Pope Again Appeals to Reason

Speaking to participants at an international symposium on natural law on February 12, Pope Benedict xvi continued his unswerving challenge to secularism in his determined crusade to return Europe to its “religious roots.” He appealed to the assembled for a religious reaction through “creative reason” against society’s intellectual approach based exclusively on science, which he declared has created “dangerous problems.” He appealed for a return to law based on “norms that precede any human law and as such they cannot be repealed by anyone.”

Losing the War of Words

Recently cited official memos indicate that the United States has, in effect, lost the war of words with Islamic terrorists. Senior personnel in the White House, State Department and Department of Homeland Security are shunning the use of any term that links Islamic terrorists with either terms “Islamic” or “terror.” The fashionable terms adopted in official circles are “extremists” or “resistance movement.” This is one step from the term “freedom fighters” employed by liberals in the past as a label to describe the terrorist gangs of the ’60s and ’70s. Oh, for the days when we called a spade a spade!

Global Warming Hoax?

Experienced climatologists are increasingly putting the challenge to the notion that the planet is being heated up by human activity. Canadian climatologist Timothy Ball reminded the world that only 30 years ago we were being warned that global cooling was the big risk. How the wheel turns. Politicians, academics journalists and their left-wing fellow travelers have all jumped on the anti-capitalist, anti-industry, anti-U.S. bandwagon since then to turn the pseudoscience of global warming into “fact.”

Howard Tells It Like It Is

“If I was running al Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and pray, as many times as possible, for a victory not only for Obama, but also for the Democrats,” Australian Prime Minister John Howard said on the Nine Network’s Sunday, referring to Sen. Barack Obama’s plan to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq by March next year. The hue and cry from the left at the temerity of Mr. Howard actually telling it like it is reached a crescendo in both Australia and the U.S.

Turning Kosovo Over to Murderers

Kosovo (where Serbs have been murdered and ethnically cleansed and Orthodox Christian monasteries and churches have been destroyed by Albanian Muslims) should not be handed over to those who have murdered their way to power (with German help!), Rodney Atkinson argues.

Worms in Munich

Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Ali Larijani deigned to preach to the gathered elite of world leaders at the Munich Conference on Security Policy. “What is important is that the world undergoes fundamental changes,” he pontificated. That these “fundamental changes,” according to the religious tenets he espouses, must be purely Islamic in character, was left unsaid. European Union leaders squirmed. The president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Clifford May, commented, “As for what Larijani and his fellow Islamist revolutionaries think of their European hosts, one can only surmise. But I suspect it is not too far from the Führer’s appraisal of those he humiliated in Munich nearly 70 years ago.” May recalled that Hitler had referred to his appeasers thus, “Our enemies are little worms.”

China and U.S. Debt

China overtook Mexico to become America’s second-largest trading partner in 2006. The result is the U.S. trade deficit with China—now a record $232.5 billion—hiked to 30 percent of the total $763.6 billion trade deficit.

South Africa’s Land Grab

Following in the footsteps of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, President Thabo Mbeki’s anc/Communist cabal enacted its first expropriation of privately owned land. The government seized a 62,271-acre farm in Barkley West owned by the Lutheran Church.