Chicanery in China?

...When you mess with which child is singing Ode to the Motherland, offer up phantom fireworks and fake fans, have soldiers create your spectacles billed as volunteers and face allegations that some of your athletes are not eligible, it makes people wonder what is real and what is fake...

Joe Warmington, a columnist at the Toronto Sun, thinks that China owes the world an apology for what's been happening at the Olympics. Not having followed the games myself, I don't know but he makes a pretty strong case.

However, there are a whole lot of injustices more pressing and more pernicious for which the world deserves an apology from Communist China. Among them?

* Severe persecution of religious believers.

* Coercive abortion and sterilization policies.

* Harvesting and selling human body parts.

* Extensive use of slave labor and denial of worker's rights, safety and health concerns.

* A long list of other human rights abuses.

* Support of repressive governments in Burma, Belarus, and other places.

* Destruction of national economies (like our own) through cheap imports.

* Support of terrorists.

* Military aggression in Asia...and beyond.

* Extensive spy networks in their own country and many others.

* Theft of Western technology.

When you look at this list, the chicanery of underage gymnasts (though certainly an unfair ploy) seems rather tame. But it does reveal how brazenly unapologetic is China's attitude. Even when the world has come to town, even when the cameras are running, even when the coaches themselves have revealed the truth about their team breaking the rules, Communist China (and the Olympic committee too) simply shrug, smile -- and get ready for the next chicanery.

Congressman Mike Pence on the "Police State" of Communist China, Forced Abortion, the Olympics and More

"It is important that we speak truth to power. And with the 2008 Olympics in Beijing about to begin, it is important that the people of the United States be heard on our ideals as athletes from around the world and global media descend on China.

"It is important that we say as the late Tom Lantos, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a hearing last year, a few months before his death: 'China is a police state.'

"I personally believe that the selection of China as the site of the 2008 Olympic Games was a historic error. The Olympics is a symbol of the human spirit and in that regard, a symbol of human freedom, and this police state therefore is precisely the wrong venue for a celebration of human dignity and the human spirit.

"And so I commend my colleagues' support for H. Res. 1370. I am particularly grateful for the call on the government of the People's Republic of China to end the abuses of human rights, to release those imprisoned for political and religious expression, and also challenging China to honor its commitment to freedom of the press of foreign reporters.

"While there is much talk in the media today about the cloud of smog hanging over Beijing as these Games approach, let me say from my heart: the real cloud over the Beijing Olympics is the horror of forced abortion. Therefore I am especially grateful to Congressman Chris Smith for adding an important amendment to this resolution noting that: 'Whereas the Chinese government limits most women to having one child and strictly controls the reproductive lives of Chinese citizens by systematic means that include mandatory monitoring of women's reproductive cycles, mandatory sterilization and contraception, mandatory birth permits, coercive fines for failure to comply,' and the like. This legislation will call on the People's Republic of China to immediately end the practice of forced abortion...

Read more of Indiana's Mike Pence's bold remarks to the Congress here.

Crackdown on Christians in Belarus

Felix Corley summarizes for Forum 18 the latest acts of persecution by Belarusian authorities against religious believers:

Officials have tried to stop three different Protestant communities in Grodno Region, north-western Belarus, from conducting peaceful religious activity, Forum 18 News Service has learnt. In the small town of Svisloch, a planned open-air baptism has been banned, despite the attempts of Pentecostals to negotiate with the authorities. Bishop Fyodor Tsvor told Forum 18 that "they just don't want to allow it."

In the nearby town of Mosty, a Pentecostal pastor was fined nine months' minimum wages for leading a small unregistered church. The court verdict notes as evidence of wrongdoing that "at meetings they read the Gospel, discuss questions of religious faith, sing songs and conduct religious rites."

In Grodno itself, Baptist pastor Yuri Kravchuk was summoned by the senior state regional religious affairs official, Igor Popov, who told him that his leadership of a worship service in a private home violated the Administrative Code. His case has now been sent to the city's Oktyabr District Court. All three communities point out that the state's actions violate the Belarusian Constitution.

Read his extended report right here.

With Friends Like This: Severe Religious Intolerance from America's "Ally"

Anne Applebaum, a weekly columnist for the Washington Post, knows a bit about freedom issues around the world. After all, she has served as a correspondent for The Economist in Warsaw; was foreign editor and then deputy editor of the Spectator magazine in London; and she won the Charles Douglas-Home Memorial Trust award for journalism in the ex-Soviet Union. Applebaum is also the author of Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe and the Pulitzer Prize winner for non-fiction in 2004, Gulag: A History.

Therefore, when she perused the latest publication of the Hudson Institutes' Center for Religious Freedom, the 91-page Saudi Arabia's Curriculum of Intolerance, she knew she had found an important and alarming study.

Here is a portion of her subsequent op/ed column:

Because they are so clearly designed for the convenience of large testing companies, I had always assumed that multiple-choice exams, the bane of any fourth-grader's existence, were a quintessentially American phenomenon. But apparently I was wrong. According to a report last week by the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom, it seems that the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Education finds them useful, too.

Here, for example, is a multiple-choice question from a recent edition of a Saudi fourth-grade textbook, "Monotheism and Jurisprudence," in a section that attempts to teach children to distinguish between "true" and "false" belief in God:

Q. "Is belief true in the following instances:
(a) A man prays but hates those who are virtuous.
(b) A man professes that there is no deity other than God but loves the unbelievers.
(c) A man worships God alone, loves the believers, and hates the unbelievers."

The correct answer, of course, is (c): According to the Wahhabi imams who wrote this textbook, it isn't enough to simply worship God or just to love other believers; it is important to hate unbelievers, too. By the same token, (b) is wrong as well: Even a man who worships God cannot be said to have "true belief" if he also loves unbelievers.

"Unbelievers," in this context, are Christians and Jews. In fact, any child who attends Saudi schools until ninth grade will eventually be taught outright that "Jews and Christians are enemies of believers." They will also be taught that Jews conspire to "gain sole control over the world," that the Christian crusades never ended, and that on Judgment Day "the rocks or the trees" will call out to Muslims to kill Jews.

These passages, it should be noted, are from new, "revised" Saudi textbooks, designed to be less harsh on the infidels. After an analysis of earlier textbooks caused an outcry in 2006, American diplomats approached their Saudi counterparts about modifying the more disturbing passages, and the Saudis agreed to conduct a "comprehensive revision . . . to weed out disparaging remarks toward religious groups."

The promised revision -- hailed at the time as a great diplomatic success -- was supposed to be finished by the beginning of the 2008-09 school year and was accompanied by a Saudi public relations campaign. Among other things, the Saudis sponsored an interfaith dialogue this week, one that all participants hailed as a great breakthrough -- despite the fact that the meetings took place in Spain, apparently because it would be too embarrassing for Saudi Arabia to host Christian and Jewish religious leaders on its own soil. But now the beginning of the 2008-09 school year is nearly upon us, the only textbook revisions have been superficial and the most disturbing part of the books' message -- that faithful Muslims should hate Jews and Christians -- remains...

Life in Cuba: What Oliver Stone Hasn't Told Us

Interested in hearing what's really going down in Cuba -- reports you don't get from the MSM, Hollywood, or America's Democrat Party leaders? Then listen in to this illuminating conversation between a few young Cubans. Don't worry if your Spanish isn't that sharp -- there's English subtitles. (By the way, thanks to The Real Cuba for the tip.)

And You Thought "Planet of the Apes" Was a Fantasy

"I am an ape," declared Pedro Pozas, a Spanish animal rights activist, in 2006. The Spanish parliament, which apparently has come to see things Pozas's way, is now poised to endorse the Great Ape Project, granting chimps, bonobos, apes, and orangutans some of the same rights that Jefferson once rooted in the human condition.

The Great Ape Project was launched just 15 years ago by Princeton utilitarian bioethicist Peter Singer and Italian animal rights philosopher Paola Cavalieri with the stated goal of obtaining a United Nations declaration welcoming apes into a "community of equals" with humans. In a kind of parody of the Declaration of Independence, the project's "Declaration on Great Apes" asserts that "all great apes: human beings, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans" have basic rights including "the right to life," the "protection of individual liberty," and the "prohibition of torture," construed to include "deliberate infliction of severe pain for an alleged benefit to others," clearly aimed at the use of apes in medical research.

But why grant apes rights? After all, if the Spanish parliament deems these animals insufficiently protected, it can enact more stringent protections, as other countries have. But improving the treatment of apes--of which there are few in Spain--is not really the game that is afoot. Rather, as Pozas chortled after the environment committee of the Spanish parliament passed the resolutions committing Spain to the Great Ape Project, this precedent will be the "spear point" that breaks the "species barrier."

And why break the species barrier? Why, to destroy the unique status of man and thus initiate a wholesale transformation of Western civilization.

Specifically, by including animals in the "community of equals" and in effect declaring apes to be persons, the Great Ape Project would break the spine of Judeo-Christian moral philosophy, which holds that humans enjoy equal and incalculable moral worth, regardless of our respective capacities, age, and state of health. Once man is demoted to merely another animal in the forest, universal human rights will have to be tossed out and new criteria devised to determine which human/animal lives matter and which individuals can be treated like, well, animals...

Read the rest of Wesley J. Smith's cogent commentary here.

Here's UK News & Commentary You Can Trust

Dr. Greg Gardner over in Birmingham, England sends along to visitors of Vital Signs (particularly those interested in the latest engagements of the culture war in the UK) a couple of very good news and commentary sources -- reputable, relevant and rightly purposed.

1) The Christian Institute is a nondenominational Christian charity committed to upholding the truths of the Bible with it's resources designed to promote the Christian religion in the United Kingdom. The CI also helps inform Christians of how the issues of the day relate to their biblical obligations and assists Christians in the normal practice of their faith through CI's fine legal team.

A case in point, both in the CI's legal assistance and the subsequent news coverage of the affair, is a Christian from Islington whose job was threatened because she asked to opt out from performing civil partnership registrations involving homosexual couples. With the CI's help, the employment tribunal unanimously decided that the Christian woman had been directly discriminated against by the Islington Council because of her faith-based request.

Here's that story from the Christian Institute website and here is the page linking you to more detailed information about the organization itself, including a faith statement and positions on key issues.

2) Christian Concern for our Nation describes itself as "an organisation that exists to serve the Church by providing information to enable Christians to stand up publicly against a tide of unchristian legal and political changes in the United Kingdom. It brings together focused legal, policy and media expertise and strategic intervention in order to secure favourable legal and political outcomes in areas of concern... CCFON was established to inform and empower Christians to speak with a coherent and cohesive voice against ungodly and unjust laws, and to speak up for righteousness and justice..."

This organization also hosts a website that is an excellent source of information, an example of which is this Andrea Williams’s summary of just where pro-life Britons are in their struggles against the monstrous Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill recently passed by Parliament and now awaiting possible amendments.

Shades of Stalin: Religion Under Severe Fire In Eastern Europe

Here's a brief rundown from Forum 18 on a few of the latest examples of how East European thugs are running roughshod over the human rights of religious believers:

* In Azerbaijan, corrupt police planted a gun in the home of a Baptist pastor and then threw him in jail on charges of holding an illegal weapon. The pastor's brother says the purpose of the action (one in a series of persecutions of religious believers) is to halt Baptist activity altogether. "Their target is the church." Pastor Shabanov is the second Baptist pastor in the remote village of Aliabad to face imprisonment on what local Baptists insist are trumped-up charges. Shabanov's family insist he has no weapon and that police planted the gun they claim to have found. But the local police chief appears to have made up his mind. "He's a criminal," the head of Zakatala regional police told Forum 18, even though under Azerbaijani law individuals are innocent until found guilty in court.

* In Belarus, an extremely heavy fine (more than two months of the average wage) have fallen on a Baptist Christian who "organised choir singing and conducted conversations on religious topics" outside Ushachi's public market. After a plain clothes policeman had told a group of Baptists from outside the area to stop, Vladimir Burshtyn replied that they were not disturbing public order and cited religious freedom guarantees in Belarus' Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yeah, that's what it says but Alexander Lukashenka's government (and the petty tyrants in other locales who look to him for guidance) doesn't worry about the small print. The fine is, to Forum 18's knowledge, the highest yet imposed on Baptists for unregistered religious activity.

* In Tajikistan the country's only synagogue (located in the capital city of Dushanbe) has been bulldozed by the government, leaving the Jewish community without a place to worship or to conduct its food aid programme. The state's next demolition target, as part of a "city reconstruction plan" is the Bread of Life Protestant Church. Church members told Forum 18 they have been given until early July to vacate the building ahead of demolition.

* In Uzbekistan, leaders of 26 Protestant congregations across the country have published an open letter rejecting state-controlled TV stations' repeated broadcasts of a film encouraging intolerance and hatred of religious minorities. Protestant leaders also condemn "garbled facts, aggressive attacks, lies and slander" against named individuals and churches by the state TV broadcasts, and accuse the state and those who took part in the film of violating Uzbek criminal law through the broadcast. The leaders also complain that the state-controlled leaderships of schools and colleges strongly encouraged students to watch the film and so encouraged religious hatred and intolerance amongst young people. State-run newspapers and websites carried linked articles attacking religious minorities and their sharing of their beliefs, one such article stating that religious minorities "have one aim: to infringe on human freedom with all the consequences that flow from it." No wonder that direct persecutions are increasing there.

More Persecution of Kazakhstan's Religious Minorities On the Way

Forum 18 is reporting that the new religion law to be passed in Kazakhstan is a travesty of justice, a law that will further promote the government's oppressive treatment of religious minorities.

Despite recent changes to Kazakhstan's draft Religion Law, the text still contains many violations of international human rights commitments, Forum 18 News Service has found. It is due to be presented to parliament for its first of three readings tomorrow (11 June) by the parliamentary Working Group.

"They put many distracting points in the draft to take away our attention from the real pitfalls," Aleksandr Klyushev of the Association of Religious Organisations complained to Forum 18. "We need to do everything in our power to stop this Law from being adopted."

Penalties for unregistered religious activity will be stepped up, and 50 adult citizen members will be required to register local religious communities. Local religious groups will not have the right to engage in educational, publishing or missionary activity.

Kamal Burkhanov, who leads the Working Group, defended the restrictions on sharing one's faith in public. "Do people go to the toilet on a bus?" he told Forum 18. "No, they go to a toilet. Therefore whoever needs to meet their religious needs should go to a synagogue, mosque or a church." He showed no sympathy for those - like Baptists - who are often fined for unregistered religious activity. "They should not violate the law."

Burkhanov said the OSCE's review of the draft Law has not yet been received, but he claimed that any criticism of any provisions would be taken into account...

Earlier versions of the draft Law were fiercely criticised by many religious communities – including Lutheran, Baptist, Catholic, Hare Krishna and other representatives – as well as by legal specialists and human rights activists... A Working Group draft from 2 June – which Forum 18 has seen – removes or softens some of the provisions that clearly violate Kazakhstan's international human rights commitments, but many violations of these commitments remain.

Tony Campolo's Jihad Fixation Focuses on the Wrong Enemy

Tony Campolo was leaning so far left that he fell over a long time ago. And when he did, he must have cracked up even farther. Thus, he's joined the likes of his friends Jim Wallis, Jimmy Cater, Bill Clinton and other liberal extremists who distort Christianity (Campolo now refers to himself as a "Red Letter Christian") and then use the distortion to attack not only political conservatives but the Faith itself.

Here's Mark Tooley's take on Campolo's latest fiasco, an anti-American tirade appearing on Wallis' web site in which Campolo engages in bad history, bad politics, bad hermeneutics, bad geography and...well, you get the bad idea.

The Only Pro-Life Pharmacy Business in California Celebrates an Anniversary

Yes, Virginia; there are still a few Christians around who take their religion seriously, seriously enough to let it rule their business instead of the other way round.

So, here's my heartiest congratulations to Brent Watson, pharmacy director and owner of Central Coast Pharmacy Specialists in Templeton, California, whose business just celebrated its one-year anniversary as the only pro-life pharmacy in the state!

Watson's business "made the decision – in open defiance to Big Drug and Insurance Companies – to stop issuing birth control pills, the so called 'morning after pill,' and other medication that could be used for an abortion."

"It's not good medicine,” Watson said.

Watson explained that contraceptives are harmful to patients and “block the implantation of early human life. This puts pharmacists in direct conflict with their profession when forced to dispense against their conscience and professional promise to ‘do no harm’ to patients. We want patients to know we are a pro-patient, healing only pharmacy that provides compounded medications individually made to fit the specific needs of each patient one prescription at a time."

According to Watson, the harmful effects of contraceptives are noted even by the FDA, which requires patients to sign a disclosure before taking oral contraceptives.

Watson said that he was proud that his pharmacy could be among the few openly pro-life pharmacies in the nation while many other pharmacists continue to face persecution by employers because of their pro-life views...

Christian Evangelism: Free Speech or Hate Crime?

Two Christian preachers were stopped from handing out Bible extracts by police because they were in a Muslim area, it was claimed yesterday. They say they were told by a Muslim police community support officer that they could not preach there and that attempting to convert Muslims to Christianity was a hate crime.

The community officer is also said to have told the two men: 'You have been warned. If you come back here and get beat up, well, you have been warned.'

A police constable who was present during the incident in the Alum Rock area of Birmingham is also alleged to have told the preachers not to return to the district....

The rest of this Daily Mail (U.K.) article is here.

Freedom of Speech for Preachers? What a Constitutional Idea.

Jill Stanek has a report here on a bold new move by the Alliance Defense Fund to take back the freedom of speech for America's religious leaders. It involves what the ADF is calling a "pastor's revolt" this September against the unconstitutional 1954 law that has so effectively hindered pastors, priests, rabbis, and religious organizations from speaking freely about political candidates.

In the article Jill gives a little history of the Johnson Amendment, some information about the IRS' confusion and double standards, and news about how the ADF move is being rigorously challenged by (big surprise) the loutish Barry Lynn and his Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.

Writes Jill, "ADF will challenge one specific part of the code, the prohibition of a pastor to speak from the pulpit about views on political candidates. ADF considers this a violation of a pastor's First Amendment rights. This has never been challenged in court.

On Sept. 28, approximately 50 pastors the ADF has chosen from volunteers nationwide will preach sermons to provoke the IRS on this point. This would immediately invoke a lawsuit that would find its way to the U.S. Supreme Court."

For further info, check out this page on the ADF site itself.

The Increasingly Violent Campaign Against Muslim "Apostates"

Though the Koran does not teach that "apostasy" should receive punishment, the sad and frightening fact is that the rise of sharia law and other extremist teachings have resulted in several Muslim countries accepting (if not actually promoting) the most severe of punishments for those who renounce Islam. And yes, those punishments extend even to executions as certain Muslim leaders look less to the Koran itself and more to actions and pronouncements attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, his peers and later leaders.

Two countries, Sudan and Malaysia, have gone so far as passing laws prescribing the death penalty for apostasy. In others (i.e., Saudi Arabia, Mauritania, Iran), the death penalty for apostasy isn't codified but is still a serious possibility. Egypt allows the marriage of an "apostate" to be annulled with the results including loss of inheritance and custody rights. In other countries where sharia laws are in force (i.e., Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Yemen), "apostates" face such penalties as annulment of marriage, termination of citizenship, confiscation of identity papers, and the loss of property, social standing and economic rights.

Other alarming examples of this trend are outlined in a recent report developed by Christian Solidarity Worldwide. A primer on the report can be found in the article, "No Place to Call Home," on the CSW web site. There you'll also see how "apostates" from Islam are penalized using other, more indirect laws. Those include blasphemy laws, treason, and nativist/patriotic strictures such as the "insulting Turkishness" law in Turkey.

But, as unfair and inhumane as these examples are, it is "beyond the law" that most of the persecution of "apostates" occurs. As the CWS article says,

"Apostates are subject to gross and wide-ranging human rights abuses including extra judicial killings by state-related agents or mobs; honour killings by family members; detention, imprisonment, torture, physical and psychological intimidation by security forces; the denial of access to judicial services and social services; the denial of equal employment or education opportunities; social pressure resulting in loss of housing and employment; and day-to-day discrimination and ostracism in education, finance and social activities.

The affect of all this on the personal lives of apostates and their families can be significant and far-reaching. As the number of apostate communities has significantly increased in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia over the past twenty years, human rights abuses have been more regularly reported.

The experiences of apostates in Muslim countries are blatantly at odds with their rights as guaranteed under international law. Most Muslim nations are members of the UN and have ratified international human rights treaties. However, these nations and the international community have failed in their duty to uphold the rights of apostates by neglecting to guarantee their personal safety and their full and fair participation in society.

The CWS report "calls on Muslim nations, the international community, the UN and the international media to resolutely address the serious violations of human rights suffered by apostates."

What Might an Obama Presidency Look Like ?

“What are you so afraid of?”

That's what a caller to Sandy Rios' radio show asked, referring to her strong opposition to the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama. Rios, the former President of Concerned Women for America, who now serves as President of Culture Campaign, Chairman of the North Korean Freedom Coalition, Fox News contributor, and WYLL radio talk show host, had a good answer.

But this column by Sandy Rios serves as an extended answer to that question and as such it is perhaps one of the best summations of just how dangerous Obama as President could be to the nation's health and safety. Check it out.

Belarusian Believers Struggle to Retrieve Nation's Noble Human Rights History

Evangelical pastor Antoni Bokun understands the tragedy involved in Belarus losing its historic reputation as a haven for religious rights. And he sees it not only as a patriotic observer of history but also from the vantage point of being a victim of the Communist dictatorship's increasing persecution of religious believers.

Bokun, the Pastor of John the Baptist Pentecostal Church in Minsk, has been heavily fined for leading worship services that the authorities deem illegal. He was even jailed briefly last year. But Bokun is still standing for Christ and praying that the Communist authorities will come back to their senses and stop the harassment, intimidation and outright persecution that has been launched against Belarusian evangelicals, Catholics and others. Indeed, he is praying for a spiritual revival that will reach into the government, creating a renewal of Belarus' remarkable past as a leader in human rights.

In 1573 --- long before John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, long before the U.S. and British Constitutions, and nearly 400 years before the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights --- Belarusians had created one of Europe's first legal declarations upholding religious freedom. Thus, when many other European states were still torturing and executing people for their religious faith, Belarus was protecting religious rights of conscience and serving as a safe haven for dissidents fleeing from their own governments.

Pastor Bokun says, "Inspired by our long history of freedom of conscience, Belarusians continue to work and hope for the day that our country will reclaim its heritage as a land of religious freedom." Having a special love for Belarus myself and being a visitor to that nation ten times now, I certainly share Pastor Bokun's dream and applaud the brave, sacrificial efforts he and others are making to stand for the gospel, for religious freedom, and for a retrieval of Belarus' noble history.

Read more about the situation from Pastor Bokun's article, printed by Forum 18, right here.

Christians Under Fire in Israel: New Testaments Burned; Mayor Defends Actions

Burning sacred books, distorting one's own religion to justify the attacks on another religion, physical violence including bombs and fire against those who appeal for conversions --- sound familiar? Well, take a look at this USA Today piece explaining who is on the dealing end of this paranoid frenzy.

Orthodox Jews set fire to hundreds of copies of the New Testament in the latest act of violence against Christian missionaries in the Holy Land.

Or Yehuda Deputy Mayor Uzi Aharon said missionaries recently entered a neighborhood in the predominantly religious town of 34,000 in central Israel, distributing hundreds of New Testaments and missionary material. After receiving complaints, Aharon said, he got into a loudspeaker car last Thursday and drove through the neighborhood, urging people to turn over the material to Jewish religious students who went door to door to collect it. The books were dumped into a pile and set afire in a lot near a synagogue, he said.

He said he regretted the burning of the books, but called it a "commandment" to burn materials that urge Jews to convert. "I certainly don't denounce the burning of the booklets," he said. "I denounce those who distributed the booklets."..

Earlier this year, the teenage son of a prominent Christian missionary was seriously wounded when a package bomb delivered to the family's West Bank home went off in his hands.

Last year, arsonists burst into a Jerusalem church used by Messianic Jews and set the building on fire, raising suspicions that Jewish extremists were behind the attack. No one claimed responsibility, but the same church was burned down 25 years ago by ultra-Orthodox Jewish extremists.

Aharon later apologized further (kinda') as this Christian Post article describes.

He added, “We respect all religions as we expect others to respect ours. I am very sorry that the New Testament was burned, we mean it no harm and I'm sorry that we hurt the feelings of others.”

However, the Or Yehuda deputy mayor also declared that Israel cannot allow messianic Jews to “come into our homes and incite against our religion, and turn our children away from Judaism. That is against the law.”

Aharon, a strong anti-missionary activist, admits he had initially organized “three or four” yeshiva students from the town’s Michtav M’Eliahu Yeshiva to go to apartments in a part of town with many Ethiopian Jews to collect packages recently given to them by local messianic Jews, according to the Post. The packages contained a New Testament and pamphlets, which Aharon claims encouraged going against Judaism.

Not To Be Missed: The Persecution Report Vidcast from Voice of the Martyrs

The May edition of the Persecution Report vidcast (a presentation of Voice of the Martyrs) is now available right here. The Report features compelling stories detailing intimidations, unjust imprisonments, and physical violence perpetrated against Christian believers (including torture and murder) in Laos, Nigeria, India, Paksitan, Iraq, and Kenya.

The Persecution Report vidcast is 14-minutes long but it is important viewing.

Also, please peruse other news items briefly reported in the print portions of the Voice of the Martyrs website. You'll be challenged to pray more fervently and frequently for persecuted Christians and to otherwise act in their support when possible.

New Jersey Football Coach Doesn't Have a Prayer with District Court Judges

Just how wacky, how unjust, how intellectually and morally perverse American judges have become can be seen in this bizarre case of the 3rd District Court of Appeal's recent decision that a high school coach cannot bow or take a knee when his team has a prayer.

Here's a bit of columnist Home News Tribune Rick Malwitz's take on this sad story.

...Tuesday the court issued a bizarre ruling in the case involving East Brunswick High School football coach Marcus Borden. A lower court had ruled that Borden could not lead his team in prayer, but could be in the locker room during a student-led prayer. He could bow his head and take a knee.

The appeals court allowed how a coach could bow his head and take a knee, but not Borden.

"Without Borden's 23 years of organizing, participating and leading prayer with his team, this conclusion would not be so clear as it presently is," wrote Judge Michael D. Fischer.

The Judge continued, " . . . if a football coach, who had never engaged in prayer with his team, were to bow his head and take a knee while his team engaged in a moment of reflection or prayer, we would likely reach a different conclusion."

In other words a coach who often uses God's name in a different context — especially when a defensive back blows his assigned coverage — can bow his head. But not Borden, who had a disturbing and troubling habit of . . . praying.

The way Borden's attorney Ronald Riccio interpreted the ruling, " . . . just about every other football coach in New Jersey can bow his head or take a knee with his team so long as he had never engaged in a prior practice of leading his team in prayer."

Shame on you, Marcus Borden, for your past behavior...

The convolutedness of the ruling is found in a concurring ruling by Judge Marianne Barry: "Defendants (the East Brunswick district) told the District Court that Borden can bow his head, but he cannot do "a pronounced bowing of the head.' What is "pronounced,' and who would decide that question? As defendants also told the District Court, "The district does not have thought police, and we certainly don't have bow police.' "

In the absence of bow police in East Brunswick, the 3rd Circuit assumed the task. But only for Marcus Borden...

In a related story, HNT staff writer Greg Tufaro reports that Coach Borden is expected to petition the U.S. Supreme Court for a review of the federal appeals court ruling.

Britain's P.M. to Miss Olympic Opening Ceremony

Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown will be demonstrably absent from the opening ceremony of this summer's Olympic Games in Beijing. However, he emphasizes that this shouldn't be seen as a boycott, merely as a cost-saving decision. (Right; a politician worried about a flight and hotel bill.) It is, of course, a typical political ploy of trying to play the middle course. In this case, Brown is trying to minimize the new pressure created by Tibet sympathizers but still not completely alienate the Communist thugs who run China.

This story in the Independent (U.K.) calls Brown's decision "a bruising snub to the Chinese government" but it isn't really. These cats don't bruise easily. They've proven impervious to the weak-kneed protests that sometimes sqeak out from the West over China's monstrous litany of human rights abuses. Gordon Brown's absence isn't going to bother them much.

When will Western leaders find conscience and will enough to substantially protest China's barbaric tyranny? Don't hold your breath.