A man outside the church in Tanta, Egypt that was bombed on Sunday

EGYPT mourns this week the 44 Coptic Christians killed in the attacks on Palm Sunday. ISIS has declared war on the nation’s Christians.

“Shortly before 6 PM, I was fetched by an administrator and a few police officers to take an out-of-the-way elevator into the Athenaeum. The massive hall, where I was supposed to meet with students for dinner before my talk, was empty—the mob, by then numbering close to 300, had succeeded in preventing anyone from entering. The large plate-glass windows were covered with translucent blinds, so that from the inside one could only see a mass of indistinct bodies pounding on the windows. The administration had decided that I would live-stream my speech in the vacant room in order to preserve some semblance of the original plan. The podium was moved away from a window so that, as night fell and the lights inside came on, I would not be visible to the agitators outside.

I prefaced my speech by observing that I had heard chants for the last two hours that “black lives matter.” I therefore hoped that the protesters were equally fervent in expressing their outrage when five-year-old Aaron Shannon, Jr., was killed on Halloween 2010 in South-Central Los Angeles, while proudly showing off his Spiderman costume. A 26-year-old member of Watts’s Kitchen Crips sent a single bullet through Aaron’s head, and also shot Aaron’s uncle and grandfather. I said that I hoped the protesters also objected when nine-year-old Tyshawn Lee was lured into an alley in Chicago with the promise of candy in November 2015 and assassinated by gang enemies of Tyshawn’s father. The gangbangers’ original plan had been to cut off Tyshawn’s fingers and send them to his mother. While Black Lives Matter protesters have in fact ignored all such mayhem, the people who have concerned themselves are the police, I said. And though it was doubtful that any of the protesters outside had ever lost a loved one to a drive-by shooting, if such a tragedy ever did happen, the first thing he or she would do is call the police.

I completed my speech to the accompaniment of chants and banging on the windows. I was able to take two questions from students via live-streaming. But by then, the administrators and police officers in the room, who had spent my talk nervously staring at the windows, decided that things were growing too unruly outside to continue.”

— Heather Mac Donald, “Get Up, Stand Up,” City Journal, April 9, 2017

GREAT comments by U.S. Marine veteran Ken O’Keefe in this discussion about the allegations in 2013 — later proven to be false — that the Syrian government used chemical weapons against its own people.

Notice how the word “regime” is always used to describe a targeted country, even if the leaders were democratically elected.

TWEETS from James Perloff:

LEAVING ASIDE the issue of human casualties — a far more serious concern — how much did it cost America to fire 59 Tomahawk missiles at Syria?

Estimated cost: $60 million.

That could have done a lot for the Rust Belt that Trump so often referred to in his campaign.

Jesu! From out thine opened Side
Thou hast the thirsty world supplied
With endless streams of love;
Come ye who would your sickness heal,
Draw freely from that sacred well,
Its heavenly virtues prove.
Hail, Jesu! pray for us.

From the Rosary of Fr. Frederick William Faber

A LECTURE by Heather Mac Donald on anti-police propaganda at Claremont McKenna College was cut short due to protests.

From Breitbart:

“During my speech, the protesters banged on the glass windows and shouted. It was extremely noisy inside the hall. I took two questions from students who were watching on livestream, but then the cops decided that things were getting too chaotic and I should stop speaking,” Mac Donald said. “An escape plan through the kitchen into an unmarked police van was devised; I was surrounded by about four cops. Protesters were sitting on the stoop outside the door through which I exited, but we had taken them by surprise and we got through them.”

In her short lecture, Mac Donald argued that there is no institution more dedicated to protecting black lives than cops. Read More »

THEY CLAIM the Syrian children were murdered for propaganda purposes with injections of opiates.

WHY did the United States attempt to destroy Syria’s most important airbase, a military base that was being used to fight Muslim terrorists? An explanation from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, from an April 6th interview:

Concern about a war is unrealistic, because the reality is that we are living this war. But as for calling it a Syrian-Israeli war, you can assume in any case that these terrorists are fighting for Israel. Even if they are not a regular Israeli army, they are still fighting for Israel. And Israel shares the objectives with Turkey, the United States, France, Britain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other states. They all share the same objective. It is a war that has taken a new form and uses new instruments. Practically, our victory over the terrorists is a victory over all those states put together. That’s why Israel is doing its best to support these terrorists in every place the Syrian Army advances. They attack in one way or another in order to provide support to the terrorists and in order to stall the momentum of the Syrian Arab Army in facing them.

Other quotes from the interview:

Those Western countries, led by the United States, in partnership mainly with Britain and France, and unfortunately some European countries which did not have a colonial history, do not accept independent states and do not accept peer relations. They want satellite states which implement their policies. Read More »

THE “America First” nationalists in the Trump administration (e.g. Steve Bannon) are being marginalized for the real power behind the throne: the Kushners, the Goldman Sachs bankers and the moronic warhawks. See Mike King’s report (salty language, indecent images):

We believe that Jared & Ivanka “won the battle” because the game was rigged against the Nationalists all along. The object of the game was to paint the Democrat Trumpstein as a born-again nationalist, then draw in Christians, pro-lifers, union workers, “angry White guys” and all the various sub-groups of “alt-right-wingers” (including us, though we always had some doubts), and then discard us all like used-up lemon rinds soon after the election — making it look like the result of a lost “power struggle,” rather than the calculated, pre-meditated betrayal it was intended to be all along.

Why anyone would be surprised at all this is … surprising. In general, don’t trust people who make their living in casinos or New York real estate or beauty pageants. Don’t trust people who brag about sleeping with married women and cheating on their own wives. And, call me prejudiced, but don’t trust people who build ugly skyscrapers. Read More »

Descent from the Cross

THE Resurrection of Jesus Christ met with skepticism from the very beginning. The Apostles and other disciples were the first doubters. When the women, who had gone to the tomb to anoint Jesus’s body, found that it was empty and witnessed an angel, they then went to tell the Apostles, who did not believe them. When Christ appeared to the Apostles later they thought He was a spirit. People were not anymore inclined then than they are today to believe death can be reversed.

The evangelists – Mark, Matthew, Luke and John – ultimately convinced vast multitudes of the veracity of their accounts.

Could they have been fooled? Could they have made up the story for some ulterior purpose?

This 1945 pamphlet by Rev. Martin J. Scott. S.J. provides brief answers to skeptics.

FROM Bach’s magnificent St. Matthew Passion

THIS excellent video was posted on Youtube by “Reason and Logic” with the quote:

“Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace.” Neocon Michael Ledeen

THIRTEEN tweets that illustrate Trump’s hypocrisy on Syria.

In related news:

Iran’s president said on Saturday that “terrorists” were applauding his US counterpart Donald Trump for launching a missile strike on an airbase of his Syrian government ally.

But Hassan Rouhani backed calls for an independent inquiry into a suspected chemical weapons attack on a rebel-held town in northwestern Syria on Tuesday that Trump blamed on Damascus.

“This man who is now in office in America claimed that he wanted to fight terrorism but today all terrorists in Syria are celebrating the US attack,” Rouhani said in a speech on state television. Read More »

A SONG to mark a hundred years of American involvement in needless wars.

IN 1982, Oded Yinon, a journalist for the Jerusalem Post and former senior official with the Israeli Foreign Ministry, outlined a plan for Israeli regional supremacy. It involved expansion into the area between the Nile and Euphrates Rivers. This domination would come about by inflaming sectarian divisions in Arab countries and breaking apart these states through managed civil wars.

The Yinon Plan provides essential background for the war in Syria. Read more here at Global Research.

Why Trump violated international law and attacked Syria:

ROBERT PARRY writes at Consortium News:

With the latest hasty judgment about Tuesday’s poison-gas deaths in a rebel-held area of northern Syria, the mainstream U.S. news media once more reveals itself to be a threat to responsible journalism and to the future of humanity. Again, we see the troubling pattern of verdict first, investigation later, even when that behavior can lead to a dangerous war escalation and many more deaths.

Before a careful evaluation of the evidence about Tuesday’s tragedy was possible, The New York Times and other major U.S. news outlets had pinned the blame for the scores of dead on the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. That revived demands that the U.S. and other nations establish a “no-fly zone” over Syria, which would amount to launching another “regime change” war and would put America into a likely hot war with nuclear-armed Russia.

Even as basic facts were still being assembled about Tuesday’s incident, we, the public, were prepped to disbelieve the Syrian government’s response that the poison gas may have come from rebel stockpiles that could have been released either accidentally or intentionally causing the civilian deaths in a town in Idlib Province. [cont.]

CHRISTOPHER BOLLYN writes at his site:

To understand why President Trump has launched military strikes against the Assad government of Syria one needs to understand that the master plan for Syria is to break the country up into ethnic statelets (i.e. Balkanize). This is the Zionist (Israeli) Likud plan, known as the Yinon Plan (1982), which calls for destroying the military forces of both Syria and Iraq and then breaking them up. To read more about the Zionist master plan for Syria, see yesterday’s posting:  Why trust Al Qaida terrorists about the gas attack?

“U.S. IS ABETTING INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM”

Does this mean that Donald Trump’s cruise missiles were fired to help the Al Qaida terrorists, the same group he blames for 9/11, who are fighting to overthrow the government of Syria?

Yes, that is exactly what the result of the U.S. military action is. The U.S. is actually waging war against the elected government of Syria, illegally, on behalf of terrorists, which the U.S. designated as terrorists in March 2017! This is a “big mistake” for President Trump (and the U.S.) and proves the veracity of the expression, “The War on Terror is really a War of Terror.” Read More »