A Blast From the Past: The Non-Aligned Movement

By Eric Margolis, September 03, 2012
This week’s Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) conference in Tehran brought nostalgic memories of the Cold War and world-bestriding leaders like Nehru, Nasser, Castro, Nkrumah, and Sukarno. Most of them were disasters for their nations, but they certainly were colorful and interesting.

In spite of intense efforts by the US and Israel to deter attendance at the Tehran meeting—backed by a wave of western media attacks on the conclave—over 150 nations and international bodies attended.

This big turnout marked a major failure by Washington to further tighten its siege of Iran. Of particular note was the presence of India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh. India refused to bow to US pressure to boycott the event and announced future energy, trade and transport deals with Tehran.

Iran plays a key role in India’s plans to expand its influence over Afghanistan and Central Asia. India is building a new, strategic rail line linking the Iranian port of Chahbahar to western Afghanistan. Iran supplies over 11% of India’s fast-growing demand for energy. Delhi increasingly worries about the security of its Mideast energy imports.

As I wrote a decade ago in my first book, War at the Top of the World, the US and India may one day become rivals for Mideast oil and gas resources—and, indeed, for control of the Gulf. India’s refusal to go along with US policy further underlines the gradual shift to Asia of the world’s center of strategic and economic gravity.

To Washington’s further annoyance, Egypt’s new president, Mohammed Morsi, shrugged off threats of a cut in US aid and flew to Tehran. Under the 30-year Mubarak dictatorship, Egypt had been a bulwark against Iran. But no more. The increasingly assertive, independent Morsi made clear that Egypt would follow its own foreign policy interests rather than those of the US and Israel, as in the past.

Morsi has surprised just about everyone. When he stumbled into power earlier this year he was regarded as a plodding nobody, selected by the all-powerful military to do its bidding and not make trouble. The Muslim Brotherhood leader, a former space engineer, threw off his cloak of humility and quickly proceeded to muzzle Egypt’s bullying US-backed military, the key to US domination of Egypt for the past 40 years.

How Morsi pulled this off without facing a military coup remains a mystery. But he certainly had the backing of most Egyptians. It took Turkey’s Islamist Lite government a decade to push the swaggering generals back to their barracks and bring real democracy.

The Egyptian leader stunned everyone by openly blasting the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad, calling for its replacement by an elected, democratic government. Egyptian intervention in the bloody Syrian conflict may help pave a way to a peaceful settlement. It could also rekindle ancient Egyptian-Syrian rivalry for leadership of the Arab world.

In spite of issuing dulcet banalities about Egypt’s turn to democracy, Washington is extremely unhappy with Egypt’s newly elected government. Egypt will no longer be a discreet defender and ally of Israel, as under Mubarak, but a rival power that genuinely demands a Palestinian state and sees no reason to confront Iran or other US foes.

The US is responding to Egypt’s newfound independence by muttering about cuts to its annual $1.3 billion donations to Egypt’s military and millions more in secret payments. However, the Saudis and Gulf Arabs are lending cash-strapped Cairo $3 billion and the US-run IMF another $4.8 billion in loans. Interestingly, President Morsi just visited China where he received pledges of aid.

In past years, most non-aligned conferences, whose objective was to find a middle way between the West and Soviet Empire, produced only hot air, often quite anti-American. As America’s world power declines after the loss of two wars and deep recession, the NAM meeting in Tehran may be a step, albeit small, towards moving away from today’s unipolar world towards a more balanced, equitable international system.

Iran’s supreme leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei loosed a Parthian Shaft at the summit’s end. He called the United Nations Security Council outdated, unbalanced, and an instrument of the western powers. Khamenei called for a major reform of the world institution. Few delegates disagreed with him.

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Nick Vujicic on Why God Made Him Limbless

Anugrah Kumar, Christian Post, Sep. 03, 2012
Evangelist Nick Vujicic, who spoke at Saddleback Church in Calif. on Sunday, was born with neither arms nor legs, and questioned God for eight years why it was so. The answer changed his life, and through him that of tens of thousands of others.

For the now 30-year-old Nick, founding president and CEO of the nonprofit organization Life Without Limbs, the most important thing in life was to understand why God made him without arms and legs.

Speaking at Pastor Rick Warren’s church in Lake Forest on Sunday evening, the inspirational speaker said he spent eight years asking God, “Why? Why was I born this way? I don’t understand how can You say You love me when You allow me to stay in this pain.”

Vujicic, who has been living in California since 2007, was born in Brisbane, Australia. His parents—Pastor Boris Vujicic and nurse Dushka Vujicic—were not given any medical explanation or warning about his birth with neither arms nor legs. But Nick got the answer to his desperate prayers.

John 9:1-3 spoke to him in a special way. The New Testament portion reads: “As he (Jesus) went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned,’ said Jesus, ‘but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.’”

The Life Without Limbs author described his feelings after reading these verses. “I got goosebumps on my skin I don’t even have,” he told the congregants. “And I had faith because I understood something. You see, all I wanted to know was that God knew what He was doing with me.”

By the age of 19, Nick started to fulfill his dream of being able to encourage other people and bring them the Gospel of Jesus through motivational speaking and sharing his testimony about how God changed his life and gave him a future and a hope.

The desire to have arms and legs has remained, Vujicic admitted. Initially, he thought, “Lord, if you give me arms and legs, I’ll go around the world and share your power with the world.” He said he still has ups and downs in life. “I am just like you.”

Vujicic said he has failed God every single day, but has relied on Philippians 1:6: “Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”

Vujicic recalled he and dozens of his Christian friends once prayed for 90 minutes for his arms and legs in a farm in a jungle in India. They made arms and legs with clay, and prayed it turn into flesh and bone. It didn’t happen, but he had peace in his heart as he saw an eagle soaring in the sky throughout those 90 minutes. He said it was as if God was smiling, and was happy he had the faith to pray.

“Please give me arms and legs. But if You don’t give me arms and legs, I trust You.” This has been Vujicic’s prayer. He said his commitment to Jesus is “to want His plan, and not my plan … even when I don’t understand.”

You are praying for something, but what if God says “no” to that? he asked. “Is He still God? Yes. Will He waste your pain? No.” He quoted Romans 8:28, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

Vujicic, who has traveled around the world, sharing his story with millions of people, said he’s grateful to God for saving him from the two biggest disabilities: sin and death.

He said when he was 10 he wanted to commit suicide, and wanted to see someone like him so that he wouldn’t be alone. Five years ago in California, he finally met a baby named Daniel, who too was born without arms and legs … “exactly like me.” “Not getting a miracle, I can be a miracle to Daniel … an older brother of Daniel his whole life … encourage him.”

Nick said if he truly lived without arms and legs throughout his life “just so I can hug Daniel in heaven, it’s all worth it.”

“I found the purpose of my existence, and also the purpose of my circumstance. There’s a purpose for why you’re in the fire,” he says on his ministry’s website. “If God can use a man without arms and legs to be His hands and feet, then He will certainly use any willing heart!”

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O Catolicismo Romano e o Livro de Gênesis

O catolicismo romano e o livro de génesis from Dennis Molinski

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Not Enough Monkeys in the Universe

 The DNA molecule stores specific information by lining up four chemical compounds in a very specific order similar to the way Morse Code lines up three symbols (a dot, a dash, and a space) to convey a unique message. The order in which these four chemicals are arranged not only determines the distinguishing characteristics of an animal, but also if the organism will grow into a man or a marigold. Biochemists around the world are involved in a major undertaking to decode the language written on the human DNA molecule. But where did this fantastic molecule come from?

Scientists have had great success splicing new sections of DNA onto the DNA molecule, duplicating sections of DNA, producing the building blocks of DNA from basic chemicals, and unraveling the DNA molecular code. All too often, it is inferred that because we can do these things, we know how the molecule originated. However, this is a total distortion of reality.

Science has not even come close to explaining how the DNA molecule could have originated without intelligent guidance (i.e. creation). Here are just a few of the problems naturalistic scientists need to solve before making any sweeping statements concerning life’s origin:

1. When the building blocks of DNA are mixed together, they do react and link up...but not in the spiral

shape of the DNA molecule. How did the shape originally occur when it doesn’t happen now?

2. Great amounts of energy would be required to produce a molecule as complicated and as large as even

the simplest segment of DNA. Yet the molecule is so energy sensitive that it easily comes apart.

Many mechanisms are in place within a cell to protect the DNA molecule from degeneration. How

could DNA have survived before all the protective mechanisms existed?

3. DNA is not a random, meaningless molecule. It carries specific and useful information needed for

the formation and development of an organism. Where did this coded information come from?

4. Specific proteins function to construct copies of the DNA, but DNA is required to create the

needed proteins. How could one exist without the other being there first?

There are many other major problems which have no answer aside from the acknowledgment of an intelligent designer. Yet, chance processes continue to be the only possibilities taught. It has been said that given enough time, anything can happen (such as a monkey typing the entire contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica). Rather than just accept such statements, let’s use the science of probability to ask, “How many monkeys (or how much time) would it take to randomly type just the title ‘Encyclopedia Britannica’?”

The odds of a monkey typing the ‘e’ of the title in the first place is 1 in 39 (the number of keys on a typical keyboard). The odds of getting an ‘e’ followed by an ‘n’ is (1/39 x 1/39). The odds of a monkey getting just the title ‘Encyclopedia Britannica’ correct (one time) is 1/1036. If these monkeys are extremely proficient and persistent typists and make one attempt every second for the entire assumed age of the universe (15 billion years) it would still require 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 monkeys. In other words, enough monkeys to cover every square foot of the Earth’s surface, stacked over one mile deep, making one attempt every second for 15 billion years MIGHT type the title right...once. But even if one monkey did type the title right once, how would we ever recognize it among billions of trillions of wrong ones?

The useful information coded into the simplest DNA molecule is unimaginably more complicated that the simple title ‘Encyclopedia Britannica’. The odds of the useful code found on the DNA molecule forming by chance processes is astronomically smaller. In actuality, it is an absolute impossibility. Science clearly reveals that life can not form by evolutionary processes. Why aren’t we teaching our children these facts of science?

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Como funcionam os métodos de datação

Como funcionam os métodos de datação from Dennis Molinski

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Light at the End of the Valley

By Maria

September 1, 2012

Have you ever faced something that seemed totally hopeless; you felt like there wasn’t any way out of your difficulties and everything looked lost? Or maybe you’re in one of those places right now where the situation seems impossible and it looks like this is going to go on and on, and there isn’t any hope in sight.

Maybe you seem all alone and feel like no one else is going through such intense, horrific, and painful circumstances, like you’re encircled on all sides with no place to run. You can’t seem to hear God speak to you and nothing seems to indicate that He’s there.

Maybe it would help to remember that there have been some pretty well-known people who have felt the same way—those who experienced great adversity. If you think I’m going to tell you that they slid by basically unscathed with great joy and victory in their hearts, no, I’m not, because that’s not what happened.

Here are a few examples of men in the Bible who suffered incredibly. We are given little glimpses into what they went through, but a few words on a page can scarcely convey the enormity of the struggles and battles that they had to fight.

We all know about Job. It wouldn’t hurt to go back and read the very vivid accounts of what he went through. He was in such anguish and distress that he bitterly blamed God for even letting him be born. He was at the point where he begged God to end his life.

Abraham is another one who could hardly bear the excruciating pain when God asked him to send away his firstborn son, Ishmael. It’s painful to even think about the indescribable agony he went through when he was faced with sacrificing Isaac, his son of hope, his son of promise, the one to carry on the family line, the one to support them in their old age, and the one he loved so very dearly.

I imagine Moses got pretty disheartened (to put it mildly) when the people he was giving his life to help turned against him and became vindictive and critical, constantly finding fault and barraging him with their grievances and assailing him with their verbal abuse. They leveled serious charges against him, repeatedly accusing him of bringing them into the wilderness to kill them, until at one point he cried out to God desperately, saying, “What am I going to do, Lord? These people are getting ready to stone me.”

David lost some of his sons, he lost his kingdom, he lost his health, and he lost a whole series of battles against his enemies. Try to imagine the torment and trauma he must have endured for long periods. You’re probably familiar with some of his feelings of woe and the despair in his writings in Psalms. Listen to this one: “Will the Lord turn away from us for ever? And isn’t He going to be kind to us any longer? Is His unfailing love gone permanently? Has His word come to nothing? Has He forgotten to be compassionate? Is He withholding His tender mercies because He’s angry with us?”[1] It sounds like he was at the end of his rope.

I think Jeremiah must have felt deeply discouraged. How could you have it any worse than this: Very influential people were plotting to kill him. He was rejected, he was mocked and despised, he was thrown in jail, and he was dumped into a well that had no water in it, only deep mud into which he sank.— Thank God, or that would have been the end of him! So there are always things to praise God for. But I have a feeling he must have gone through some major depression over all that, deeper than the pit he'd been thrown into and the mud he was mired in.

And Joseph! Poor Joseph! He must have faced intense discouragement and times of depression; after all, being sold into slavery by your own brothers is not something that you can lightly dismiss. But then, as soon as things began to look up, well, most of you know the story. He was unjustly thrown into prison with no hope of getting out. Hopeless. Helpless. Impossible.

Peter was evidently ready to give up his calling after he denied Jesus. Think about that for a while; what kind of feelings that must have brought with it. Having denied knowing his own Savior, how could he ever want to show his face in public again, much less be trusted as a leader of the early church?

Even Paul, who mostly tried to present his victories in his letters of encouragement to the churches, felt hopeless and despondent at times. Although in 2 Corinthians 4:8 Paul voiced the well-known verse, “We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed. We are perplexed, but not in despair,” this apparently was in his “good” times, or at least better times. Listen to the other side of the situation, in which Paul said, “We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life.”[2] It just shows that we can still have faith in Jesus even when things are so bad that it seems like it would be better not to even be alive.

These men are some of God’s greats. If they passed through such terrible anguish of spirit in their lives for God, why should we think it strange that God’s children today should have their times of desolation and even despair when they can’t see anything good coming from their lives? They can’t see the rewards. They can’t see the promises. It often just looks like failure.

Everyone goes through the valley of weeping and mourning at some point. David described it as the “valley of Baca,” meaning literally weeping, lamentations—a vale of tears.[3]

The key is that we go through it, and as we do, we can, as the Bible puts it, “make it a well.” It can become a place of refreshing springs.

In the previous two verses, David states that those who are praising God find their strength in Him. In their hearts are the ways of those who, passing through this valley of tears, make it a well.[4] We can tend to equate praising God with something we do when we feel all warm and happy and content, but one thing that all these “men of faith” have in common is that they continued to praise God through their valleys of Baca, their misery and suffering. They weren’t sitting around merrily singing little praise songs. They were in agony.

Sometimes they were enduring such intense suffering or despair that all they could do was cry out for the Lord’s mercy, but even that was a praise because it was acknowledging God’s total control and their faith in His mercy and power to deliver.

Verse 6 in the original text then goes on to tell us a beautiful secret. According to Strong's Concordance, the phrase that the King James translators translated as "the rain also filleth the pools" in the original Hebrew can also be translated as "The Teacher (referring to God, the Great Teacher) overshadows with blessings." What a beautiful interpretation, and how fitting it is.

So as we pass through this valley of tears and suffering and hardships, yet still praising Him, we can make that desolate valley of suffering into a spring of refreshing, and our Teacher overshadows us with blessings.

The water that becomes a fountain of refreshing can turn our journey of life—that would otherwise be gloomy and sad—into joy; turn our mourning into dancing, and give us comfort and beauty.[5] And later when we’ve come through the valley, we can look back with gratitude, realizing that these things have given enrichment and enhancement to our lives. Our Great Teacher will have enveloped us with priceless blessings of spiritual growth and a deeper understanding of Himself, and a heart that comes to resemble His own more and more.



[1] Psalm 77:7–9.


[2] 2 Corinthians 1:8 NIV.


[3] Psalm 84:6.


[4] Psalm 84:4–5.


[5] Psalm 30:11.



Copyright © 2012 The Family International.

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Proteins: Life’s Molecular Machines

Proteins are huge molecules made by linking together hundreds, or even thousands, of different amino acids like beads on a long necklace. These proteins are not found in random arrangements, but are specifically designed to carry out unique biological functions. In order to function properly, they must have exactly the right amino acids, in exactly the right positions, and be of exactly the right length. It is the specific sequence of the ‘beads’ on a protein chain that allows each one to form the perfect 3-dimensional configuration needed to perform the required functions within our bodies.

It is estimated that the human body contains over 200,000 different proteins.1 The following description of proteins is given by molecular biologist Michael Denton: “If a cell were magnified a thousand million times...in every direction we looked, we would see all sorts of robot-like machines. We would notice that these simplest of the functional components of the cell -- the protein molecules -- were astonishingly, complex pieces of molecular machinery, each one consisting of about three thousand individual atoms arranged in highly organized 3-D spatial configurations…the task of designing even one such molecular machine - that is, a single functioning protein molecule - would be completely beyond our capacity...”2

One example of a very common protein is the hemoglobin molecule. Hemoglobin is a protein in our red blood cells that transports oxygen throughout our bodies. The molecule is perfectly designed to transport the optimal amount of oxygen in exactly the right way. If just one of the 287 amino acids which make up the hemoglobin molecule is out of place, an often fatal disease called sickle-cell anemia results. Because of this misplacement of just 1 out of 287 specific amino acids, the defective hemoglobin molecules bind together when the amount of oxygen in the bloodstream becomes low. This in turn stretches the red blood cells into a sickle shape which cannot easily flow through small blood vessels.

If this is the consequence of the misplacement of just one amino acid out of 287; how could all of the very specific proteins needed by the first form of life have developed by random chance processes? The simplest known form of life has over 100 different (and specific) proteins. These are all formed from only L-type amino acids and are arranged in a very specific order by the DNA molecule. Yet in the words of John Horgan, “The DNA cannot do its work, including forming more DNA, without the help of proteins. In short, proteins cannot form without DNA, but neither can DNA form without proteins.” This is the classic chicken or egg mystery. You need both to be present simultaneously because one cannot form without the other.

Further complicating the process is the fact that all laboratory experiments simulating the conditions necessary for the formation of life produce a random mixture of 50:50 R and L stereotypes. The odds of just one protein forming (such as the 287 amino acid hemoglobin molecule) with all L stereotypes, could be compared to flipping a coin and getting “heads” 287 times in a row. This could statistically only happen only once in every 10124 tries. Most scientists agree that any specific event with odds greater than 1050 will never happen. It gets even more impossible, though, because proteins are not just random molecules, but need all the amino acids to be in a specific order to function correctly. The odds of getting the specific 100 proteins required for the simplest form of life, with all L stereotypes, and all in the specific order needed, is greater than 1/1010,000. Yet, a single human body uses not a mere 100, but 100,000 such specifically designed proteins!

These outlandish odds demonstrate the scientific impossibility of the formation of life by chance reactions. However, these problems are almost never presented in textbooks. Our children deserve better than an indoctrination which ignores these overwhelming problems.

1. James Perloff, Tornado in a Junkyard, Refuge, 1999, p. 66.

2. Michael Denton, Evolution:A theory in Crisis, Adler & Adler, p. 328. 3. John Horgan, “In the Beginning”, Scientific American, 2/91, p. 119.

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Witnessing

By David Brandt Berg

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“Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature” is not an option. It’s a commandment. The message is clear. There’s no denying it or excusing ourselves. We must simply have the faith to obey, even if it means going out not knowing whither we go.1

Jesus made it quite clear that all Christians are ordained to preach the Gospel when He said in John 15:16, “Ye have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit.”

Therefore, it is not just a nice thing to do when we feel like it or can find the time, but it is the God-given job and responsibility of all of His true children, as Paul expressed, “For though I preach the Gospel, I have nothing to glory of: for necessity is laid upon me: yea, woe is unto me if I preach not the Gospel.”2

This is why we devote our time and energies to preaching the Gospel to every creature and winning their souls to Jesus Christ and His service for others.3 That’s what we’re here for: to win people to Christ! For “herein is My Father glorified, that ye bearmuch fruit; so shall ye be My disciples.”4

Regardless of nationality, country, color, or creed, the heart of man is the same the world over, and his heartaches and sorrows and sins and pains and fear of death are the same. His longings, loves, and hunger for God and His truth, for joy and happiness and peace of mind, are God-created, and the same in men the world over.

Even though many people are seeking genuine love, they seldom, if ever, find it. For there are never enough of God’s people who are willing to show them His real love. As Jesus Himself said, “The harvest truly is plenteous, but the laborers are few. Therefore,” He commanded, “pray ye the Lord of the harvest, that He will send forth laborers into His harvest.”5

Only the supernatural, miracle-working power of the Holy Spirit of God Himself can do the job and win their hearts, bring them to a decision, and cause them to be bornagain as new creatures. Therefore, God has promised an anointing of this very power to His witnesses to help them lead others to Him. “Ye shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you. And ye shall be witnesses unto Me.”6 The purpose of the power is for witnessing.

We’ve got nothing but God, so let’s show them His Spirit! As Paul said, “My speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.”7 It’s this fiery anointing that counts.

If you haven’t got the fire, I don’t care how “good” a witness you are; it’s just cold, dead icicles of facts and figures, and you’ll never set anyone else on fire without it! As Jesus said, “Without Me, ye can do nothing.”8

But if you do your part, and “abide in the vine,” yielding yourself to Him in submission and humility, then the Lord will do His part, and inspire you, or fill you with His Spirit, so you can “bear much fruit”—newborn babes into the kingdom of God.9

As a young preacher with real love for the lost and a sincere desire to try to win the lost the churches had failed to reach, I tried everything I could think of, dreamed up every method I could imagine to try to carry the Gospel to them. I preached on the streets and in the parks; I sang at the top of my voice; I showed pictures and movies anywhere I possibly could—to reach people with the message of God’s love! But it was still the meeting method and the mass evangelism approach, which only had moderate success.

Then, one day I found out the exciting truth and thrilling fact that you could win more souls witnessing individually to individual people wherever you could find them, anywhere, any time, all the time, everywhere to everybody! You have to search them out individually, personally, with tender loving care and personal attention. Jesus said that the good shepherd “calleth his own sheep by name (personally, individually) and leadeth them out.”10

As children of God, you should have love and compassion for everyone—young or old, rich or poor, strong or weak, even if you don’t like them—“every creature!” However, God’s Spirit will lead you especially to those who really need your loving help, and who will respond in appreciation, just as the Spirit will also lead them to you.

God’s Spirit goes where there are open and receptive hearts that are hungry. He seeks the low and the humble and the contrite heart, but resists the proud. His Word says, “The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich (or full) He hath sent empty away. … For God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble.”11

In leading people to the Lord, you often have to inspire their faith in you before they can believe in God. You are their link with God. As Jesus said, “He that receiveth whomsoever I send receiveth Me; and he who receives Me receives Him who sent Me.”12

You must establish points of contact with them. There must be something in common in order for people to communicate. Use the kind of language that will win them. If it takes strong language to get the point across, use it! If it takes sweeter language, use that. Ask God for wisdom.13

One of the most needed abilities in witnessing is adaptability: being able to beanything to reach anybody and to become all things to all men. This tactic of adaptability was largely responsible for much of the apostle Paul’s soul-winning success. He said, “To the Jews, I became as a Jew; that I might gain (win) the Jews; to them that are under the law, as under the law, that I might gain them. ... I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.”14

Sometimes, all people need is for someone to listen, and that’s half the job of being a witness. Let’s not fail them in showing them we’re willing to listen to their troubles. Often they’re really hungriest for fellowship and companionship and real love and sympathy, just somebody to talk to, to relieve their loneliness and to feel like somebody cares and shares their misery and their needs and problems.

(Prophecy:) “Can you not hear the heartcry of their bosom? To love is to weep with them, to cry with them, to suffer with them that suffer, and to feel the agony of heart with them whose hearts are broken!”

Originally published May 1975. Updated and republished September 2012.
Read by Peter Amsterdam.


1 Hebrews 11:8.

2 1 Corinthians 9:16. See also Ezekiel 3:17–19.

3 Mark 16:15.

4 John 15:8.

5 Matthew 9:37–38.

6 Acts 1:8.

7 1 Corinthians 2:4–5.

8 John 15:5.

9 See John 15:1–8.

10 John 10:3.

11 Psalm 34:18; Luke 1:53; 1 Peter 5:5.

12 John 13:20.

13 James 1:5.

14 1 Corinthians 9:20, 22.

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Obama's America: Waiting for Blowback

Posted: 01 Sep 2012 03:45 AM PDT By Nicolas J.S. Davies, Huffington Post, Aug. 30, 2012 The United States has suffered three widely acknowledged military disasters since the end of the Second World War: in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. The American public responded to each crisis by electing new leaders with a mandate to end the wars and avoid new ones. But in each case, our new leaders failed to make the genuine recommitment to peace and diplomacy that was called for. Instead, they allayed the fears of the public by moving American war-making farther into the shadows, deploying the CIA and special operations forces in covert operations and proxy wars, sowing seeds of violence and injustice that would fester for decades and often erupt into conflict many years later. Six months after taking office, President Eisenhower signed an armistice agreement to end the Korean War. But three weeks later, he unleashed the CIA’s first covert operation, to overthrow the elected government of Iran. The nationalization of Iran’s oil industry was reversed and U.S. oil companies gained a substantial share of Iran’s oil production. Problem solved, right? Not exactly—the U.S. coup and its support for the Shah’s despotic rule led to the 1979 Iranian Revolution and a hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy. Now the long-term breakdown of diplomatic relations between the United States and Iran threatens to explode into a new American war. A year later, the CIA followed up on its “success” in Iran by removing another elected leader, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman of Guatemala. The coup rescued United Fruit Company’s ownership of 42% of the agricultural land in Guatemala from Arbenz’s modest efforts at land reform, but the 42-year civil war that followed killed at least 250,000 people. The U.S. defeat in Vietnam led to ten years of relative peace, in which the U.S. avoided open warfare anywhere in the world. But once again, this concealed what senior U.S. military officers have called the “disguised, quiet, media-free” approach to war in Central America and Afghanistan. Proxy forces armed with American weapons and supported by small numbers of American “advisers” once again plunged millions of people’s lives into chaos. In El Salvador and Nicaragua, the political parties the U.S. fought in the 1980s have eventually won elections and come to power anyway. And in Afghanistan, mujaheddin that the U.S. armed and supported in the 1980s produced the most dramatic act of “blowback” ever on September 11th 2001, plunging America into a decade or more of war, economic crisis and global chaos that we have yet to find our way out of. President Obama fulfilled the U.S. commitment to withdraw from Iraq that the Maliki government wrung out of the Bush administration, and he stopped the CIA from kidnapping people and bundling them off to Guantanamo. But even after his much-vaunted “withdrawal” from Afghanistan, there will still be twice as many U.S. troops there as when he took office. And he halted the parade of men in orange jump suits stumbling off American planes into the tropical sunshine in Cuba, not by restoring the rule of law, but by ordering the extra-judicial execution of terrorism suspects—a national policy of cold-blooded murder. Not a week goes by without news of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan or Yemen, but the U.S. also conducts assassinations by helicopter-borne special forces like the ones who killed Osama Bin Laden. The former head of Special Operations Command (SOCOM), Admiral Eric Olson, told an Aspen Institute conference that SOCOM conducts a dozen such operations every night in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The total number of night raids in Afghanistan escalated from twenty per month in early 2009 to over a thousand per month two years later, and senior officers admit that at least half of them target the wrong person or house. Sixty thousand U.S. special operations forces now conduct assassinations, night-raids, training missions, joint operations and exercises in 120 countries around the world, twice as many as when Obama came to power, with deployments in about 70 countries at any given time. In The Politics of Heroin, Alfred McCoy described how the CIA formed secret alliances with Nationalist Chinese generals in Burma and Thailand, Corsican gangsters in Marseilles, Afghan warlords, Haitian military officers, Manuel Noriega in Panama and Nicaraguan Contra commanders. In every case, the CIA’s partners exploited their impunity as U.S. allies to become major players in the global drug trade. Now former Mexican special forces trained at Fort Bragg and Fort Benning run the Zetas drug cartel, and the new police chief installed by a U.S. offensive in Kandahar province in Afghanistan in 2011 reportedly earns $60 million a year from opium smuggling. The current expansion of U.S. special forces to conduct covert and proxy warfare sacrifices U.S. long term interests in peace, stability and the rule of law for short-term political gain, just as when U.S. “advisers” were sent to Vietnam in the 1950s and to Central America and Afghanistan in the 1980s. But which of the 120 countries where U.S. special forces now operate will become the next Vietnam or Iran or Guatemala? Could it be India, which holds 50 joint training exercises a year with U.S. forces, the most of any country in the world, as it battles separatists in Kashmir and Assam and a “people’s war” by Naxalites or Maoists in 7 other provinces? Or what about Uganda, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Djibouti or Kenya, where U.S. forces are training African Union “peacekeepers” to fight the Al-Shabab militia in Somalia? Or the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic or South Sudan, where U.S. special forces have been sent to track down Joseph Kony but are suspected of planning a covert war against Sudan? The pervasiveness and perversity of America’s military madness could produce severe “blowback” from any one of the 120 countries where U.S. special forces now operate. So how will we respond when the inevitable blowback comes? Will we once again fall in line as our leaders lash out at some new enemy? Or will we know enough of our own history to look in the mirror and recognize the real source of the violence and chaos that our irresponsible leaders keep unleashing on the world?

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Book on Bin Laden Killing Contradicts U.S. Account

Posted: 31 Aug 2012 03:43 AM PDT

By Eric Schmitt, NY Times, August 29, 2012

WASHINGTON—A new first-person account of the Navy SEALs raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan last year contradicts the Obama administration’s previous descriptions of the mission, raising questions about whether the leader of Al Qaeda posed a clear threat to the commandos who fired on him.


According to the account in the book, “No Easy Day,” which will go on sale next week under the pseudonym Mark Owen, Bin Laden was shot in the head when he peered out of his bedroom door into a top-floor hallway of his compound as the SEALs rushed up a narrow stairwell toward him.


The author, whom military officials have identified as Matt Bissonnette, 36, said he was directly behind the “point man,” or lead commando, as the SEALs followed Bin Laden into the room, where they found him on the floor at the foot of his bed with “blood and brains spilled out of the side of his skull,” and two women wailing over his body, which was “still twitching and convulsing.”


The author said he and another member then trained their weapons on Bin Laden’s chest and fired several rounds, until he was motionless. The SEALs later found two unloaded weapons—an AK-47 rifle and a Makarov pistol—near the bedroom door.


In the administration’s version of events, the lead commando’s shot in the stairwell missed, and the SEALs confronted Bin Laden in the bedroom, killing him with one shot to the chest and another above the left eye.


The new book’s account, if true, raises the question of whether Bin Laden posed a clear threat in his death throes.


Military officials have said that the SEALs made split-second decisions, fearing that Bin Laden, though unarmed, could have exploded a suicide vest or other booby trap. Critics, however, say that while the military has described the raid as a “kill or capture” mission, there was virtually no chance the SEALS would bring Bin Laden back alive.


The Pentagon and the White House declined to comment on the new account, reflecting at least in part the administration’s reluctance to reopen an issue at a time when Republicans have accused the administration of exploiting the raid’s success to burnish President Obama’s national security credentials during his re-election campaign.


Elsewhere in the book, the author states that members of the SEALs unit were not “huge fans of Obama,” although they respected the commander in chief for authorizing the operation. “We just got this guy re-elected,” the author quotes another member of the unit, identified by the pseudonym Walt, as saying.


The Associated Press and The Huffington Post reported the new account of Bin Laden’s death on Wednesday after purchasing copies of the book. The New York Times obtained a copy later on Wednesday.


In response to a crush of news media attention, criticism and consumer demand, Dutton, the imprint of Penguin that acquired the book in secret, said this week that it was moving up the book’s planned Sept. 11 release date by one week, to Tuesday. Demand for the 336-page book has been enormous; it is currently No. 1 on the best-seller lists at Amazon.com and BN.com.

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