Posted 8:36 PM by Hill
Quo Vadis, President Carter?
I confess to being a fan of former President Jimmy Carter. He has made some significant differences in my life. He is the first identifiably Christian President to serve during my lifetime. He is the person whose example convinced me to become involved with Habitat for Humanity while I lived in another Texas city. I was super impressed with the way he got Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin to agree on something that I never thought Arabs would agree on - the continued existence of Israel. President Carter has written a piece for the Washington Post which you can find at this link.
Mr. Carter says that the U.S. and its supposed new direction in foreign policy is troubling, but he has, as far as I can see, so far managed to understand only one side of the story. Only my love for this fine and upright man prevents me from treating him more harshly here. Mr. Carter has managed either to misunderstand or to misconstrue almost everything that President Bush has so far managed to to accomplish in the area of at least attempting to ensure that the country is safe from further attacks by Moslem extremists. Mr. Carter points out that the U.S. was formerly "admired almost universally as the preeminent champion of human rights", but lately has "become the foremost target of respected international organizations concerned about these basic principles of democratic life". While he is correct about the fact that the U.S. was once a paragon of human rights and a beacon to the world, we have not held that position for many years - at least two decades. And the "respected international organizations" he refers to are organizations like Amnesty International, which has a firmly stated goal fo abolishing capital punishment in the world, and which manages to garner financial support from countries like Russia and China by attacking the U.S. in this area. In the past, this organization has shown that it has interlinked contacts with other "rights" organizations such as Greenpeace and the lunatic fringe Earth First! and The Animal Liberation Front.
But I digress. Mr. Carter then goes on to say that the U.S. has detained its own citizens as enemy combatants without charging them with a crime or allowing them access to legal counsel. This is true. Nevertheless, if you are a U.S. citizen and are taken prisoner in combat while in the service of a foreign power, you can have your citizenship stripped from you, and you can also be prosecuted for treason. Perhaps this is a reason to watch these individuals more closely. If you are likely to be tried for treason, you are certainly a flight risk, and so far the only one tried in Federal court was not only allowed access to counsel, he was allowed full access to the U.S. legal system, so Mr. Carter's concerns seem a bit premature. He also notes that hundres of Taliban fighters who are not Afghans are being held under similar circumstances at our naval base in Cuba. The U.S. government has no duty under international law to provide these individuals with access to lawyers or very much of anything else. They may legally be held until the conflict is over, which may be ten or twenty years from now. Mr. Carter may not like it, and it certainly goes against the grain for America to do such a thing, but please remember that these people are perfectly unrepentant. They are all determined to go back to fighting us as soon as they are released, and the U.S. is under no obligation to allow them to do so. Additionally, it is not true, as Mr. Carter asserts, that these actions are comparable to those by despots the U.S. has opposed over the years. Let's start with the fact that despots liek Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro do not require that a person actually attack their government in order to merit this treatment. It's only necessary to get in the way of the despot sufficiently to be noticed. Oh - and almost every one of the people so treated by Hussein and Castro was a citizen of their country, not a soldier opposing them.
Mr. Carter also states that there is currently no danger from Iraq and that it is necessary for a country to do tests of its nuclear devices in order to be able to later produce them and use them. This was probably true when he was President, but Mr. Carter may not realize that those tests may now be simulated using computers. He also says that there is an urgent need for the UN to enforce unrestricted inspections in Iraq. This is probably true, but unrestricted inspections will not be allowed in Iraq. That's why Mr. Hussein kicked out the inspectors who wer already present in Iraq. He didn't want unrestricted inspections. He also says that the U.S. has abandoned any sponsorship of substantivenegotiations between Israel and the Palestinians when there have never been any substantive negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The Israelis have negotiated ardently with them, as with other governments, but the Palestinians have never given in on a single point. They don’t really want to negotiate. They want to kill Jews. On this point, it is difficult to understand why Mr. Carter doesn't see the point. The entire history of Isrel and the "Palestinians" is that they have never negotiated anything meaningful between them, primarily because Yasser Arafat has never allowed any real negotiations. Israel is in the positon of trying to fight terrorism in its midst while simultaneously protecting the civil rights of the "Palestinians", many of whom are Israeli citizens.
Mr. Carter's final statement is telling: "It is crucial that the historical and well-founded American commitments prevail: to peace, justice, human rights, the environment and international cooperation." Personally, I think that the former President's stated wish will come to pass, and in fact I feel that it has never really strayed far from those ideals he espouses. Everything he says in his article begs the question - what are we to do in the face of an entier population of individuals whose most fervent desire is to annihilate us and our entire way of life, including the America-bashing countries and politicians of Europe. Mr. Carter offers many complaints, but no real solutions. If he wants foreign policy or military deployments to change, why doesn't he offer an alternative to what is being done - that is, an alternative that does not invite genocidal attack from Moslem extremists. I mean, we always have the option to simply spread our figurative legs and wait to see what happens. Fortunately most Americans are not suicidal, and neither, I think, is Mr. Carter. As I’ve said before, what we really need is another Charles Martel to defend us. If you’ve read the article about more personal attacks from al-Qaida possibly happening at some point (like drive-by shootings and hostage executions, for instance), perhaps you will understand a little better what we are up against. These guys don’t have political demands to make. They want us dead. All of us. As soon as they can arrange it. If we are to prevent them from killing us all, then we have to devise strategies that will accomplish that and still leave us with our self-respect. It’s a tough call. I’ve never been gladder that I wasn’t President than I am at the moment.

Posted 9:54 PM by Hill
What is a Logical Response to the Terrorist Threat?

Terrorism it seems, has assumed a life of its own in the U.S. We have all seen how devastating terrorists can be to us and our way of life, but we don't really know what to do about it. It's sort of like the problem of world hunger or the millions of orphans who are present among us. I have spoken with several folks who upon realizing the enormity of the attack on us, did things that in an ordinary world would be considered insane - or at the very least heavily compulsive. One man cleaned all his firearms; a woman called everyone she knew on a daily basis, even though she knew they were not in danger. I collected together all my survival supplies, called all my children and E-mailed all my other relatives. It was almost as though I felt that my family would have to live on what we had stored at the moment until the country came to its senses (which, by the way, does not seem to have happened as yet), or perhaps we would have to travel to a far country where things like matches and permanent dwellings were not known. It's very difficult to know what to do when your nation is attacked. There must have been similar feelings in the minds of those who were around when Peral Harbor was attacked so long ago. It seems long ago to me because I would not be born for almost two years after the attack.
There is a feeling of violation that transcends most other feelings and which drives lesser matters from the mind. The feeling and its confusing and frustrating aspects are still very perceptible to me. I can recapture them all involuntarily by simply watching video of the events in New York and Washington. There is not really any separation or distance that forces the reactions to the background. I can remember feeling this way about the death of my father for twenty years following the day we buried him. Anything that brought him to mind would bring along with it a sense of loss and langorous mourning for the past, which was never to be recovered. Perhaps Thomas Wolfe was right - you can't go home again. There have been other situations in my life that have evoked the same sort of response from me and which seemed as hopelessly closed off as that one does. Neverhteless, what happened last September is of a different kind - when an event like that occurs, there are hundreds of millions of people who feel something akin to what you feel. It isn't just that we haven't been attacked on our own soil since 1814; it's that we felt invulnerable and untouchable (apparently primarily because of our overweening arrogance). What happened crushed that attitude so completely that it may never regrow again.
One of the things that has been most obvious is that God has been the subject of increased scrutiny from Americans. In my opinion, this can only be good. Any time the public decides that God is important enough to stop consuming, driving to work, fornicating and creating wealth for themselves and their posterity to consider the role that God should have in their lives, this is a good thing. The mode of transfer for this increased notice was abrupt, and I have discovered a review about a PBS program I didn't watch - mainly becuase I wasn't aware of it - whose title is Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero. This article, which gives a half-hearted review of a PBS examinaiton of the idea that God may have failed us on September eleventh, is something to behold. Since I didn't see the actual program, I can only judge from the review, which offers no hope at all. There are the predictable post-modern questions asked by the PBS documentary - Does God exist; If He exists, then why did He permit this to happen; why did so many courageous young firefighters and police officers lose their lives in the attack? Why were so many families left without visible means of support because the father was killed in the attack. Those with the post-modern view won't believe fervently in God unless He reduces himself to an observable phenomenon. They conclude that He either could not prevent the attack, or that He chose not to prevent it. This is much the same problem faced by religious Jews following Word War II. If you accept that God controls everything, then you must accept that the holocaust was in His will. Many, many Jews simply could not accept this idea. They either rejected God entirely or concluded that He is is irrelevant.
PBS's conclusion is predictable; they raise questions, but avoid answering them because the answers disturb the prevailing attitude toward God. They fail utterly to find a path through the doubts and find anything substantive at all. One of the things contained in the review is a comment from a minister in my own denomination - the Episcopal Church - who says that faced with the need to harden ourselves and accept the difficult truth of the attack, it has been hard to open up to God at all. : "We're sensitive to the changes around us, but we know we have to survive and [we] have numbed ourselves, hardened ourselves. To be vulnerable is very difficult right now. And to be open to faith takes vulnerability and some people aren't willing to do that." This is simple dissemulation. Christians grow closer to God in difficult times because He helps them live through the travail. Those who do not grow closer to Him during difficult times often find that they feel even more alienated than non-Christians in the same situation. There are those among us, who have recently been identified as "Tranzis", or Transnational Progressives, who see an occurrence like the September 11th attacks as wasteful and senseless; it solves no problems, it feeds no poor people, and it does not serve the common good as they conceive it to be.
So how should we react to the attacks? Here's a list of suggested reactions, in no particular order.
We should mourn the loss of lives in the attacks.
We should pray for those who work to make us safe.
We should feel anger focused on the terrorists and those who support them in any way.
We should want to end the conflict by destroying the terrorists.
We should support those in charge at the local, state and national levels who are working to overcome the almost unbelievable difficulties and protect us.
We should suport those in uniform who fight and otherwise serve our country
During the anniversary observances, we should weep with sorrow and ask God to save us from the Evil One.
We should go to our beds every night believing that our government and our God will protect us.
We should all remember that as Thomas Jefferson said, "The tree of liberty must be watered occasionally by the blood of patriots. It is its natural manure."
We should keep our chins up and work toward a safer nation and a richer future for all Americans. We should also remember that The President of the United States has asked all Americans to give service to the nation during the month of September.

May the Lord Bless you all and hold you in the palm of His hand.