Tag Archives: history

Jimmy Carter playing God paved the road for radical Islamists playing Satan

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Jimmy Carter informed us back in 1976 that he had “looked on many women with lust” and “committed adultery many times in my heart.”

The fact that a man’s heart or other organs have lusted after many women is not exactly news. The reason men don’t go around broadcasting their lust is because it’s obvious. It would be like saying, I get horny on days that end in a “y.”

But Carter did tell us about his lust – in a formal interview with Playboy, perhaps fittingly. He evidently thought that a man’s lust was newsworthy, if the man was him.

It reminds me of the devil’s temptation of Christ, a story told in three of the four Gospels. The devil failed in his temptation of Christ, but the fact that it happened was Good News-worthy two millennia ago.

Carter was a born-again Christian. (Full disclosure: I am too.) In fact, Carter was a Sunday School teacher. In teaching the temptation of Christ on Sundays and advertising “the temptation of Carter” on Saturdays, he was aware of the parallel he was drawing.

Mind you, I don’t judge a person’s brand of Christianity. That’s beyond my paygrade.

But I do judge their politics. Carter seemed to believe that a New Testament approach could work in international affairs – as in forgiveness and love thy enemy – with the likes of Leonid Brezhnev and the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Ah, the Ayatollah Khomeini.

When Carter was elected in 1976, the country of Iran was run by a Shah – roughly the equivalent to a Western monarch. The Shah was hostile to communism and generally friendly to the West. Many Iranian students went to Western universities. Women’s rights and human rights steadily improved over the decades of rule by the Shah and his predecessor father.

Carter’s limited experience as the former governor of Georgia and his black and white view of good and evil left him unprepared for the nuances of international geopolitics. In his simplistic syllogism, democracy was good; monarchs were anti-democratic; the Shah was a monarch; and, therefore, the Shah was bad.

In contrast to pragmatists such as Henry Kissinger (whom he despised), Carter was uncomfortable with the notion of the lesser of evils.

And so, when the Shah was threatened, Carter did little to save him. The resulting revolution led to a bloody theocratic state called The Islamic Republic of Iran. Like the Shah’s regime, it was a monarchy except in name, and this time it was led by a monarch – the Ayatollah – who claimed a hotline to Allah (and actually had one to Brezhnev) together with a divine right to rule.  

The Islamic theocrats naturally hated America. They taunted us by holding 53 hostages in the American Embassy in Tehran for 444 days until the day of the inauguration of the man who defeated Carter’s bid for a second term, Ronald Reagan. (Funny, that coincidence.)

Carter’s sanctimonious forgiveness and love failed to free any hostages. (To his credit, he did attempt a rescue, but it never got off the ground.)

Since the time of the Iranian hostage crisis, Iran has shuffled along in their seventh-century oxcart. They throw gay men off tall buildings, they chop off the hands of shoplifters, and they stone prostitutes to death. They threaten to annihilate Israel, and they are just weeks away from having a nuclear bomb with which to do so.

In this odd world of ours, I sometimes see a bumper sticker reading “What would Jesus do?” I’ve always assumed that the owners of the cars to which those stickers are stuck have no interest in Jesus. They’re instead just trolling Christians. They’re trying to contrast the typically conservative political leanings of Christians with what they regard (unburdened by any actual knowledge) as the liberal leanings of Jesus.

But some Christians are actually guided in their geopolitics by that bumper sticker question – What would Jesus do? Never mind that Jesus spent his entire life in a place without iPhones which could be walked in the long direction in a few weeks and the short direction in a day. These particular Christians believe that Christ taught not just the tools for a relationship with God, but also for a relationship with Taylor Swift, John Maynard Keynes, and the Ayatollahs.

The teachings of Christ are probably harmless in dealing with Taylor Swift. (I know nothing of Swift’s beliefs, and I don’t mean to pick on her.)

However, the teachings of Christ are probably less helpful in dealing with John Maynard Keynes. Can we honestly suppose that Christ had insights into economic questions like how to obtain the greatest good for the greatest number, and what the capital gains tax should be, and that those insights are revealed if only we read between the lines of, say, Corinthians?

As for the Ayatollahs, the teachings of Christ are wholly unhelpful in dealing with them. Or in dealing with their jihadi foot soldiers who seek to conquer, enslave, rape, take hostage, behead and eliminate people they regard as infidels by means of suicide bomb vests, airplanes in skyscrapers, and pickup trucks on sidewalks.

The what-would-Jesus-do Christians seem unaware that we already know the answer to their bumper sticker question, “What would Jesus do?”

What Jesus would do is what he did do. He taught love, forgiveness and pacifism. He surrendered and sacrificed himself. He was excruciatingly tortured – naked and humiliated on the cross – that he might rise again to show us The Way.

The madmen of Islam would very much like us, now, to try doing with them what Jesus did with his enemies two thousand years ago. The last Western leader to try that was Jimmy Carter. And here we are.

Why do American Jews vote against Israel?

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For a hundred years, American Jews have overwhelmingly voted for the Democrat candidate. Franklin Roosevelt received about 80% of the Jewish vote each time. This dramatic tilt toward the Democrats continued up through the turn of the century, when they gave Al Gore about 79%. They gave Obama 78% in his first election, and even gave him 69% in his second – after Obama’s antipathy toward Israel became impossible to overlook.

Some of this Jewish support for Democrats is understandable. Like most immigrants, the Jews suffered discrimination at the hands of silk-stocking Republicans. American intellectuals in the early- to mid-20th century took their cue from Europe, where antisemitism was rampant (and still is). Two generations ago in America, there were still Jewish country clubs because the ordinary Republican-dominated ones denied admittance to Jews.

All of that is shameful, and, I’m glad to say, nearly all of that is now behind us.

In this century, it’s the Democrats who exhibit an antisemitic undercurrent. It was evident in Barack Obama’s support for Iran – a Jew-hating terrorism state that denies there was a Holocaust in the past while openly urging one in the future.

Obama was willing to let Iran get nukes, ostensibly not for the purpose of making good on their Holocaust threat (wink, wink). He even sent them billions that they used to fund their nuke program.

In the Biden administration, the Democrats’ anti-Israel stance grew. They begged the Iranians to rejoin the one-sided deal that Obama gave them (and Trump revoked) and also stopped enforcing international sanctions. That allowed them to resume lucrative oil exports to fund their nukes again – and to fund terrorists attacking Israel.

After the October 7 pogrom, many Democrats equated Israel’s effort to defend itself, on the one hand, with Hamas’ invasion, rapes, beheadings, torture, random rocket attacks, and kidnapping and murder of men, women and children, on the other hand.

I assumed that these last four years of Democrat hostility toward Israel would finally tilt the Jewish vote toward Republicans in 2024.

I was wrong. Jews voted 68% for the Democrat in 2020, and this year they still voted somewhere between 66% and 79% for the Democrat (it’s difficult for exit polls to get a fix on the number). And this was for a Democrat who openly pandered to Muslim radicals.

So, what’s up with American Jews?

I have a theory.

But first, let me admit the ignorant and the speculative nature of my theory. I grew up in the wilds of Colorado, and literally had never met a Jew (at least not knowingly) until I went away to college. My current Jewish friends tend to be strong Israel supporters and, likewise, strong Republicans; my generalizations therefore do not apply to them specifically. I now have tremendous respect for both Judaism and Jewish culture (and have often written about it) but cannot claim any real expertise in the subject.

Subject to all that, here goes.

Somewhere around seven million Jews live in America – nearly as many as in Israel. Together, those two countries comprise 80% of the world’s Jewish population.

Israeli Jews are different than American Jews. Israeli Jews are mostly first- or second-generation immigrants to Israel. Jews who immigrate to the Jewish state of Israel tend to be practicing Jews, unsurprisingly. A disproportionate number are Orthodox Jews. They believe deeply in Judaism and they believe deeply in Israel. 

American Jews, not so much. While many are devout, at least a third are not observant of their religion at all. (This is not intended as a criticism. Most self-identifying Christians are not observant of their religion either.) Deeply religious Orthodox Jews are relatively rare in America.

The result is that American Jews are less invested emotionally in the Land of Abraham.

That’s hard to dispute. But I submit that it goes beyond that.

Many American Jews have not just failed to embrace Judaism, but have casually or consciously rejected it. People who reject long-standing family and religious traditions tend to feel some guilt and need some rationalizations. Rejection of one’s heritage typically morphs into hostility toward that heritage.  

In the case of the many non-observant American Jews, it’s possible that their ambivalence toward Israel – which seems to manifest in outright opposition every four years at election time – is rooted in a rejection of their ancestral faith which naturally morphs into hostility toward it.

In agnosticism, as in religion, there’s no zealot like a convert.

In the land of Anne Frank, they’re chasing and beating the Jews

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Anne Frank famously kept a diary describing her life as a Jewish girl during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. She and her family lived in a concealed room behind a bookcase for two years.

The Nazis eventually discovered the family and sent them to concentration camps including Auschwitz. She died in Bergen-Belsen at age 15.

Anne’s father, Otto, was the only one of the family to survive the Holocaust. He was instrumental in publishing his daughter’s diary after the war.

The rest is history. 

Key to Anne’s survival for those two years were the efforts of Otto’s secretary, a Catholic woman named Miep Gies. She risked imprisonment and even death in buying food for the family and secretly bringing it to their hiding place.

Gies devised elaborate ruses, such as obtaining illicit food ration cards, avoiding large purchases from any single grocer, and bringing the food to the hiding place at hours that would not attract suspicion.

After the war, Gies was dismissive of the personal risk to herself: “Over two million Holland people helped hide Jewish people in the Second World War, I am just doing what I can to help.”

Now, 80 years later, history reverberates in the Netherlands. Nazis of the 21st century are openly chasing and beating the Jews on the streets of Amsterdam.

Lacking the courage of Miep Gies, the police response is unenergetic, and the governmental response is lackadaisical.

“Shame on them” does not even begin to reflect my sentiments.

The Colorado Christian baker wins again – but his tormenters will be back

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The left has hounded artistic Colorado baker Jack Phillips for over a decade. It started back in 2012 when a gay couple demanded that he create a “gay wedding cake” with two figurine husbands on top.

Of course, the gay couple could have gotten their gay cake created by many other bakers. They seem to have chosen Phillips not despite, but because, creating such a object was contrary to his religious beliefs.

Phillips politely said he would happily bake a cake for them, but not a gay cake. That’s an important point. Phillips did not simply refuse to serve the couple on the grounds that they were gay. Rather, he refused to create a special “gay cake” for them.

Phillips thus refused to create an artistic expression that was contrary to his religious beliefs.

The gay couple were something like a couple seeking out a Kosher restaurant, demanding that the Jewish chef cook up an elaborate pork dish, and then contending that they’d been discriminated against when told that pork is not on the menu.

It’s actually worse than that. The gay couple thought Phillips’ beliefs were not just discriminatory, but should be illegal. So, they schemed to establish that as a legal matter.  

First, they brought an action against Phillips before the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, and won. The case then went to a Colorado appellate court, and they won there too.

Phillips finally filed for review in the Colorado Supreme Court, where all seven Justices are Democrat appointees. Those Colorado Justices refused to even hear the case on the grounds there was zero merit to Phillips’ appeal.

Then Phillips filed for an appeal in the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s the court of last resort in America, and they accept only a few percent of the appeals lodged there.

To everyone’s surprise, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that Phillips’ case was worth hearing. Not only that, but after hearing the case they reversed the Colorado decision. They decided that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had exhibited an unfair antipathy toward Phillips’ religious-based actions.

Let that sink in. The U.S. Supreme Court – the highest court in the land – found that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission and state courts had shown six years of unfair antipathy toward Phillips’ ordinary Christian religious beliefs.

At least they didn’t feed him to the lions. But what happened next was almost as bad, as anyone who’s been a defendant in a lawsuit will tell you.

On the very day the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in favor of Phillips, a self-described “devil worshipper” demanded by email that Phillips bake a cake celebrating the devil’s birthday – complete with a dildo on top. (It’s not clear what is bedeviling about dildos.)

As before, Phillips politely explained that he could not bake such a cake because it was contrary to his religious beliefs.

Before then, on the very day that the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Phillips’ appeal of the “gay cake” case, someone came into Phillips’ bakery and demanded that he create a “transgender cake” depicting transgender stuff.

You can see the pattern.

As before, Phillips refused to create the “transgender cake.” As before, the transgender person brought an action before the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. As before, he/she won. And as before, the case eventually went up to the Colorado Supreme Court.

This time, the Colorado Supreme Court took the case (perhaps feeling stung by the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of the Colorado decisions the earlier time).

But the Colorado Supreme Court dodged a decision on the merits. Instead, they dismissed the case on a technicality.

It was a win for Phillips, but it didn’t establish any precedent for other Christian bakers or anyone else who wants protection for his religious beliefs.

Pity the Colorado Supreme Court. They were faced with either (1) defying the earlier U.S. Supreme Court decision by ruling against Phillips, or (2) defying their woke principles by ruling in his favor.

Ah, they were torn between the law of the land and the law of the woke. They found a clever way to choose neither.

But trust me, they’ll be back. The devil-worshipping transexuals, the kangaroo state courts and “civil rights” commissions stacked with Democrat appointees, and the rest of the totalitarian wokerati – they’ll all be back, lawless as ever.

They want to outlaw religious beliefs that they don’t believe in, and that’s almost all of them.