A WordPress Blog-THE CHURCH MILITANT Ephesians 5:11-"And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them". This Christian News Blog maintains a one stop resource of current news and reports of its own related to church, moral, spiritual, and related political issues, plus articles, and postings from other online discernment ministries, and media which share the aims to obey the biblical commands to shed light on and refute error, heresy, apostasy, cults, and spiritual abuse. ALL CONTENT FROM HTTPS://RATHEREXPOSETHEM.BLOGSPOT.COM MOVED TO THIS NEW BLOG, MAY 2020
See Omar's fiery speech as GOP votes to remove her from committee
House votes to kick Rep. Ilhan Omar off committee over anti-Semitic remarks
The GOP-led House voted Thursday to boot Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee over her past anti-Semitic comments after two Republicans once reluctant to oust her decided to support the resolution for removal. The vote to remove Omar (D-Minn.) from the powerful panel after a heated floor debate broke along party lines, with 218 Republicans voting to strip her of the assignment and 211 Democrats backing their colleague. One Republican, David Joyce of Ohio, voted present. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) announced the vote Wednesday after the chamber approved the Democratic assignments for the committee, setting the stage for Omar’s ouster. “Oh, so now we can vote her off,” McCarthy told reporters after the assignments were finalized.
Utter temper tantrum on House U.S floor after Ilhan Omar REMOVED from Foreign Affairs Committee
CORTEZ: "TARGETING WOMEN OF COLOR"
Sparks fly during vote to knock Rep. Ilhan Omar off Foreign Affairs Committee
Many Catholic and Protestant schools and education program providers are lining up with Common Core, Social-Emotional Learning, and "woke" propaganda, warned veteran educator and elementary director emeritus at FreedomProject Academy, Mary Black, in this episode of Conversations That Matter with The New American magazine's Alex Newman. Black, who has been teaching for around five decades, says these problems are becoming ubiquitous, and that parents must guard their children. In some cases, private schools have become even worse than government schools. Even more alarming, even many Christian textbooks for Christian schools are promoting globalism, critical race theory (CRT), and dangerous manipulation of children. 🇺🇸 The New American: http://www.thenewamerican.com/
In the face of increasing tensions between the U.S. and China, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has called for more cooperation and allies in the Indo-Pacific region. Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has accused NATO of wanting to "defeat" Russia, accusing the NATO-backed Ukraine regime of having no "independence" and only acting as a proxy for Western powers. NATO is trying to recruit more allies and build up forces in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, while Russia and China have formed an alliance, strengthening their power and creating another obstacle for the U.S.-led alliance. As the U.S. and its NATO allies prepare for war, questions are being raised about the potential consequences, with some suggesting that politicians may be using it as a way to gain control over the population and advance their globalist agenda.
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
Wednesday, Feb. 1, is No Hijab Day, a Western feminist expression of solidarity with Muslim women in the United States who are supposedly oppressed and discriminated against (by those fictional but omnipresent MAGA-hat-wearing thugs) because they wear the hijab. Accordingly, Newark, N.J. city council President LaMonica McIver is set to introduce a resolution declaring Wednesday World Hijab Day in the City of Newark. McIver, of course, has all the proper Leftist intentions: celebrating “diversity,” standing against “hatred,” and all that. But this year, in particular, her gesture is nothing short of grotesque. In Iran, women are dying for the freedom not to wear the hijab. And in Newark, witless Leftists are celebrating the symbol of their oppression.
Back on Sept. 16, 2022, in Tehran, the Iranian morality police arrested Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman, for not wearing her hijab properly. Amini later died in a hospital in Tehran, and numerous Iranians charged that she had been tortured to death while in custody. All over the country, protesters took to the streets to protest not against the hijab laws, but against the repressive and brutal Islamic Republic itself. Other women, and male protesters as well, were killed as the Iranian regime ruthlessly applied the Qur’anic injunction to “strike terror in the enemies of Allah” (8:60). The protests went on for months until the regime began summarily executing protesters, and even then some indomitably courageous Iranians continued to take to the streets to demand their freedom.
It is against that backdrop that the Newark World Hijab Day resolution will be introduced. For innumerable women in Iran, the hijab is the most visible sign of their second-class status, and of the brutality of the regime that will imprison them for years or even kill them outright for daring to venture out in public without wearing it. The Iranian authorities call their morality police the “Guidance Patrol,” an Orwellian name that makes them sound like a bunch of benign, avuncular individuals selflessly dedicated to helping young Iranians avoid moral pitfalls and stay on the straight and narrow. A more accurate name, however, would be the Terror Patrol, for the morality that these officials enforce is not the virtuous person’s free choice of the good, but the enforced obedience of those who are frightened into submission.
Is that really what the city of Newark wants to celebrate? It’s likely that LaMonica McIver didn’t consider what has been happening in Iran even for one second before deciding to introduce her resolution. She was just upholding the Left’s mythology about rampant “Islamophobia” in the United States. Actual incidents of Muslim women being harassed or discriminated against for wearing the hijab, however, are extraordinarily hard to find. It’s much easier to find examples of Muslim women in America who falsely claimed that they were being harassed or discriminated against in order to score points on the Left’s insane scale of victimhood worship.
In one such incident, an eleven-year-old girl in Toronto made international headlines with her claim that a man had followed her and cut her hijab with scissors. After an investigation, police concluded that the attack never happened. Likewise, Yasmin Seweid, a Muslim teen, claimed in December 2016 that Trump supporters on a New York subway tore off her hijab and no one in the packed subway car helped her. She, too, gained international media attention, and she, too, made up the whole thing. Shortly before that, a hijab-wearing Muslim student at San Diego State University also falsely claimed that she was assaulted by Trump supporters. In July 2017, a Muslim in Britain falsely claimed that a man had pulled off her hijab in a “race hate attack.” In November 2016, a University of Michigan Muslim student claimed she was “accosted by a white man who told her to remove her hijab or he would set her ablaze with a cigarette lighter.” She also fabricated the whole event. And there are many others of this kind, but the World Hijab Day feminists, of course, have taken no notice.
Nor have they ever acknowledged the fact that women are far more likely to be oppressed for not wearing the hijab than for wearing it, and not just in Iran. In Mississauga, Ontario, a few years back, Aqsa Parvez’s Muslim father choked her to death with her hijab after she refused to wear it. Amina Muse Ali was a Christian woman in Somalia whom Muslims murdered because she wasn’t wearing a hijab. Forty women were murdered in Iraq in 2007 for not wearing the hijab. Alya Al-Safar’s Muslim cousin threatened to kill her and harm her family because she stopped wearing the hijab in Britain. Amira Osman Hamid faced whipping in Sudan for refusing to wear the hijab. An Egyptian girl, also named Amira, committed suicide after being brutalized by her family for refusing to wear the hijab. Muslim and non-Muslim teachers at the Islamic College of South Australia were told they had to wear the hijab or be fired. Women in Chechnya were shot with paintballs by police because they weren’t wearing hijab. Other women in Chechnya were threatened by men with automatic rifles for not wearing hijab.
Such examples could be multiplied endlessly. When is LaMonica McIver going to introduce a resolution recognizing the women who have been brutalized and killed for not wearing the hijab? I won’t be watching the news feeds for any word of that.
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
Bader Alzahrani is charged with transporting a stolen New Jersey school bus across state lines.
On Jan. 15, 2023, a break-in was reported in an unoccupied residential home in Livingston, New Jersey. During a search of a backpack in that home, law enforcement saw a Saudi Arabian passport with the name Bader Alzahrani, along with other items that appeared to belong to Alzahrani. On Jan. 17, 2023, the Livingston Board of Education reported that a school bus was stolen from a parking lot across the street from the unoccupied residential home where the break-in was reported. Law enforcement officers located Alzahrani in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, and was later found to be in possession of the keys to the stolen school bus.
As noted in the article below, a subsequent investigation found Alzahrani was keeping a journal with entries including:
“God I am ready for your orders. I want to live the rest of my life to serve you and the religion.” “Blood, blood, destruction, destruction. Allah.” and “Jews control everything.”
Livingston police said after his arrest that Alzahrani acted alone and that there was no threat to the public.
“Court documents: Man accused of stealing school bus had an antisemitic journal,” News 12 New Jersey, January 30, 2023:
A man accused of stealing a school bus in Livingston on Jan. 17 faced a federal judge on Monday.
Bader Alzahrani was arrested in Pennsylvania. The 22-year-old man was charged with receipt of a stolen vehicle and transportation of a stolen vehicle.
Court documents states that a bag with journals of antisemitic messages was found in a house across from the parking lot where the bus was stolen from at the Livingston Senior and Community Center on Hill Side Avenue. The documents also states that a Saudi Arabian passport with Alzahrani’s name was also found.
Authorities say that the journals had entries in English and Arabic. They contained such phrases as “God I am ready for your orders. I want to live the rest of my life to serve you and the religion.” “Blood, blood, destruction, destruction. Allah.” and “Jews control everything.”
Alzahrani is in the United States on a student visa. Officials say that he went missing in October from the university he was attending. Officials would not name that university….
“I have a daughter and that’s just it freaks you, that something could happen,” says Miles Finney. “He could’ve tried to pick up kids, that’s crazy that they let that happen.”…
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
Days after the chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities asked Congress to pass a bill prohibiting taxpayer funding for abortions, Joe Biden was asked about it:
Reporter: Catholic bishops are demanding that federal tax dollars not fund abortions.
Biden: No, they are not all doing that, nor is the Pope.
Bishop Joseph Strickland of the Catholic Diocese of Tyler, Texas, immediately tweeted: “Mr. Biden can’t be allowed to twist the words of Pope Francis in this way.… It is time to denounce Biden’s fake Catholicism.”
It’s long past time. Biden, the master flip-flopper, was, once-upon-a-time, back in 2012, a “pro-life Democrat.”
But that was then. Now, he’s all-in for abortion “under any circumstances.” And he’s all-in for ending the Hyde Amendment that prohibits Congress from funding abortions.
Back in July, Pope Francis made his church’s position on abortion clear: “A month after conception, the DNA of the fetus is already there and the organs are aligned. There is human life.”
And then Francis added a question directed to Biden, a self-proclaimed “devout Catholic”: “Is it just to eliminate a human life?”
The question was rhetorical. Said Francis: “I leave it to [Biden’s] conscience, and [request] that he speak to his bishop, his pastor, his parish priest, about that incoherence.”
National Public Radio (NPR) exposed the conflict just days after Biden was inaugurated, posing the issue: “Biden Is Catholic. He Also Supports Abortion Rights.”
One knows that Biden is a “devout Catholic” because his first press secretary, Jen Psaki, said so. At Biden’s very first press conference, she was asked point-blank about Biden’s abortion policies. Here is her response:
I will just take the opportunity to remind all of you that he is a devout Catholic, and somebody who attends church regularly. He started his day attending church with his family this morning.
The Most Reverend Jose Gomez, archbishop of Los Angeles and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, was far more enlightening. In his statement following Biden’s inauguration, he reminded his readers:
The bishops and Catholic faithful carry out Christ’s commandment to love God and love our neighbors by working for an America that protects human dignity, expands equality and opportunities for every person, and is open-hearted towards the suffering and weak. (Emphasis added)
And Gomez certainly expected Biden, as a “devout Catholic,” to be willing and open to “engage” with him on the touchy topic of abortion:
It will be refreshing to engage with a President who clearly understands, in a deep and personal way, the importance of religious faith and institutions.
Mr. Biden’s piety and personal story, his moving witness to how his faith as brought him solace in times of darkness and tragedy, his longstanding commitment to the Gospel’s priority for the poor — all of this I find hopeful and inspiring.
But, Gomez warned:
We cannot stay silent when nearly a million unborn lives are being cast aside in our country year after year through abortion….
I must point out that our new President has pledged to pursue certain policies that would advance moral evils and threaten human life and dignity, most seriously in the areas of abortion, contraception, marriage, and gender.
He added that those policies, as they are enacted, would affect all human beings, especially Catholics who hold that life is precious, dear, and a gift from God: “Of deep concern is the liberty of the Church and the freedom of believers to live according to their consciences.”
As Biden’s mental and physical health continues to deteriorate, the time gets nearer he will learn his final destiny. As Jesus’ Apostle John wrote in Revelation 21:8:
But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
The end of the “two weeks to flatten the curve” seems to be finally approaching. On Tuesday, House Republicans passed a bill effectively ending the state of the national “public health emergency” related to the Covid-19 pandemic, the day after the White House announced it would lift the Covid-19 national emergency and public health emergency (PHE) on May 11. The House also voted to end the federal Covid vaccine mandate for healthcare workers.
H.R. 382, the “Pandemic is Over Act,” terminates the public health emergency on the day the bill is enacted. The measure passed the House on a party-line vote of 220-210.
The title refers to the verbatim statement made by Joe Biden back in September 2021. “The pandemic is over,” Biden said in an interview with CBS News. “We still have a problem with Covid,” he added, “We’re still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over.” However, the statement did not stop Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from extending the emergency in October 2022 and then again in January 2023.
During the debate on the floor, Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), the lead sponsor of the bill, said,
President Biden has taken too long to act on his statement last September that the pandemic is over, which is why I am moving forward with my bill to end the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency and finally restore checks and balances between Congress and the Executive Branch.
The congressman added that “the American people are tired of living in a perpetual state of emergency and it’s long overdue for Congress to take back the authorities granted under Article 1 of the Constitution.” Indeed, the past three years have signified the establishment of “medical tyranny” in which the healthcare agencies under the umbrella of the HHS, as well as other entities within the executive branch, subjected Americans to unlawful and unethical policies that restricted their God-given rights and freedoms.
According to Guthrie, “Since President Biden took office, we have seen the pandemic used to justify … countless executive overreaches” such as the “one-size-fits-all vaccine mandates for health care workers, mask mandates, and eviction moratoriums.”
According to media reports, House Democrats mostly focused their criticism of the measure on its timing.
“A pandemic of this magnitude cannot be unwound overnight. We cannot flip a switch and make COVID-19 end,” claimed Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), seemingly confused about “Covid-19” as a disease, “the pandemic” (which never was in a traditional sense of the word), and “the public health emergency,” which was never justified in the first place. No wonder Pallone invoked references to “chaos and confusion” further in his speech.
The House also passed H.R. 497, the “Freedom for Health Care Workers Act,” which would end the Covid vaccine mandate for healthcare providers that receive funds through Medicare and Medicaid, with seven Democrats siding with their Republican colleagues. Congress.com, which tracks actions on all federal legislation, does not reflect the names of the Democrats who supported the bill.
“No American should ever be forced to choose between the COVID shot or losing their livelihood,” stated Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-N.C.), who introduced the bill last week. He added that the mandate from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is “unscientific, un-American, and deeply damaging to healthcare workers as we already face a nationwide staff shortage.”
The CMS vaccine mandate was introduced in November 2021 and applied to more than 17 million workers at approximately 76,000 healthcare facilities, according to the White House.
The day before the vote, the White House released a statement calling the potential end of the mandate “a threat to the lives of patients and health care workers alike,” and said the bill would be vetoed should it pass the Senate and reach Biden’s desk.
The White House quoted the long-unsubstantiated worry that the unvaccinated healthcare workers would somehow endanger the health and lives of vulnerable patients. However, it has long been common knowledge, even among the top healthcare agencies, that the Covid shots prevent neither infection nor transmission of Covid. In fact, the latest findings suggest that a higher number of doses directly correlates with a higher rate of Covid infections. In other words, the people who have been boosted are more likely to get infected.
It is worth briefly noting the brow-raising explanation of the May 11 timeline established by the White House and provided by Biden. Interacting with reporters on Tuesday, the occupant of the White House said, “The Covid emergency will end when the Supreme Court ends it. We’ve extended it to May the 15th [sic] to make sure we get everything done. That’s all.” The statement drew surprise and ridicule from social media users.
On Monday, January 30, the president’s Office of Management and Budget officially notified Congress of the administration’s plan to extend both Covid-related emergency declarations to May 11, and then end them both on that date. Biden’s clumsy mention of the Supreme Court was likely a reference to the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) attempt to end the Title 42 border policy (cited in the letter to Congress), which is rooted in the emergency and allows for border officials to rapidly expel illegal migrants. The nation’s highest court ruled in December 2022 that the measure must stay in place.
What Does It Mean?
As evidenced by cuts to federal spending on the “emergency,” lawmakers agreed that Covid was winding down back in December 2022. According to the Washington Examiner:
Lawmakers had already reached a deal in the omnibus end-year spending bill to end a practice that was put in place with the emergency declaration that required that states offer continuous enrollment for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), public health insurance programs for low-income people, in order to receive additional federal funding. It has allowed millions of people who may have exceeded the income levels to qualify without a temporary or permanent lapse in coverage. Beginning in April, states will be allowed to begin removing ineligible people from Medicaid.
Perhaps one of the main questions related to the development is whether the emergency use authorizations (EUA) of Covid vaccines, treatments, and tests would end. If the emergency is over, there is no need to use experimental vaccines and boosters, right? Theoretically, all of them — including vaccines for children and all the boosters — should be recalled. Those medicines and tools that were fully licensed would be allowed to remain on the market, but the customers would have to pay for them out of pocket.
Apparently, that is not the case.
As uncovered by CNN, HHS has smartly covered vaccine manufacturers whose bottom lines would be threatened by issuing “two other emergency declarations that provide broader access to medical measures for Covid-19”:
For instance, the emergency use authorizations for tests, treatments and vaccines are not tied to the public health emergency, but HHS will have to determine when to end the declaration that allows their use.
According to CNN, the HHS also covered pharmacists who may injure children by administering Covid shots. The rule is set to expire in October 2024.
Also, thanks to the provisions provided in the omnibus bill, experimental Covid antivirals such as Paxlovid would also remain covered by Medicare.
In a Twitter thread, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) practically declared that its powers to allow shoddily tested drugs to market will not end with the termination of the emergency:
Importantly, the ending of the public health emergency declared by HHS under the Public Health Service Act will not impact FDA’s ability to authorize devices (including tests), treatments or vaccines for emergency use.
It remains to be seen how – and if — Congress reacts to that.
