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AIR DEFENSE FOR ISRAEL, BUT NOT THE US


This week, American Patriot missiles were put on alert for a possible Iraqi missile attack on Israel. There is a lot of debate about the effectiveness of Patriot missiles. But Israel's defense is more important than any question of cost, so they are deployed.

Meanwhile there is a huge debate about the United States deploying a missile defense.

Russia and the usual Communist states are attacking the idea. So America liberals are attacking it. So our NATO "allies" are attacking our deployment of such a weapon.

During the Cold War, this same parade would attack any effective new weapons deployment by the United States. The neutron bomb was a classic case of this alliance preventing a weapon that was distinctly favorable to the United States against the USSR.

The Strategic Defense Initiative - renamed "Star Wars" by Teddy Kennedy - was the idea that finally broke the Soviet Union's will. Their technology and economy simply could not match such a US system. So Gobachev called on his liberals and his - sorry, I mean our - NATO "allies." But Reagan wouldn't yield.

But no one objects to our protecting Israel, its seacoast, its land borders, and its air.

The only two places in the world where the First World has a border directly on the Third World is at the Rio Grande and on the Israeli border. American Democrats are dominated by liberals, and they look forward to plenty of third world minorities coming into the US and voting for the left. The Republican presidential candidate is fanatically in favor of erasing that border completely to bring in cheap labor.

Bush is for the missile defense, of course, but only because conservatives are kneejerk supporters of anything in a uniform.

Meanwhile, both parties are absolutely committed to the protection of Israel's border. And both parties would cheerfully kill to protect Israel from air attack. Nobody in NATO has breathed a word against that.

We spend billions each year to protect Israel's ground borders, while our own are as open as the government can get away with. These are policies Bush will not merely preserve, but advance.

And Israel's air missile defense is sacred to the United States, unlike our own.

I am against almost all military expenditures right now. Neither Bush nor Gore will do anything with American forces except push the liberal agenda. I tend to favor a missile defense, because it protects the United States, which is, to me, what the US armed forces are all about.

My mild support becomes stronger when I see the Communists and our "allies" - and, of course, the liberals -- line up against it. These are the same people who always lined up against any military systems the Soviet Union didn't want, precisely because they later proved to be effective.

 

 

THE UN DECIDES TO "USE" RELIGION

The United Nations is hosting an ecumenical religious gathering "to try to use religion for the cause of peace."

Well, it's kind of ecumenical. The Dahli Lama wasn't invited because China didn't want him there.

My hackles rise when anyone says he wants to "use" religion. Mine are, after all, very old-fashioned hackles. They are also Bible Belt hackles.

For me, religion tells you, as part of its doctrine, exactly what it is to be "used" for. In the Bible Belt, the purpose is to avoid damnation and to attain salvation. I think a person has a right to believe in and preach the Gospel of salvation. I also think a person has a right NOT to believe in the Gospel of salvation.

What upsets me is people who do not believe in the purpose for which the churches were established, but want to take the money and influence generations of believers have given the church and use it for their own goals. They want to use what is God's to make their version of Caesar.

Modernist preachers who have lost all faith in Heaven and Hell try to justify themselves by keeping their church salaries and trying to "use" religion for some "sophisticated" goal -- like peace.

One of my problems is that the founder of my faith said specifically that He did NOT come to bring peace.

Those who consider themselves "sophisticated" and those who consider themselves Modern and Ecumenical do not understand what a triumph religious freedom was for Americans. To them, refusing to fight over religion is easy, since they consider it all a joke anyway.

In the real America, our ancestors took their religion very seriously indeed. Most of them believed that having the correct theology made the difference between eternal joy and eternal agony. Religious freedom was not an easy thing for them to allow, and it is a triumph, IF YOU UNDERSTAND REAL HISTORY. To make this refuge for serious beliefs, they had to give up imposing something they felt was endlessly important.

The result is that we have a country that, among other things, was the last best hope of faith against Communism. In much of Europe, religion has almost died under the burden of being state-sponsored.

For those who value faith, America's freedom of religion has more than justified itself.

But there are those who insist that religion has no value in itself. They want to "use" it for what they consider "real" goals, as the UN is doing now. They insist that what the Founding Fathers really meant by "freedom of religion" just meant not taking religion seriously.

Some years back someone at a Baptist Convention stated that, in his opinion, God did not hear the prayers of Jews. Naturally there were shrieks that he was "anaziwhowantedtokillsixmillionjews." Freedom of religion, the Modernists said, means that you can't take religious differences that seriously. Jews constitute a minority, so you have to say that their religion is as good as yours.

As usual with "modern," sophisticated" opinion, this is not merely wrong. It is the OPPOSITE of the truth. The fact is that if you cannot state publicly that you believe someone is going to Hell or that God does not hear them, neither freedom of speech nor freedom of religion means anything at all.

You might as well say that "freedom of speech" means that you can only state opinions that don't offend others.

Most of the people I worked and marched with in politics took their religion, or their nonreligion, AND THEIR RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCES, very seriously indeed. In college, the anti-liberal Young Americans for Freedom had one absolute requirement: a member had to believe in God. The other strong ally against the liberals were the Objectivists, who had one absolute requirement: you had to be an atheist.

Being Americans, we had no trouble working together against the common enemy.

In Washington, my regular allies included large numbers of serious Catholics and serious Calvinists, and the members of each group were convinced that the other was going to Hell.

To a European, the fact that these groups were firm allies against the common enemy would be terribly puzzling. But to old-fashioned Americans, it has been routine for centuries.

Our ability to work together BECAUSE we take our religion or our non-religion seriously is something unique that Americans established. That is why it is so easy for Modern people to confuse freedom of religion with freedom from religion.

These self-styled "sophisticates" are very unsophisticated people. Serious American Catholics are not shocked that Bob Jones might consider their religion absurd. They return the favor.

But what really shocks, astonishes and totally confuses liberals is that these two groups, having freely put down each others' religious doctrines, then turn around and vote together, AGAINST LIBERALS.

Liberals simply do not understand America. They talk endlessly about "sophistication" but they will never be sophisticated enough to understand us.

 

 

 

 

 

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Issue: Sep.. 9, 2000
Editor: Virgil H. Huston, Jr.
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