Cuba`s new day /// Gregg Easterbrook on the NFL

Transcription

Cuba’s new day /// Gregg Easterbrook on the NFL
FEBRU A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
7
DAYS
OF
WAR
One deadly week
shows the dangerous
new advance of
Islamic terrorism
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Restoring America.
“I believe we live in a God-centered world and that all the definitions
of success, fulfillment, morality, value, family, and life are
His to give and ours to follow. They provide a roadmap for us.”
With his signature wit and straight shooting style, Mike Huckabee shines a light
on issues such as religion, morality, individual rights, and political divisiveness.
He delivers a realistic yet optimistic approach to moving America forward.
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MikeHuckabee.com
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11/20/14 3:50 AM
FEB0715
/ VOLUME 30 / NUMBER 3
COVER STORY
Terror by the minute
34
Across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East terrorist
attacks unfolded seemingly simultaneously in
January, a product of bigger, better-financed
Islamic jihadists driven by a singular ideology. ‘The
West is duly terrified. But it should not be surprised’
Medical emergency
23
ISIS takeover in Anbar, as with other parts of Iraq, is
wrecking hard-won advances
F E AT UR E S
46 The fifth wave
Policy changes are prompting
an increase in the number
of Cubans coming to the
United States—and
jeopardizing a revival
50 Union demands
46
An obscure case in
Pennsylvania appears to be
the first to address where
teachers’ money goes when
they religiously object to
union membership
54 Promise keepers
Federal pro-life opportunities
this year include efforts to
hold President Obama to his
word on Obamacare and to
protect unborn children
who can feel pain
50
ON THE COVER
Photo illustration by Krieg Barrie
using an AP photo by George Osodi
of a Boko Haram militant in Nigeria
DEPARTMENTS
3 Joel Belz
5 DISPATCHES
News
Human Race
Quotables
Quick Takes
20 Janie B. Cheaney
23 CULTURE
Movies & TV
Books
Q&A: Gregg Easterbrook
Music
32 Mindy Belz
57 NOTEBOOK
Lifestyle
Technology
Science
Houses of God
Sports
65 Mailbag
67 Andrée Seu
Peterson
68 Marvin Olasky
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Joel Belz
The evidence
we want
Where on earth has the ‘beautiful
religion’ of Islam created anything
like an attractive society?
Don’t you get a little weary of having the
experts remind you that you shouldn’t get
the wrong impression, that Islam really isn’t as
violent as you might have quite erroneously
been led to believe, and that Muslims in general
are at their roots a people of peace?
Ignore the evidence, we’re told. Forget what
your eyes and your ears have been telling you
on the nightly news. Pay attention instead to the
Muslim clerics in Detroit, the Ivy League academics, the Washington think tank specialists,
and the network anchors and authorities. Oh.
And don’t forget that even the president of the
United States has also assured you, several
dozen times, that Muslims around the world,
perhaps more than any other people, yearn for
peace. And so, for good measure, did the president’s predecessor.
All this is worse than a mere display of political correctness. It’s lower than condescending.
“Wait a minute!” millions of us ought to be saying. “We can figure this out for ourselves. We’ve
watched this movie enough times to have a
sense of how it goes.” We’re grown-ups. We don’t
need to spend our whole lives wearing blinders,
kidding ourselves while nodding in polite
acceptance of things we really don’t believe.
So here’s the evidence we’d like to see—the
evidence a watching world deserves. Central to
your display should be that Islamic country or
state to which millions of people from the rest
of the world are streaming because it is so
compelling and attractive. Where, on this whole
globe, is the Islamic society where this “beautiful religion” (to use President Obama’s words
last week) is practiced in a way that prompts
people by the millions to move there and to live
for the rest of their lives?
Remy de l a Mauviniere/ap
R
 [email protected]
3 JOEL.indd 3
Muslims, by
the millions,
have forsaken
their homes
across North
Africa to enjoy
the freedoms
offered by
European
countries like
France.
When I visited Saudi Arabia briefly some 25
years ago, I was warned not to speak in public
to a woman, and if in conversation with any
Saudi man, not to mention Jesus. Either kind
of misbehavior, I was told, could result in my
arrest. And that was in an Islamic country
known as friendly to the United States. Want to
spend your next vacation there?
The reverse, of course, is the reality.
Muslims, by the millions, have forsaken their
homes across North Africa to enjoy the freedoms offered by European countries like
France. But once there, they think nothing of
joining protests and marches against the very
freedoms they have come to enjoy.
Nor can it be argued that we’re moving in
the right direction. In
2001, I listed in this
column five Islamic
countries considered by
many as “frontispiece”
societies exhibiting a
moderate practice of
Islam: Syria, Indonesia,
Egypt, Pakistan, and
Saudi Arabia. Of those
five, 14 years later, only
Indonesia retains a right
to display itself on a
travel poster.
Three explanations for all this are common—
but bogus. It isn’t for lack of time. Islam has had
well over a millennium to get its act together. It
isn’t for lack of money. Islam has had, and still
has, access to all kinds of global wealth. It isn’t
for lack of power. In at least 20 of the world’s
190 countries, Islam has been dominant in the
political driver’s seat.
None of this, of course, can ever be suggested as warrant for harassment of Muslim
people. When that occurs, Christians should
rise up promptly and vigorously to disown
such behavior as unbiblical and obnoxious.
But we are not engaging in harassment
when we ask questions like this: If a group of
radical Christians had, anywhere in the world,
done what a small band of Muslims did in Paris
a couple of weeks ago, the rest of us Christians
shouldn’t have been surprised if we were asked
to engage in a straightforward and candid
conversation. It’s one thing for the leaders—
and defenders—of Islam to say that what we’ve
just seen isn’t the true fruit of what they teach.
It’s another thing for them to show us where
the true fruit is. A
FEBRUARY 7 , 2 0 1 5 W ORLD 3
1/21/15 10:52 AM
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insurance, through a Biblical model of community among believers.
Samaritan members share directly with each other and do not share
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DISPATCHES
NEWS / HUMAN RACE / QUOTABLES / QUICK TAKES
JAN. 11
MARCHING IN PARIS
CANDLE: CHRISTOPHE ENA/AP • LEADERS: PHILIPPE WOJA ZER/AP
Millions marched down the Boulevard
Voltaire in Paris in solidarity on Sunday Jan.
11 after the terrorist attacks on the satirical
newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher
grocery store. The same day the French
government also deployed 10,000 troops to
guard Jewish sites around the country.
Though the march was announced only two
days before, it brought a historic gathering
of dozens of foreign leaders including
French President François Hollande,
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British
Prime Minister David Cameron, Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Ukrainian
President Petro Poroshenko, and Jordanian
King Abdullah II. No high-level American
leader was present, with U.S. ambassador
to France Jane Hartley the most prominent
to join the march (even though U.S. Attorney
General Eric Holder was in Paris that day for
a security conference). In a rare admission
afterward, White House press secretary
Josh Earnest said the United States made a
mistake and should have sent a higherranking off icial to the march.
F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
WORLD
5
1/21/15 11:37 AM
DISPATCHES
NEWS
Jan. 13
Ukraine
attack
A rocket attack on
a passenger bus
killed 12 civilians in
separatist-held
Donetsk in eastern
Ukraine. The
Ukrainian
authorities said
the rocket came
from separatist
territory, which the
Russian-backed
rebels denied. The
attack, the largest
of the year,
crushed a brief
cease-fire
between the two
sides and halted
planned peace
talks between
Ukraine, Russia,
Germany, and
France.
UKRAINE: Mykol a Ryabchenko/AP • CUBA: Desmond Boyl an/AP • EL CAPITAN: Ben Margot/AP
Jan. 21
Cuba summit
A U.S. delegation led by Assistant
Secretary of State Roberta
Jacobson arrived in Havana for two
days of talks aimed at normalizing
relations—the first U.S. diplomats
to enter Cuba since the 1970s.
Hours before the U.S. team sat
down with Cuban counterparts,
President Barack Obama in his
State of the Union address said the
U.S. policy once directed at
communist leader Fidel Castro was
“long past its expiration date” and
pledged “to end a legacy of
mistrust in our hemisphere.” The
same day, a Russian spy ship pulled
into Havana’s harbor unannounced.
The Viktor Leonov, its listening
equipment prominently displayed,
parked not far from the site of
historic talks.
6 W O R L D F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
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11:39 AM
JAN. 14
EL CAPITAN CLIMB
UKRAINE: MYKOL A RYABCHENKO/AP • CUBA: DESMOND BOYL AN/AP • EL CAPITAN: BEN MARGOT/AP
After 19 days of climbing, falls,
and injuries, Americans Tommy
Caldwell, 36, and Kevin
Jorgeson, 30, became the first
to “free-climb” the Dawn Wall of
El Capitan, the smooth granite
face in Yosemite National Park.
The 3,000-foot Dawn Wall is
considered the most diff icult
climb in the world, and they
ascended with only their hands,
feet, and a rope they used solely
to stop a fall. They did most of
their climbing at night to avoid
the daytime heat, and between
climbing the pair slept in a tent
hooked to the cliff face. The
climbers had attempted the
Dawn Wall five times over the
last five years.
1/21/15 11:39 AM
DISPATCHES
NEWS
Jan. 15
Belgian sweep
Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP
1/21/15 11:40 AM
MEYER: Sharon Ellman/AP • GUANTANAMO: MLADEN ANTONOV/AFP/Getty Images
Under heightened alert to imminent terror attacks, Belgian counterterrorism police conducted raids around
the country and killed two suspected Muslim militants and wounded another in Verviers, Belgium. According
to authorities the militants, recently returned from Syria, were part of a cell planning “a major imminent
attack.” When police raided their house, the militants opened fire with automatic weapons, the Belgian
prosecutor said. None of the counterterrorism police were injured. Belgian police arrested more than a
dozen other suspects but said the mastermind of the planned attack remained at large.
JAN. 12
BUCKEYE VICTORY
The Ohio State Buckeyes, under thirdstring quarterback Cardale Jones, beat the
favored Oregon Ducks 42-20 to win the
college football national championship.
The win cemented the dominant legacy of
Ohio State head coach Urban Meyer, who
is 38-3 over the three seasons he has led
the team, and now 3-0 in national title
games. The Buckeyes’ win capped a
season of upsets, including beating
No. 1-ranked Alabama to advance to the
championship game.
JAN. 15
GETTING OUT OF GITMO
MEYER: SHARON ELLMAN/AP • GUANTANAMO: ML ADEN ANTONOV/AFP/GET T Y IMAGES
GEERT VANDEN WIJNGAERT/AP
The Obama administration has accelerated its
transfer of detainees out of Guantanamo Bay in
the last couple months in an eff ort to move
toward President Barack Obama’s goal of closing
the military prison. On Jan. 15, the administration
announced the transfer of five Yemeni
detainees, four to Oman and one to Estonia. The
five had been held at Guantanamo since 2002
but never charged. That comes on the heels of
another transfer of five detainees to Kazakhstan
at the end of last year. Now 122 detainees
remain at the prison. Closing the prison is
unlikely while Congress is under Republican
control. In mid-January Senate Republicans
introduced a measure to slow transfers of
detainees under certain circumstances. “If you
look at the security situation that we’re facing
around the world right now, now is not the time
to be emptying Guantanamo with no plan for
how and where these individuals are going to
go,” said Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H.
3 NEWS-PHOTOS.indd
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F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
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1/21/15 11:42 AM
DISPATCHES
NEWS
Around the globe
MIDDLE EAST A winter storm packing blizzards, rain, and
high winds ravaged the Middle East, leaving vulnerable
millions of refugees sheltered in tents or unheated
buildings—as the UN estimates Syria’s civil war has displaced more than 10 million persons in and around Syria.
SWITZERLAND The Swiss franc soared as much as
40 percent against the euro as Swiss Central Bank
off icials without warning removed a currency cap.
The sudden move shocked global markets and
jolted residents—many Eastern Europeans—who
took out loans in the more stable franc. Many saw
the amount they owe treble overnight.
SAUDI ARABIA Authorities postponed the
second installment of a 1,000-lash flogging
issued to a blogger for insulting Islam. A
prison doctor said Raef Badawi, already
serving a 10-year prison sentence, may
not survive the punishment only one week
after he received the first 50 lashes.
YEMEN The president’s
home in the capital Sanaa
came under heavy shelling,
as Shiite rebels pressed
their campaign to oust a
U.S.-friendly government.
LIBYA The Islamic State claims to have abducted
and jailed 21 Egyptian Christians in Libya. Egypt
confirmed 20 of its citizens were taken.
NIGER Muslims attacked Christian
businesses, homes, and at least 55
churches in retaliation for the “Je
suis Charlie” demonstrations in Paris.
KENYA Gunmen riding a motorbike shot dead a Kenyan pastor
at his church, renewing calls
from other Kenyan pastors for
permission to carry firearms.
CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC Rebels handed
over to U.S. authorities Joseph Kony’s secondranking commander in the Lord’s Resistance
Army, Dominic Ongwen, on whom the U.S. State
Department put a $5 million bounty in 2013.
MALAWI, MOZAMBIQUE, MADAGASCAR
Two weeks of torrential rains, including
a tropical storm, killed at least 260 and
displaced more than 350,000 persons.
10
WORLD
3 GLOBE+LA.indd 10
F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
AFP/GET T Y IMAGES
GLOBAL PERSECUTION Last year saw the greatest rise in violence against
Christians in the modern era, according to a new Open Doors USA ranking
of the worst places on the globe for believers. North Korea topped the 2015
list for the 13th straight year, but a rash of countries in the Middle East and
Africa saw dramatic upticks in persecution, largely a result of the growth
and reach of Islamic militants. In Africa, where eight of 12 ranked countries
moved up the list, Kenya rose on the list more than any other country, jumping to No. 19 from No. 43 a year ago. The group estimated some 100 million
Christians are persecuted globally.
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Looking ahead
AFP/Get t y Images
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Feb. 4
College football fans will
be holding their breath today as
high-school standout seniors have
their first opportunity to sign letters
of intent with colleges that have
offered them athletic scholarships. In
recent years, top high-school players
have used the interest to put on
press conferences at their high
schools announcing their decisions.
Feb. 8
The AMC network will bank
on remaining Breaking Bad fans when it
debuts a new series today called Better
Call Saul. The new drama is a spinoff of
the critically acclaimed Breaking Bad
series that ended its five-season run in
2013. Bob Odenkirk will reprise his role
of Saul Goodman, a shady lawyer in the
original series.
Feb. 11
The European Space
Agency is set to launch its
experimental spaceplane on a
suborbital trajectory from a base in
French Guiana where the vehicle will
travel nearly across the world before
parachuting into the Pacific Ocean.
Scientists with the ESA hope the
Feb. 11 launch will help them to design
better re-entry vehicles in the future.
Feb. 14
Rising demand in
China and crop diseases in West
Africa have economists
predicting chocolate shortages
and a rise in prices as Valentine’s
Day approaches. West Africa
typically produces 70 percent of
the world’s cocoa.
Feb. 14
The political future of Nigerian
President Goodluck Jonathan will be put to
the test today as Nigerians head to the polls
for the nation’s general election. Nigerian
elections have resulted in bloody violence in
the past. And trouble during a recent
election in Anambra State have many
sounding alarms that the 2015 election
could be problematic.
3 GLOBE+LA.indd 11
1/21/15 12:00 PM
DISPATCHES
NEWS
Kennedy’s way
Supreme Court’s record suggests it likely will rule
to legalize gay marriage nationwide by Emily Belz
12 W O R LD F E B R U A R Y 7 , 2 0 1 5
3 NEWS 1 PAGER.indd 12
Justice Kennedy
was clear: Gay
marriage gave gay
people ‘dignity in
the community
equal with all
other marriages.’
two of us in truth—to make
such a vital policy call for
the thirty-two million citizens who live within the
four States of the Sixth
Circuit: Kentucky, Michigan,
Ohio, and Tennessee,”
wrote Judge Jeffrey Sutton
in the 6th Circuit decision.
The 6th Circuit was the
only circuit to read Windsor
as a ruling based chiefly on
states’ rights rather than
equal protection. Justice
Kennedy used both arguments when he wrote the
Windsor ruling. He struck
down DOMA based on
states’ rights to create their
own marriage laws but also
wrote that DOMA was
discriminatory to legally
married gay couples.
Lower courts that have
struck down state marriage
laws over the last year have
based their rulings on that
second part, Windsor’s equal
protection language that
describes DOMA as treating
same-sex marriages as “second tier marriages.” And the
Supreme Court repeatedly
declined to intervene in
those lower court rulings.
Lawyers arguing in favor
of state marriage laws focus
instead on the states’ rights
language. Peter Breen, a
constitutional lawyer whom
the state of Illinois com
missioned to defend its
marriage law, said the
Rich Pedroncelli/AP
In March 2013, when
the Supreme Court
heard arguments over the
federal Defense of Marriage
Act (DOMA) in United States
v. Windsor, only nine states
had legalized same-sex
marriage. Now, mostly due
to court rulings striking
marriage laws based on the
Windsor decision, same-sex
marriage is legal in 36
states.
The Supreme Court now
has agreed to decide
whether same-sex marriage
should be legal in all 50
states, with arguments this
spring and a decision in
June. The prospects for the
remaining state marriage
laws are not good. The
signs are relatively clear
given swing vote Justice
Anthony Kennedy’s past
rulings on gay rights and
the court’s decisions this
past fall: Over and over the
court declined emergency
stays on rulings that struck
down state marriage laws.
The high court agreed to
take up four consolidated
cases from the 6th U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals,
which is the only circuit so
far to have ruled in favor of
state marriage laws. The
6th Circuit, in a 2-1 ruling
last fall, said that voters
rather than the courts
should decide the issue of
same-sex marriage.
“Our judicial commissions did not come with
such a sweeping grant of
authority, one that would
allow just three of us—just
R
Supreme Court will be
“getting into policymaking”
if it declares gay marriage
legal nationwide.
“In Windsor the court
stated that marriage was a
state sovereignty issue,” said
Breen. “In order to reverse
the 6th Circuit, it has to
reverse itself in Windsor.”
But the state sovereignty
argument seems unlikely to
overpower the equal protection argument given
Kennedy’s past opinions in
favor of gay rights—
Windsor, Lawrence v. Texas,
and Romer v. Evans—which
focused on the “animus”
toward homosexuals in
laws. Lawrence and Romer
struck down laws that
criminalized sodomy, but in
Windsor Kennedy addressed
marriage for the first time.
Kennedy was clear in
that ruling that gay marriage
gave gay people “dignity in
the community equal with
all other marriages.” Rick
Garnett, constitutional law
professor at the University
of Notre Dame Law School,
thinks that language about
“dignity” shows Kennedy
would not rule in favor of
state marriage laws.
“In my view, it is not at
all likely that Justice
Kennedy would sign or
author an opinion that did
not follow Windsor through
to its logical conclusion,”
said Garnett. “My impression is that he takes a fair
bit of interest in what people call his ‘legacy’ and in
his own image of himself as
a principled libertarian.”
Breen added the critical
disclaimer to such speculation: “As attorneys we are
trained not to give weight to
decisions the Supreme
Court has not made.” A
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12:04 PM
CREDIT
Brand
Outside
World 7.14.indd
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5/28/14
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DISPATCHES
HUMAN RACE
appointed
stated
kindled
Hundreds of faith leaders rallied in
Atlanta Jan. 13 to support “humbled”
former Fire Chief Kelvin Cochran, fired
Jan. 6 for biblical beliefs on sexuality
expressed in a book. Marchers delivered 35,000 petitions for his job to the
Georgia State Capitol as Martin Luther
King Jr.’s niece Alveda King and others
called for religious freedom. Mayor
Kasim Reed said the matter is closed
and Cochran’s judgment, including
statements since his suspension in
November, led to his firing. He called
Cochran’s writings “discrimination”
inconsistent with making “Atlanta a
more welcoming city.”
14 WORLD FEBRUARY 7 , 2 0 1 5
3 HUMAN RACE.indd 14
reassigned
Acting Secret Service
Director Joseph Clancy
reassigned four top officials in the wake of scandals. Clancy told The
Washington Post he made
the moves after a
December report maligned
agency leadership and
culture. Clancy has been
the interim leader since a
knife-wielding man broke
deep into the White House
last year. The four officials
were Dale Pupillo, protective operations; Paul
Morrissey, investigations;
Jane Murphy, public relations; and Mark Copanzzi,
technology and mission
support. Clancy’s report
did not specify their
reassignments.
obama: Mandel Ngan/AP • cochran: David Goldman/ap • wolf: Lee Love/Genesis Photos
President Barack Obama gave his sixth State of the Union message Jan. 20. The president outlined
his proposal to raise $320 billion in new revenue through higher taxes and revealed a laundry list
of items the Republican-led Congress deems dead on arrival. “Obama claims his budget is practical, not partisan—what about it being balanced?” said U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., on Twitter. Even
the evening’s guest list fell out along party lines, the president inviting a recently released Cuban
prisoner while Republicans invited Cuban dissidents as a sign of protest over the president’s
executive action on Cuba.
11:51 AM
PATERNO: Carolyn K aster/AP • SHIN: Jean-Christophe Bot t/ Keystone/AP • berns: American Enterprise Institute
Baylor University has
named recently retired
Congressman Frank Wolf
its Jerry and Susan Wilson
Chair in Religious
Freedom. Wolf (WORLD’s
2014 Daniel of the Year)
advocated against religious
persecution during his 34
years in Congress. In 1998,
legislation he authored
created the State
Department’s ambassadorat-large for international
religious freedom.
By the
numbers
voyeurism.
Whether the rules
are poorly written
or an example of
Russian LGBT
suppression, as
accused, remains
unclear. A Russian
Health Ministry
spokesman told
the Interfax news
agency the ban
would target only
conditions that
may affect drivers’
decision-making.
obama: Mandel Ngan/AP • cochran: David Goldman/ap • wolf: Lee Love/Genesis Photos
PATERNO: Carolyn K aster/AP • SHIN: Jean-Christophe Bot t/ Keystone/AP • berns: American Enterprise Institute
restored
The late Joe
Paterno is again
the winningest
college football
coach after the
NCAA reached a
settlement in a
lawsuit with
Pennsylvania
officials. In 2012,
the NCAA
removed 111 of
the Penn State
football coach’s
409 wins over his
inaction regarding
assistant Jerry
Sandusky, who is
serving 30-60 years for
molesting 10 boys. Some in
State College say this helps
revive Paterno’s reputation
while others maintain
Paterno knew of the abuse
in 2001 and only told the
athletic director.
recanted
North Korean defector Shin
Dong-hyuk, who escaped
prison camp to tell human
rights abuses firsthand,
has changed his story’s
details. Shin now claims to
have spent time in a less
restrictive camp before
returning to the infamous
Camp 14. Shin told Blaine
DIED
Harden, author of Shin’s
best-selling story, that he
didn’t think specific dates,
places, and circumstances
mattered. The revelation
gave Pyongyang fodder to
combat fallout from Sony
cyberattacks and U.S.-led
efforts to put North Korea
before the International
Criminal Court. Shin told
Harden, “I am asking for
forgiveness.”
banned
In the name of safety,
Russian leaders effectively
banned transgender and
sexually disordered people
from driving. The new regulations targeted roadway
hazards that injure
or kill 280,000
Russians yearly.
Regulators used as
guidelines the
World Health
Organization’s
“mental and behavioral disorders,”
which include
transexualism and
abnormal sexual
preferences like
3 HUMAN RACE.indd 15
Clarence E. Huntley
Jr. and Joseph Shambrey,
lifelong friends and
91-year-old Tuskegee
Airmen, died hours apart
on Jan. 5. Track teammates in their Los Angeles
neighborhood in the
1930s, the friends’ World
War II enlistments in
1942 kept them together
by chance. The mechanics
for the famed all-black
Tuskegee squadron in
later years rarely went
one month without meeting or talking.
died
Conservative
political scientist and World
War II veteran
Walter Berns,
95, died Jan. 10
of lung failure.
The constitutional
scholar controversially
resigned from Cornell
University in 1969 after it
capitulated to armed student civil rights activists
who captured a building. A
Georgetown professor
65 The number of
U.S. counties, out of
3,069, that have fully
recovered from the
2007 recession,
according to the
National Association
of Counties. The NAC
study measured economic output, unemployment rates, jobs,
and home prices.
2
The number of
ambulances diverted
or delayed by a Jan. 15
protest that shut
down rush hour traffic
on Interstate 93 in
Boston. The protest
was against alleged
“police and state
violence against black
people.”
9-0 The Jan. 20
ruling by the U.S.
Supreme Court in
favor of Arkansas
prison inmate Gregory
Holt, a Muslim who
said a state prison
policy banning beards
violated his religious
liberty.
from 1979-1994,
he criticized liberalism as a
path to tyranny when
liberty has no
restraint. In his
final years as
resident scholar at
the American Enterprise
Institute, Berns maintained
that a democracy depends
on the character of its
people: “The purpose of
law is and must be to
promote virtue.”
FEBRUARY 7 , 2 0 1 5 WORLD 15
1/21/15 11:50 AM
DISPATCHES
QUOTABLES
‘It’s been
our policy for
years that we
refrain from
moving deliberately
provocative images.’
An ASSOCIATED PRESS statement on not
publishing cartoon images of Muhammad
following the Islamist attack on staffers of the
French satiric magazine Charlie Hebdo. The
agency took down from its website images
of Andres Serrano’s controversial
1987 “Piss Christ” photograph after
critics noted the double standard
toward religions.
‘Does it occur
to him that he
is arguably
crossing the
line from
husband
to pimp by
exploiting
his wife as a
sex object?’
Former Arkansas Gov. and
possible 2016 presidential
candidate MIKE HUCKABEE,
on hip-hop mogul Jay-Z and
his superstar wife Beyoncé
in his new book, Gods, Guns,
Grits, and Gravy.
‘Think of us
when you’re warm.’
EHAB YOUSEF, a Syrian actor and refugee, in a video
after Syrian president Bashar Assad underwent a
“snow bucket challenge” to raise awareness of
Syrian refugees from the war-torn country who
are spending a fourth straight winter
in freezing camps.
‘Now that Senator
Boxer is stepping down,
can we call her ma’am?’
Political commentator BEN SHAPIRO, in a Jan. 8 tweet.
During a 2009 Senate hearing Sen. Barbara Boxer (left ),
D-Calif., upbraided U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Michael Walsh for
calling her “ma’am” instead of “Senator.” Walsh
had addressed male senators at the
hearing as “sir.”
16
WORLD
3 QUOTABLES.indd 16
F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
ALEX MALARKEY, recanting
claims he made at age 6 that
he went to heaven after he
went into a coma following a
2004 car accident. Tyndale
House and Lifeway
announced they will stop
selling the book by Alex’s
father Kevin, The Boy Who
Came Back from Heaven.
PROTEST: BANARAS KHAN/AFP/GET T Y IMAGES • YOUSEF: HANDOUT • BOXER: CLIFF OWEN/AP • MAL ARKEY: HANDOUT
‘When I made
the claims
that I did,
I had never
read the Bible.’
more
g Visit our website—wng.org—for breaking news and1/21/15
10:41 AM
protest: BANARAS KHAN/AFP/Get t y Images • YOUSEF: handout • Boxer: Cliff Owen/ap • MAL ARKEY: handout
1/20/15 3:07 PM
3 QUOTABLES.indd 17
DISPATCHES
QUICK TAKES
It’s bad news for Swiss pizza lovers, but good
news for Swiss pizzerias. Swiss customs
authorities ruled in January they would make no
exceptions for German pizzerias to transport
their wares across the border into Switzerland
without a routine customs inspection. In the
past, Swiss residents who lived near the nation’s
border with Germany have preferred calling
German pizza delivery companies because they
charge prices 30 percent lower. But a 2014 rule
change meant that German delivery drivers would
have to go through a normal customs process
when entering Switzerland to deliver pies.
The process resulted in both cold pizzas and
unhappy Swiss customers.
Uncommon cents
A California man spent $4,785,000 on Jan. 8 to
purchase two coins with a nominal value of 26
cents. Kevin Lipton, a wealthy numismatist
from Beverly Hills, Calif., purchased an
ultra-rare Birch Cent at an auction operated by Heritage Auctions. Only 10 Birch
Cents, an experimental line of pennies produced by the U.S. Mint in 1792, are known to
exist. Lipton paid $2,585,000 for the rare penny
and another $2.2 million for a rare 1792 quarter.
Wet blanket
As snow blanketed parts of northern Saudi Arabia, a Saudi cleric gave playing
in the snow a cold shoulder. Cleric Mohammad Saleh Al Minjed issued a
fatwa, or religious ruling, prohibiting Muslims from building snowmen. The
undated fatwa was widely circulated in the Arab press and social networks
in early January. According to the cleric, building a snowman represented the
customs of the decadent West and therefore should be avoided. Ignoring the
fatwa, some Saudis have built snowmen and even snow camels during the
rare January snowfall. Al Minjed also prohibited Muslims from making snow
replicas of animals, but indicated that snow replicas of ships, fruits, and
buildings were perfectly compatible with Islam.
18 Prince of Wales pub: David Dyson/The Sun/newscom • Birch Cent: Heritage Auctions/ap • pizza: Patrick Seeger/picture-alliance/dpa/AP • Saudi Arabia: MOHAMMED ALBUHAISI/AFP/Gett y Images
Customs-made pizzas
W O R L D F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
3 QUICK TAKES.indd 18
10:22 AM
rug: Adam Winer/WF TS-T V/ABC Action News/ap • china: Imaginechina/ap • forged banknote: Greater Manchester Police dept. • illustration: krieg barrie • Del auter: Bill Green/The Frederick News-Post/ap
Royal mix-up
An errant gas bill from a British utility mistook a pub in London’s northern
suburbs for His Royal Highness Prince Charles. The letter from British
Gas mailed to a pub called The Prince of Wales ostensibly amounted to a
collection letter alerting the customer of a debt of more than $2,600. The
Jan. 5 letter even included the salutation, “Your Royal Highness.” In an
interview with the BBC, pub owner Terry Gaskin said his Prince of Wales
pub doesn’t have an account with British Gas. “I’ve no
idea whether Prince Charles has been paying his gas
Gaskin and
bill or not,” Gaskin said. An official with British Gas said
partner Karen
the entire letter was a mix-up—neither Gaskin nor
Rand with
Britain’s crown prince owes the utility money.
the letter.
PRINCE OF WALES PUB: DAVID DYSON/THE SUN/NEWSCOM • BIRCH CENT: HERITAGE AUCTIONS/AP • PIZZA: PATRICK SEEGER/PICTURE-ALLIANCE/DPA/AP • SAUDI ARABIA: MOHAMMED ALBUHAISI/AFP/GET T Y IMAGES
RUG: ADAM WINER/WF TS-T V/ABC ACTION NEWS/AP • CHINA: IMAGINECHINA/AP • FORGED BANKNOTE: GREATER MANCHESTER POLICE DEPT. • ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • DEL AUTER: BILL GREEN/THE FREDERICK NEWS-POST/AP
Phone charges
Canine confidence
A new rug at the Pinellas County (Fla.) Sheriff ’s
Off ice greeted visitors for months before a
deputy actually read the wording on the rug. It
turned out the $500 rug carried the slogan: “In
dog we trust.” Sheriff ’s spokeswoman Cecilia
Barreda on Jan. 14 said the rug’s manufacturer
made the mistake and is correcting it.
Chinese customs agents had
questions for a man stumbling
around a security checkpoint at
the border between Hong Kong
and Shenzhen, China, on Jan. 11.
He seemed sober but was struggling to walk normally. The man
then set off a metal detector. A
quick inspection revealed the
unnamed border crosser to be in
possession of 94 iPhone handsets taped around his body like
long underwear. Authorities estimate the value of the new
iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 plus models secured to his torso and legs
to be worth nearly $50,000.
Because of the price diff erences
between Hong Kong and mainland China, iPhone smuggling has
become a rising problem.
Pound foolish
A Manchester, U.K., trade group has warned associated bars and
nightclubs to be careful after one of its aff iliates accepted what a local
newspaper called the worst forged banknote in the entire city. According to
police, a local nightclub accepted a fake 20-pound bank note that
amounted to two color photocopies stapled together. Manchester Bar and
Club Network spokesman Phil Burke told the Manchester Evening News that
he had almost fallen for the same sort of forgery in the past. “Everyone was
laughing at me,” he told the paper. “But perhaps if you’re working in a nightclub
which is very dark with flashing lights, you might not spot that it’s fake.”
Name that goon
A local government off icial in Maryland has learned the
hard way you never pick a fight with people who buy ink by
the barrel. In an impulsive Facebook
posting delivered Jan. 3,
Frederick County Councilman
Kirby Delauter demanded
the Frederick News-Post
cease printing his name in
the newspaper without
first obtaining the councilman’s authorization or
face a lawsuit. Delauter indicated he was upset by a
recent News-Post piece
detailing his concerns about his
personal city hall parking space. In its news report on
Delauter’s Facebook post, the News-Post mentioned
Delauter’s name 10 times. Delauter apologized in a later
posting in which he reaff irmed press and speech freedoms.
3 QUICK TAKES.indd 19
Late for work
Shri A.K. Verma last reported for work
at India’s Central Public Works
Department in December 1990. And
in January, more than 24 years
absent from his job, the wheels of
justice for India’s bureaucracy
finally turned and Verma was
fired. An off icial with the
Public Works Department
said the bureaucracy
began investigating
Verma’s absenteeism in
1992, but the off icial
charges necessary to fire
him were not brought until 2007.
Then his case file sat in a drawer
for another eight years. According to a 2012 report from the Hong Kong–
based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy, the Indian bureaucracy
was rated as the “worst in Asia.”
F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
WORLD
19
1/20/15 10:22 AM
JANIE B. CHEANEY
A poor weapon
Islamic terrorists must be stopped,
but crude satire isn’t the way to do it
20 WORLD F EBRUARY 7 , 2 0 1 5
3 CHEANEY.indd 20
Charlie was
apparently
free to publish
crude
pornographic
cartoon
images of
the prophet
Muhammad.
Does it follow
that they
should have?
Lionel Cironneau/ap
If I were to suggest that most of the
residents of an inner city neighborhood
were poor, partly at least because they were
unmarried high-school dropouts with lots of
kids who either got by on welfare or worked
only long enough to pay this month’s rent,
someone within hearing would accuse me of
blaming the victim.
If I observed that a victim of rape acted
unwisely when she wore short shorts and a
halter top to a pool hall frequented by drunken
deadbeats after midnight, I would be pounced
upon with cries of Blaming the Victim.
And if I offered an opinion that the publishers of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo had
crossed the line of decency many times in their
satirical cartoons of religious figures, and it
may have contributed to their brutal slaying by
radical Muslims, what would be the response?
Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic
League, did just that with a piece posted on the
League’s website, provocatively titled “Muslims
Are Right to Be Angry.” He described some of
the work published by Charlie Hebdo—deeply
offensive not just to Muslims but to Christians
and Jews as well (the cartoons republished by
certain Western news outlets were much
tamer)—and made a case for justified religious
outrage. He concluded with a quote from James
Madison: “Liberty may be endangered by the
abuses of liberty as well as the abuses of power.”
Donohue had bashed in a hornet’s nest. The
internet buzzed with outraged rebuttals and
gravelly condemnation. The next day, Bill’s
radio interview with constitutional lawyer and
talk show host Hugh Hewitt turned into a verbal
brawl, with accusations of cowardice and ignorance flying wildly.
As an American, I grieve along with the
French. They are devastated: one commentator
noted it was equivalent to terrorists slaughtering the entire cast of Saturday Night Live. As a
R
Christian, I think Bill Donohue has a point,
though he might have waited a week before
making it. Charlie Hebdo was unquestionably
brave, continuing to offend in the face of
threats and firebombs. Was it the courage of
folly? Sometimes we have to make distinctions
between civil rights and moral wisdom. Charlie
was apparently free to publish crude pornographic cartoon images of the prophet
Muhammad. Does it follow that they should
have? We are governed by statute but also by
conscience. Those whose consciences are surrendered to Christ are not
necessarily called, at this
moment, to take a stand on
the right to offend. That’s
probably not what James
Madison had in mind when
he proposed the First
Amendment. Before taking
any stands Christians need
to ask themselves what God
thinks—about everything.
Is God an advocate of
free speech? Blasphemy laws in the Muslim
world are arbitrary and excessive, but ancient
Israel had its own blasphemy laws (see Leviticus
24:10-16), and so have Christian societies in
the modern era—in 17th-century New England
you could be put in stocks for taking the Lord’s
name in vain. Of course that doesn’t mean blasphemy should be reinstituted as a criminal
offense, because God’s law and civil law are two
separate things ever since around 5 B.C. Also,
when the church governs secular society, she
often goes off-message. But the church should
influence secular society, and while there is a
place for intelligent satire, we should always
give reasons for our hope—“yet do it with
gentleness and respect” (2 Peter 3:15).
While Western pundits praised the dead,
tweeting and retweeting “Je suis Charlie,” Boko
Haram carried out a bigger atrocity in Nigeria
for the goal of establishing a caliphate in central
Africa. The victims had done nothing to
“offend” the murderers except exist. Like Boko
Haram, the Paris assassins were motivated by
hate, not hurt feelings. They must be stopped,
but crude satire is a poor weapon.
Christians are called to pray for their enemies:
murderers and blasphemers as well as the vast
majority of Muslims who don’t carry AK-47s or
machetes. We don’t have to insult their prophet,
or venerate those who do. We can show them a
better One. A
 [email protected]  @jbcheaney
1/20/15 11:06 AM
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1
3 MOVIES and TV.indd 22
1/15/2015
1/15/2015
2:06:572:06:57
PM PM
1/16/15 2:46 PM
CULTURE
MOVIES & TV / BOOKS / Q& A / MUSIC
MOVIE
Direct hit
AMERICAN SNIPER SHOULD CHALLENGE
THINKING ON BOTH THE RIGHT AND
THE LEFT by Megan Basham
It is beyond
tiresome
that every War
on Terror film
that is not
overtly concerned with
criticizing
American foreign policy and
the U.S. military
immediately
becomes a political flash
point. Pundits left and right
wear their reaction as a
sort of I.D. badge, and the
actual movie becomes a
nearly irrelevant factor in a
much bigger conversation.
Thanks to its box office
success (not to mention six
Oscar nominations),
American Sniper is falling
prey to this even more
than similarly themed
predecessors Lone
Survivor and Zero Dark
Sniper’s
Thirty. In fact, in Sniper
case, “success” is probably an understatement.
When an R-rated movie
without a single superhero
or blue CGI character earns
$105
million
Bradley Cooper
over a
as Chris Kyle
WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT INC.
R
 [email protected]  @megbasham
holiday weekend in January,
it is more of a cultural phenomenon. As such, the
commentary on Sniper has
grown all the more intense.
On one side Sean Hannity
and Breitbart News hail the
film for its patriotism; on
the other, The New Republic
accuses it of mythologizing
a “hate-filled killer” and
actor Seth Rogen likens it to
Nazi propaganda. It’s hard
to see how either side
justifies such simplistic
reductions of a highly
nuanced and personal film.
What American Sniper
offers is an authentic story
full of resonant details that
to some degree speak to
wider issues but are never
directly about those issues.
In crafting the narrative,
director Clint Eastwood
and screenwriter Jason
Hall drew on Chris Kyle’s
best-selling memoir as well
as the recollections of his
wife, Taya. With these two
sources, it’s hardly surprising the film stays tightly
centered on how Kyle
(brilliantly played by
Bradley Cooper) became
the deadliest sniper in our
F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
WORLD
23
1/21/15 9:27 AM
MOVIES & TV
24 carries a Bible, there’s little
evidence it means more to
him than a talisman from his
childhood. When another
character asks him if he
holds any particular faith in
any particular god, Kyle
responds, “You’re not getting
weird on me, are you?”
I believe audiences are
turning out to see American
Sniper in part to honor veterans of a war whose stories have been lost in
exactly the kind of media
wrangling we are now witnessing. Along with everything else it does, the movie
portrays the enemy we are
up against in the most
unflinching terms, and it
allows us to feel gratitude
and respect for those who
have undertaken the fight.
More than this, however, I
believe audiences are drawn
to a story that faithfully portrays the complexities of the
soldier who inspired it. In
telling his story, it tells the
story of countless others,
not with chest-pounding
and not with hand-wringing,
but with truth. A
MOVIE
Black or White
R
Rare is the movie that
can eloquently
address racial divisiveness
without making us feel as if
we just took our daily
multivitamin—healthy but
flavorless. Black or White
(PG-13 for strong language)
is this year’s vitamin.
Acting heavyweights
Kevin Costner and Octavia
Spencer take care of the
eloquence—giving
nuanced and deeply felt
BOX OFFICE TOP 10
For the weekEND of January 16-18
according to Box Office Mojo
CAUTIONS: Quantity of sexual (S), violent
(V), and foul-language (L) content on a 0-10
scale, with 10 high, from kids-in-mind.com
SV L
1̀ American Sniper* R........................ 3810
2̀ The Wedding Ringer R................. 6 510
3̀Paddington* PG..................................... 131
4̀ Taken 3 PG-13............................................. 265
5̀Selma PG-13.................................................. 255
6̀ The Imitation Game* PG-13.... 244
7̀ Into the Woods* PG.......................... 342
8̀ The Hobbit: The Battle
of the Five Armies* PG-13......... 162
9̀Unbroken* PG-13................................... 365
10Blackhat* R................................................. 565
`
*Reviewed by WORLD
performances—but it is not
enough for a film that boils
down to a melodramatic
public service announcement with our nation’s
ongoing racial tensions as
the backdrop.
At the center is
Elliot (Costner), who
learns that a car accident has just claimed
his wife—the primary
caretaker for the couple’s granddaughter
Eloise (Jillian Estell).
With both of Eloise’s
birth parents out of the
picture, Elliot assumes
sole custody of the
third-grader until
Eloise’s paternal
grandmother Rowena
(Spencer) stakes her
claim and embroils the
families in a custody
battle.
Note that the above
paragraph makes no
mention of race, and
that’s the interesting thing.
If you removed race from
the story, it would remain
intact; but would we still
watch it? The film paints an
evenhanded picture of the
two sides without showing
prejudice toward either,
even to the point of admitting its own penchant to
stereotype. Not long after
we meet Reggie (André
Holland), the uneducated
and destitute junkie who
illegitimately
fathered
Eloise, his
uncle angrily
voices what
every viewer
has on his
mind—Reggie
personifies the
stereotype of
the black man.
But therein lies the
problem with the movie’s
attempt to address race.
Reggie is a stereotype, but
even stereotypes should
have hearts. Yet we don’t
see his. Reggie says he has
overcome his addiction,
found work, and wants to
start life anew, yet we see
no zeal getting past his ills
and no remorse over his
prodigal life. He disappears
when he’s needed most,
and we never learn why.
Short monologues peppered throughout frame
the film’s discussion of the
thornier questions, most
notably Costner’s pithy
courtroom scene at the
end, but one wonders
whether it would’ve been
better to subtly weave
these matters into the
s tory’s fabric. At least it
would help us swallow the
truth better.
—by JULIANA CHAN ERIKSON
Tracey Bennet t/Tracey Bennet t
military’s history (the focus
of Kyle’s book) and the personal repercussions he and
his family suffered after he
left the service (the focus,
according to interviews, of
Taya’s input).
At the risk of gender-
stereotyping, this is exactly
how most married couples I
know would relate their
experiences—the husband
describing the mission and
how he carried it out, the
wife sharing the emotional
toll the mission took.
Within their two points of
view are specific realities to
make any tunnel-vision
partisan uncomfortable.
Liberal viewers may
clutch their pearls at Kyle’s
blunt assessment of Islamic
extremists as evil, but only if
they avert their eyes from
tactics like torturing children and enlisting mothers
to strap bombs to their little
boys. It is justifiable to call
the perpetrators of such horrors “savages,” as Kyle does,
and to take satisfaction in
killing them before they can
carry out any more savagery.
Yet Eastwood also avoids
shaving off the parts of
Kyle’s persona that would
make him more palatable to
religious or conservative
moviegoers. He’s a harddrinking, hard-talking man
(profanity and war violence
account for the film’s rating), and we get a distinct
sense from his wife that he
puts on a warrior’s face to
avoid thinking about what
his line of work is doing to
his soul. Indulging any
doubts could get him or
those under his protection
killed, but not indulging
them has made him, in Taya’s
assessment, less human.
Likewise, though Kyle
W ORLD F EBR U ARY 7 , 2 0 1 5
1/21/15 9:29 AM
bl ackhat: Frank Connor/Universal Pictures • paddington: Heyday Films
CULTURE
MOVIE
Paddington
R
MOVIE
TRACEY BENNET T/TRACEY BENNET T
BL ACKHAT: FRANK CONNOR/UNIVERSAL PICTURES • PADDINGTON: HEYDAY FILMS
Blackhat
R
Real-life hackers gave
cybercrime action
thriller Blackhat thumbs-up
for accuracy, and the recent
Sony security breach makes
the film timely; but other
flaws cripple the thriller’s
ability to, well, thrill.
Too bad, because the
plot showed promise: The
Chinese government and
the FBI enlist the help of
incarcerated hacker
Nicholas Hathaway (Chris
Hemsworth) to track down
another hacker, who’s been
using his malware to wreak
global havoc, such as
exploding a nuclear power
station in Hong Kong and
crashing the stock market.
Capture the cyberterrorist,
and Hathaway gains his
freedom.
The deal rockets
Hathaway on a wild, bloody
chase through Los Angeles,
Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur,
and Jakarta with his college buddy Chen Dawai
(Wang Leehom), a Chinese
agent, and Chen’s beautiful
sister Lien (Tang Wei), also
a computer genius.
Let’s suspend the disbelief that an MIT-trained
tech geek should look like
Hemsworth, who played
the title Norse god in Thor.
Sure, there’s an intriguing
twist to casting against
type, but Hemsworth fits
into his role as he would a
tutu. He mumbles out tech
terminology, glowers at
computer screens, and
punches arcane code at the
keyboard without the confident ease you’d expect
from a computer savant.
He’s convincing enough
when bashing chairs into
faces and poking out brain
matter (the movie is rated
“R” for violence and bad
language), but otherwise
feels completely out of
place in his role.
The movie’s narrative is
just as bulky and blundering. Predictably, Hathaway
and Lien fall in love—but
the interaction between
the two characters is so
parched of chemistry that
when the two kiss and
jump right into fornication,
their romance feels abrupt
and cheap.
Still, Blackhat has its
redeeming moments.
Director Michael Mann
presents some stylized
and stunning scenes. In a
couple CGI-generated
scenes, we plunge deep
into the guts of a computer
system as a virus wiggles
through the architecture,
which is cool enough to
cease the eye-rolls and
yawns temporarily, but not
enough to save Blackhat .
See all our movie reviews at wng.org/movies
—by SOPHIA LEE
A marmalade-quaffing
Peruvian jungle bear
learns English and travels
to London in search of a
new home. While on the
surface this fish-out-ofwater story seems old hat,
something more is going
on. Just like Maria in The
Sound of Music was the
catalyst for the brusque
Captain von Trapp to admit
his mistakes, so too does
Paddington change the
family that takes him in.
Henry Brown, the
father, is nominally head of
the household, more tolerated than respected. His
hyper-cautious temperament cannot abide a
rambunctious bear doing
battle with indoor plumbing
(in the film’s defining set
piece). But we soon learn
that Henry was not always
so reserved, and what
made him change then is
the same thing that helps
him realize
Paddington’s
value now.
This PG
movie’s
mixture of
simple
humor and
sanitized
peril should
appeal to children 5 to 11. Some
of the material is a
bit discordant. The
hero-dad poses as a
cleaning woman to
breach a secret
archive, only to be
hit on by a lecherous security guard
in a painfully
extended scene. The
brother teases his sister, saying she wants to
“bunk up” with her
boyfriend. And then there’s
the taxidermist (Nicole
Kidman) who’s seeking to
stuff Paddington, briefly
torturing a cabbie to get
information, and an eccentric live-in relative who
drinks a security guard
under the table.
Still, Paddington is
beautiful to look at. An
early scene with its digitally animated rendering
of billowing fur and watery
eyes is amazing. The film
never gets predictable as
we’re treated to amusing
flashbacks and characters’ vivid imaginings. And
Ben Whishaw (Q from the
James Bond films) finds
the right mixture of pathos
and exuberance in voicing
Paddington.
Perhaps the biggest
surprise of the film is that
Paddington, schooled in
the ways of a gentler
London 40 years past,
finds its people
callous and
dismissive, a
refreshing
cinematic
indictment of
our own day.
—by IAN C.
BLOOM
F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
WORLD
25
1/21/15 9:29 AM
CULTURE
BOOKS
Presidential
treadmill
REMEMBERING WASHINGTON
AND LINCOLN by Marvin Olasky
themselves
at the seat of Govt. [and] will
pursue schemes for their
own aggrandizement”—but
since state legislatures would
select them, senators could
not get too high and mighty.
Richard Brookhiser’s
Founders’ Son: A Life of
Abraham Lincoln (Basic,
2014) shows how Lincoln
assuaged the disappointment
he had in his own taciturn
father by adopting
Washington and others as his
true intellectual parents.
Brookhiser’s drive-by shootings of utopians are incisive;
for example, “In Concord,
Massachusetts, the smell of
other people’s blood filled
Henry David Thoreau with
rapture.” Brookhiser quotes
one frequent White House
visitor’s recollection of how
Lincoln after lunch would
often sit and read the Bible,
“sometimes in his stocking
Since the holiday is called Presidents Day, it’s appropriate to go beyond Washington and Lincoln to
Paul Johnson’s Eisenhower (Viking, 2014), a short
biography of the president whose reputation
grows among historians as new materials on his
administration become available. Eisenhower
was a brilliantly clear writer and speaker when
he wanted to be, but when asked at one of his
193 presidential press conferences a question he
did not want to answer, he deliberately mangled
his syntax so that critics looking for a quotable
remark to attack would walk away frustrated.
26
WORLD
3 BOOKS.indd 26
thousands of Civil War
deaths, as well as the death of
one of Lincoln’s sons, seem
to have made a profound
impact.
Another good book about
the Great Emancipator, Todd
Brewster’s Lincoln’s Gamble
(Scribner, 2014), focuses on
the half-year leading up to the
signing of the Emancipation
Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863.
When Lincoln announced in
September 1862 his intention
to issue the proclamation on
New Year’s Day, he was still
offering financial payment to
rebellious states agreeing to
abolish slavery gradually,
with final emancipation perhaps coming as late as 1900.
But the South said no, and
Brewster excellently explains
how Lincoln ratcheted up the
military pressure so the war
became an uncivil war of
attrition.
Johnson shows how Eisenhower, as top commander of
the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II,
learned how to get underlings working together in
ways that improved military strategy rather than
drove it to the stupidest common denominator.
Sadly, few of Eisenhower’s successors have
emulated his balanced (or close to) budgets or
his skillful management of an oppositional
Congress. Eisenhower pushed for consensus or
at least compromise, and therefore gained a place
in history far better than those yearning for
approval by historians, regardless of how many
innocents are hurt in the process. —M.O.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • EISENHOWER: BILL ALLEN/AP
Reasons to like Ike
feet with one long leg
crossed over the other, the
unshod foot slowly waving
back and forth. … He read it
in the relaxed, almost lazy
attitude of a man enjoying a
good book.”
That reading affected
Lincoln’s thinking, as is
evident in Lincoln’s second
inaugural address but also in
a letter he wrote to a
Kentucky newspaper editor
in 1864: “If God now wills
the removal of a great wrong,
and wills also that we of the
North as well as you of the
South shall pay fairly for our
complicity in that wrong,
impartial history will find
therein new cause to attest
and revere the justice and
goodness of God.” Was that
mention of God, and others
Lincoln made, just political
window dressing? Earlier, it
might have been, but the
F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
1/16/15 1:53 PM
LEE: RICK DIAMOND/DOVE AWARDS/GET T Y IMAGES
Edward Larson’s The
Return of George
Washington, 1783-1789
(HarperCollins, 2014) tells
well the story of how
Washington’s pre-eminence
created a willingness among
the Founders to create a
single executive with kingly
power. Otherwise, if the
Constitution had made it at
all, we would have had an
executive office with perhaps
a trio of heads: one from the
North, one from the middle
states, and one from the
South.
Larson writes lucidly and
explains how the constitutional compromises, including counting slaves as
three-fifths of a person,
developed. He notes that
suspicion concerning a
Senate was also rampant—
George Mason complained
that with six-year terms
senators “will probably settle
R
Notable books
SPOTLIGHT
FOUR RECENT AUDIOBOOKS FOR THE FAMILY
reviewed by Emily Whitten
EIGHT TWENTY EIGHT: WHEN LOVE DIDN’T GIVE UP
Larissa Murphy and Ian Murphy
Eight Twenty Eight refers to the date of the Murphys’ wedding—a wedding that nearly didn’t happen after Ian suff ered
a traumatic brain injury in 2006. But it also refers to Romans
8:28, “all things work together for good.” In the first years
after Ian’s injury, as he learns to walk and talk again, Larissa
struggles to find that promise amid their trials. Read by Erin
Spencer, Larissa’s voice here is tender, poetic, and filled with
truth and grace as she seeks—and repeatedly finds—the
goodness of God amid sinful, broken bodies. Ages 16 and up.
IN FREEDOM’S CAUSE: THE REAL STORY
OF WALLACE AND BRUCE Bill Heid
This audio drama by Bill Heid adapts G.A. Henty’s
1885 novel by the same name. With more than 30
voice actors, including Joanne Froggatt (Anna in
Downton Abbey) and Billy Boyd (Pippin in The Lord of
the Rings), characters like Robert the Bruce and
William Wallace come alive as they fight to protect
Scotland against English aggression. While the story
occasionally loses focus, overall it is a gripping
presentation of the life of young Ned who fights for Wallace and Bruce and later finds
his true love. The audiobook shows the characters’ Christian beliefs. Ages 10 and up.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • EISENHOWER: BILL ALLEN/AP
LEE: RICK DIAMOND/DOVE AWARDS/GET T Y IMAGES
THE GREEN EMBER S.D. Smith
Trip Lee released his rap album,
Rise, three months ago, and he’s
following that with Rise: Get Up
and Live in God’s Great Story. Lee
said in our interview, “I thought of
the book idea first,” with the
music flowing out of the themes
The Green Ember, self-published through Sam Smith’s
website, StoryWarren.com, has a raw feel. But like C.S.
Lewis’ Narnia books, it is a fantasy story that overcomes
any rough edges with heartwarming characters, big
ideas, and a tantalizing plot. Heather and Picket begin
the tale as carefree bunnies, but wolves destroy their
home, their family disappears, and they are caught up
in a war that has raged for many years. With the help of
rabbits like Maggie O’Sage and Uncle Wilfred, Heather
and Picket must find the courage to save their family and help bring justice to the
Great Woods. Ages 8 and up.
of his writing, such as “Don’t buy
FIRST STORIES TO LAST A LIFETIME Jim Weiss
glory.
Master storyteller Jim Weiss may be best known
among homeschool families for his narration of Susan
Wise Bauer’s The Story of the World, but his numerous
audiobooks cover a wide range of topics, including
biographies and classic works of literature. In First
Stories to Last a Lifetime, Weiss provides a lively
recording of some of our culture’s most popular folk
stories, including “The Gingerbread Man,” “The Three
Little Pigs,” and “The Ugly Duckling.” Weiss’ humorous
voices, well-crafted tales, and entertaining selections make this an excellent introduction not only to the tales, but to the storyteller himself. Ages 2 to 6.
To see more book news and reviews, go to wng.org/books
3 BOOKS.indd 27
into those low expectations. If
you’re a Christian,
it’s time to get up
and live.” To Lee,
that means stewarding possessions, sexuality,
and every area of
our lives for God’s
Lee also
addresses the root of racial
prejudice, which he says can’t be
fixed by political solutions: He
prays that as people read his
book their hearts will be changed,
making them “able to love others
… seeing people as made in the
image of God.” —E.W.
F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
WORLD
27
1/16/15 10:09 AM
CULTURE
Q&A
Gregg Easterbrook
Tunnel
vision
How to fix the problems
that plague football
by Marvin Olasky photo by Greg Kahn/Genesis
ESPN columnist Gregg Easterbrook has
written a variety of books, but with so
much focus now on the Feb. 1 Super Bowl, we
spoke about his recent book on football, The
King of Sports (Thomas Dunne, 2013).
R
Let’s start with something basic: the size of
Super Bowl players. Increasing at a remarkable
level. The average offensive lineman on the
1972 Miami Dolphins, the NFL’s only perfect
team, weighed 260 pounds. The average offensive lineman on last year’s Washington Post
All-Met Team—high-school students—was 310
pounds. To have the national sport be one that
celebrates weight gain, in a nation with a
childhood obesity epidemic, can’t be the world’s
best thing.
If the 1966 Green Bay Packers, one of the great
rofessional teams, played the worst team in the
p
current NFL, the Oakland Raiders, would the Green Bay
players lose by 50 points? Oh, they would. The game
Talking about gargantuan size: What about the cost
of NFL venues, with taxpayers usually paying most of it?
Every NFL ownership group has a net worth of at least
a billion dollars, yet taxpayers pay most of the cost of
stadia, which in most cases are either exempt from local
property taxes or given dramatically reduced rates.
Why should these guys get even a penny in subsidies?
It’s a very profitable business. The NFL rolls in money,
$10 billion this year. It will be 11-12 billion next year.
would be over at halftime, just because of the increase
in size and strength of players.
Patrick Henry students here learn about the virtues
of a free enterprise system, but this sounds like crony
capitalism, or welfare for the affluent. The arguments
28 3 Q&A.indd 28
Packers: Vernon Biever
The Green Bay
Packers play
the Dallas
Cowboys in the
1966 NFL
Championship
Game on Jan. 1,
1967.
for free enterprise are tremendous, but the NFL is not
even remotely similar to free enterprise. It’s publicly
subsidized and protected from competition. Imagine
what Apple or General Motors would pay to have an
antitrust waiver like the NFL has! It’s allowed to
behave in ways antithetical to market competition.
Maybe that made sense half a century ago; it sure
doesn’t make sense today.
WORL D FEBRUAR Y 7 , 2 0 1 5
1/21/15 8:36 AM
Who’s willing to do something about that? The
politician who stands up to the NFL interest group
will get blamed for making the football team leave
the city.
You write about the little structural things that
ommunicate the importance of studying, like the
c
Friday night dinners. Every Friday night before a game
coaches and players go to the nicest steakhouse in the
area of Blacksburg, Va., and the players are called up to
pick steaks by the order of their grade point averages.
The player with the highest GPA gets the first steak and
so on down the line—it doesn’t matter who the star
players are. That has two effects: Players with good
What about all the football concussions that we
hear about? Nobody wants an NFL player to get
hurt. I certainly don’t. But there’s only 2,000 of
them, and they’re adults who knowingly assume a
risk in return for being very highly compensated.
As regards the NFL, that’s totally true, but 99
percent of football players are not NFL players.
Three million at the youth and high-school level—
that’s where almost all of football is played.
Children assuming the risk … The law does not
allow children to assume risk in the way that it
allows adults. I played high-school and college
football, both my boys played in high school, one
of them played in college: Under the right environment, football can be a great experience, but
they’re never going to get anything tangible from
it, and that’s where the concussion crisis is,
because 50,000-60,000 concussions occur each
year in youth and high-school football.
‘The NFL is not even remotely
similar to free enterprise. It’s
publicly subsidized and protected
from competition. … It’s allowed
to behave in ways antithetical to
market competition.’
GPAs get the best steaks, but the process also makes
sure that everybody on the team knows how their
teammates are doing in class. When teammates realize
the last five guys coming up are barely hanging on,
they rally around those guys and try to help them get
their schoolwork done. Anybody could duplicate that
model, and of course most big college programs don’t.
So will we move away from NFL socialism and
youth football riskiness? You need some larger
sense of national resolve. A little more than a hundred years ago, football was on the verge of being
outlawed. Football at that time was much more
brutal than today’s, in part because the equipment
was different, but also because you were allowed
to punch people in the face. Football games
concluded with broken limbs, broken noses.
Nineteen deaths in 1905 during games … Yes. A
lot of state legislatures wanted to outlaw football.
At that time the academic scandal concerned ringers, guys who were actually professionals would be
paid to put on the uniforms of college teams and play.
Teddy Roosevelt brought the leaders of the football
establishment to the White House, twisted their arms,
and said, “You got to clean up this sport. You have to
have actual students, and you’ve got to change the
game so people stop dying.”
And football changed. Cleaning up football, it turned
out, made it far more popular than it had been before.
You mention another nice touch, involving names
carved in the walls of a tunnel. Players run through an
old tunnel cut from local limestone to go on the field.
I ran through it with the team several times; it would
bring chills to the spine of the most jaded person.
Carved into the wall of the tunnel are the names of
former players who graduated: Not who played, who
graduated. So a lot of their stars, like Michael Vick,
DeAngelo Hall, don’t have their names on that wall.
Vick still hasn’t graduated, but DeAngelo Hall came
back for several years to finish his credits because he
wanted his name on the wall. That’s not a bad
incentive.
There’s been a lot of discussion over the past year
about whether college football players should be paid
or not. There’s increasingly a sense that it’s unfair for
players to generate millions of dollars for a college
but not get anything in return. I think it is unfair, but
what they should get in return is a diploma.
We don’t have ringers today, but most of the big
college football factories don’t take seriously the
“student” part of student-athlete. You start The King of
Sports, though, with an exception: Virginia Tech. The
Packers: Vernon Biever
book is mainly about what’s wrong with football and
how it needs to be reformed, but I didn’t want to just
be a naysayer: I wanted to show that football could
be done in an ethical manner. Virginia Tech had a
winning record for 20 straight years, and the program
is structured to make sure kids are actually in class
and actually graduate.
 [email protected]  @MarvinOlasky
3 Q&A.indd 29
You propose that students should receive six-year
scholarships. Yes, so once their NCAA eligibility has
A video of this
interview
in its entirety
can be found
at wng.org
and in the
iPad edition of
this issue
been expired, then they’ve got one more year at
campus to fix their degrees, fix their credits, and
actually graduate. The odds of even a football factory
player ever taking a snap in the NFL are 30-1. By far
most of them never play. So once the dream of being
drafted is over, they should go back to college and
earn a degree. A
FE B RUARY 7 , 2 0 1 5 W O R L D 29
1/15/15 2:51 PM
MUSIC
Joyful noise maker
Andraé Crouch sang with an indefatigable—
and soulful—optimism by Arsenio Orteza
30 W ORLD F E B RUARY 7 , 2 0 1 5
3 MUSIC.indd 30
A son of a Pentecostal pastor who ran
a laundry business on the side, Crouch
experienced spiritual rebirth at the age
of 9 and composed the first of his many
standards, “The Blood Will Never Lose
Its Power,” at age 14 (some sources say
15). Shortly thereafter, he formed his
first group, the Church of God in Christ
Singers. It included the future R&B
superstar Billy Preston.
Crouch had a knack for attracting
talented collaborators. The members of
his most famous ensemble, “Andraé
Crouch and the Disciples,” included the
drummer Bill Maxwell and the guitarist
Hadley Hockensmith, who together
would go on to form the Christian jazzfusion band Koinonia. The jazz saxophonist Michael Brecker played on
Crouch’s 1976 album This Is Another Day.
And Stevie Wonder, Joe Sample, and
Michael Ochs Archives/Get t y Images
On Jan. 3, the incomparably influential black-gospel musician
Andraé Crouch suffered a heart attack
and went to be with the God of whom he’d
faithfully written and sung for 50 years.
His death wasn’t exactly a surprise.
He’d been hospitalized one month earlier
for pneumonia and congestive heart
failure, ailments particularly foreboding
where a 72-year-old man is concerned.
But its timing, so to speak, was curious. A 10-date, multi-artist tour billed as
“Let the Church Say Amen” had been
scheduled to begin on Dec. 6. Its purpose:
to honor Crouch and his music. What
might God have been trying to say in
reclaiming one of his own on the cusp of
such a momentous event?
Maybe, just maybe, that no greater tribute could accrue to Crouch than the legacydefining music that he had already made.
R
Earth, Wind & Fire’s Philip Bailey contributed to I’ll Be Thinking of You (1979).
Like his other early albums, I’ll Be
Thinking of You appeared on Ralph
Carmichael’s Light Records, a label
whose roster was predominantly white
and whose recordings were distributed
with high-profile aplomb to Christian
bookstores and radio. Thus was Crouch
able to cross over from black gospel to
the evangelical mainstream.
His preferred musical stylings also
played a role. In disentangling black
gospel music from its blues roots and
adopting a sleek, funky soulfulness, he
hit upon a pop-friendly formula ideally
suited to his indefatigable, explicitly
scriptural optimism.
Not for Crouch was the dark night of
the soul. His nearly 2,000 songs portray
Jesus as a friend, a healer, a consoling
giver of life more abundant. His concerts
often culminated in exuberant sing-alongs
in which the racially diverse audience
that he attracted found itself united in a
brotherhood rooted in the Fatherhood of
God.
Crouch had his trials. In 1982, a
series of bizarre misunderstandings
resulted in his being busted for cocaine,
an episode that didn’t lead to charges but
proved a watershed. Although he continued to record—and to record well—
under his own name, he also undertook
background roles, contributing either
alone or with his choir to TV (The
Jeffersons), films (The Color Purple, The
Lion King), and recordings by Michael
Jackson (“Man in the Mirror”) and
Madonna (“Like a Prayer”).
But perhaps the most defining moment
of his career was his appearance in the
1982 Christmas episode of the latenight, cutting-edge comedy television
show SCTV. Playing a soup-kitchen-
running angel, he rescues the down-andout ne’er-do-well “Johnny LaRue” (John
Candy) from suicidal despond with
sympathetic acts of kindness and a
performance of “Soon and Very Soon.”
Surreal though the skit was, Crouch
was going where no Christian had gone
before—and bringing Jesus with him in
the process.
It was, essentially, the story of his life. A
 [email protected]  @ArsenioOrteza
1/19/15 9:19 PM
handout
CULTURE
Notable CDs
RECENT POP-ROCK ALBUMS reviewed by Arsenio Orteza
LIVE IN SACRAMENTO The Beach Boys
Oft bootlegged and even off icially released in part,
albeit with studio doctoring, these two Beatlemaniaera concerts (average length: 44 minutes) finally get
their un-retouched, major-label imprimatur thanks
to the European Union’s recently fangled copyright
laws. The relentlessly shrieking girls (who, if they’re
still alive, are probably grandmothers now) grate, as
does Mike Love’s tween-song stoking of their
smittenness. But the energy is a welcome reminder
that, once upon a time, the Fab Five could cut the
musical mustard without a small army of sidemen.
KEEP AN EYE ON SUMMER The Beach Boys
The EU-copyright saga continues, providing the
curious with 46 glimpses behind the curtain of
Brian Wilson’s pre-crackup studio wizardry. What
they confirm: that Papa Murray was a buttinski,
that lots of hard work and loving care went into
separately tracking the vocals and the instrumentals, and that the Jesus-music pioneer Chuck
Girard clapped on one song. Amid such arcana,
previously released mixes of several completed
greatest hits emerge. Perfectionists will take
comfort from the abundance of proof that Rome wasn’t built in a day.
HOPE Susan Boyle
Hope is Susan Boyle’s first album since being diagnosed with Asperger’s, sharing that news with the
world, and experiencing the consequent relief. Not
surprisingly, it’s also her most joyous album and, in
keeping with her devout Catholic faith, practically a
gospel aff air. “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” “I Can
Only Imagine,” “Oh Happy Day,” “Abide with Me”—
rather than being shaped by their juxtaposition with
songs by Pink Floyd, Paul Simon, and Sarah
McLachlan, the gospel songs do the shaping. Only
John Lennon’s “Imagine” creates cognitive dissonance.
SPOTLIGHT
Neil Diamond still comes off
gauche when pandering to middleaged women in sold-out arenas,
but the humbler studio persona
that he has spent the last decade
constructing gets more likable all
the time. Beginning with 2005’s
12 Songs, he’s been
sloughing off layer
after layer of “adult
contemporary” shellack. And now, with
the Don Was–produced Melody Road
(Capitol), he has fully
reconnected with his Brill
Building roots and made what
may be the most charming album
of his career.
First things first: Diamond is
singing as well as ever. His distinctive baritone betrays none of
the wear or tear that one would
expect from septuagenarian
pipes. Second things second:
He’s a smart-enough cookie to
know that his chart-topping days
are behind him and that he therefore may as well luxuriate in the
freedom attendant upon such
epiphanies. Why, the KoreanAmerican love song “Seongah
and Jimmy”
even risks
silliness—
and gets
away with
it. —A.O.
MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GET T Y IMAGES
HANDOUT
UNITED STATES Ian McLagan and the Bump Band
Although remembered primarily as a keyboardplaying sideman (Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones) and
band member (Small Faces, Faces), McLagan, who
died in December, was also a crafter of hooky,
clever songs chronicling love’s little ups and
downs that Rod Stewart, Steve Forbert, and
other similarly raspy-voiced blokes could do
worse than cover. Nothing on United States is as
hooky or as clever as 2000’s “She Stole My
Record Collection,” but “Love Letter,” which goes
“I’ll paint you a picture like Rembrandt only better,” comes close.
To see more music news and reviews, go to wng.org/music
3 MUSIC.indd 31
F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
WORLD
31
1/19/15 9:20 PM
MINDY BELZ
The ‘Je suis Charlie’
moment
An Alliance is urgently
needed to defeat Islamic
terrorism
32 W ORLD FEBRU A RY 7 , 2 0 1 5
3 MINDY.indd 32
When that
movement is
bent on
beheading
our people,
crushing our
friends, and
destroying
our society, is
that not war?
youtube
Let January 2015 mark the moment
when the world got serious about
defeating Islamic jihadist terrorism.
Those three words are chosen purposefully:
Islamic jihadist terrorism is a brand of evil that
springs from the madrassas and mosques
inciting Muslims to go to war against infidels
the world over. It may not speak for all Muslims
but it springs from the bowels of their institutions. It targets Christians and Jews, but also
fellow Muslims who don’t buy its requirement
to live in a world without music and kites, who
balk at the notion of strapping explosives on
11-year-old boys, or who happen to be Shiites
or otherwise out of step with an ideology built
on violence, whose adherents regularly invoke
the Quran.
The world has been waiting for a leader of
the free world to make the stakes plain. That
used to mean a Republican or Democratic
president of the United States, but no more.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest told
a reporter, “This is not a matter of the world
being at war with Islam” but with “these
individuals who are terrorists.”
It’s worth noting the Bush administration
also had a hard time identifying its “war on
terror” as a war against “Islamic” terrorists.
Instead we’ve heard the menace properly
called out by a French socialist and a retired
former Democratic senator. On Jan. 10 Prime
Minister Manuel Valls said France was in “a war
against terrorism, against jihadism, against
radical Islam, against everything that is aimed
at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity.”
The following week former Democratic Sen.
Joe Lieberman, said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed
the world must go on the offensive against “radical
R
Islamists” who “long ago declared war on the
West, but most of the nations targeted or threatened have not yet declared war against them.”
Our cover story describes the reach and
scope of Islamic terrorism in one deadly week’s
time, highlighted by the Paris attacks on Charlie
Hebdo. A close examination of seven days’ events
over four continents reveals a movement—not
“individuals”—linked by common ideology,
fraternal training, and shared goals. When that
movement is bent on beheading our people,
crushing our friends, and destroying our
society, is that not war?
Sporadic airstrikes alone, we’ve seen again
and again, cannot defeat an enemy. They are
defensive, while a strategy designed for offense
involves first winning back territory everywhere
Islamic terrorists have claimed it—in Iraq,
Nigeria, Sudan, Libya, and Central African
Republic to start. This is a world war, and if you
recall, that’s what world wars look like.
One of the silver linings to President Obama’s
passive-aggressive foreign policy is that the
alliance is forming without us. Keep in mind
that France successfully routed al-Qaeda insurgents in northern Mali in 2013. But the alliance
needs our leadership, it needs NATO. Besides
European nations now seized with the threat, it
must include, as Lieberman points out, leading
Islamic nations with a stake in defeating the
terrorism that goes by their name: Egypt, Saudi
Arabia, and the Gulf states. We can work with
those states despite their human rights abuses,
but we don’t have to ignore them à la Roosevelt
with Stalin.
The strategy will require sacrifice for average
Americans. And yes, Muslims in the West may see
their own freedoms curtailed. What they can do
to prevent or minimize that is to begin forcefully
in word and deed separating themselves from
the ideology that’s plotting world war in their
name. If they do that, they may one day see
themselves mainstreamed into Western life.
When was the last time someone pointed out to
you a German-American or Japanese-American
as somehow “other?”
If non-jihadist Muslims don’t find their courage, if they allow clerical and political leaders to
forever play the victim card in this business,
they will forever be consigned to second-class
citizenship, caught under a cloud of suspicion.
The fight is on, and we may opt to continue
playing defense, but then we must expect it
soon on our streets in broad daylight, as in
Paris and Verviers. A
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1/21/15 9:00 AM
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TerŘor
by the minute
Across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East terrorist
attacks unfolded seemingly simultaneously in January,
a product of bigger, better-financed Islamic jihadists
driven by a singular ideology. ‘The West is duly
terrified. But it should not surprised’ by Jamie Dean
34 W O R L D F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
3 COVER STORY.indd 34
1/21/15 9:59 AM
A man injured in a suicide blast in the Nigerian town of
Potiskum on Jan. 12; masked gunmen run toward a
victim of their gunfire outside the Charlie Hebdo office
in Paris on Jan. 7 (top); Islamic State militants leading
away captured Iraqi soldiers in Tikrit, Iraq (left).
AMINU ABUBAK AR/AFP/Get t y Images; AP; AP via militant website
F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5 W O R L D 35
1/21/15 9:59 AM
WORLD
AHMED GAMEL/ANADOLU AGENCY/GET T Y IMAGES
36
Egyptian President
Abdel Fattah al-Sisi
(center) attends a
Christmas Eve mass
led by Egyptian
Coptic Pope
Tawadros II at the
St. Mark's Coptic
Orthodox Cathedral
in the Abbassia
District of Cairo,
Egypt, on Jan. 6.
was standing in the Coptic cathedral, expressing
solidarity with marginalized Christians.
“Let no one say to you: ‘What kind of Egyptian
are you?’” al-Sisi told the congregation. Many
cheered. Some wept for joy.
It was a bright beginning to an agonizing week.
Within hours, masked terrorists stormed the
offices of Charlie Hebdo, shouting “Allahu
Akbar”—Arabic for “Allah is great”—and launched
a Paris murder spree that left 17 people dead.
Meanwhile, a far deadlier terrorist attack was
already underway.
Nearly 2,000 miles south, militants from the
Islamist terror group Boko Haram unleashed a
massive attack on more than a dozen villages and
towns in northern Nigeria, including Baga, a city
with a multinational military base.
Initial reports were stunning: Some local
officials estimated 2,000 dead. Others believed
hundreds died. Survivors described fleeing past
bodies strewn through villages, as militants shot
mostly women, children, and elderly villagers too
slow to escape.
Survivors reported militants burning whole
towns, with some villagers still inside their
homes. One local official told BBC the town of
F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
1/21/15 10:00 AM
ASSOCIATED PRESS
O
n the evening before
Islamist terrorists burst into
the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo,
an Egyptian Muslim slipped
into a Coptic church in
Cairo, surrounded by a
cadre of armed men.
The unexpected outsider
approached the altar of St.
Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Cathedral and turned to
face a crowd of stunned Christians. But this was
no attacker: This was their president wishing
them Merry Christmas.
For long-oppressed Christians in a predominantly Muslim nation, the visit was extraordinary.
Indeed, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi became the
first Egyptian president to visit a Coptic Orthodox
Church on Christmas Eve, celebrated by Eastern
Orthodox Christians on Jan. 6.
At the same cathedral less than two years
earlier, Muslim rioters attacked mourners leaving
a funeral for four Christians killed in religious
attacks on the outskirts of Cairo. Police fired tear
gas as a mob laid siege to the church for hours,
and one person died. Now a Muslim president
ASSOCIATED PRESS
AHMED GAMEL/ANADOLU AGENCY/GET T Y IMAGES
Baga—once home to 10,000 people—is now
“virtually non-existent.”
Humanitarian groups and journalists struggled to gain access to the war zone to confirm the
number dead. The Nigerian government reported
the death toll was about 150, but many remained
skeptical of that estimate, given the military’s
misreporting in the past.
Whatever the final count, the savagery
appeared to surpass even Boko Haram’s severest
brutality in its years-long campaign to conquer
northern Nigeria and establish an Islamic
caliphate.
Satellite images published by Amnesty
International offered an aerial view of the
destruction. The organization estimated more
than 3,700 structures damaged or destroyed, and
suspected a high death toll. The group called the
attack “catastrophic.”
Meanwhile, other horrors unfolded: Witnesses
said militants kidnapped some 300 women and
girls as they fled the Nigerian attacks and imprisoned them in a school. Many feared the militants
would force the girls into slavery.
Thousands of displaced villagers clamored for
refuge in far-flung towns and neighboring countries.
Residents inspect
damaged shops
following a Monday
bomb explosion at
a market in Bauchi,
Nigeria, on Dec. 23,
2014. The explosion
killed at least six
people and injured
19, said state
commissioner of
health Dr. Sani
Malami.
In Maiduguri, Boko Haram’s headquarters, militants strapped explosives to a girl perhaps 10 years
old and detonated her in a crowded marketplace.
A day later, assailants in Potiskum used two more
little girls as suicide bombers.
Still, the eyes of the world remained on Paris.
As world leaders marched arm-in-arm with millions of Parisians mourning the 17 slain victims
in France, hundreds of abandoned corpses filled
the streets and open spaces of northern Nigeria,
with scant international attention.
Nigerian attorney Emmanuel Ogebe called the
Baga attacks “terrorism on steroids,” and added:
“The global silence is deafening on this burgeoning
genocide. Paris is bad, but Paris is no Baga.”
Perhaps the African catastrophe drew less
attention because the death toll wasn’t immediately clear, and Nigeria has endured Boko Haram
terrorism for years: The group killed more than
10,000 people last year. Far fewer expected a
jihadist incursion in the heart of Paris.
But like the terrorists in Paris—and other parts
of the world—Boko Haram militants aren’t just a
local threat. They’ve spilled across borders, striking villages in Cameroon and recruiting soldiers
from Niger and Chad.
F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
WORLD
37
1/21/15 10:00 AM
They also share a common ideology: Islamist
militants from France to Nigeria to Iraq champion
a strain of radical Islam driving terror threats all
over the world, including the United States.
President Barack Obama doesn't speak of
radical Islam, despite the clear declarations of
Islamist terror groups. That’s a mistake, according to Sebastian Gorka of the Va.-based Marine
F
or Boko Haram, terror has everything to do
with Islam.
After militants kidnapped nearly 300
schoolgirls from Chibok village last April, the
group’s leader declared: “This is what I know in
Quran. This is a war against Christians and
democracy and their constitution. Allah says we
should finish them when we get them.”
Over the last decade, the jihadists have finished
thousands of Christians, burning churches, killing
residents, and driving villagers from their homes.
Last August, the group’s leader declared Boko
Haram had established a caliphate—similar to the
strategy followed by Islamic State in Iraq and
Syria—in the villages it conquered.
38
“
ThE
gLoBaL sIlEnCe iS dEaFeNiNg
oN ThIs
bUrGeOniNg
gEnOcIdE.
PaRiS Is
bAd, bUt
PaRiS Is
nO BaGa.
”
—EmMaNuEl
OgEbE
attacks, the Christian president didn’t publicly
acknowledge the carnage for nearly two weeks.
U.S. efforts to help find the missing Chibok
girls faltered last year, as security experts worried
Boko Haram had infiltrated the Nigerian military.
Witnesses say soldiers often abandon their posts
or fail to respond to Boko Haram attacks.
Meanwhile, Boko Haram isn’t the only group
attacking Christians.
As recently as December, Fulani herdsmen
from the largest Muslim tribe in northern Nigeria
attacked predominantly Christian villages in the
country’s northeast. Witnesses told Morning Star
News the herdsmen killed 15 Christians and
burned churches and homes in two states.
Local sources in Kaduna State have documented some of the recent carnage, particularly
Fulani attacks on Christian communities last June
and September. Beyond tallies of numbers dead
and houses burned, locals have documented
names and faces and glimpses into lives lost.
In documents provided to WORLD, a spreadsheet includes the name, sex, age, occupation,
church membership, and mode of death for
PARIS: FREDRIK VON ERICHSEN/PICTURE-ALLIANCE/DPA/AP • AL-SISI: STEPHANE LEMOUTON/SIPA/AP
Corps University. Gorka says discrediting the
enemy’s message is critical to defeating them.
Some moderate Muslims, like Egyptian
President al-Sisi, have scorned Islamic extremists,
but the Obama administration hasn’t embraced
that approach. Gorka says that’s because it
“undermines their narrative that [terrorism] has
nothing to do with Islam.”
Parisians gather at
the Place de la
Republique for a
march against
terrorism in their
city on Jan. 11.
The recent mass attacks come ahead of presidential elections set for Feb. 14. Some election
observers see the escalation as an attempt to
destabilize the country and prevent the contests.
Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, has
vowed elections will go forward, though he faces
sharp criticism over his ineffectiveness in battling
the Boko Haram insurgency. Even after the recent
W O R L D F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
1/21/15 10:02 AM
dozens of victims in Kaduna State: There’s the
55-year-old carpenter shot twice in the head and
chest. There’s a 35-year-old pastor’s wife shot
below the ear. Here’s a 1-year-old girl shot in the
stomach. There’s a 28-year-old bricklayer who
was beheaded.
In some cases, postattack photos show bodies
piled high, including the corpses of many women
and children: A woman’s neck is slashed. A pastor’s
body is burned. A child lies next to his severed hand.
It’s a brutal record of an ongoing reality for
Christians in northern Nigeria, and the
‘By oUr oWn hAnDs’
Egypt’s president makes a historic call for Islamic
leaders to launch a ‘religious revolution’ aimed
at ending radical jihadism in their midst
PARIS: FREDRIK VON ERICHSEN/PICTURE-ALLIANCE/DPA/AP • AL-SISI: STEPHANE LEMOUTON/SIPA/AP
When Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi
visited the Coptic cathedral in Cairo on Jan. 6, it
wasn’t the first time the former military official
surprised religious leaders.
Many Christians cheered and snapped
photos during al-Sisi’s historic visit to the
church, but the mood was far more subdued
when the president addressed a group of
prominent Muslim leaders at Al-Azhar
University five days earlier.
Standing in the iconic university where
Muslim clerics have trained for more than a
thousand years, the country’s Muslim
president blasted Islamic extremists:
“Is it possible that 1.6 billion people
[Muslims] should want to kill the rest of
the world’s inhabitants—that is 7
billion—so that they themselves may
live? Impossible!”
Al-Sisi urged a “religious revolution”
in Islam, and called on imams to confront the strain of Islamic thinking that
is “antagonizing the entire world.”
“The entire world is waiting for your
next move,” he said, “because this umma
[Islamic community] is being torn, it is being
destroyed, it is being lost—and it is being lost by our
own hands.”
Al-Sisi’s quest is an uphill battle.
A month earlier, a professor at Al-Azhar refused to
denounce Islamic State extremists, and a top Salafi
leader declared any Muslim who off ered Christmas
greetings to Christians an unbeliever. (Al-Sisi visited the
Coptic church soon after.)
Still, al-Sisi’s remarks are “a statement the likes of which
no one else in the Arab world has made since September
11th,” said Sebastian Gorka of the Marine Corps University.
Other Muslims have condemned terrorism, but al-Sisi is
one of the most high-profile leaders to call so strongly for
Islamic reform. During his run for the presidency after the
ouster of former President Mohamed Morsi (a member of
the Muslim Brotherhood), al-Sisi told an interviewer: “I see
documents’ authors—whom WORLD agreed not
to identify for security reasons—dedicated the
report to the memory of the slain:
“We who are alive to mourn you all take comfort from the Bible that tells us that in heaven you
are saying a prayer. This prayer, we your brethren
left alive join you in saying: ‘How long, O Lord,
holy and true; dost thou not judge and avenge our
blood on them that dwell on the earth?’
(Revelation 6:10).”
The report also includes a note of hope: “May
the Holy Spirit embolden us to follow Christ with
that the religious discourse in the entire Islamic world has lost
Islam its humanity.”
Egyptian Christians widely supported al-Sisi’s election,
viewing him as a leader who saved them from the growing
tyranny of the Muslim Brotherhood. They also welcomed
his eff orts to include Christians in the committee drafting the country’s new constitution.
Critics charge the former military leader gained his
position through a coup after Morsi’s ouster in 2013, and
that he’s cracked down harshly on Muslim
Brotherhood supporters and political opponents. His defenders say al-Sisi’s actions
protected the nation from an organization
with deep terrorist connections.
So far, it’s unclear whether al-Sisi has
a broader plan to push for reforms, but
some experts say the United States
should support the leader’s stance as
part of its own policy against terrorism
and bolster al-Sisi’s position as a
moderate voice.
Middle Eastern expert Walid
Phares says the Obama administration
has been slow to embrace al-Sisi’s
approach or use terms like “jihadists”
because it fears creating more extremists, a dynamic Phares calls “obviously
false.”
Meanwhile, al-Sisi faces plenty of
problems in Egypt. Terrorists in Egypt’s
Sinai Peninsula have launched repeated
attacks and killed dozens of soldiers. Days
after the Paris attacks, Islamic State militants
posted pictures of 21 Egyptian Christians abducted
in Libya.
Egyptian Christians still endure entrenched
discrimination, and sometimes face violence,
particularly in rural regions. The day al-Sisi visited
the Coptic church in Cairo, gunmen killed two police
officers guarding a church two hours south in the
town of Minya.
Tawfik Hamid, an Egyptian-born Muslim also
calling for Islamic reform, applauds al-Sisi’s stand,
but admits the broader war against jihadists will be
harder to win. “ISIS [the Islamic State] has a lot of
money and resources, they are determined, and
they can do serious damage to the world,” he
says. “That is what is worrying me: Who will win?
Will it be us or them?” —J.D.
F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
WORLD
39
1/21/15 10:02 AM
A
40
An Islamic State
fighter armed with
a knife and an
automatic weapon
stands next to
captured Syrian
army soldiers and
off icers in Raqqa,
Syria.
jihadist group planning imminent attacks on
police.
After the Paris attacks, French President
François Hollande called the killing spree a terrorist act of “extreme barbarity.” French Prime
Minister Manuel Valls declared his country “at
war with terrorism, jihadism, and radical Islam.”
President Barack Obama called the attacks
“cowardly and evil,” but avoided mentioning the
strain of radical Islam driving the deadly threats
against countries around the world.
In a later statement, the president said the
terrorists “fear” freedom of speech and press. But
according to a radical Muslim cleric writing in
USA Today after the Paris attacks, jihadists don’t
fear free speech, they violently oppose it.
“Muslims do not believe in freedom of expression, as their speech and actions are determined
R CONTINUED ON PAGE 42
RAQQA MEDIA CENTER OF THE ISL AMIC STATE GROUP/AP
s jihadist forces wreaked havoc in Nigeria,
Islamist gunmen stormed the offices of
Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Within minutes, the
terrorists laid waste to the magazine known for
its satirical depictions of religious figures, including the Muslim prophet Muhammad.
During the noon attack on Jan. 7, the gunmen
opened fire on staff members and shouted: “We
have avenged the Prophet Muhammad.” The rampage left 12 people dead, including a police officer
executed on a sidewalk nearby.
Two days later, another gunman attacked a
Jewish grocery store in
Paris, killing four victims.
Authorities believe the suspected terrorist Amedy
Coulibaly also killed a
policewoman. The terror
group Islamic State later
released a video apparently
calling Coulibaly, 32, “a
soldier of the Caliphate.”
Meanwhile, police
tracked the Charlie Hebdo
suspects to a printing shop
in Paris. Before dying in a
shoot-out with police, the
gunmen—brothers Chérif
and Saïd Kouachi—told a
local television station
they acted on behalf of the
terrorist organization
al-Qaeda in Yemen.
For horrified Parisians,
the City of Light plunged into darkness.
Millions of citizens poured into the streets,
mourning the 17 dead in the city’s worst terrorist
attack in decades. An international outpouring
included world leaders marching through Paris,
though top U.S. officials were conspicuously
absent. Marchers hoisted signs declaring: “Je suis
Charlie”—French for “I am Charlie” in a sign of
solidarity with Western victims.
In a Wall Street Journal column, Ayaan Hirsi
Ali—an activist who escaped Islamist brutality in
Somalia—wrote the attacks in Paris were deplorable, but also predictable given the radical ideology driving them. “The West is duly terrified,” she
wrote. “But it should not be surprised.”
Though the brutality of radical jihadists isn’t
surprising, the advance has been swift. Since the
purported “Arab Spring” began four years ago—
with high hopes and public support from democracy leaders including then-Secretary of State
W O R L D F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
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BAGA: HARUNA UMAR/AP • KOUACHI BROTHERS: AP • PRINTING COMPLEX: MICHEL SPINGLER/AP • HAMZA: JOHNNY GREEN/PA WIRE/AP • PARIS SECURIT Y: CHRISTOPHE ENA/AP • SATELLITE IMAGES: MICAH FARFOUR/AMNEST Y INTERNATIONAL/AP
Hillary Clinton and President Obama—jihadist
groups like the Islamic State and Boko Haram
have executed not only terror but also conquest.
In Nigeria, one group estimates Boko Haram
controls a chunk of the country the size of Belgium.
In the Middle East, the Islamic State has gained
territory the size of the United Kingdom, according to counterterrorism expert Matthew Olsen.
Over the summer, Islamic State terrorists drove
entire Christian populations from their ancient
homelands in Iraq, and continue to (see p. 44).
In places like Europe, Islamists haven’t gained
territory, but they have gained momentum. The
Paris attacks grew from a network of support
reaching back to the Middle East (see sidebar).
One week later, authorities in Belgium raided a
renewed devotion and dedication, because no
force shall destroy the church of God in Northern
Nigeria.”
TIM ELIN E OF E VEN T S:
Boko Haram fighters attack a multinational joint task
force command post in Baga, driving out its forces,
and launch a rampage on villages and towns in the surrounding area
of Borno State in northern Nigeria.
RAQQA MEDIA CENTER OF THE ISL AMIC STATE GROUP/AP
BAGA: HARUNA UMAR/AP • KOUACHI BROTHERS: AP • PRINTING COMPLEX: MICHEL SPINGLER/AP • HAMZA: JOHNNY GREEN/PA WIRE/AP • PARIS SECURIT Y: CHRISTOPHE ENA/AP • SATELLITE IMAGES: MICAH FARFOUR/AMNEST Y INTERNATIONAL/AP
JAN. 3 Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi makes a surprise
visit to St. Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Cathedral during its
Christmas Eve service—the first Egyptian president to do so.
JAN. 6 Baga after an April 2013
attack by Boko Haram
At 11:30 a.m. local time gunmen Chérif and Saïd Kouachi
enter the offices of satire magazine Charlie Hebdo,
killing leading cartoonists and editors along with a policeman.
Hijacking a car in the middle of the day in the city, they tell the ousted
driver, “If the media ask you anything, tell them it’s al-Qaeda in
Yemen.” By evening a million Parisians gathered in city streets with
“Je suis Charlie” placards.
JAN. 7 Boko Haram attacks in Baga again. Early reports
suggest 2,000 men, women, and children may have
been killed. At least 10,000 residents flee the area, some drowning in
Lake Chad and others escaping across the border to Chad. Baga “is
virtually non-existent,” said an eyewitness.
JAN. 7 A 25-year-old French policewoman is shot dead in
Paris by a gunman connected to the Kouachi brothers,
later identified as Amedy Coulibaly.
JAN. 8 In a dawn-to-dusk siege at a printing complex on the
Paris outskirts, the Kouachis are cornered and eventually killed. Meanwhile, Coulibaly takes shoppers and clerks hostage
in a kosher grocery story, killing four and wounding four
before he is killed in a police assault.
JAN. 9 Calling his actions “barbaric,” a
federal judge in New York sentences
Abu Hamza, the Finsbury Park Mosque cleric, to
life in prison for terrorist activities, including a
plot to kidnap Westerners in Yemen and set up a
terrorist training camp in Oregon. A Hamza disciple
recruited Chérif Kouachi for al-Qaeda.
JAN. 9 Militants strap explosives to child suicide bombers
and explode them in two marketplaces in northern
Nigeria, killing three in one incident and 16 in another, with many
wounded.
JAN. 11 More than 1.5 million people march in Paris to protest
attacks, including four prominent heads of state, but
no top U.S. officials.
JAN. 11 France deploys 10,000 troops to protect Jewish and
other sites.
JAN. 12 JAN. 12 Islamic State claims to have abducted 21 Egyptian
Christians in Libya, and publishes a photo of them in
captivity.
Satellite images released by Amnesty International
show over 3,700 structures damaged or completely
destroyed in Baga and nearby villages in the Boko Haram rampage.
JAN. 15 Belgian authorities raid a suspected terror cell in
Verviers, killing two suspects and thwarting what
they say were plots for more European attacks.
JAN. 15 3 COVER STORY.indd 41
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42
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A demonstrator
holds up a “Je suis
Mohamed” sign
during a protest
in Algiers, Algeria,
on Jan. 16.
SIDALI DJARBOUB/NEWPRESS/SIPA/AP
I
n Paris, many citizens were still grappling with
questions about the new reality in their home
country.
Though Parisians defiantly marched through
the city’s streets and denounced the jihadist
attacks, the city’s Jewish population was particularly shaken. After the attack on a Jewish grocery
store left four dead, some Jews openly wondered
if Israel might be a safer home.
It’s too early to predict whether the attacks will
cause some French citizens to leave the country,
but the rampage has already left a deep wound in
a spiritually needy nation. (Operation World estimates evangelicals comprise about 1 percent of
the population in the heavily secularized country.)
In a Jewish neighborhood near the grocery
story assault, the Paris branch of the organization
Jews for Jesus put a sign in the window quoting
Jesus’ words: “Peace I leave with you, My peace I
give you, not as the world gives do I give to you. Do
not let your heart be troubled, nor let it be fearful.”
Karl deSouza, a staff member at the Paris
branch, wrote about his prayers with his family at
home after the attacks:
“We prayed for the family members who died
in the attack, we prayed for this country in
mourning, we prayed for justice, and we also
prayed that those who planned and orchestrated
this massacre would stop what they are doing,
turn to Messiah Jesus, for a true change in their
hearts, and do what is right.
“It will never be a religion or ideology that
changes the world, but through the One who
came to set things right. And that change begins
in us, his image-bearers.” A
 [email protected]  @deanworldmag
1/21/15 10:04 AM
BENMERZOUGA & MEZIANE: HANDOUT • BEGHAL & CHÉRIF: HANDOUT • SAÏD: PREFECTURE DE POLICE DE PARIS/AP • COULIBALY: AP • ABDULMUTALL AB: U.S. MARSHALS/GET T Y IMAGES • HAMZA: ADRIAN DENNIS/AFP/GET T Y IMAGES
by divine revelation and not based on people’s
desires,” wrote Anjem Choudary.
The cleric—who once vowed the Islamic State
flag will fly over the White House—also explained
why insulting Muhammad is a capital crime
under Sharia law: “This is because the Messenger
Muhammad said, ‘Whoever insults a Prophet kills
him.’”
Identifying the threat of radical Islam is more
than a matter of semantics; it’s a matter of strategy. Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born activist, writes: “If
we take the position that we are dealing with a
handful of murderous thugs with no connection
to what they so vocally claim, then we are not
answering them. … The more we self-censor … the
bolder the enemy gets.”
CoNnEcTiNg tHe pLoTs
SIDALI DJARBOUB/NEWPRESS/SIPA/AP
BENMERZOUGA & MEZIANE: HANDOUT • BEGHAL & CHÉRIF: HANDOUT • SAÏD: PREFECTURE DE POLICE DE PARIS/AP • COULIBALY: AP • ABDULMUTALL AB: U.S. MARSHALS/GET T Y IMAGES • HAMZA: ADRIAN DENNIS/AFP/GET T Y IMAGES
The Paris gunmen have terror ties extending back to 9/11
Benmerzouga
Meziane
Beghal (left) with
Chérif in 2010
Saïd
Coulibaly
Hamza
outside the
Finsbury Park
mosque
Abdulmutallab
Saïd and Chérif Kouachi claimed to work for al-Qaeda in Yemen, while Amedy
Coulibaly said he belonged to the Islamic State. But the network of terrorist ties
of the three killers behind January attacks in Paris—pointing all the way back
to 9/11—have much to say about the tangled web of militant Islamic jihadism.
And while terrorist groups are allegedly splintering into opposing factions,
the Paris attack shows how multiple allegiances can lead to one deadly killing
spree.
Fourteen days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, British authorities over two
days raided what became known as the Leicester terror cell run by Algerian
militants. From their rundown terrace homes in the English Midlands, the al-Qaeda
operatives raised hundreds of thousands of dollars via fraudulent credit cards.
They forged passports and distributed funds to recruit and train for al-Qaeda
attacks, including 9/11.
Two Algerians, Brahim Benmerzouga and Baghdad Meziane, were arrested
and would be jailed for years on terror charges. Djamel Beghal, a close friend of
theirs and also an Algerian, was already in detention at the time of the raid—
held in Dubai for using a false passport (as he was trying to reach an al-Qaeda
training camp in Afghanistan).
Beghal, reportedly a leader of al-Qaeda in Europe, would spend the next
decade in and out of jail on terrorism-related charges. He worked out of the
Finsbury Park Mosque in London, run by the radical Islamic cleric Abu Hamza.
Hamza discipled in jihadism Richard Reid, the shoe bomber who tried to
blow up a Paris-to-Miami flight in December 2001. It was Beghal who allegedly
recruited for al-Qaeda at Finsbury Park both Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui, the
convicted “20th hijacker” in the 9/11 attacks. In Dubai custody, he admitted
also to a plot to bomb the U.S. embassy in Paris.
Abu Hamza, notably, was sentenced in a New York City federal court for his
terrorist activities on Friday, Jan. 9—the same day the Kouachi brothers began a
final siege in an industrial area of Paris, and the day also Coulibaly took hostages
in a kosher supermarket, where he killed four. All three knew Beghal and nursed
their terrorist plans through Hamza’s Finsbury Park Mosque mafia.
Chérif Kouachi along with Coulibaly met Beghal in a prison in France in
2005—all serving time in the same jail on terrorism charges. Both Kouachi and
Coulibaly, who is from Mali, were apt recruits for Beghal, and by 2010 all three
had been released.
They began at that time plotting a new attack in Europe—a plot that led to
their rearrests. French authorities sentenced Beghal to 12 years. Coulibaly also
was jailed, but released sometime last year, while Chérif Kouachi wasn’t convicted due to lack of evidence.
Meanwhile Chérif’s brother Saïd had visited Yemen to study in 2009. There
he met Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the “underwear bomber” who attempted to
blow up a Detroit-bound flight on Christmas Day 2009. The two shared an
apartment for several weeks in Sanaa, Yemen’s capital.
Given their history it’s not surprising the Kouachi brothers and Coulibaly
were long under surveillance by counterterrorism officers in France. But that
watch was dropped in mid-2014, as authorities shifted focus to hundreds of
young Muslim men cycling back and forth to Syria. “The system is overwhelmed,”
French terrorism expert Jean-Charles Brisard told The New York Times.
By the end of Jan. 9, two days after the Charlie Hebdo attack and with 17
killed, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, along with Amedy Coulibaly, were dead. That
same day in New York, Abu Hamza received a sentence of life in prison without
possibility of parole. Djamel Beghal, his partner in crime starting at the Finsbury
Park Mosque in London, remains in a prison in central France. The Algerian
Brahim Benmerzouga was deported to Algeria, where he lives with his family
according to his London lawyer. Baghdad Meziane, who successfully fought
British eff orts to deport him, is at large, his whereabouts unknown. —Mindy Belz
F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
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ħ
eading east from the
hospital in Fallujah
where he worked to his
home in Baghdad, Dr. Firas
with his driver and the driver’s
son suddenly were caught in a
firefight. In Abu Ghraib ISIS
had stormed the infamous
prison in July 2013, releasing
500 inmates to fight in a
planned takeover of Iraq, and
Dr. Firas came under fire, his
car riddled with bullets as the
three tried to run.
The driver and his son were
shot dead. Dr. Firas ran back to
his car, but as he tried to drive,
the terrorists demanded, “Get
out!” Iraqi soldiers fighting the
terrorists yelled, “Go back!” Dr.
Firas left the car in confusion,
running into bushes to escape.
That incident 18 months
ago was the beginning of danger that’s now normal in Dr.
Firas’ life. Road travel in Iraq
requires negotiation with four
distinct checkpoint entities:
ISIS, Iraqi military, Iraqi police,
and militias with loyalty to one
side or another. Going through
checkpoints is a strategic
game. Depending on who he is
talking to, Dr. Firas (not using
his last name for security reasons) will show identification
and answer questions differently. Each checkpoint carries
the risk of arrest or death.
Seven months after ISIS
overran not only Anbar
Province but Mosul and much
of north-central Iraq, and five
months after U.S.-led airstrikes
against the militants began,
little overall has changed. ISIS, also calling itself
the Islamic State, controls territory from Anbar
north through Mosul and beyond. Iraqi and allied
forces have beaten back the jihadists in key areas,
but ISIS remains on the rampage: In January the
fighters took 250 residents captive in the small
town of Abu Maria in Nineveh Province after they
refused to join ISIS.
“For a while now, ISIS has been carrying out
assaults on villages in the Nineveh Plains to
conscript young men. If they refuse to join ISIS
they are immediately killed or arrested,” a Kurdish
commander told Rudaw news agency.
ISIS takeover in
Anbar, as with
other parts of Iraq,
is wrecking
hard-won advances
by Kim Milhoan
PHOTO BY EPA /L A NDOV
44
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HANDOUT PHOTOS
MeDiCaL eMErGEnCy
HANDOUT PHOTOS
Dr. Firas is spending more time in Kurdistan,
where the Sunni pediatric doctor can work with
American counterparts (and be safe). Some of the
Americans helped him establish a cath lab and
improve care at Fallujah Hospital.
Kurdistan first became a destination for medical
care for all Iraqis after the fall of Saddam Hussein
as doctors fled and facilities were destroyed.
Dr. Firas, in his 30s, recruited the first nonmilitary American medical team to Fallujah in
2012 to pioneer life-saving procedures for children
in a state-of-the-art facility paid for by the Iraqi
government.
The American medical team that made four
visits to help at the hospital found Dr. Firas lighthearted, joyful, and quick with a joke in Fallujah.
Now displaced and working in the city of
Sulaymaniyeh, he is deflated. Fighting between
ISIS and the Iraqi military destroyed major parts
of Fallujah Hospital, obliterating
the years of improvements and
his hard work. The director of the
hospital, also a physician (and a
Muslim), is in hiding and cannot
be reached. No administrative
structure exists.
According to Dr. Firas, when
ISIS first arrived in Fallujah in
2013, Sunnis living there
assumed they would defend their
interests. Minority Iraqi Sunni
Muslims, feeling increasingly
marginalized by Iraq’s Shiite
majority government, staged a
protest throughout most of 2013
on the trucking highway east of
Fallujah linking Iraq to Jordan
and Syria.
Closure of the highway by
thousands of protestors delayed the work of the
American team of physicians assisting him, and
continued protests prevented their return to
Fallujah as planned in November 2013.
Then an ISIS sniper killed Fallujah’s mayor,
and authorities turned away the American team.
In an email, Dr. Firas wrote, “I am so sorry for this
mission … I had more than 50 patients waiting for
you.”
ISIS exploited the anti-government sentiment
to claim rigid control of Fallujah in January 2014.
Now residents are caught between ISIS terrorists
and the Iraqi military, who assume those who
remain in Fallujah are ISIS supporters. An Iraqi
military sniper recently shot in the head an orthopedic surgeon on his way to the hospital to care
for patients.
A year ago Dr. Firas fled to Baghdad—where
his wife, newborn baby, and extended family
“
I Am nOt
pLaNnInG tO StAy
hErE As i
hAvE LiVeS
tO SaVe iN
FaLlUjAh.
”
—Dr. fIrAs
Damage at Fallujah
Hospital after an
airstrike by the
Iraqi army, on June
3, 2014 (left and
right). Dr. Firas at
work in the cath
lab (above).
reside: “I sat on my couch for four months, not
knowing what to do.”
As a Sunni Arab Muslim, working in a Baghdad
hospital or in Kurdistan is difficult, but he finally
got a job at a private Arab hospital in
Sulaymaniyeh. He only treats a few patients a
week, while his former patient families keep calling: “I am not planning to stay here as I have lives
to save in Fallujah.”
He now splits time among the hospital in
Kurdistan, his home in Baghdad, and Fallujah.
Security is a daily challenge: He rents a car and
hires a driver to decrease his risk of being
kidnapped, since driving a private car himself
implies wealth, making him a target. He meets his
patients at the children’s hospital in Fallujah
because it is a lesser target than the general
hospital. ISIS terrorists had to tell him how to
avoid the land mines on the bridge leading there.
When he diagnoses a child who does need a
procedure, he advises a life-threatening trip to
receive care. Just this month, a family tried to take
their child to Ibn Al-Batar Hospital in Baghdad. An
armed militia arrested the child’s father en route
and threatened his life. They let him go after he
pleaded for the life of his daughter. The family
returned to Fallujah, but Dr. Firas was able to
negotiate to get the family to Kurdistan, and the
child had her life-saving procedure.
Dr. Firas has medical skills and training he is
currently unable to use. He doesn’t know whether
the Iraq he saw starting to rebuild will ever
recover. He repeats a phrase repeated by other
physicians in Iraq, caught just as he was in that
2013 firefight: “I just don’t know what to do.” A
—Kim Milhoan is a physician specializing in pediatric cardiac anesthesiology, and with her husband has worked alongside doctors in Iraq.
She is also a World Journalism Institute mid-career course graduate.
F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
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46 W O R L D F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
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The
fifth
wave
Policy changes are prompting an increase
in the number of Cubans coming to the
United States—and jeopardizing a revival
by j.c . der r ic k
photo by u.s. coa st gua r d/a p
José Garrigó was born in Havana, Cuba, days before Fidel
Castro seized power on Jan. 1, 1959. Garrigó’s father, the president of
the association of Cuban banks, became an adviser to the Castro government, even though he’d played a similar role for the previous government.
It didn’t take long for him to fall out of favor—and then into prison.
In what Garrigó calls a miraculous turn of events, his father escaped
and eventually took his family aboard an overcrowded flight to Spain in
1967. Garrigó was 8 years old. The family lived first in Madrid, then
Barcelona, where as a young man Garrigó professed faith in Christ.
“We sort of grew up like the people of Israel,” he told me. “We grew up
with pictures and stories of home.”
As a child Garrigó was too young to understand that his family was
part of the second emigration wave from Cuba, following thousands who
escaped at the time of the revolution. Two Castro-approved waves followed
in 1980 and 1994. All four were designed to cast off undesirables, but
pastors and Christian leaders also left in migrations
that crippled the church for years afterward.
Twenty-four
Now a fifth wave appears to be under way.
Cuban migrants in
the waters south
Loosening restrictions since President Barack
of Key West, Fla.,
Obama took office have contributed to a gradual
on Jan. 1. The
Cubans were
exodus, and the administration’s new effort to
later repatriated.
normalize relations is accelerating the process.
Those factors combined with individual situations
on the ground in Cuba are putting new pressures on the world’s fourthlargest house church movement.
“We’re hemorrhaging leaders, and it puts the movement in danger,”
said the International Mission Board’s Kurt Urbanek, who said more than
500,000 Cubans have professed faith in Christ in the past 13 years
through Baptist efforts alone. “If you have a mass exodus of your highly
trained leaders, then where does that leave you?”
3 CUBA.indd 47
1/20/15 9:46 AM
THE CHURCH IN CUBA has a relatively long, persecution-filled
history. When Christopher Columbus claimed the island for
Spain in 1492, he also claimed it for the Roman Catholic
Church, which barred all non-Catholic religious practice for four
centuries. In 1901, after the United States liberated Cuba from
Spanish rule, a new constitution separated church and state. Most religious activity, including missions work, flourished
for much of the next six decades. That changed when the Roman
Catholic Church openly and vehemently opposed Castro’s revolution. Once in power, Castro cracked down on all churches,
prompting the first emigration wave that saw as much as 50
percent of the Protestant population flee. The suppression
included bans on celebrating Christmas and all religious radio
and television broadcasts. In 1962, government officials gathered
up some 100,000 Bibles and 2,000 hymnals and ground them
into powder at a Havana paper mill. In 1965, authorities arrested
53 Baptist leaders and accused them of being CIA spies.
By 1989, both the Protestant and Catholic communities had
shriveled to about half their prerevolution size. Protestants
accounted for only about 0.5 percent of the population, and
practicing Catholics also comprised under 1 percent.
The spiritual climate changed sharply in 1990, when the fall
of the Soviet Union ushered in what Cubans call the “special
period in time of peace.” The USSR, focused on its own problems, yanked its military and economic support, including
medicine, fuel, and food. Cubans began starving both physically
and spiritually. “There were a lot of things promised to people,
and they started to realize those promises weren’t going to
come true,” said Hermes
Soto, a Cuban pastor from
(1) Sunday worship at the
Methodist Church of Marianao in
1964 to 2014. “They realized
Havana. (2) Hermes Soto. (3) José
their hands were empty, and
Garrigó. (4) U.S. and Cuban flags
not only that, their hearts
hang from the same balcony in
were empty.”
Old Havana, Cuba, on Dec. 19.
Protestant church attendance jumped some 400 percent between 1990 and 1994,
according to Galen Jacobs, a missionary who has worked in
Cuba for more than two decades. As churches grew, leaders
requested permission to build new buildings, and the Office of
Religious Affairs offered a compromise: house churches. Some
10,000 new churches were planted by the end of the decade. “It’s
part of God’s sense of humor that Fidel was partly responsible
for the house church movement,” Jacobs said.
Today Cuba has the fourth-largest church-planting movement
in the world, trailing only China and two people groups in India.
Christians meet in houses, old buildings, patios, backyards, and
garages—almost anywhere you can imagine. The Baptist and
Assemblies of God denominations alone account for more than
19,000 churches and missions around the island, according to
the International Mission Board’s Urbanek, author of the 2012
book Cuba’s Great Awakening. “It has been a movement of God,”
Urbanek said, noting Baptists didn’t have a written strategy
until 2004. “They were just reacting to the onslaught of people
flooding into the churches.”
In 2006 the Western Cuba Baptist Convention mission board
organized 50 days of prayer to reach 1 million Cubans for Christ
by planting 100,000 house churches and 13,000 traditional
churches across all Protestant denominations. Although no one
has an exact count, missions groups believe those thresholds
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GARRIGÓ: ALPHA USA • HAVANA: YAMIL L AGE/AFP/GET T Y IMAGES
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have been surpassed. Protestants now comprise more
than 10 percent of the Cuban population—roughly twice
the number of Catholics who attend mass.
THE CUBAN ADJUSTMENT ACT OF 1966 and subsequent
revisions to the law have made coming to the United
States a very attractive proposition. Unlike immigrants
from other countries, Cuban nationals can enter the
United States without a visa and without passing a criminal background check. The “wet foot, dry foot” immigration policy, instituted during the Clinton administration,
stipulates that once they step on U.S. soil, Cubans are
instantly considered political refugees. They can obtain
permanent residency after a year, and are put on the
fast track toward citizenship. They also gain access to
resettlement cash and welfare benefits.
Over the last 55 years, amid government efforts to
jettison undesirables, it was often those with the connections and resources to get out of the country—the upper
crust of society—who took advantage of opportunities to
leave. In José Garrigó’s case, his parents owned a sprawling countryside farm they traded for a trip out of Cuba.
Most who remained on the island became “exhausted,
worn out, and hopeless,” said Dan Burrell, a former South
Florida pastor who has traveled back and forth to Cuba
almost 20 times since 2002. “The heavy hitters left.”
Many Christian leaders only stayed to continue
spreading the gospel, but rules also gave them incentive
to stay: While a Cuban pastor could use missions connections to travel to the United States legally, he usually
couldn’t take his family, and not returning would prejudice the government against the missions organization
with whom he worked. That began to change about three
years ago, when the Cuban government started allowing
most people to leave the island without exit visas and the
Obama administration started issuing five-year multientry visas “like candy.”
With the pressure to stay removed, Urbanek told me
Baptists have lost roughly 75 of 450 trained pastors—
shared between 7,431 churches, house churches, and
missions—in the last three years. Across all denominations the number of lost pastors is likely in the hundreds.
In 2014 one of three Baptist seminaries on the island
lost its entire administrative leadership staff in a threemonth period. Hermes Soto, 70, the seminary director
since 2002, was among them. He told me he stayed so
long because of the great spiritual needs of the people, but
after his health began failing and his wife had a bout with
cancer, it was time to join his two sons and grandchildren
in the United States. He worries that not enough pastors
will stay to continue the work: “If I could tell them anything,
it would be to think about the Lord first and put their own
needs secondary. After 50 years, I feel I have succeeded.”
In December the Obama administration amped up
the pressure to leave when it announced plans to
normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba. Lawmakers
on both sides of the aisle criticized the move because it
didn’t include any significant concessions from the
NTER/IMB
T Y IMAGES
 [email protected]  @jcderrick1
3 CUBA.indd 49
Cuban government, signaling Congress is unlikely to take the
necessary steps to drop the trade embargo. “Normalizing relations with Cuba cannot be a one-way street,” said New York
Rep. Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs
Committee, who said human rights should be the center of any
rapprochement.
Obama’s announcement stoked fears that the current “wet
foot, dry foot” policy could soon end. The U.S. Coast Guard
reported a significant spike in the number of people trying to
reach the United States as the two nations prepared for highlevel talks on Jan. 21-22 in Havana. There is “more pressure on
those that have any thought of leaving,“ Jacobs told me. “It’s like
now or never, which in the short term could create a greater
brain drain.”
In the long run, however, normalizing relations could help
keep Cuban pastors on the island. At least 1,800 Cubans are
enrolled in formal theological education, more than ever
before, although some are studying nonpastoral vocations.
These numbers could produce tremendous fruit. Baptists estimate 800 annual conversions for every trained pastor during
the 13-year period in which more than a half-million Cubans
made professions of faith at evangelistic meetings. That doesn’t
include evangelistic activity during the week. “I have the utmost
respect for those who choose to stay instead of coming to a
country they perceive to be Disneyland,” Jacobs said.
While an open Cuba is an answer to prayer, it also raises
myriad challenges aside from people leaving the island.
Missionaries voiced concern that vices such as gambling,
pornography, and sex tourism will increase, and economic
opportunities may curb hunger for the gospel.
“Today we have only God, but tomorrow we may have choices,”
said Cristobal Tan, 48, pastor at Iglesia Las Buenas Nuevas, a
church begun in 1953 by American missionaries in Sancti
Spiritus, Cuba. “We have to prepare God’s people to know how
to choose.”
THE FUTURE OF CUBA’S REVIVAL is also what most concerns
José Garrigó, who finally returned to the island in 2013. He was
excited to see how much he remembered from his childhood,
but he was “very, very sad to see the state of decay of the Havana
that I left.” The family farm was destroyed, as was his school.
Garrigó broke down when he saw his childhood playmate,
Maritza, for the first time in 46 years.
Garrigó, who now lives in Colorado, oversees the Cuba work
of Alpha para Latinos, an organization promoting evangelistic
discussion groups around the world. His 2013 visit was intended
to be a mostly exploratory trip, but it turned into a training for
130 people representing more than a dozen denominations. He
saw “phenomenal” hunger for the gospel and a young, vibrant
church that enjoys relative freedom in the current conditions:
“They are not just preaching, they are living the gospel.”
Garrigó, who still calls Cuba “my country,” supports the U.S.
policy change but worries it will encourage people to leave the
island or pursue financial prosperity. “The search for meaning
and hope could be blurred,” he said. “People are very open,
because they are hopeless and don’t have anywhere to turn. If
the lifting of the embargo kills that, it’s going to be sad.” A
—with reporting by Nat Belz in Sancti Spiritus, Cuba
F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
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49
1/20/15 11:12 AM
3 PA TEACHERS UNION.indd 50
1/20/15 10:17 AM
UNIONDEMANDS
AN OBSCURE CASE IN PENNSYLVANIA APPEARS TO BE THE FIRST TO
ADDRESS WHERE TEACHERS’ MONEY GOES WHEN THEY RELIGIOUSLY
OBJECT TO UNION MEMBERSHIP / BY EMILY BELZ / ILLUSTRATION BY KRIEG BARRIE
When Jane Ladley, 62, first started teaching at a public
elementary school in the 1970s, she assumed all
teachers joined a union. She didn’t think much about it.
Then Ladley took a break from teaching in the 1980s and
1990s to raise her four sons. At a certain point during that
time she read a Focus on the Family magazine article about
a teacher in California who had objected to the way the
union used his money for ideological causes. When she
went back to teaching in the 1990s, she knew that for
religious reasons she didn’t want to pay dues to the state
union again.
In about half of the states in the country (states that
aren’t “right-to-work”) unions can require dues from all
employees at unionized workplaces. But few union members
in those states know they can file as religious objectors to
paying union dues, a portion of which national unions use
for lobbying or funding their pet causes.
State and federal laws protect such religious objectors,
but measures also exist to ensure that union members
don’t file as religious objectors simply to avoid union dues
and benefit from union bargaining without paying anything.
So in many cases religious objectors, instead of keeping the
union dues money, direct their money to a nonreligious
nonprofit. The union must agree to the pick of the nonprofit.
And this is where religiously objecting teachers’ cases start
to get complicated, ground that courts have not plowed to
this point.
When Ladley went back to teaching, she opted out of the
state teachers union, Pennsylvania State Education
Association (PSEA), which is an arm of the National
Education Association (NEA). Ladley, as a Christian and a
pro-lifer, was primarily concerned that the NEA had in the
past directed funds to Planned Parenthood, an organization
that according to its own report performs over 300,000
abortions a year. In its 2011 disclosures the NEA reported
3
giving $8,500 to the group. The NEA stated in its 2014-2015
formal resolutions that it supports “family planning, including the right to reproductive freedom.”
She didn’t want any of her money going to a national
group where it might be used for such ideological purposes.
But she believes in the value of collective bargaining for
teachers, and so when she opted out of the PSEA, she joined
a local union with no ties to a national union, the Keystone
Teachers Association.
“Teachers unions should be working for the teachers
within their school job,” she said.
The PSEA, like public sector unions around the country,
has been declining in membership. Part of its 6.5
percent drop in membership since 2011 is explained by
teacher layoffs. But more states have become “right-towork” in recent years, allowing workers to opt out of union
membership. Pennsylvania is not one of those states.
In 2012, Ladley’s school district came under a new
union contract that required nonmember teachers to pay
dues to the state union (a slightly reduced amount known
as a “fair share fee”). Ladley and three other teachers she
knew decided to file as religious objectors. Under
Pennsylvania law their union dues could go to nonreligious
nonprofits that they and the union agreed to.
Ladley carefully composed letters explaining her religious objection and proposed directing her money to a
scholarship fund for those studying the U.S. Constitution
through a Pennsylvania group called the Coalition for
Advancing Freedom. The union agreed that as a religious
objector she did not have to be a member but then rejected
her choice of nonprofit. The PSEA in a letter to Ladley said
the group was “political.” The union instead sent her a list of
acceptable nonprofits for her gift, like United Way and the
American Red Cross.
3
F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
WORLD
51
1/20/15 10:17 AM
The PSEA did not return a
request for comment. In its
court filings the union says Ladley’s
lawsuit is premature because the
union hasn’t decided whether to
accept her second nonprofit pick. It
also argues that the Supreme Court
does not give union members
“unfettered discretion” in regard to
their nonprofit recipients.
The Supreme Court has ruled
that union members do not have to
fund the union’s political activities
through their union dues, but it
hasn’t addressed how unions can
control the nonprofit picks of religious objectors. Most teachers
don’t test the process.
“Most people either aren’t aware
that that’s an option for them,” said
Elizabeth Stelle, director of policy
analysis at the Commonwealth
Foundation, a conservative
Pennsylvania think tank. “Or they
assume they don’t qualify because
they think they have to take a vow
of poverty or be a nun.”
The process of filing as an
objector and redirecting money to
a nonprofit correctly “takes a lot of
due diligence,” she added. “Even [the
union’s] refusal to go with a person’s
—Ladley
first choice can force the person to
give up on the process. ... In the case
of Jane, they’ve never been called out on this before.”
3
‘Teachers unions should be working for the
teachers within their school job.’
52
WORLD
F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
Chris Meier is a public school history teacher in
Pennsylvania who filed suit with Ladley. Meier
said the union never told him that he could religiously
object to the union dues. He did research himself, and
told other teachers about it. In his district he knew at
least five other teachers who ended up filing as religious
objectors.
The union approved the other teachers’ choices for
nonprofits. The union did not approve Meier’s choice of
nonprofit: Meier wanted to give his money to a legal
nonprofit that handles cases against teachers unions,
the National Right to Work Legal Defense Fund.
“The PSEA probably didn’t think it was funny,” said
Meier. The union told Meier his choice was rejected
because it was a “conflict of interest.” Meier said he
thought most of the charities the union listed as
acceptable were “great” but said, “It’s the moral stand.
They shouldn’t be able to force me to choose one off
their list.” A
3
THE FAIRNESS CENTER
“How is the Constitution too political?” Ladley said
later. “It’s the foundation of our country.”
Her $435.14, the reduced annual union due withdrawn
from her paycheck, has been sitting in an escrow account
ever since. Last May she sent another letter to the union.
She proposed an alternative nonprofit, a Pennsylvania
group that does education on the Constitution called
the Constitutional Organization of Liberty. The PSEA
quit responding to Ladley’s correspondence.
“I was really confused,” Ladley said. “I thought I
followed the process here.”
Ladley, now retired after 25 years of public school
teaching, began to think the union was going to wait
her out, wait until she gave up and donated to the
groups the union had suggested. This past fall she filed
a lawsuit in a local court, arguing that the PSEA couldn’t
on the one hand hold her money in escrow indefinitely,
or on the other hand, control what nonprofit her money
went to based on ideology. The complaint notes the
nonprofits the union suggested all have “political”
spending.
 [email protected]  @emlybelz
1/20/15 10:14 AM
WM0215_CHM.qxp_VisionVideo 1/8/15 2:20 PM Page 1
CHRISTIAN
HISTORY
magazine
The story of the church
for the people of the church, one fascinating topic at a time.
Sign up for a FREE subscription (donation requested)
Please use source code “WM0215” when subscribing.
The Fairness Center
• Online: www.christianhistorymagazine.org
• By phone: 1-800-468-0458
• By email: [email protected]
magazine — learn from the past,
engage the present, and meet the future in faith.
1/16/15 2:39 PM
Promise
keepers
Federal pro-life opportunities
this year include efforts to hold
President Obama to his word on
Obamacare and to protect unborn
children who can feel pain
by J.C. Derrick in Washington
ive years ago, the House of Representatives
passed the Affordable Care Act by a vote of 219
to 212—with the final, critical votes for it
coming only after President Barack Obama
promised to issue an executive order reinforcing a
ban on federal abortion funding. But a government
report shows that more than 1,000 healthcare plans
issued in 2014 under the law include abortion on demand—
and many rely on taxpayer-provided subsidies.
The 2015 open enrollment period started last November and
continues through Feb. 15. A website developed by the Family
Research Council and the Lozier Institute, ObamacareAbortion.
com, notes: “Due to a lack of transparency in Obamacare,
Americans are again finding that it is very difficult, or even
impossible, to clearly discern whether the Obamacare plan
they are considering includes abortion.”
That website provides helpful state-by-state information,
including the four states without any abortion-free plans: New
Jersey, Vermont, Hawaii, and Rhode Island. In mid-January
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed lawsuits on behalf of
two pro-life residents in Vermont and Rhode Island who say
Obamacare forces them to pay for others’ abortions in violation
of their consciences. “Paying for elective abortions should
never be a prerequisite for accessing healthcare,” said ADF’s
Casey Mattox.
What happened to the 2010 promise of an executive order?
Former Michigan Rep. Bart Stupak, leader of the small number
of pro-life House Democrats, at the time believed “safeguards”
against federally funded abortion would “be enforced through
54
WORLD
F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
3 OBAMACARE-ABORTION.indd 54
1̀
2̀
WHITE HOUSE: ALEX WONG/GET T Y IMAGES • STUPAK: CHARLES DHARAPAK/AP
BL ACKBURN, MANCHIN & CARPER: J. SCOT T APPLEWHITE/AP
1/21/15 8:42 AM
RAPAK/AP
WHITE/AP
(1) Pro-life activists participate
in a “Memorial Die-in” outside
the White House Jan. 21, 2014.
(2) Stupak. (3) Blackburn.
(4) Carper (left) and Manchin.
4̀
 [email protected]  @jcderrick1
3 OBAMACARE-ABORTION.indd 55
3̀
this executive order.” Most pro-life leaders said Stupak was
foolish to believe that. Now he admits the Obama promise has
proved worthless, and left him “perplexed and disappointed.”
The broken promise means Republicans this year are likely
to push again the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, which
only the House passed last year. It would prohibit abortion
coverage in all plans sold on government exchanges, and
override a California regulation requiring all employersponsored plans—even those of churches—to cover elective
abortions.
President Obama would probably veto such a bill, as well
as another one with a good chance of passing: a national ban
on abortions after 20 weeks. The House passed the PainCapable Unborn Child Protection Act in June 2013, but
Democrats killed it in the Senate. Reps. Trent Franks, R-Ariz.,
and Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., reintroduced the bill last
month on the first day of the 114th Congress, and it will likely
pass again.
New Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, with a 100
percent pro-life voting record, has pledged the Senate will
consider similar legislation. It will take 60 votes to get it to
the Senate floor, and Republican senators total 54, some of
whom (such as Maine Sen. Susan Collins) may not support the
effort. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the bill’s original sponsor,
has been working for months to convince moderates it’s in
their best interest to back the popular legislation. West
Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin is the only Democrat to privately
commit to support it, but pro-life groups have their sights on
others, including Indiana Sen. Joe Donnelly and Delaware
Sen. Tom Carper.
Passage of the bill would be the biggest federal legislative
step forward since the partial-birth abortion ban became law
in 2003 and the Supreme Court upheld it in 2006. Since that
time abortionists have no longer been able to deliver the legs
and torso of a baby, and then insert scissors to puncture the
skull: Abortionists would then suction out the skull’s contents
and pull out the remainder of what they’d turned into a corpse.
Up to the moment of birth, though, abortionists can still inject
a toxic saline solution into the womb to kill viable babies.
The Charlotte Lozier Institute, research arm of the Susan B.
Anthony (SBA) List, found the United States is one of only
seven countries in the world that allow elective abortions
beyond 20 weeks—the list includes China, North Korea, and
Vietnam. Thirteen states have now passed 20-week restrictions,
and national polls have found a majority of Americans favor
such protection for the unborn. A recent Quinnipiac survey
showed support for a 20-week limit has increased to a 2-to-1
margin, with higher support among women than men.
Pro-life organizations estimate the legislation would save
18,000 lives per year, but they anticipate it won’t become law
as long as Obama is in the White House. “The most important
thing is education and gaining visibility,” said SBA List president Marjorie Dannenfelser. “This is one of those issues that
really does transcend partisan politics.”
SBA List hopes to make the bill a major issue in the 2016
presidential election: It has solicited and received letters of
support for a 20-week ban from virtually all potential
Republican presidential candidates, except New Jersey Gov.
Chris Christie and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. A
F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
WORLD
55
1/21/15 8:40 AM
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3 LIFESTYLE and TECH.indd 56
1/16/15 2:27 PM
NOTEBOOK
LIFESTYLE / TECHNOLOGY / SCIENCE / HOUSES OF GOD / SPORTS
Megan
and Ethan
LIFESTYLE
Single but not alone
MAT T PURCIEL
A CHURCH COMMUNITY RALLIES TO HELP A MOTHER RAISE
HER FATHERLESS CHILD by Angela Lu
Since 2013 we’ve followed Megan
Dancisak’s journey as a single mom:
Ethan during that time has grown
from a 16-month-old to a talkative
toddler who will soon be 3. Here’s a
recap of how Megan’s decision to keep
Ethan saved one life, changed her
own, and touched others (see also
wng.org/topic/pro_life_reality).
Megan, now 28, is
the daughter of a
single mom who was
pregnant at age 19.
Young Megan grew up
watching her mom work
long hours and bounce
from one relationship to
another. She walked
R
home from school alone
and fixed dinner for
herself. In college she
fell into a promiscuous,
booze-filled party lifestyle that led her to the
precipice of suicide.
Still single in 2011,
she became pregnant at
age 25 without even
knowing the identity of
the father—and she
decided to keep her baby.
She had professed faith
in Christ several years
earlier and was determined not to do unto
others what her mother
had done unto her. She
decided to give her child
a happy, healthy home.
Angela Dancisak,
Megan’s aunt, told me
how impressed she was
that her niece had
become responsible and
accountable: “She’s a
F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
WORLD
57
1/16/15 4:54 PM
NOTEBOOK
LIFESTYLE
very hands-on mom, but I
also think it’s her faith
that’s brought her a long
way and helped her.”
That transformation
didn’t happen in isolation.
Through a mentoring program initiated by a local
pregnancy center, Lesley
Hoff met an excited, “freaked
out,” six-months-pregnant
Megan. Hoff, a mother of
three, saw some of her own
fears in Megan but others
she had not experienced:
Who was Ethan’s dad? How
could she both work and
raise a son alone? Hoff
rushed to Megan’s hospital
bedside the day Ethan was
born, then invited her to
stay with Hoff’s family for a
judge her growing belly and
ringless left hand. Yet when
she told the group’s leader,
Nick Tortorici, he enveloped her in a hug, reminding her that Jesus still loved
her. “That could have been
a turning point if she
experienced any type of
judgment … but people were
loving and encouraging,”
said friend Anna Lutz.
Weekly, Megan bared
her fears to the 30 people
gathered around the living
room: How do I raise a
child on my own? Will other
Christians judge me for the
sin that I wear on my
sleeve? How can I afford to
feed another mouth? The
church group listened,
around. One woman filled
up Megan’s gas tank.
Another, Chaundra
Kennedy, drove her home
and spent the night to make
sure she wasn’t alone.
As Megan returned to
work at T-Mobile, she
couldn’t afford day care, so
she sent out her work
schedule to the community,
frantically seeking willing
baby sitters. Friends
stepped up to watch Ethan,
sometimes splitting one
work shift between two
people. Megan has never
had to take a day off work
due to the lack of childcare.
Finances were another
source of constant stress as
she struggled to pay bills
three weeks younger than
Ethan, bonded with Megan
over the difficulties of
parenting. “Because she’s
so honest, it encourages
me to open up,” Lander
said. When Megan works
weekends and can’t afford
child care, the Landers
watch Ethan and bring him
to church. The two blond
toddlers are now best
friends, chasing each other
around and sharing a
mutual love for Mickey
Mouse.
Today, Megan is able to
support herself and pay her
bills on time. Abandonment
and insecurity still linger in
her life, but she’s finding
contentment in Christ.
58 W O R L D F E B RUARY 7 , 2 0 1 5
prayed, and mobilized.
Members attended Megan’s
baby shower—and provided
baby supplies. They pooled
donations to take care of
some of her needs. On the
day of Ethan’s birth, more
than a dozen of her church
friends crowded the hospital hallway to hear Ethan’s
first cries. They formed a
big circle around her bed
and passed baby Ethan
She’s also helping others in
similar situations. When
church friends introduced
her to another woman
surprised by pregnancy,
Megan met with her, this
time taking on the mentoring role, and encouraged
her to trust God.
Recently, at Megan’s
apartment, toys lay strewn
over a glass coffee table as
Ethan, with his big blue
eyes and a toothy smile,
stood gleefully banging on a
plastic drum slung around
his neck. This was not how
Megan had pictured spending her nights after work: It
was better. A
Matt Purciel
few days to help calm
panicky first-time-mother
fears. She coached Megan
on feeding and changing
Ethan.
Megan also found parenting support at church.
She had feared that her
church community group
would take the news badly.
Her attendance had been
spotty at best, and she
worried that others would
and keep food on the
table. Two members
of Dancisak’s women’s Bible study
started meeting with
her monthly to help
her budget. Although
at times she would spend
money unwisely or resist
change, she’d always come
back to the women a few
days later, expressing
humility and taking their
advice. With an accountability structure in place,
others in the group became
even more generous in
their giving.
Rachel Lander, whose
daughter Ava is merely
1/16/15
g Visit our website—wng.org—for breaking news and more  Download WORLD’s iPad app today; details at wng.org/iPad
4:56 PM
Hyperloop: Tesl a Motors/ap • elevator: ThyssenKrupp AG
Megan bared her fears to the 30
people gathered around the living
room: How do I raise a child on
my own? Will other Christians
judge me for the sin that I wear
on my sleeve? How can I afford
to feed another mouth?
TECHNOLOGY
NOTEBOOK
Timely
capsules
Company hopes Hyperloop
concept will revolutionize intercity
travel by Michael Cochrane
Imagine a rapid transit system
that takes you from San Francisco
to Los Angeles in 30 minutes for less
than $30 one way; or lets you commute
from Houston to San Antonio in under
20 minutes for a mere $15. A crowdsourced California startup believes it
can build such a transportation
system—based on Tesla and SpaceX
founder Elon Musk’s Hyperloop
concept. The hope, which some say is
impractical, is that within 10 years it
could connect major cities with safe
and affordable public transportation.
In December, Hyperloop Transpor
tation Technologies (HTT), a crowdfunded research and development
company formed in 2013, released a
76-page report documenting its
research into the engineering, safety,
cost, and other issues that must be
R
addressed to make Hyperloop a reality.
“When the California ‘high speed’
rail was approved, I was quite disappointed, as I know many others were
too,” wrote Musk in 2013. “How could it
be that the home of Silicon Valley and
JPL … would build a bullet train that is
both one of the most expensive per mile
and one of the slowest in the world?”
The proposed San Francisco to Los
Angeles “bullet train” would cost an
estimated $200 million per mile to
build. The HTT report estimates “that
it’s absolutely feasible” to build a
Hyperloop line between these two c ities
for $20 million to $45 million per mile.
Hyperloop isn’t a train. It’s a tubebased system in which magnets and
electric compressor fans propel capsules containing up to 28 passengers
each. Its projected cruising speed is as
high as 700 miles
per hour—almost as
fast as a supersonic
plane.
Hyperloop would
be above the ground
on pylons, and the tubes could come in
prefabricated sections—features that
HTT researchers believe will keep
construction costs down. Lower construction costs would mean affordable
ticket prices for fast, inexpensive
intercity travel.
Critics have challenged Musk’s
claims about the low costs of the project and have raised concerns about
safety during emergency stops. One
other caution: Passengers wouldn’t be
able to leave their seats during trips,
meaning any “bathrooms” would have
to be built into the seats.
A conceptual
rendering of
the Hyperloop
passenger
transport
capsule.
Elevating efficiency
Hyperloop: Tesl a Motors/ap • elevator: ThyssenKrupp AG
Matt Purciel
Ever notice how very tall office buildings have lots of elevators? That’s because, with
the high demand of a bustling office tower and only one car per elevator shaft, you
need lots of shafts.
But all that may be about to change. Elevator manufacturing giant ThyssenKrupp AG
is rolling out a cable-free elevator that would allow multiple cars to run in the same
shaft, much like the trains that move airport passengers from the terminal to the gate.
Since the ThyssenKrupp design also allows cars to move sideways and diagonally,
buildings with such elevators might need only two shafts, one for going up and the
other for descending.
Reducing the number of elevator shafts would not only improve the economics of
skyscrapers (less space for elevators means more leasable space), it would allow
architects and developers to design even taller buildings.
“Skyscraper heights are always limited by the fact that the shafts take up more and
more space” the higher buildings go, said Daniel Levinson Wilk of the Fashion Institute
of Technology, who studies the history of elevators, in The Wall Street Journal. —M.C.
F E B RUARY 7 , 2 0 1 5 W O R L D 59
1/20/15 12:45 PM
NOTEBOOK
SCIENCE
Wings
and a
prayer
by Julie Borg
computers crash,” said
Steve Casner, co-author of
the study.
The researchers studied 16 experienced pilots
as they flew routine and
nonroutine flight scenarios in a Boeing 747-100
simulator. Results indicated that instrument
scanning and skills for
manual tasks remained
intact, but pilots struggled
with maintaining awareness of the plane’s position when the GPS and
map display were disabled
or with troubleshooting
difficulties when the automated systems were not
available.
“Our results suggest
that we might be a bit less
concerned about things
that pilots do ‘by hand’ in
the cockpit and a bit more
concerned about those
things that they do ‘by
mind,’” said Casner.
“Pilots’ ability to remain
mindful and engaged as
they now watch computers do most of the flying
may be a key challenge to
keeping their cognitive
skills fresh.”
Off the market
Holding his 5-month-old son, Wyatt,
stay-at-home dad Josh Wainscott
waves goodbye to his wife, Ashley,
as she heads to work.
60 W O R L D F EBRUARY 7 , 2 0 1 5
3 SCIENCE and HOG.indd 60
The number of prime-age men, ages 25 to 54 years, who
do not have jobs has more than tripled in the past 45
years. In the late 1960s only 5 per 100 men were unemployed; by 2000 that number rose to 11 and today it is 16.
Of course, the economy is not as strong today as it
was 15 years ago, but the official unemployment rate
accounts for only one-third of the increase of men
without jobs. The remaining two-thirds comprise men
who are neither employed nor seeking jobs.
So what are these men doing?
Disability (at 20 percent) accounts for the largest
share of prime-age men who are not looking for work,
according to statistics reported by The New York Times.
Thirteen percent are not looking for work because they
are in school.
The number of stay-at-home dads and male homemakers remains rare but has doubled since 2000. Sixteen
percent of parents who stay home are men, according
to Pew Research Center statistics. —J.B.
People are living longer
and death rates from
infectious and cardiovascular diseases are falling
globally, according to
data from 188 countries
collected by the Institute
for Health Metrics and
Evaluation at the
University of Washington.
In the past 23 years
worldwide life expectancy has jumped from
65.3 to 71.5 years.
Females tend to be
living slightly longer than
their male counterparts.
Life expectancy at birth
has increased 6.6 years
for females and 5.8 years
for males. If these trends
continue, global life
expectancy will be 85.3
years for females and 78.1
years for males by 2030.
Mortality rates for
measles have dropped 83
percent since 1990, and
death due to diarrhea has
dropped by 51 percent.
Death rates for stomach
cancer, Hodgkin’s lymphoma, rheumatic heart
disease, peptic ulcer disease, appendicitis, and
schizophrenia have fallen
by more than one-third
since 1990.
Ischemic heart disease, stroke, and chronic
obstructive pulmonary
disease accounted for
over one-third of all
deaths in 2013. —J.B.
cockpit: LM Otero/ap • beach: Brynn Anderson/ap • stay-at-home Dad: Steve Ringman/The Seat tle Times/ap
“Use it or lose it”
may be a worn-out
cliché, but according to
researchers at NASA’s
Ames Research Center,
that may be exactly what
is happening to pilots subjected to prolonged use of
cockpit automation.
“There is widespread
concern among pilots and
air carriers that, as the
presence of automation
increases in the airline
cockpit, pilots are losing
the skills they still need to
fly the airplane the ‘oldfashioned way’ when the
R
Longer lives
1/19/15
g Visit our website—wng.org—for breaking news and more  Download WORLD’s iPad app today; details at wng.org/iPad
9:24 PM
Liz McCue/The Telegraph/ap
Cockpit automation
may Inhibit pilots’
thinking skills HOUSES OF GOD
NOTEBOOK
COCKPIT: LM OTERO/AP • BEACH: BRYNN ANDERSON/AP • STAY-AT-HOME DAD: STEVE RINGMAN/THE SEAT TLE TIMES/AP
LIZ MCCUE/THE TELEGRAPH/AP
NORTH PLATTE, NEB.
Virginia Knapp, organist
for more than 50 years at
Our Redeemer Lutheran
Church, sits in front of
the church’s pipe organ.
3 SCIENCE and HOG.indd 61
F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
WORLD
61
1/16/15 10:11 AM
NOTEBOOK
SPORTS
Winning while losing
NBA STARS JEREMY LIN AND LEBRON JAMES FIND BENEFITS
FROM DIFFICULT SEASONS by Andrew Branch
Cleveland Cavaliers
clinging to a .500
record after a
losing skid. “Right
now we’re just not
very good in every
aspect of the game that
we need …,” James said
last month, echoing earlier
calm acknowledgments of
his need for patience.
The second half of the
season begins with the spotlight
still fixed on losers. New York and
the Lakers are bottom-feeders, often
in comical fashion. San Antonio and
Oklahoma City seem more likely
to fight for the final playoff
berth than the NBA finals. It
increasingly appears the
league will see a longdormant team emerge in
May and June. The likes of
Washington’s John Wall,
Golden State’s Stephen
Curry, and others have
ushered in a new group of
young, competitive teams.
On the dark side of the box
score, though, Lin, LeBron, and others
are learning to keep grinding with
patience and joy, even while losing.
“When I focus on who God is and
how much He loves me,” said Lin, “I
am able to live with joy and freedom
from life’s pressures or the results of
basketball games.”
Your match
in Row T
Does speed dating
boost sagging
attendance? The NBA’s
Eastern Conference–
leading Atlanta Hawks
hoped so. On Jan. 7,
Philips Arena hosted a
“Swipe Right Night”
with the mobile dating/
tryst app Tinder. Users
of the app “swipe right”
if they like a person’s
picture. If that person
does the same, they can
chat. Users swipe left for
“undesirables,” which
helped brand arena
security the “Swipe Left
Patrol.” Fans met in
designated areas,
watching their phones
while the Hawks beat
Memphis 96-86. —A.B.
Dolphin swimmer
Former Miami Dolphin Rob Konrad may have swum more than nine miles over 16 hours in the ocean.
The retired fullback sailed from the Palm Beach area midday Jan. 7 and stumbled onto land the next
morning suff ering from hypothermia and dehydration. Konrad, 36, says his boat was on autopilot when
he hooked a fish that pulled him into choppy waters without a life vest. Playing NFL football likely saved
his life, as he strained most known limits of the human body in water. He said he gained confidence
while swimming: “Five or six hours in I realized, ‘Maybe I can do this.’” —A.B.
62
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3 SPORTS.indd 62
F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
LIN: MARK J. TERRILL/AP • ATL ANTA HAWKS: KEVIN C. COX/GET T Y IMAGES • KONRAD: LYNNE SL ADK Y/AP
In sports, which team wins and
which loses doesn’t have lasting
significance. Halfway through the
NBA season, though, one Los
Angeles Laker says his team’s
lowly record has changed his
relationship with God.
Jeremy Lin, 26, hasn’t had an
uplifting year by conventional standards. The Houston Rockets traded
him to the Lakers this summer, but
not before attempting to lure New
York’s Carmelo Anthony with a
banner that gave him Anthony Lin’s
jersey number. On the court, finding
even a dozen wins has drained blood
and sweat from a Laker squad now
mired in the bottom five. “I went
through one of the worst, if not the
worst, slump I’ve had in my basketball
life,” Lin wrote on New Year’s Day.
The candid blog post told of
sleeplessness and a discouragement that often stretched well
beyond the final buzzer. Yet
he began to “fight for a life
of joy” through prayer and
reading his Bible. “It hasn’t
been an easy journey, but it has
been a rewarding one,” Lin said. “I
can see myself surrendering the
results to God. … I complain less and
am more grateful. I feel much more
peace and joy.”
Lin isn’t the only one publicly
slogging through a career low point,
either, with LeBron James and his
R
1/21/15
9:38 AM
CREDIT
3 SPORTS.indd 63
1/19/15 9:55 PM
the world market
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B Covenant Christian School, a
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COLLEGE EMPLOYMENT
B BELHAVEN UNIVERSITY teaches
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MINISTRY OPPORTUNITIES
B Providence Presbyterian Church of
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Providence is a member of the
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B Most Turks are Muslims and have
never heard the message of salvation.
But, you can help change this. In 2014
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WRITING CAMPS
B Hands-on, H.S. writing camp, save
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SEND LETTERS AND PHOTOS TO [email protected]
DECEMBER 27
‘Far as the curse
is found’
g Jamie Dean is right: The solution will not come
from Washington, except insofar as it ends the souldestroying ideologies and policies that are a huge
part of the problem. The solution comes from the
gospel, the church, and allies who understand that
we change culture one person at a time.
DEAN FROM OHIO ON WNG.ORG
g Jesus did say that the poor will
always be with us. As a pastor I have
found that it is better to teach folks
skills, as the article says, and also
teach that Jesus Christ is the way, the
truth, and the life. Both change lives
and give hope to those in need.
compromise the gospel for social
work, noting that the problem is our
broken humanity.
JIM SCHULTZ / DECATUR, ILL.
‘Double trouble’
, The reason for the president’s
BROJOHN ON WNG.ORG
, The people where the coal mines
have closed have at least two
alternatives: Find a job in a mine
elsewhere and move, or take
taxpayer-sponsored retraining
and find a new career.
Blantyre, Malawi
submitted by
Sandra Gutknecht
recent immigration order is obvious:
He doesn’t care what the people think.
He has been governing against the will
of the people since the beginning of
his presidency.
LYNN BARTON / MEDFORD, ORE.
, Perhaps President Obama thinks
his immigration order is the right
thing to do. I think we should revise
our immigration laws to make it easier
for immigrants to come here and earn
a living. Obama’s actions might be
illegal, but his intentions are good.
CLYDE HERRON / BONNER SPRINGS, KAN.
g Obama knows he’s badly damaged
the Democratic brand, but he thinks
he’s on the right side of history.
BILL TAYLOR ON WNG.ORG
g I fully agree with Obama’s move and
his description of the current state of
affairs regarding illegal immigration. I
don’t blame illegal immigrants; I blame
businesses for continuing to hire
ANTHONY BROOKS / LEESBURG, GA.
‘A nation at risk’
, Wonderful article. We are connected to a group of Anabaptist/
Mennonite Native churches and have
seen the great harm religious and
government social programs cause by
creating dependency. We are encouraged by a new spark of hope and
revival among Navajo Christians.
LEONARD & ANNA MARY BURKHOLDER /
BOWMANSVILLE, PA.
, I am frustrated by the ineffectiveness of most attempts to help the poor.
Sophia Lee rightly warns us not to
, Mail/email g Website
3 MAILBAG.indd 65
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undocumented workers and Congress
for being too partisan to find a solution.
Let’s go, Congress. It’s your move.
WEST COAST MOM ON WNG.ORG
talent throw away their future by their
lifestyle, so I appreciate all the more
the gifted artists who stay true to
family and relationships.
PETER ALLEN ON WNG.ORG
‘Unspoken’
, I agree that Unbroken is incomplete.
Maybe a sentence at the end about
Zamperini forgiving his captors is the
best we can expect from Hollywood.
Maybe it’ll take a Christian movie company to tell the story of how he could
be so abused yet return to forgive
them. I want to see that story.
DAVID NYHUIS / EATONVILLE, WASH.
g I can only hope that movie viewers
will be drawn to read the book. Laura
Hillenbrand truly understood the
power of Zamperini’s transformation
when he encountered Christ.
GREENTRAVELGAL ON WNG.ORG
g To be fair to Jolie, Zamperini wanted
nothing to do with Jesus in the prison
camps and I don’t know how the whole
story could have fit into one movie. I
agree with her that his conversion is a
second storyline and should be treated
as such.
LIT TLEWOMEN ON WNG.ORG
‘In the fullness of time’
, Thank you for the column about the
seemingly impossible events leading
up to Jesus’ birth. I’ll use it to remind
my Sunday school class of His sovereignty in all things, including the
refining process.
JANINE DILL ARD / TRENTON, N.J.
‘Community crisis’
g I’m not saying that most police are
bad, but if they treated us white, middleclass folks with the same suspicion and
disrespect that many blacks tolerate
regularly, the outcry would deafen the
nation and things would change.
‘Myth makers’
g “Myth makers” typically ignore the
Pauline letters. Even secular scholars
generally admit that Paul wrote most
of them, and before the Gospels, so the
core of Christian teachings stands on
the firmest possible documentary
footing. Minor inconsistencies in the
Gospels and the “lack of contemporary
secular references to Jesus” are just
red herrings.
SCOT T B ON WNG.ORG
‘Terror and grace in 1914’
g I watched the video that portrays
this story and wondered how the
soldiers in the trenches could go back
to killing each other. Marvin Olasky
helped me understand, but it’s still sad.
LOWELL W ON WNG.ORG
DECEMBER 13
‘I kissed Fox goodbye’
, Fox is the only news we ever watch,
but I am persuaded by Marvin Olasky’s
challenge. He and WORLD’s many
other fine writers have delighted,
inspired, and informed us. You faithfully fulfill the magazine’s mission
statement, so I will try to help by
continuing to introduce many new
subscribers to WORLD.
BILL DOUGL AS / INDEPENDENCE, KAN.
‘The light of the sun in a
dark basement’
, Thank you for your “Daniel of the
Year” article about Rep. Frank Wolf. I
knew nothing about him prior to reading this piece, and I feel blessed in a
deep way to have learned about him.
DOUG WRIGHT / RENTON, WASH.
DON SUT TON ON WNG.ORG
‘In with the old’
g Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s I
felt that Queen did signify something:
living uninhibited by morals. It saddens me when artists with so much
66 W O R L D F E B R U A R Y 7, 2 0 1 5
3 MAILBAG.indd 66
, In 1980 I worked on Wolf’s cam-
paign. His Christian faith and advocacy
for the powerless are a few of the
many reasons why I call him a friend
and my congressman. In or out of
Congress, he will be the same man: a
humble Christian and a voice for the
forgotten.
DAVID A. WILLIAMS / FORT WORTH, TEXAS
NOVEMBER 29
‘Happy days of despair’
, Excellent column. Janie B. Cheaney
went straight to the root of our human
condition. I was struck by my internal
conflict of emotion: pain at seeing my
error painted against the backdrop of a
happy, satisfied, and comfortable life.
May God’s spirit challenge and convict
us to appreciate our blessings.
FRED BERKHEIMER / PINEHURST, N.C.
‘Interpretive dance’
, Daniel James Devine has given us
good insight into the BioLogos movement’s attempt to buy its way into
churches, Christian schools, and
seminaries. It’s a real Trojan horse.
THEODORE AND DONNA LOY / NORMAL, ILL.
Corrections
Actress Sheila MacRae did not appear
in the movies Oklahoma! and Carousel
(“Departures,” Jan. 10, p. 77).
Carolyn McCulley went to college
amid post-1970s feminism and
became a Bible-believing Christian in
1993 (“Pilgrims passing through,” Nov.
1, p. 28).
Clarification
The Affordable Care Act’s mandate
requiring employers to provide
health insurance came into effect for
companies with 100 or more fulltime employees on Jan. 1, 2015, and
will for companies with over 50 on
Jan. 1, 2016 (“WORLD and
Obamacare,” Dec. 27, p. 57).
LETTERS & PHOTOS
, Email: [email protected]
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g Visit our website—wng.org—for breaking news and more 1/14/15 3:43 PM
Andrée seu peterson
The serpent’s egg
France’s walled-off immigrant populations
have turned mischievous and murderous
As an innocent abroad hitchhiking through
France and Switzerland in the early ’70s, I
kept seeing pro and con billboards about foreign
guest workers and felt like an eavesdropper to
an argument Europe was having with itself over
the continent’s ambivalence toward its foreign
workers.
America has its own love-hate thing between
natives and noncitizens, or between inhabitants
with papers and inhabitants without papers. But
it would be a mistake to think the drama is similar in any but a superficial way. The French put no
such value on religion as we do, being children
of Robespierre and not John Witherspoon. If they
ended up encouraging the spread of Islam in
their country, which they did, it was not originally
from love of their guests’ rights to worship but
from the motive of keeping their travailleurs
étrangers from becoming permanent residents.
That is, France thought its North African
labor force should go home—back to Algeria
and Morocco and Tunisia—after their usefulness had been served, and they thought themselves decent enough hosts in the meantime to
prepare to send them packing with their religious customs still intact. Thus the allowance
and even encouragement of Muslim prayer
places would evolve from that.
France’s need for foreign labor waxed and
waned with the vicissitudes of history, war, and
economy. In the late 19th and the 20th centuries,
the low-birthrate nation put out the doormat
for Italians, Belgians, and Poles, their first preference. Whereas voices in America complain
about immigrants smuggling whole families in,
French employers welcomed family migration,
reasoning that it would curb the baser instincts
of men alone in a foreign land.
When European guests began unionizing
and demanding better pay, Lady France sent
suitors to her North African colonies, actively
recruiting after World War I. But being loath to
EMMA FOSTER/EPA/L andov
R
 [email protected]
3 SEU PETERSON.indd 67
This too is the
irony, that a
nation like
France that
cares nothing
for religion
should foster
the most
virulent
r eligion on
Earth.
actually intermarry with the North African
workers, they built them “workers villages” and
“garden cities,” or bionvilles—shantytowns.
These were isolated housing in which linguistic,
cultural, social, and religious practices would
be maintained, as in a hothouse. Eventually,
great complexes of low-cost social housing
were erected. What could go wrong?
Algeria’s independence from France in 1962
coincided with a marked expansion of the
French economy, for which laborers were
sought. From the ’60s to the ’70s (where I come
in, backpack in tow) the number of foyers (in
hostels) had mushroomed, and now it was not
only France fostering the maintaining of cultural and national identity but the North African
nations as the biggest advocates. A demand for
accommodation to Muslim religion arose. The
seminal mosque was a prayer room in a hostel,
overseen by a “worker imam.”
William Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar:
“And therefore think him as a serpent’s egg /
Which hatch’d, would, as his kind, grow
mischievous; / And kill him in the shell.” But do
we ever see the menace of what will be in the
harmless sleeping embryo?
Even as France was trying to divest itself of
now unneeded foreign labor in the wake of the
1973 oil crisis and economic recession, and even
as the climate in the country was cooling toward
foreign workers, Under-Secretary of State for
Migrant Workers Paul Dijoud proposed proceeding full speed ahead with maintaining separate
cultural identities, including special language
classes for the children of migrants, the ELCO
(Enseignement des Langues et Cultures d’Origine).
This is the irony of the French Muslim situation, that programs implemented to keep
foreigners and their religion separate—to let
Algerians be Algerians and Moroccans be
Moroccans—the better to return to sender with
good speed, became virtual laboratories of cancerous forces that would ultimately engulf the
nation. This too is the irony, that a nation like
France that cares nothing for religion should
foster the most virulent religion on Earth.
Roughly 1,900 years before Christ, a band of
70-plus Israelites from famine-stricken Canaan
showed up for help in Egypt. By the time they
walked out under Moses after four centuries of
incubation, they were over a million strong. In
that particular case, they were not the serpent
but the serpent-slayer. What is in the future is
not always recognizable through the opaque
membrane of the tiny egg. A
F E B RUAR Y 7 , 2 0 1 5 WORLD 67
1/16/15 4:48 PM
MARVIN OLASKY
Thermopylae
on the way
It’s time for the church to be bold
68 W ORLD FEBRU A R Y 7 , 2 0 1 5
3 OLASKY.indd 68
A church
boycott of
marriage
certificates
[would not] do
anything to
help young
couples steer
clear of
government’s
unbiblical
definitions.
krieg barrie
“You can’t fire me. I quit.”
As Valentine’s Day approaches some
Christians are proclaiming this, in essence, to
government officials who promote a view of
marriage antithetical to biblical understanding.
The Christian journal First Things is rightly
critiquing the new, official view that marriage
begins whenever any two individuals of whatever sex decide, and ends whenever the mood
of one of the partners changes. But First Things
then mistakenly promotes a “marriage pledge”
by which ministers refuse to sign governmentprovided marriage certificates.
Under the journal’s proposed doctrine, a couple marrying in church will also have to go to a justice of the peace. First Things argues, “To continue
with church practices that intertwine government
marriage with Christian marriage will implicate
the Church in a false definition of marriage.”
That argument reminds me of the attitude of
William Lloyd Garrison and other Northern abolitionists who favored separation from the South
so they would no longer be part of a slaverycondoning nation. But by washing their hands
of the matter those pastors were not helping the
slaves—nor would a church boycott of marriage
certificates do anything to help young couples
steer clear of government’s unbiblical definitions.
It looks like about 300 pastors, elders,
priests, and other church leaders have signed
the pledge. Their discretion may be prudent,
since governments down the road could prosecute ministers who perform marriages between
a man and a woman but refuse to do the same
for same-sex couples. But these 300 are unlikely
to inspire children throughout the centuries, or
filmmakers now, as 300 Spartans at the battle of
Thermopylae (480 B.C.) have.
Those 300, commanded by Leonidas, knew
more than 100,000 Persians would attack them.
R
Persian King Xerxes sent to Leonidas an
ambassador who offered enticements: Abandon
your posts and receive the title “Friends of the
Persian People.” Leonidas said no. The emissary
then returned with a written demand by Xerxes:
“Hand over your arms.” Leonidas responded,
“Come and take them.”
Five hundred years later, the Apostle Paul in
Philippi also refused to give in, or give up his
rights as a Roman citizen: “They have beaten us
publicly, uncondemned, men who are Roman
citizens, and have thrown us into prison; and do
they now throw us out secretly?”
The book of Acts also tells us that Paul in
Jerusalem used his birthright to gain a right to
speak: “I am a Jew, from Tarsus in Cilicia, a
citizen of no obscure city.” Later, “when they had
stretched him out for the whips, Paul said to
the centurion who was standing by, ‘Is it lawful
for you to flog a man who is a Roman citizen?’”
Paul then explained to the tribune in charge, “I
am a citizen by birth.” The whipping stopped.
The 300 Spartans died, but in dying they
saved Greece. Paul eventually suffered martyrdom, but his goal was to keep preaching as long
as he could—and he stood on his rights so he
could make every day count.
Most of the readers of this magazine are
Americans, citizens of a country founded by
those who saw church weddings as the real
thing, not just a show with no legal validity. A
pastor can make life easier for himself by telling
members of his congregation to go to the courthouse, but most Americans have long trusted
churches as the main arbiters of marriage. Now
distrust rides us, but pastors should not abandon
the pass they have been defending.
According to Plutarch, one soldier complained to Leonidas, “Because of the arrows of
the barbarians it is impossible to see the sun,”
and Leonidas replied, “Won’t it be nice, then, if
we shall have shade in which to fight them?”
Yes, 300 church leaders have decided to
vacate our contemporary Thermopylae, but
500,000 (I’m one of them) have signed a more
general statement, the Manhattan Declaration,
which calls the church to be bold and courageous on three issues: the sanctity of life, the
dignity of marriage, and freedom of religion.
Maybe 300 or more pastors should make a
specific declaration concerning the cloud of
summonses and warrants that may descend on
them for refusing to perform same-sex marriages: “Won’t that be nice? We’ll have paper on
which to print our responses.” A
 [email protected]  @MarvinOlasky
1/15/15 12:05 PM
WOuld you Rather
your son Lean on
your faith?
. Or stand on his own?
You’ve prayed and taught.
Loved and challenged. You’ve demonstrated faith.
But when your son leaves home he’ll have to stand on his own.
Make sure he is standing on the Truth.
Worldview Academy is a week-long leadership camp designed to
challenge, inspire, and prompt students to own a faith based on the unchangeable
truth of scripture and the compelling grace of Christ... just like you taught him.
Worldview Academy. No more leaning. Stand.
krieg barrie
R E G I S T E R T O D AY : 8 0 0 . 2 4 1 . 1 1 2 3 • W W W. W O R L D V I E W. O R G
own3 your
own series 34
OLASKY.indd
12/5/14
1/16/15
2:046:40
PM AM
MS_Green Ad_World10.14.indd 1
3 OLASKY.indd 4
8/26/14 4:53:42 PM
1/16/15 2:08 PM

Cuba`s new day /// Gregg Easterbrook on the NFL

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