Upon reading the headline, “[German] Police Arrest More Than 40 at Neo-Nazi March,” one might assume that 40 neo-Nazis were arrested. In fact, between 40 and 70 demonstrators there to protest the Nazi gathering were arrested yesterday. Perhaps most shocking is the image of German riot police in full gear standing solidly to protect the Nazi right to march in the Lichtenberg suburb of Berlin. Sixteen hundred police had been deployed for the event to protect 700 neo-Nazis who were demanding the right to set up a nationalist youth center.

When exactly did the Nazi Party regain the right to spread its ideology? When, in Germany of all places, did the party led by Adolf Hitler and responsible for the atrocities of World War ii, earn the right to police protection?

For more about the growth of the right-wing movement in Germany, read “The Rise of Right-Wing Europe.”

Collapsing Economy

“We have gone from recession into something that looks more like collapse,” said Ian Shepherdson, chief domestic economist at High Frequency Economics about the accelerating job losses in recent months, according to an article in the New York Times. “This is almost indescribably terrible,” Shepherdson said. “In the past six months, the U.S. has lost 1.55 million jobs, almost as many as were lost in the whole 2001 recession, which included 9/11 and the two months after. The pace of job losses is accelerating alarmingly.”

A report released on Friday by the Bureau Labor Statistics revealed that U.S. companies have axed 533,000 jobs in the month of November—the largest one-month loss since December 1974. The Times said this is “fresh evidence that the economic contraction accelerated in November, promising to make the current recession, already 12 months old, the longest since the Great Depression.”

Overall, the losses since the start of the recession—America’s 12th since the Great Depression—now total 1.9 million. Most of those have come in the past three months. The unemployment rate has risen to 6.7 percent—and could rise as high as 8.6 percent by the end of next year, according to Global Insight. The underemployment rate has also swelled to 12.5 percent—the highest level since that statistic was first compiled in 1994.

Seventy percent of the job loss has occurred in the service sector. “The service sector had been holding up relatively well into this downturn, but now the service sector is just imploding,” said Michael T. Darda, chief economist at the research firm mkm Partners. “As goes the service sector, so goes the U.S. economy.”

“You can’t get much uglier than this,” said Richard Yamarone, chief economist at Argus Research. “The economy has just collapsed and has gone into a free fall.”

Obama’s First Big Test

“The world may be focused on Iraq, Afghanistan and terror in India, but experts say the biggest foreign-policy challenge for the next U.S. president will be dealing with Iran,” wrote Spiegel Online this week. “Obama has promised a new approach—but the risk of failure is great.”

Iran announced just this week that it is now running uranium-enrichment centrifuges at its Natanz nuclear power plant. According to Spiegel Online, “One thing is clear: A nuclear Iran could not only further destabilize the Middle East, it could also trigger a nuclear arms race in the region.”

President-elect Obama has expressed a willingness to negotiate with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He hasn’t yet stated what his approach might be in negotiating with the Islamic Republic. “For the Obama administration there is no greater foreign policy challenge,” said Dennis Ross, Bill Clinton’s former envoy to the Middle East.

Spiegel Online wrote that Iran’s heretofore successful atomic plan “now seems virtually unstoppable” and “if Iran wants to, it will soon become a nuclear power.”

The West’s Acceptance of Polygamy

In Scotland, driving more than 30 miles over the speed limit is generally an infraction penalized by the loss of one’s license. Except, it would seem, if you’re a polygamous Muslim husband dashing between homes in an effort to service more than one wife.

That exact scenario occurred recently when a Scottish judge allowed a Muslim husband to retain his license after he was booked for driving 64 miles an hour in a 30-mile-an-hour zone. “He has one wife in Motherwell and another in Glasgow and sleeps with one one night and stays with the other the next on an alternate basis,” argued the man’s lawyer. “Without his driving license he would be unable to do this on a regular basis.”

Never mind the impeccable logic employed by this judge—the tacit sanctioning of breaking one law in an effort to break another. More worryingly, this episode is just another example of the cultural and legal advance by Islam into Western societies and over Western judicial systems.

Islamic affairs expert Daniel Pipes made this point in the Washington Times today: “Monogamy, this ruling suggests, long a foundation of Western civilization, is silently eroding under the challenge of Islamic law. Should current trends continue, polygamy could soon be commonplace.”

In the last 50 years or so, and as a result of the growth of Muslim populations in Western states, polygamy has become more widely accepted. Pipes writes,

Social acceptance is also growing. Academics justify it, while politicians blithely meet with polygamists or declare Westerners should “find a way to live with it” and journalists describe polygamy with empathy, sympathy and compassion. Islamists argue polygamy’s virtues and call for its official recognition.

Among the by-products of this cultural acceptance of polygamy is that is increasingly being sanctioned in Western courts and judicial systems. At least six Western jurisdictions, including the UK, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Australia and Canada, now allow for harems as long they were established in jurisdictions in which polygamy is legal, which is to say in virtually any Muslim nation. “Thus, for the cost of two airplane tickets,” writes Pipes, “Muslims potentially can evade Western laws.”

There’s another angle to this story beyond the dilution and fracturing of Western judicial systems at the hands of Islamic culture. The institution of marriage is under heated attack in Western societies across the world, particularly from homosexual advocates, secular ideologists and liberal politicians, media pundits and journalists.

Tolerance of polygamy is a direct assault on the sanctity of marriage.

The acceptance of polygamous marriages, says Pipes, is of vast significance: “Just as the concept of one man, one woman marriage has shaped the West’s economic, cultural and political development, the advance of Islamic law (shariah) will profoundly change life as we know it.”

We have written much about the West’s capitulation to the formidable armies of Muslim culture. Recently, Rob Morley showed how America is courting Islamic money. You can also go here and here to learn about Islam’s drastic advance into British society. For a more in-depth analysis of this trend, and to learn about its prophetic significance, read “The Sickness in Britain’s Heart.”

Who Needs Providers When You Have the Government?

Regarding the appalling breakdown of family life in Britain, Melanie Phillips recently concluded, “The truth is that it is all far, far too late. Britain has simply undone the fabric of civilized life.” An article in the Sunday Times of London illustrates the shocking role the government has played in the downfall of the family and the catastrophic effect it is having on British youth.

In recent weeks, the case of Karen Mathews has stunned Britain. Mathews is the mother of seven children by five different men. She has never worked, but got benefits from the government equivalent to a family earning ₤20,000 ($29,000) a year before taxes.

Her house was so filthy that one of her neighbors said, “I wouldn’t want to keep a pet dog in there, let alone children.” Mathews was convicted of kidnapping her 9-year-old daughter, Shannon. Mathews regularly drugged and beat Shannon. Her feet were encrusted with dirt, and her head infected with lice. In the evenings she had a bag of sweets for dinner—if she was lucky.

The most tragic thing about this case is that it is not an exception. “I met many children from families such as the Matthewses—including teenagers so starved and abused that it had stunted their growth,” writes Harriet Sergeant in the Times. “One boy recalled taking speed each morning ‘just to get me to school.’ Another had been given nothing to eat but dry cornflakes for three days. A third was told by her mother on her 13th birthday, ‘Go out and sell your body. I am not feeding you anymore.’”

Why is it happening? “Politicians point to the breakdown of the family and the absence of fathers, but this is a fundamental mistake,” writes Sergeant. “They are presuming there is a family in the first place to break down.”

The British government sees no need for fathers. In many cases, it is not that the father left—he was never there in the first place. “Women get money from the government. Men get eradicated. What do you need a man for?” said a father of five, living in London. “The government has taken our place. I am old-fashioned, from the ghetto, and I am serious for my kids. But the government is the provider now.”

The statistics paint a shocking picture for Britain’s future. The Times reports, “Babies born to teenage mothers are 60 percent more likely to die in their first year than those born to other parents. A report from the Children’s Society claims that 25 percent of all youngsters living in step-families run away before the age of 16; many are younger than 11. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a social research charity, discovered that children with one parent are more likely to have behavioral problems, do less well at school, have sex earlier, suffer depression and turn to drugs and heavy drinking. They are also, according to evidence from the States, more likely to get involved with gangs and crime.”

In a society where little or nothing is done to uphold and defend the sanctity of marriage, it should come as no surprise that our families are upside-down, just as the Prophet Isaiah foretold.

December 7

Today, December 7, a date which will live in infamy, marks the 67th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The commemoration, which usually focuses on the destruction wrought on American battleships and servicemen by Imperial naval and air forces, this year has a different theme: America’s response. “We’re moving into the Pacific War, the first strike back,” a National Park Service spokeswoman said. That included a risky but morale-boosting raid on Tokyo and the subsequent battle at Midway Island. Focusing on America’s strength of will to respond decisively in 1941 carries special meaning in 2008, when America’s lack of will and lack of strength weigh heavily on the minds of its veterans and its allies.

Another Anniversary

Dec. 7, 1989. A telephone rang, breaking the morning routine at a home in Edmond, Oklahoma. It was for Gerald Flurry, and the word was this: Get on a plane to Pasadena, California, right now if you want to keep your job.

That afternoon, Mr. Flurry and his assistant, John Amos, were onboard—but this was about much more than a paycheck. Mr. Flurry, a pastor in the Worldwide Church of God, was being summoned by the wcg administration for holding to his beliefs, beliefs that followed the truth taught in the Worldwide Church of God for decades under its founder, Herbert W. Armstrong. Beliefs Mr. Armstrong’s successors felt had become outdated.

Mr. Flurry and Mr. Amos hoped and prayed that the church they loved could somehow be put back on track with the teachings that established it—teachings they wholeheartedly believed came from God.

Though they hid it from the membership at large, the wcg administration had other ideas, which it revealed during a four-hour wrangle that ended at midnight with the firing and excommunication of Mr. Flurry and Mr. Amos.

After that landmark battle, a tiny new organization was born. Suddenly, the work that held the Bible-based teachings of Mr. Armstrong went from a $200 million, 382-television station, 8-million-subscription, 120,000-member powerhouse to a 12-member church with $80 in the bank. That infinitesimal organization was the Philadelphia Church of God. You may know it better as the publisher of theTrumpet.com.

Today, the pcg, celebrates the 19th anniversary of that fateful night. The Philadelphia Church of God’s beliefs are unchanged, but its size is anything but. The church has grown exponentially since that infamous date of December 7, and today uses a 160-acre headquarters campus, a liberal arts college, a school, a substantial web presence, 190 television stations, dozens of literature titles, a correspondence course, a cultural foundation and much more to proclaim the same message and the good news of the soon-coming wonderful World Tomorrow.

Celebrate our anniversary of raising the ruins with us by visiting pcog.org.

Elsewhere on the Web

President-elect Barack Obama unveiled his solution to rising unemployment yesterday, one day after the government reported that 533,000 jobs were lost in November, the largest one-month drop since 1974. The solution: government expansion and huge spending. “Obama offered few details and no cost estimate for the investment in public infrastructure. But it is intended to be part of a broader effort to stimulate economic activity that will also include tax cuts for middle-class Americans and direct aid to state governments to forestall layoffs as programs shrink.”