Why does a civilization, providing peace, stability, prosperity and unimagined freedom to its inhabitants turn to self-hatred?  Why do those who richly enjoy the fruits of the West, also agree to abhor it?

To understand this destructive habit of mind, we must first turn to the nineteenth century, when Christianity was finally and fully replaced by collectivism. People were no longer defined by God but by society; that is, individual identity was said to be achieved only through social interaction. Without society, there was no humanity.

This idea belongs to the German philosopher, Georg Hegel, who in many ways is the father of the modern world. His philosophy (Hegelianism), though vast and difficult, changed the West.

“The rational alone is real” summarizes his ideas. This means that reality is a manifestation of reason, including both nature and history. Hegelians define reason in two ways: as Infinite, which belongs to God, or as finite, which belongs to man. The latter definition establishes materialism, as embodied, for example, by Marx, who was himself a Hegelian.

There is also a third strain, namely, the anti-Hegelians, like Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Both thinkers gave primacy to the will (voluntarism), where reality was the manifestation of the human will, making reason untrustworthy, if not needless. The West’s current secularism stems from both Hegelianism and voluntarism.

So, why does the West hate itself? Because anything that hinders or denies human reason and the human will must be destroyed. The biggest hindrance is the West’s past, its root: Christianity. Western self-abhorrence is hatred of what stands in the way of a “better” future.

Voluntarism values strength and hates weakness. Materialism values reason and hates faith. Both engender hatred, which is the first step towards self-annihilation.

The historical culture of the West affirms that it is impossible for human reason to be all-encompassing or understand the totality of existence; nor can reason provide a rationale for all reality. Human reason can only discover God. It can never explain Him.

As for human will, it is tyranny without faith.

But despite the hatred, the West refuses to vanish, and its historical morality persists. Temperance, forgiveness, self-sacrifice, duty, charity, courage, wisdom and compassion have not faded away and thus evoke hatred – for these virtues are reminders of the West’s vitality.

In other words, morality remains the West’s second nature, which self-hatred is not yet strong enough to erase. The West is yet haunted by the memory of a life greater than the needs of the body — and there still lingers the ghostly grandeur of goodness and of beauty. The satisfaction of appetites cannot give meaning to life, while the force of will is empty without spiritual purpose. Therefore, collectivism is a hollow substitute for faith, because there will always be the question of the human soul.

A godly Hegelian, Max Stirner, once observed: “Moral people skimmed off the finest fat from religion [Christianity], ate it up, and are now having a hard time trying to get rid of the ensuing scrofula.”

This, in a nutshell, is the West. It hates itself because it despises its “scrofula,” which it got by deciding to believe that its traditional morality could feed a civilization finer than the one that sprouted and matured from its true root.

Thus, the West hates itself because its materialism and voluntarism have failed. It contrived various political stunts, like identity politics, social justice, gender confusion and the borderless post-nation state — but they bore no fruit.

Two further such stunts derive from the ideas of Edward Said and Will Kymlicka. Both men, especially Said, are now fundamental to any sort of liberal education.

Thus, it is Said who spawned the now-trendy anti-white bigotry, when he openly declared that whites are by nature oppressors, colonialists and imperialists, who had done enough damage to the world and its people and time had come to replace them. Of course, until his death, Said was well rewarded for his hateful rhetoric by Western universities, and his book, Orientalism, has now attained scriptural status. Conservatives have never fully challenged him (except one – Ibn Warraq).

(As an aside, Said also hated the scholars of the Frankfurt School, labeling them all as Eurocentric imperialists who should be ridiculed and ignored. Thus, the Frankfurt School is hardly anti-West).

Then there is Will Kymlicka, the father of multiculturalism, who is a one-man industry. Again, few conservatives challenge him, because most likely they accept the premise that the West has no inherent value, other than being an economic structure built to generate profit. Kymlicka advocates more and more people from all over the world living in the West, until all qualities that distinguish it are gone.

Kymlicka naively assumes that the West will continue to offer peace, stability, prosperity and unimagined freedom to all, even though the people living within its borders despise everything that made the West unique, or who carry ideas from their own cultures and histories which only fashioned failure and oppression.

As for the true root of the West, Christianity, its claim remains the strongest – that life has eternal meaning. Why does the West hate itself? Because it has forgotten this truth and is now trying to content itself with emptiness.

Copyright © 2018 Nirmal Dass The Daily Caller-All rights reserved.

The Rwanda Governance Board continues to close churches it says fail to meet requirements laid down at the beginning of the year. New requirements set in place for those congregations that want to continue ministry are also complicating efforts to comply. Many see the closures as part of an effort by the government to make its aggressive secular stance clear.

According to a report by Rwanda’s pro-government KT Press, more than 8,000 churches have now been closed, and the number keeps growing.

“On checking which churches were included, we learned that all churches are suffering the same fate, and that even churches considered luxurious for local standards have had to close,” a local analyst, who wished to remain anonymous, told World Watch Monitor.

World Watch Monitor learned that in one village the church was closed while a wedding was ongoing. The couple and all the guests were simply told to leave the church during the service, and the church was closed.

Another church was stopped from having services and other meetings (such as home groups) in a school hall as an alternative after all the churches in that parish had been closed. The church had timber instead of a metal door and window frames, and was told the roof also needed to be elevated “just a little”.

“It seems that the local authorities in the different districts initially had some freedom about the degree to which they could enforce the new requirements,” the local analyst said. “However, it now seems that those who were more lenient have been rebuked and have become stricter. In one district authorities banned all meetings of a closed church, and congregants are not even allowed to meet in home groups.”

One congregation now meets in a church building in another neighbourhood. Another congregation’s members walk 20km to attend church in a neighbouring community after their church was closed.

New requirements

Many new requirements not originally included in the directive have now been added, including:

• Toilets being a certain distance from the church entrance. In one instance local authorities entered the church halfway through the service and ordered the people to leave because the church would be closed. This church has fulfilled 80% of the requirements and was not aware of this new requirement.
• Congregations have been told they also need to install a certain kind of canvas ceiling, even though that material carries a considerable fire hazard.
• One church was told it needed to change its roof and rebuild one of the brick walls. This will be hard for them to do as they have already been forced to make loans and depend on the goodwill of businessmen to meet the initial requirements.
• Church access roads as well as church compounds need to be paved.
• The inside walls and ceilings in the church must be plastered and painted. Exposed brick is not allowed anymore.
• All churches must have lightning-conductors.
• All pastors now need to have a theological degree. This was already communicated as a requirement, but now the degree needs to be from an accredited institute.
• Another new law states that only institutions that also teach science and technology can teach theology, meaning that few of the many (often highly regarded) theological institutions or Bible schools are regarded as valid.

This law is being enforced even though it has not yet been approved officially. In most cases it is almost impossible for churches to make the required changes within the given timeframe of 15 days.

Secular country

Rwandans’ right to religious freedom is granted under article 37 of the 2003 constitution, which was amended in 2015. Prof. Anastase Shyaka, Chief Executive Officer of Rwanda Governance Board, in a television show on Sunday 15 July claimed that churches that had been closed in fact remained active, with their right to religion guaranteed.

There has also been a marked increase in secularism in the government:

• They no longer allow prayer meetings in government institutions, which used to be very common.
• Words referring to the Christian faith have been removed from the preamble of the Constitution.
• During the commemoration of the genocide, neither pastors nor priests (who used to play a prominent role in past commemoration events), can speak or preach any more, unless the event is organised by a church.
• Two Sundays per month, main roads are closed, meaning that many people cannot reach their church. Church attendance has declined.
• Many Rwanda Patriotic Front (the ruling political party) meetings and other activities that may be compulsory are arranged for Sundays.

On paper, the same rules apply to Muslims as to Christians, but in practice this is not the case. Muslim clerics indicated that they would appeal the decision outlawing the calling of worshippers to prayer over loudspeakers. For now, the practice continues.

There is a high level of fear among church leaders. Shortly after the new requirements began to be implemented, officials arrested six pastors accused of plotting to defy the government orders. Although the pastors have since been released, a senior church leader explained that the arrest served as a stern warning to others to not resist the move.

Copyright © 2018 Published by World Watch Monitor where the featured image was sourced-All rights reserved.

Advances in technology are driving cultural change throughout the world. Historically, new advances have been made slowly and rarely, allowing people time to adapt to them. However, the current pace of change is unsettling established patterns of life, and further technological developments are likely to transform cultures to an even greater extent.

In the face of radical cultural change, parents will have to identify likeminded families who share their values and their philosophy of family life, with whom they can associate. No matter where people stand on the moral spectrum, this is a human need. We shall all need to find our communities of faith, values or life orientation in order to raise our children in line with our convictions.

As life becomes more frenetic, setting aside time for family and community is going to become a major issue. One of the biggest deficits or negatives of the technological culture is that it has driven out time. We have more labour-saving devices than ever before, and yet we all complain that we have less time. The machines that we have created have taken over and we are struggling to keep up with them.

Time is essential to build relationships: marriage needs time for conversation, and parents need to spend time with their children in order to establish a relationship with them and influence them. We need to protect time in order to protect our relationships.

The Major Institutions

Historically, there have been five major institutions in society that fulfil five basic tasks: the family, the marketplace, government, the school, and religion. (Even those who do not subscribe to a religious faith still have the task of working out a philosophy of life.) Each of these institutions developed over time and all began in the family. In our own lifetime, healthcare has emerged as a sixth institution, as medicine has become specialised. But each institution is rooted in the family.

Each of these institutions taps into a different capacity. The government, for example, specialises in force (e.g. the police, courts, prisons, the armed forces), and education specialises in intelligence, but the family is the institution that specialises in sexuality. It is only through the complementarity of the sexes that children can be conceived and born. A father is therefore entitled to say to the teacher, ‘Since I am the man who brought this boy into existence through the sexual act, I am uniquely equipped to educate him in the area of sexuality.’

Where fathers speak to their sons about sexual matters, and mothers their daughters, they can have a huge impact. Public policy is secondary to the input that parents should have into the lives of their own children in the privacy and sacredness of the home. Children will learn more about sexuality from observing how their mother and father relate to each other, without a word being spoken.

We need to teach our sons to respect women because they have the capacity for motherhood. If a man is going to be a good lover of his wife in adult life, he needs to learn self-control over the sexual advances. Pornography presents a serious threat to the sexuality of boys and their future marriages, and the use of pornography is increasing among girls and women too.

Change Through Relationship

Three of the major institutions are deeply relational: the family, the school and religion. Government and the market-place are more instrumental. During my time as Deputy Assistant Secretary for the family and social policy at the US Department of Health and Human Services, where I had access to the largest depository of evaluation data on government social problems, I observed that there is not a single government social behaviour-changing programme in the United States that works.

At the local level, there are micro programmes that have some measure of success, though they rise and fall depending on staff, leadership and needs. But where they work, they do so in an idiosyncratic way. Cookie-cutting a programme doesn’t work. The success of social programmes is dependent on the love of the giver for the receiver. The person in need must be in receipt of a dedicated service.

In a therapeutic context, it is essential that the patient clicks with the therapist. The relationship between them is the vehicle through which change occurs. But you don’t go to the government for relationships. You go to the government for justice. The main function of the government is to protect the different institutions, not to grow them. It is a massive strategic mistake for the government to try to operate behaviour-changing programmes.

The government has completely failed in the realm of sex education. Not a single programme has delivered what it is supposed to deliver. The same is true of marriage programmes. At a national level they are not working. The real change will take place in the relational spheres of family, school and religion.

The primary role of the government is to protect and to punish violation. The campaign group Mothers Against Drunk Driving was very effective in reducing rates of drunk-driving, not through social programmes, but by getting the law enforced.

Social science has established beyond any doubt that marriage is the foundational relationship in society. Yet we face the ill-will of people who have no interest in the truth and refuse to accept the facts. In academia, many social scientists are closing their minds to data that do not fulfil their presuppositions, but any social scientist worth his salt will grapple with the data that doesn’t fit his view of things.

Effects of The Sexual Revolution                    

There has been a considerable rise in divorces and out-of-wedlock births since the 1950s. In the United States, only 46 per cent of 17 year-olds are living with their biological mother and father. (Among African-American 17 year-olds the percentage is as low as 17 per cent.)

There has been a marked increase in the number of fatherless families, where girls often have the model of a mother who is doing her best for her children, but boys have no role model. Girls are now out-stripping boys in all areas of education. This is bad news for marriage, because girls do not generally marry down.

The 1994 Family Education Trust (FET) report, Broken Homes and Battered Children, demonstrated that the intact married family is the least likely family structure to witness child abuse. The incidence of serious child abuse is 33 times greater in a home where the biological mother is cohabiting with her boyfriend than in a home with married biological parents. The United States National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect had not previously measured child abuse by family structure until it was persuaded to do so on the basis of the findings of the FET study in the UK.

The American study found that rates of sexual abuse are 19.8 times higher in homes headed by a biological mother and her boyfriend compared with a home headed by married biological parents, and five times higher in an intact cohabiting family. Rates of physical abuse were also 10 times and 4.3 times higher respectively than in a natural married family.

The feminist lobby doesn’t like to admit it, but statistics demonstrate that the traditional intact married family is the safest place for women too.

Religious Observance

The United States is the only country in the world with survey data that measures the effects of religious observance as well as family structure, and the evidence shows a positive association between weekly attendance at a place of worship and beneficial outcomes in terms of academic achievement, family mealtimes and abstinence from sex outside marriage. Religion has a protective effect in the areas of sex, alcohol and drugs.

These findings have public policy implications. At a time when religious liberties are under threat, we need to press for religious observance to be included in the key population surveys, so that the benefits associated with it can be brought into the public debate. In view of the positive outcomes, the government should be in the business of protecting marriage and religious freedom.

The government has lost sight of its chief purpose, with the result that more and more people are becoming fearful of an intrusive state. The fundamental role of the government is to keep the bad guys out and leave the others free to do the good. The social science data can assist us in making the case for being allowed the freedom to have a positive impact on society through our families and religious communities.

Copyright © 2018 Family Education Trust-All rights reserved.

The causes of African poverty is often misunderstood, but the continent’s economic history provides an opportunity to take a closer look at what went wrong.

“African poverty was not caused by colonialism, capitalism or free trade,” says Tupy. “As I have noted before, many of Europe’s former dependencies became rich precisely because they maintained many of the colonial institutions and partook in global trade.”

Tupy notes that African poverty preceded the continent’s contact with Europe and persists where Europeans have departed. “That is an outcome of unfortunate policy choices, most of which were freely chosen by Africa’s leaders after independence,” she says.

Africa, much like Europe, started out desperately poor. The late Professor Angus Maddison of Groningen University estimated in 1990 that, at the start of the Common Era, average per capita income in Africa was $470 per year.

The global average was roughly equal to that of Africa. Western Europe and North Africa, which were parts of the Roman Empire, were slightly better off, at $600, while North America lagged behind Africa at $400. Thus poverty in the world was fairly equally distributed.

Global inequality coincided with the rise of Northern Italian city states in the 14th century and the Renaissance in the 15th century. By 1500, a typical European was about twice as rich as a typical African. But the real gap opened only after the Industrial Revolution that started in England in the late 18th century and later spread to Europe and North America during the 19th century.

In 1870, Europeans controlled no more than 10 per cent of the African continent, mostly only the northern and southern parts of the continent. But Western European incomes were already four times higher than those in Africa. Europe, in other words, did not need Africa in order to become prosperous.

Europe colonised Africa because Europe was already far more prosperous, a chronological fact that many blame sayers overlook.

Africa’s fortunes under colonial rule included progress in health and education. Maddison estimates that in 1870, there were 91 million Africans. By 1960, the year of independence, the African population had grown more than threefold to 285 million.

The OECD estimates that at the same time the share of the African population attending school rose from less than 5 percent to over 20 percent.

After Africa’s struggles for independence, African leaders inherited countries where fierce repression of political dissent had already been established by Africans themselves. Instead of repealing censorship and detention laws, African leaders chose to expand such laws.

Post-independence African governments were determined to expunge colonial institutions because they represented rule of law, accountable government, property rights and free trade. African leaders instead opted for political arrangements and economic policies of the Soviet Union.

Even today, Africa remains the least economically free and most protectionist continent in the world.

Copyright © 2018 Freewestmedia.com-All rights reserved.

On this week’s edition of “The Hal Lindsey Report,” I address a subject that has loomed in the thinking of American Christians only as a hazy shadow in the far-off future. Well, that hazy shadow is beginning to come into sharp relief. That shadow is the specter of persecution.

Of all nations on earth, the United States of America seemed to be the last place where the persecution of Christians would be a problem. But it’s no longer such a far-fetched idea.

Though religious freedom recently won a modest victory in the U.S. Supreme Court, it suffered a disturbing defeat in a Canadian Supreme Court decision. And what happens in Canada too frequently turns up in the United States!

I believe we are seeing a crescendo of events and changing attitudes — political, cultural, spiritual, and economic — that will soon coalesce to put evangelical Christians in the cross-hairs of our society. Many of you are already facing some of these challenges at work, at school (or your child’s school), or among your neighbors or family members.

“Political correctness” is even now a problem, but I don’t believe it will be too long before being “politically incorrect” will land you a fine or a jail term. When that happens, we will be faced with a choice: be “politically correct” or stand boldly and speak out for the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

In many parts of the world, our brothers and sisters are already facing that dilemma. Some are even paying for their boldness with their lives!

This week, I want to share with you the story of a man who faced that moment and stood tall. In fact, two of the 28 chapters in the Book of Acts are dedicated to “A Man Called Stephen.” His defense of the Gospel before the Sanhedrin was so brilliant, powerful, and Spirit-directed that he drove the council of learned scholars into a frenzy. They mobbed him. Then they took him out and stoned him to death.

Now, you’re probably thinking that it doesn’t sound like Stephen offered a very effective defense if it resulted in his death. Consider this, though. He was an ordinary Israelite who allowed himself to be so completely used by the Holy Spirit that he literally confounded the most educated religious leaders of his day.

When they finally realized they were guilty of the grievous charges with which Stephen accused them, they gnashed their teeth and killed him. Yet during the inquisition, the power of the Holy Spirit was so strong upon Stephen that “his face was like the face of an angel.” And when he fell asleep, the Bible implies that Jesus Christ Himself stood in honor of Stephen’s obedience!

Not only did this ordinary believer, who allowed himself to be used by the Spirit, so please Jesus that He stood to welcome him home, but his example no doubt inspired one of the young rabbis who witnessed the entire ordeal. Saul of Tarsus would later become history’s greatest evangelist: Paul the Apostle.

So, don’t despair that days of persecution may lie ahead. Jesus Himself promised that He would give us the words to say when that moment comes. And rather than our darkest hours, those moments will be our brightest.

Copyright © 2018 Hal Lindsey.com–All rights reserved

A few people remember President Dwight Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, where he warned Americans about the rise of a military-industrial complex… a warning that was stunningly accurate and almost fully ignored.

What almost no one remembers was Eisenhower’s speech in 1953, when he said that under the pressures of fear and war spending, humanity was “hanging from a cross of iron.”

Bear in mind, this was said by Dwight David Eisenhower, five-star general who had been supreme allied commander. He was also the sitting president of the United States when he said it. So, there is absolutely no room for passing this off in the name of patriotism.

Precisely What He Said

Before I elaborate on this topic, I want you to read Eisenhower’s words for yourself. Here’s the core of Ike’s speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, on April 16, 1953:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people…

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Here’s one more line you should read:

God created men to enjoy, not destroy, the fruits of the earth and of their own toil.

Obviously this speech was widely ignored.

The Cross of Iron

“Iron” is a reference to war materials: planes, bombs, guns, tanks, and so on. And what’s crucial about this iron is that it is purchased with money forcibly taken from the productive people of the world. And I’d like you to see the extent of these extractions.

So, here are the world’s top nine military budgets for the year 2012, in billions of US dollars:

Altogether, that comes to $1.328 trillion. Added to that are not just the expenses of the smaller militaries, but dozens of now-gigantic intelligence agencies. (The US Department of Homeland Security alone spends $44 billion per year.) And so I think a reasonably accurate figure is closer to $2 trillion per year… and given many other expenditures, often cleverly hidden, even that figure may be low.

This is properly a job for some young economist, but not having one handy, I’ll give you, in rough numbers, what that equates to:

14,000,000 modern houses with amenities, or 100,000,000 brand new cars, or a year of quality food and drink for 600 million people, and so on. Obviously the cost of cars and housing varies from place to place, but you get the idea.

That’s what’s taken from us – annually – to build and operate machines of destruction. In just the past 20 years this would cover housing, transportation, and food for 150 million families… not counting the value of everything destroyed by the war machines.

Can we call this anything but an abject organizational failure? To be very blunt about it:

Humanity is producing far more than was ever dreamed possible by our ancestors, but we’re pissing it away on machines of death and destruction.

And there’s a clear reason for this. But it’s a reason that can be hard to face.

Forget Politics; It’s About the Structure

We’ve been trained to devote all our passion and attention to political fights. In other words, to spend all our energies on ephemera that come and go like the winds.

What we haven’t been trained in – what we’ve been diverted from – is the analysis of structures: the things that actually matter and the things that endure.

The structures that dominate mankind are monopolistic, non-optional, and violence based. The central principle of their operations – the one they enforce thousands of times every day – is this: Do what we say or we’ll hurt you.

However offended people may be at these statements, it will not be because they are false. Rather, they will be offended that such things are discussed. It’s not pleasant to face the fact that our world’s basic organizational structures are barbaric relics of the Bronze Age.

These systems are offensive structures by design. They are built to extract money from large populations, to consolidate those takings in the seat of the operation, and to use that money to become more powerful than every other such system. And their 6,000-year track record most certainly bears this out.

No one described this more honestly than Simone Weil, in An Anthology:

What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war… What is called national prestige consists in behaving always in such a way as to demoralize other nations by giving them the impression that, if it comes to war, one would certainly defeat them. What is called national security is an imaginary state of affairs in which one would retain the capacity to make war while depriving all other countries of it.

The truth of the matter is that the ruling structures of our world are abject failures – relics of a brutal and ignorant past. And Eisenhower was right when he said they were crucifying humanity on a cross of iron.

We can do better.

Copyright © 2018 Paul Rosenburg FreeMansPerspective–All rights reserved

Africa is being recolonized today, though this time not with armies or arbitrary borders but through Western governments and humanitarian outfits imposing population control ideology, sexual liberation, and abortion, says Obianuju Ekeocha.

This new form of colonization is rooted in a master-slave mindset, Ekeocha stresses in her book, Target Africa: Ideological Neo-colonialism in the Twenty-First Century, which was released earlier this year and documents the nefarious funding streams and political schemes behind this injustice.

While Africa has undoubtedly struggled ever since the end of colonization with all kinds of socio-economic issues and political dysfunction, rich donors from the West have exploited those problems and have assumed the role of savior and deliverer, offering “solutions” contrary to the values of most African people, she explains in the book.

A vivacious international pro-life advocate, Ekeocha, who is Nigerian by birth and is now based in the U.K., began her investigation into this subject back in 2012 when Melinda Gates emerged with a proposal to raise $5 billion to fund contraception in Africa. Ekeocha was outraged and wrote Gates a letter explaining that she, as a Nigerian Catholic, neither needed nor wanted what she was bringing. What the Africans need is a good health care systems, food programs for young children, and better education opportunities, she says.

“If you have dollars, if you hold the purse-strings, unfortunately you are in the more powerful one in this dynamics of this relationship,” Ekeocha said an interview with The Christian Post.

Much of the thinking stems from an alarmist belief that African demographics portend disaster given climate change and a less stable food supply. Some believe that the answer to those looming threats is fewer people and, therefore, drastic measures should be taken to reduce the population, a view rooted in Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb. Yet even though Ehrlich’s apocalyptic predictions never materialized, his work continues to underpin much of the approach being carried out in poor nations around the world.

And the solutions these Western entities provide “rely heavily on a single-minded strategy that entails removing or drastically reducing the source of the population growth in Africa — female fertility,” Ekeocha says in the chapter on population control.

“Thus, Western nations, organizations, and foundations wage war against the bodies of African women,” she continues.

While she always understood that Western nations were giving more money for condoms and contraception, she didn’t want to entertain conspiracy theories, and sifted through mounds of data and statistics in the United Nations’ archives where the money is closely tracked.

Ekeocha explains that a key year in all of this is 1994 when at a conference in Cairo, Egypt, Western governments were told that if they give money to African nations it can qualify as aid even if it’s for contraceptives. From 1993 to 2012 such aid increased by 1,930 percent.

“When I did all the math, tracked all the money and put it all in one place, the amount of money going into the world for population programs was about $600 million dollars per year to $12 billion per year,” Ekeocha told CP.

Anyone who makes that percentage of increase in money they are giving you within such a space of time means business, she said, and they have an agenda.

Ekeocha also unpacks how, through complicated schemes, even small organizations like the U.K.-based Population Matters markets a sense of self-righteousness to donors, allowing them to feel virtuous by buying environmental credit of sorts for the electricity and energy they consume. For every child born in Africa they ask their donors to give a certain amount of money based on their CO2 emissions.

Obianuju Ekeocha, author of “Target Africa.”

As she explains in Chapter 6 “Modern-Day Colonial Masters,” Population Matters launched an online initiative in 2009 just days after a climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark. The website was called PopOffsets which “enable[d] individuals and organizations to offset their carbon emissions by making online donations for contraception and sterilization in Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and other developing countries, even though the carbon emissions per capita in the United Kingdom is more than 135 times higher than that in Ethiopia.”

“Go ahead, commandeer the world’s resource and live self-indulgently, Population Matters seems to be suggesting, so long as you prevent a poor African from being born,” she writes.

Ekeocha told CP: “That scared me, because if a movement like that inasmuch as it’s a small group here, but they still run in millions of pounds and dollars from all their members. … And if someone is saying, ‘I’m trying to make the Earth greener’ so for every plane ride I take, every car ride I take, or every cup of coffee I buy, my use of electricity, I will make up for that by donating money to this group who will go out to Africa and do vasectomies on men.” If such efforts are multiplied it could devastate the whole continent, she said, and the approach is wholly ineffective and wrongheaded.

Ekeocha, who’s a biomedical scientist with a specialization in hematology, founded Culture of Life Africa in 2013 to highlight the toxic connection between the abortion and family planning industries and foreign aid. Her profile has only continued to gain traction ever since; she’s also active on Twitter where she frequently speaks out on pro-life issues and has amassed a following of nearly 43,000.

In 2016, when speaking before the United Nations in New York during a session on best practices for maternal health in Africa at the Commission on the Status of Women, a video showing a portion of her remarks went viral. A Danish representative was provoked that Ekeocha would refer to the humanitarian efforts promoting abortion as “colonization” and argued that the Africans ought to regard this as a positive development, and let Africans make their own choices.

Ekeocha replied that if she tried to translate into the Igbo language what it means for a woman to “choose what to do with her body” and that abortion is somehow a good thing, she could not do it as there is no way of even phrasing such an idea in her tribal tongue.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ6nioMimCc]

“Culturally, most of the African communities actually believe, by tradition, by their cultural standards, that abortion is a direct attack on human life,” she said at the time.

“So for anybody to convince any woman in Africa that abortion is actually a good thing and can be a good thing, you first of all have to tell her that what her parents and what her grandparents and her ancestors taught her was actually wrong. You’re going to have to tell her that they have always been wrong in their thinking, and that is colonization.”

African countries have been put into a position where they’re being forced to take aid money that is destructive and addictive, Ekeocha told CP. The final chapter of Target Africa outlines how she believes the continent needs to be decolonized from certain Western influences and the superiority complexes many groups carry when they come bearing “gifts.”

“We’re kind of at an impasse” Ekeocha said, noting that African nations are frequently told that they are “independent” countries, because while they are not under colonial rule as in ages past, they remain beholden to these outside Western donor groups.

She hopes her book will provide a diagnostic snapshot of the proverbial wounds and infection in this system. Ekeocha reiterated that the continent’s many problems will not be solved by having fewer people, and Westerners, Christians included, have a lot to learn from African believers and its people.

In a region of the world known for some of the worst poverty on the planet, a poverty that touches many in African societies, she explains, Africans know in the core of their being that God is their only hope.

“When you don’t have governments stepping in now and again, and all of the programs that we find here in Europe and America, entitlements and all those things, we don’t have them. And, in a way, it’s a good thing, because that means people get to understand who really is their Provider, their Protector and that their sustenance comes from God,” she told CP.

Ekeocha thought that she would be accustomed to life in the West when she moved to the U.K., having read many Western novels and watched movies, but she was in for a surprise. She told CP that prior to relocated to Europe she had never met more than five atheists in her whole life.

“We don’t have big atheist communities in Africa because people understand you cannot be in a place where you do not have any safety net and not recognize that God is your safety net. Even the wealthy Nigerians still have to cling to God. We cling to God because at any point in time your life, your protection, your sustenance — that even breathing comes from God Almighty.”

“And Africans are not ashamed to hold on to that child-like faith. We are unashamedly dependent on Him.”

Copyright © 2018 Originally published by Brandon Showalter on Christian Post-All rights reserved.

In what the Christian Association of Nigeria is calling a “pure genocide,” 238 more Christians were killed and churches desecrated by Muslims last week in the west African nation. This brings the death toll of Christians to more than 6,000 since the start of 2018.

According to a joint statement by the Christian Association, an umbrella group of various Christian denominations, “There is no doubt that the sole purpose of these attacks is aimed at ethnic cleansing, land grabbing and forceful ejection of the Christian natives from their ancestral land and heritage.”

The statement condemned the recent attacks, “where over 200 persons were brutally killed and our churches destroyed without any intervention from security agencies in spite of several distress calls made to them.”

The statement adds that the majority of those 6,000 Christians massacred this year were “mostly children, women and the aged… What is happening in … Nigeria is pure genocide and must be stopped immediately.”

The details of the murder of these thousands, though seldom reported, are often grisly; many were either hacked to death or beheaded with machetes; others were burned alive (including inside locked churches or homes); and women are often sexually assaulted or raped before being slaughtered.

Both the Nigerian government and the U.S. government have long sought to present this protracted jihad as territorial clashes between the haves (apparently always Christians) and haves-not (apparently always Muslims).

In 2012, for instance, President Bill Clinton said that “inequality” and “poverty” are “what’s fueling all this stuff” (the “stuff” being a reference to the ongoing Muslim slaughter of Christians in Nigeria). Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Johnnie Carson, said after an Easter Day bombing in 2012 of a Nigerian church left 39 worshippers dead, “I want to take this opportunity to stress one key point and that is that religion is not driving extremist violence”.

The Obama administration reportedly agreed to spend $600 million in a USAID initiative launched to ascertain the “true causes” of unrest and violence in Nigeria — which naturally lay in the socio-economic, supposedly never the religious, realm.

In its recent statement, however, the Christian Association of Nigeria denied these claims. After saying that those responsible for slaughtering Christians are always allowed to “go scot free” by the Nigerian government–which further portrays the attacks as “farmers/herdsmen clashes”–it inquired:

How can it be a clash when one group [Muslims] is persistently attacking, killing, maiming, [and] destroying, and the other group [Christians] is persistently being killed, maimed and their places of worship destroyed? How can it be a clash when the herdsmen are hunting farmers in their own villages/communities and farmers are running for their lives?

On May 2, the National Christian Elders Forum — a wing of the Christian Association, the members of which average the age of 75 and come from Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones — met with the British High Commission in an effort to receive support. (Days before the meeting, around 30 Muslim herdsmen had stormed a church during early morning Mass and murdered nearly 20 parishioners and two clergymen.) The group’s executive summary of issues included:

It is clear to the Christian Elders that JIHAD has been launched in Nigeria by the Islamists of northern Nigeria led by the Fulani ethnic group [the “herdsmen”]. This Jihad is based on the Doctrine of Hate taught in Mosques and Islamic Madrasas in northern Nigeria as well as the supremacist ideology of the Fulani.

Using both conventional (violent) Jihad, and stealth (civilization) Jihad, the Islamists of northern Nigeria seem determined to turn Nigeria into an Islamic Sultanate and replace Liberal Democracy with Sharia as the National Ideology. The object of course, is to supplant the Constitution with Sharia as the source of legislation.

The current 1999 Constitution is plagued with dual conflicting ideology of Democracy and Sharia. There are certain values which are non-negotiable in a pluralistic society and it seems the advocates of the Caliphate do not respect this.

A dual-ideology-driven Nigeria cannot be the Nigeria of our dream. We want a Nigeria, where citizens are treated equally before the law at all levels…. Bearing in mind that Christians constitute over 50% of the Nigerian population, the goal of the Islamists is bound to create serious conflicts which if not checked is capable of escalating into another civil war.

Already, the Islamists are murdering Christians with impunity and destroying vulnerable Christian places of worship and communities at an alarming and inhuman rate.

That 6,000 Christians, “mostly children, women and the aged,” have been butchered in just the first six months of this year is a reminder of how violence only escalates when left unchecked. That is the story of the Muslim persecution of Christians in Nigeria.

It took three times as long (a year-and-a-half, between December 2013 to July 2015), for example, for the same Muslim herdsmen to slaughter a total of 1,484 Christians (532 men, 507 women, and 445 children), critically wound 2,388 Christians (1,069 men, 817 women, and 502 children), and burn or destroy 171 churches.

The Nigerian government and the international community, however, have from the start done little to address the situation. This lack of participation is not surprising: they cannot even acknowledge its roots, namely, the intolerant ideology of jihad.

As a result, the death toll of Christians has only risen — and will likely continue to grow exponentially — until such time that this reality is not only acknowledged but addressed.

Copyright © 2018  Gatestone Institute – All rights reserved

It’s one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a Christian. What’s going on right now in Nigeria is “pure genocide.”

Recently on BreakPoint, I said that it took a lot of courage to be a Christian in Iraq. Just two years ago, the Obama administration called what ISIS was doing to Iraqi Christians “genocide.”

Unfortunately, there are other places in the world where being a Christian requires a lot of courage as well, and, where the treatment of Christians merits the word “genocide.”

One such place: Nigeria. By most estimates, the population of Nigeria is almost evenly divided between Muslims and Christians. That religious split largely follows geographic lines: The northern part of the country is predominantly Muslim, the eastern and southern parts of the country heavily Christian. The middle, sometimes called the “Middle Belt,” is ethnically and religiously diverse.

Not surprisingly, what makes Nigeria so dangerous for Christians originates in the Islamic north. There, Christians have been on the receiving end of a campaign Open Doors calls “religious cleansing,” that is, an attempt “to eradicate Christianity” from the region.

One of the most notorious Islamist terrorist groups in the world, Boko Haram, is responsible for killing thousands of Christians and displacing countless more in northern Nigeria. But Boko Haram isn’t the only group targeting Christians there.

In a statement released in late June, Christian leaders claimed that “over 6,000 persons—mostly children, women and the aged—have been maimed and killed in night raids by armed Fulani herdsmen.”

The Fulani are an ethnic group who are overwhelmingly Muslim, and their raids are not always at night. In April, Fulani herdsman attacked a group of Christians during Sunday mass, killing two priests and seventeen parishioners.  The same attackers then razed fifty homes belonging to Christians. In fact, earlier in the year, on New Year’s Day, 72 people died at the hands of a Fulani attack.

In their statement, Nigerian Christian leaders also complained about the “continuous abduction of under aged Christian girls by Muslim youths…” These girls “are forcefully converted to Islam and taken in for marriage without the consent of their parents.”

The language used by Christian leaders in Nigeria in their statement to describe what is happening, “pure genocide,” is hard to disagree with. As was the call, directed toward the national government to “stop this senseless … blood shedding… and avoid a state of complete anarchy where the people are forced to defend themselves.”

Unfortunately, Nigerian officials are downplaying, if not outright denying, the religious dimension of what’s happening. Instead, they’re calling this a conflict over resources, in this case, over land.

Don’t believe it. For starters, the security forces are, in the words of the statement, “skewed to one religion and one region of the country,” that is, Islam and the Islamic north.

What’s more, this idea conveniently glosses over the one-sided nature of the violence in the region: The Fulani are the hammer and the Christians are the nails.

Finally, any student of the history of genocide or ethnic cleansing knows that conflicts over resources are often just the trigger that unleashes the sort of mass violence we’re currently seeing in the nation of Nigeria.

So, what can we do about this? First, we must pray, continually, for our brothers and sisters there. Second, we have to encourage the White House to continue pressing Nigeria about what’s happening in its Middle Belt, as it did during an April meeting with the Nigerian president.

President Trump called what’s happening then a “serious problem.” That’s an understatement. It’s past time to make sure that the response to the problem is equally as serious and not understated at all.

Copyright © 2018 John Stonestreet &  Roberto Rivera BreakPoint-All rights reserved

I recently read Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali’s book Triple Jeopardy for the West: Aggressive Secularism, Radical Islamism and Multiculturalism. Nazir-Ali’s point is that all three movements pose a grave threat to the West as the vacuum where Christianity once was is filled.

It is increasingly obvious that the multitude of errors in thinking that dog the modern world can be brought back to the same root problem: the rejection of God. An obvious example is the transgender obsession that has swept the country, seemingly coming out of nowhere.

Penny Mordaunt, a minister for the ‘Conservative’ party, said this week: ‘Trans women are women, that’s the starting point.’ She aims to make changing one’s gender easier. There was talk not long ago that the ‘Conservative’ government was going to allow individuals to change their gender on their birth certificates without even a doctor’s opinion.

In a society that respects God and believes in Him, this destructive confusion simply does not permeate. How can it? With faith in God you know that a man and a woman are two very different beings, created for one another, to complement. Further, God wouldn’t make such a mistake as placing the soul of a man in the body of a woman.

Yet because we don’t believe in anything, and everything is up for grabs, then why not gender? Once we’ve rejected the Truth and reality of the universe then everything will become confused. Transgenderism is but one example.

It’s clear to anyone with any semblance of intellectual honesty that radical Islam poses a profound danger to Western civilisation. Not only the terror attacks, nor the rape (not ‘grooming’) gangs, but the hard-won liberties that are now being sacrificed in a pitiful act of appeasement.

Even in the 25 years I have been on the planet I have seen freedom of speech undermined at a terrifying pace. How it must feel for someone older I can’t imagine. After Charlie Hebdo, the vast majority of British newspapers refused to publish its defiant cover cartoon despite overwhelming support for the magazine.

Obviously this is because they were frightened of repercussions: clear evidence that already there exists in British society a strain of radical Islam that wields considerable influence.

I do not, under any circumstances, want to have to give up the fantastic, life-affirming ability to discuss and exchange ideas freely because our political class are utterly naive about the extremely violent strains within Islam that have shown themselves, again and again, throughout history.

The problem goes back to the same root: God. A properly Christian nation, proud of its heritage, would not be so woefully ignorant about this historical tendency amongst Islam. Yet because we have abandoned our God, and have a woolly, fuzzy view that religions are all the same, we will continue to capitulate in the face of people who actually believe in something.

Bishop Nazir-Ali makes an excellent point in his book that before Christianity came along, England was an organised group of warring tribes. Christianity created an overarching narrative, and system of thought and morality, in which all can partake.

Multiculturalism will see us return to this pre-Christian age, bickering and arguing amongst ourselves, divided along lines of ethnicity or politics or whatever mad thing we come up with to distinguish ourselves from one another in order to feel special and different.

The soul of the West is in grave danger and the further we retreat from God the more errors in thinking we will see abound. The way we think, and the ideas a society is governed by, has a profound effect on every aspect of our lives.

It is for this reason that I am fully behind Nazir-Ali’s book and pray every single day that my beloved country will return to its Christian roots before it is too late.

Copyright © 2018 Fionn Shiner The Conservative Woman–All rights reserved