The Last Crusade

“DEATH TO AMERICA”

“KILL THE CHRISTIAN CONVERTS”

by

Paul L. Williams, Ph.D.

Welcome to American occupied Afghanistan and the latest results of the war on terror.

Thousands of students in northern Afghanistan today burned an effigy of the pope while protesting against attempts by Christian denominations to spread the gospel and to convert Muslims to Christianity.

At the same time, the Afghan government, under President Hamid Karzai, suspended operations of US-based World Church Service and Norwegian Church Aid after a local television station accused the groups of proselytism, which is a crime in the conservative Muslim country.

Students in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif shouted “Death to America” and set ablaze an effigy of Pope Benedict XVI, in the first public reaction to the allegations. “We are demonstrating to express our disgust towards the activities of Christians trying to covert Afghanis,” Abdul Karim, an Afghan student, told the press.

‘We want the government of Afghanistan to find those people, try them and punish them. We want both the converted and those who have converted them to be brought to justice and punished,’ Mr. Karim said.

Converting from Islam to another religion is punishable by death under Afghan law.

The Afghan constitution is based on traditional sharia law, which strictly bans religious conversion.

The government is investigating the two organizations after the little-known Noorin TV channel showed footage of men reciting Christian prayers in Farsi and undergoing baptism. The television station said the men were Afghans who converted to Christianity as a result of the proselytizing efforts of the two groups.

Both groups have denied the accusations.

The footage produced irate reactions from conservative circles, including Afghan lawmakers who called upon the country’s security chiefs for an explanation last week.

Former Afghan interior minister Mohammad Hanif Atmar, who resigned on Sunday over a Taleban rocket attack directed at a peace conference, told parliament that two of the men shown in the TV footage have been taken into custody and will face the death penalty.

PRIEST LATEST VICTIM IN CHRISTIAN KILLINGS

By

Paul L. Williams, Ph.D.

A Roman Catholic bishop has been stabbed to death in southern Turkey. The incident marked the latest in a string of attacks on Christians since the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma, AKP) gained control of the government in 2002.

The AKP was formed and remains under the control of Fethullah Gulen, who has been called “the most dangerous Islamist on planet earth.”

Gulen, who has amassed more than $25 billion in financial assets, resides within a 45 acre fortress in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania.

Bishop Luigi Padovese, the pope’s apostolic vicar in Anatolia, was attacked in his home in the Mediterranean port of Iskenderun.

The suspected assassin is the bishop’s Muslim driver who had worked for him for the past four-and-a-half years.

NTV television said the priest had died in a hospital.

There was no immediate word from the Vatican.

Other attacks on Catholic clerics in Turkey have captured international headlines.killing is the latest in a string of attacks in recent years on Christians in Turkey, where Christians make up less than 1 percent of the 70 million population.

In February 2006, an Italian Catholic priest was shot to death in his church in Trabzon by a youth who was angered over the caricatures of the Muslim prophet in Danish newspapers.

In December 2007, a 19 year-old stabbed a Catholic priest outside a church in Izmir. According to newspaper reports, the Muslim assailant, who had been arrested, admitted that he had been influenced by a recent television program that depicted Christian missionaries as infiltrators who take advantage of Islamic people.

The same year, a group of men entered a Bible-publishing house in the central Anatolian city of Malatya and killed three Christians, including a German national.

The five alleged killers are now standing trial for murder.

The killings — in which the victims were tied up and had their throats slit — drew international condemnation and added to Western concerns about whether Turkey can protect its religious minorities.

Roman Catholics also have had their property confiscated by the government. Many of the churches have been transformed into mosques.

Christians in Turkey now constitute less than one half of one percent of the country’s population. 99% of the population are now Muslim – - 75% Sunni and 24% Shiite.

Less than a century ago, Christians dominated the intellectual and commercial life of the Levant, comprising more than a fifth of the population.

Under the AKP, Turkey has transformed from a secular state into an Islamic country with 85,000 active mosques – - one for every 350- citizens – - the highest number per capita in the world, 90,000 imams, more imams than teachers and physicians – - and thousands of state-run Islamic schools.

Abdullah Gul, Turkey’s first Islamist President, is a Gulen disciple along with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Yusuf Ziya Ozcan, the head of Turkey’s Council of Higher Education.

Despite the rhetoric of European Union accession, Turkey has transferred its alliance from Europe and the United States to Russia and Iran. It has moved toward friendship with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria and created a pervasive anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, and anti-America animus throughout the populace.


WKRG.com News

CREATING NEW JOBS IN OBAMA-LAND: EXPORTING ISLAMIC TERRORISTS

Despite the name he acquired from his father, an immigrant from Syria, Hammami was every bit as Alabaman as his mother, a warm, plain-spoken woman who sprinkles her conversation with blandishments like “sugar” and “darlin’.” Brought up a Southern Baptist, Omar went to Bible camp as a boy and sang “Away in a Manger” on Christmas Eve. As a teenager, his passions veered between Shakespeare and Kurt Cobain, soccer and Nintendo. In the thick of his adolescence, he was fearless, raucously funny, rebellious, contrarian. “It felt cool just to be with him,” his best friend at the time, Trey Gunter, said recently. “You knew he was going to be a leader.”

A decade later, Hammami has fulfilled that promise in the most unimaginable way. Some 8,500 miles from Alabama, on the eastern edge of Africa, he has become a key figure in one of the world’s most ruthless Islamist insurgencies. That guerrilla army, known as the Shabab, is fighting to overthrow the fragile American-backed Somali government. The rebels are known for beheading political enemies, chopping off the hands of thieves and stoning women accused of adultery. With help from Al Qaeda, they have managed to turn Somalia into an ever more popular destination for jihadis from around the world.

FORGET SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE

thelastcrusade.org

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi thanked religious left groups for their help in ensuring the passage of ObamaCare.

She specifically cited the United Methodist Church for its tireless efforts in lobbying Congress to “Say yes to health care reform.”

“To the American Medical Association, the Catholic Health Association, the United Medical — the United Methodist Church, and Voices of America’s Children. From A to Z — they are sending a clear message to Members of Congress: Say yes to health care reform,” Ms. Pelosi proclaimed from the House floor.

On her website, Ms. Pelosi lists major pro-Obamacare groups to which she expresses thanks for the new legislation. The list includes the National Council of Churches, the United Methodist Board of Church and Society, and Faithful Reform in Health Care, a coalition that included Mainline Protestant agencies.

“We are not finished,” explained Jim Winkler of the United Methodist lobby office. “There is more work to be done in the weeks, months and years ahead to fulfill the need for health care around the globe.”

Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, comments: “The Religious Left version of Jesus’ love is an unceasingly expanding federal welfare state that coercively seizes assets from one segment of society for redistribution to other segments, according to coarse political calculations, and with all the efficiency and compassion for which mammoth state bureaucracies are renowned.”

Tooley continues: “Obamacare, with its frustrating maintenance of private insurance, is an insufficient but a hoped for first step towards the eradication of private medicine and, the Religious Left inwardly hopes, ultimately of the private economy and private charity. After all, there is no salvation outside Big Government.”

NO POSTHUMOUS MIRACLE FROM POPE

VATICAN DELAYS BEATIFICATION

By

Paul L. Williams, Ph.D.

A French nun’s return to illness will delay the canonization of Pope John Paul II.

Pope Benedict XVI placed his predecessor on the fast track for sainthood, and there had been speculation John Paul would be beatified on October 16, the anniversary of his election to the papacy, the Guardian reports. The Vatican has now scheduled the canonization of six saints on October 17, which bars the beatification of his predecessor the day before.

To become a saint requires evidence of posthumous miracles. Sister Marie Simon-Pierre said three years ago she had been relieved of the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease after praying to John Paul, who also suffered from Parkinson’s.

Now, a Polish newspaper, Rzeczpospolita, reports Simon-Pierre symptoms have returned. The newspaper also said her doctor, on his Web site, suggested she did not suffer from Parkinson’s but from a disease with the same symptoms that is known to go into remission.

Vatican sources told the Guardian a panel had been scheduled to meet in April to examine Simon-Pierre’s reported cure.

Other factors may block John Paul II’s path to sainthood. During his reign, the Banco Ambrosiano affair took place – - an affair by which the Vatican Bank with the aid of the international Mafia bilked billions from Italian investors.

The late pope also presided over the plague of pediophilia which drove hundreds of dioceses into bankruptcy and caused massive declines in church attendance and candidates for the priesthood.

John Paul II’s body already has been exhumed for examination by Vatican physicians for rell-tale signs of incorruptibility – - a sure sign of a saint. When the body of John XXIII was exhumed for examination more than a decade ago, the venerable pontif’s nose fell off.

Beatification is a papal decree that permits Catholics to venerate a person after his or her death. It is a preliminary step toward canonization, although it does not guarantee sainthood. Such a decree bestows the title “Blessed” to a departed soul.

To receive beatification, the candidate must perform a post-mortem miracle. Regarding such miracles, Father Peter Gumpel, a member of the Vatican’s saint-making commission,says; “We do not accept any cure as a miracle unless we are scientifically, humanly certain that the cure has been instantaneous, not expected, and complete.”

SATAN ALIVE AND WELL IN HAITI

thelastcrusade.org

Haiti’s supreme Voodoo leader and hundreds of his followers intend to wage “war” upon Christian Evangelicals after they attacked a Voodoo ceremony in which chickens were beheaded to honor the Haitians killed in last month’s massive earthquake.

The attack on the Voodoo ritual within Port-au-Prince’s sprawling Cite Soleil slum came amid rising religious tensions, as Protestant Evangelicals and other denominations vie for converts in the wake of the earthquake that killed more than 200,000.

Some of the converts say they abandoned Voodoo to embrace fundamental Christianity because, they believe, God caused the earthquake to give them a spiritual warning.

“It will be war — open war,” Max Beauvoir, supreme head of Haitian voodoo, announced to the press at his home and temple outside the capital.

“It’s unfortunate that at this moment where everybody’s suffering that they have to go into war. But if that is what they need, I think that is what they’ll get,” Beauvoir said.

The quake also left more than a million homeless and left much of the capital and surrounding areas in ruins in this Caribbean nation of more than nine million.

Police said a Christian pastor urged followers to attack the Cite Soleil ceremony, resulting in a crowd of people throwing rocks at the voodoo followers.

Rosemond Aristide, a police inspector in Cite Soleil, said he had since spoken with the pastor, who agreed to allow voodoo ceremonies to take place there.

But he would not explain why no arrests were made nor provide further details.

Beauvoir accuses the Christian denominations of using post-quake aid supplies such as food and medicine to try to “buy souls.”

“I would like to see each one of them tied up in ropes and thrown in the sea, and I hope the best of them will be able to catch a plane and run away and leave in peace,” the voodoo priest said.

Asked whether he would encourage voodoo followers to respond with the same kind of violence, Beauvoir said he would.

“They have not been aggressors,” he said of his followers. “I think they are aggressed (attacked), and they will have to answer with the same type of aggression. I don’t mean for (Evangelicals) to die. I am not out to kill them.”

More than 50% of Haiti’s population practiced voodoo in some form, though many are thought to also follow other religious beliefs at the same time.

Voodoo evolved out of beliefs slaves from West Africa brought with them to Haiti. It is now deeply rooted in Haitian culture.

A voodoo priest named Boukman has been credited with setting off the country’s slave rebellion in the late 18th century and the creation of the world’s first black republic.