Monday, October 21, 2024

Part I

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The Media Are Doing U.S. Citizens a Disservice in Their Reporting on Israel: Israel’s Only Option Remains Its Self-Preservation

We have to start today in Israel. And the big question in Israel is, what comes next? That what comes next is a big question, and what could be an even bigger question. The big question, immediately, is what is Israel going to do in response to the attack by Iran? The second time in just a matter of the last several months that there has been a direct attack upon Israel by Iran, and Israel will not let this go unanswered. What exactly Israel does in response? Well, time will tell.

The second thing, which is a bigger question, is what comes next when it comes to the battle against Hamas and Hezbollah? And in both of those cases, here is where I think the Western media are failing Americans and others in the West in trying to interpret these issues. For example, here from Saturday’s edition of the New York Times, a headline, “Its Ruthless Leader is Gone, but Hamas is not likely to relent.” Well, absolutely right. Another headline on the same page, “Hamas says, its Demands are Unchanged as Biden Pushes for a Ceasefire.” Again, that makes sense. “Even after death of Hamas Leader, Mideast Peace May still be Elusive,” another headline, “On the Run, Hurt, Yet Ever Defiant,” that’s about the last hours and days of Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas who was killed by Israeli forces last Thursday.

So, you look at this and you recognize it’s not so much what they’re saying as what they’re not saying that is the problem. I want to look particularly at that duo of stories that ran over the weekend in the New York Times. One headline, “Hamas is not likely to relent.” The other, “Hamas says its demands are unchanged as Biden pushes for a ceasefire.” It’s not that I found any errors in these reports. And frankly, the reports are of the quality that you would expect from a newspaper like the New York Times. It’s a very liberal newspaper, but what it has as an asset is a base of professional reporters all over the world, a network of reporters all over the world that no other paper can match.

And this is one of the differences between, say, watching cable news and reading a paper of this kind of substance. There’s just a lot more information in the paper. This is a lot more information, especially in the print edition of the paper. There’s a reason why the Sunday edition of the New York Times weighs so much. That is to say the paper edition. Online, not so much.

All right. So, the article by a team of reporters that had the headline, “Hamas says its demands are unchanged,” here’s how the New York Times summarizes those demands. The demands are that Israel will stop what’s described here as its onslaught in Gaza, “as well as its complete withdrawal from the territory and the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israel.”

Now, here’s what we have to notice. It’s not that that’s wrong, it’s that is woefully incomplete. What we know about the demands of Hamas that are unchanged, the demands aren’t only those for a ceasefire. We have to remember that Hamas has been about a deadly attack against Israel. And its basic demand is not that Israel negotiate, but that Israel cease to exist. The same thing is true for Hamas, that is the Shia group that is, of course, mostly located in Gaza, also very influential in the West Bank. It also applies to Hezbollah, the Shiite group mostly now in Lebanon, launching deadly attacks against Israel as well.

You look at this and you recognize, what needs to be repeated over and over again in the press coverage of Israel’s fight against Hezbollah in the north and Hamas right there on the Gaza Strip and, at least, with influence in the West Bank, and furthermore, the Houthi rebels there in Yemen, and also, ultimately, Iran, the evil power behind what they call the axis of opposition, we need to understand that Israel is facing existential threats all around. You just look at a clock, you look at a map, and all the way around, Israel is facing existential threats.

The second thing that isn’t often mentioned is the fact that it is simply untrue that Hezbollah and Hamas are governments. They’re not governments, they are terrorist organizations. They function, of course, with press offices and with all the rest that comes with some kind of quasi-governmental entity. But they are not recognized as governments. They’re certainly not recognized as states. So, when there is some equality or even some kind of parallelism that, say, is comparing Israel with Hamas or Israel with Hezbollah, that is a fundamental error. But the American media back into these all the time.

And so, I did say carefully there, I think, sometimes, the major media in the United States back into this because they are so trained to say on the one hand, and on the other hand, here’s one source on this side, here’s a source on that side. And to be honest, in terms of adequate news coverage, you’ve got to get those voices in. For one thing, it is impossible to understand what’s going on in any of these fronts if you don’t have first-hand reports from the people involved about why they’re doing this. But when you, then, go to say Israel’s leader and then the leader of Hamas, you imply a parallelism. And that just does not exist. When you have a failure of self-government, such as is true in Gaza, then these terrorist group, these militias step in. Hezbollah effectively in control of southern Lebanon, Hamas effectively and, indeed indubitably, in control there in Gaza.

So, where does Israel go next? Well, for one thing, it has to recognize what the American people just aren’t reminded of enough, and that is that these groups want the extinction of Israel. They’re not just looking for territorial concessions, they’re not just looking for a prisoner release. They’re looking for all those things, of course. They’re not just looking for self-determination for some province outside of Israel. They want Israel.

Now, one of the major journalistic issues right now is that you have so many reporters, so many media sources saying the people of Gaza deserve better. True or false, do the people of Gaza deserve better? Well, in general terms, the answer has to be yes. They deserve far better than what they have received. They have been horribly affected by Israel’s war against Hamas. And by horribly, I mean horribly. The suffering there in Gaza is frankly unspeakable. You are looking at the deaths of civilians and you’re looking at the deaths, even, of infants and children. And that is largely because Hamas embedded itself, just as Hezbollah embeds itself in the north, they embed themselves among civilians. And as we saw in the case of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas chief who was just killed last week, he acknowledged openly that it was his moral strategy, not just his military strategy, it was his moral strategy, to embed his militia and terrorist organization with the civilian population because he wanted the civilian population to suffer just as his troops or his militia would suffer. That’s directly from his own argument.

So, one of the big questions right now is, do we see an opening for some kind of ceasefire, much less, for some kind of more abiding peace or settlement there in the Middle East? Does Israel now face a moment of decision when it can simply pull back? Well, the point of these headlines coming from even liberal media is, no, Israel can’t do that. You don’t have, for instance, the American administration saying that as clearly as it should. Israel is facing an existential threat. Hamas has simply said, “Okay, you can kill Yahya Sinwar. We will be back with more. We’re not changing our plans. We’re not changing our aims.” Hezbollah said, you can kill Hassan Nasrallah. You can kill their military leader,” which Israel did just in recent weeks. But they say, “It is not going to deter us. We’re going to be right back in the battle. We will show up with an even newly increased intensity.”

And so, is this an opening for peace? Well, if it is, it doesn’t appear to be one at the moment. What I keep calling for is a bit of candor, indeed, a lot more candor coming from the American government. Now, I will tell you, the American government on the ground in terms of policy actually seems to be operating better than would be implied by a lot of public statements. I’m glad of that. I mentioned last week that the U.S. has moved a major missile defense system into Israel with about 100 U.S. military personnel. That is an incredibly loud statement. I guarantee you it’s being heard in Iran. It’s being heard by Hamas and Hezbollah. And I want to give the Biden administration credit for doing that.

It needs, however, to be more clear, just as is also the case, I would argue in the situation, in Ukraine with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The administration, any administration, a future administration after the November election, needs to be incredibly clear with the American people and honest with the world that there are limited options in these situations. And then, when it comes to Israel, Israel is going to defend itself. You can put a period at the end of that. Full stop, Israel is going to defend itself.

Not only that, as I have argued, the United States depends not only upon Israel defending itself but Israel defending our interest in the region. It is simply not the case that it’s just friendship, as is represented by that new missile system, missile defense system, and those American personnel on the ground. The United States has its own interests in the entire region. We can’t help but to have our own interests. And that includes our own self-defense, given attacks even on the continental United States, for instance, in September 11, coming from the cauldron of the Middle East. The United States is involved in this, whether we like it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not. And I think the American people would be well-served by an administration that explained the situation more honestly.

And I’ll just say that, at least, as I can see it, applied to this electoral cycle, the problem is that Kamala Harris won’t say the right thing. I think she might do the right thing, in many cases, but she won’t say the right thing. And thus, that really blunts the effectiveness of American action. I think it’s more likely that former President Trump, if re-elected, would say the right thing. I want to tell you upfront, he will say it very simplistically. I will wish, I can anticipate, that President Trump would do a better job of explaining what he’s thinking and what he does. But in terms of the interest of Israel, I think, well, Israel’s sending every signal that it does understand what is at stake. And that’s one of the reasons why I think it is clear that the Netanyahu government certainly hopes for a Trump election in November. And given what Israel’s experiencing right now, that’s a pretty loud testimony.

Part II

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The Christian Worldview Does Not Honor Surrogacy: The Principle of Alienation and the Massive Moral Risk of Our Modern Rent-A-Womb Industry

Okay, we’ll come back to the United States in just a moment, but I want to turn from the Middle East to Italy, because just in the last several days there has been a lot of news coverage about legislation adopted by Italy’s government related to the criminalization of surrogate parenthood, of surrogacy, as it is known. Now, as you look at this, you recognize that previous generations would not know what we’re talking about. The very concept of a surrogate mother or a surrogate parent would have been only a legal fiction. If you were to go back a matter of years, it would mean someone standing in the place of a mother or someone standing in the place of a parent. Not what it means anymore. No.

Now, we’re looking at a situation in which surrogacy refers to the fact that some human gametes are used, often donor gametes, which is to say sometimes it’s egg and sperm bought in some kind of laboratory context. Sometimes, it is the donation of one or the other or both. Wow, let’s just go down the list and say that involves the transfer of an embryo into the womb of someone who is not the biological mother of the child. That person is hired to carry that child through pregnancy to birth. And then that person recedes. And the persons who paid the other side of the contract get the baby.

Now, from a Christian perspective, there are all kinds of problems here. So, we’re not even getting to the LGBTQ stuff yet. That’s on the front line. That’s the very first paragraph of most news coverage. But let’s just not go there yet. Let’s just look at the technology. Let’s remind ourselves of what the Christian worldview has to say about such a thing. Number one, it’s a good thing to want a baby. Bible’s clear about that. It’s a good thing to want a baby. But the second thing the Bible says is that there is a context in which a baby should be conceived, in which a baby should be born. That context is marriage. And that means that context of marriage is always definitively non-negotiably, the union of a man and a woman, period.

So, let’s just say, without question, that, from the Christian worldview, there’s a big problem with hiring someone as a rent-a-womb in order to have a baby, so-called “have a baby.” Now, there’s a Christian worldview principle here. I like to refer to it as alienation. And that just means that the further alienated or distant an issue becomes from the context in which God has given it, the more ethical risk is involved.

And so, you just look at surrogacy, you say, well, number one, let’s work backwards. If a man and a woman are married and they come together and they make a baby, there’s nothing wrong with that. There can’t be anything wrong with that. The moment you alienate from that context of absolute right in creation order, you bring in greater moral risk. So, even when you have just, say, donor gametes, donor sperm or donor egg, you’ve already created a certain alienation that brings in all kinds of complications, all kinds of moral risk. You add IVF, and you can’t have surrogacy without IVF. All the problems with IVF are just exaggerated and accentuated when it comes to surrogate parenting. So, we have a lot of alienation. Then you pay someone to be, as I said, basically a rent-a-womb, and you pay a woman to carry a baby, which by the way, women say, and we can understand it’s a very emotional process, they develop a relationship with that child within them, and then you take that child away in order to fulfill a contract and you give it to someone else, that’s a problem. And then you know what the big problem is and why this legislation in Italy has made headlines in the United States.

It is because let’s just put it as simply and straightforwardly as we possibly can. When you have a homosexual male couple, what you do not have anywhere is a womb. What you do not have with a homosexual male couple is any way to have a baby. If you say there is such a thing as “gay marriage,” the marriage you’ve defined against creation order is meaning a man and a man, you still can’t, in any sense, with just the two of them, produce a baby. And so, this is where surrogacy becomes a third party. And when we talk about the moral risk and alienation, it is so graphically displayed that it simply can’t be denied.

Part III

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Italy Bans Surrogacy Use by Its Citizens: This is the Right Move by Italy’s Prime Minister and Government

And yet, what the government in Italy has done is to respond to that issue, not only outlawing surrogacy in Italy, but outlawing the use of surrogacy elsewhere on the part of Italian citizens. And so, you look at the major media in the United States, they’ve reported on this. They’ve said that it is a part of the government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to satisfy the right wing of Italy’s government and Italy, by the way, sometimes, it’s had a socialist government, but it always has a right wing. There’s a right wing out there, World War II, let’s just remember the right wing of fascism in Italy. And yet here we’re talking about a right wing, which is really right wing in this sense because of the tradition of Catholicism, for example, and Catholic moral teaching and Catholic influence, which, by the way, on these issues mean we are in agreement about the definition of marriage, and we are in agreement about these reproductive moral issues.

So, many in the West, and this would also include some media in Italy, are saying she’s just trying to pacify the right wing of her party and of the government there in Italy. And I’ll simply say, if so, then good for them. This is where we have to look at reports like this and say, “You know what? At this point, that is simply the right thing, and whoever’s pushing for it is on this issue on the right side.” And so, I would say to Italy’s prime minister, congratulations.

The other thing that is being alleged against this legislation in Italy is that it might be unenforceable. And you know it might be. It might be that the government in Italy never comes to know of a situation. But then again, there’s something that’s missing here, and that is, let’s just say you have a homosexual male couple in Italy and they secure against the law some kind of surrogacy elsewhere, well, it still is likely to come to government attention when they bring that baby and need to register that baby, for instance, for school or preschool programs or anything else. They just want to register the legal existence of that child. They’re going to have to explain how that child came to be.

Other critics are saying, “this is not going to absolutely stop the practice.” Well, there are a lot of things the law doesn’t absolutely stop. But Christians understand, the law is not only a restraint, the law is not only a criminal definition, the law is also a teacher. And in this case, Italy’s legislation is going to teach the right thing, even if not all learn the lesson, the law is righteously teaching.

Part IV

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Kamala Harris Goes to Church: The Lack of Religion in the ‘24 Presidential Election Highlights the Vast Secularization of the U.S.

Well, as I promised, let’s come back home. And one interesting issue for us to discuss about the 2024 presidential election today is, well, what happened or didn’t happen yesterday when it comes to the major candidates and attending church. And so, in the course of American history, especially as you get this far into an electoral campaign, but frankly, even far earlier in most campaigns, you have presidential candidates who are pretty clear about claiming some kind of specific religious identity. And to be honest, they want to use that politically.

Now, of the two parties, as we have often explained, it’s simply beyond doubt. It’s affirmed by the leadership of both parties that the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are in a different place on this. The Republican Party is more likely to include religious believers and those who have attended church services, some voting specialists, some pollsters say that is the clearest single determinant of voting patterns. That is to say voters who attended church one time in the last month are overwhelmingly likely to vote Republican. The Democratic Party includes more secular people, and its messaging is a good deal more secular. But yesterday, it was the Democratic ticket that made news with both the presidential nominee and the vice presidential nominee, pretty ostentatiously going to church.

Now, this has often not gone well for candidates. When it comes to someone like Former President Trump now running again as the Republican nominee, he rather infamously cited two Corinthians, which, by the way, isn’t wrong, it’s just British. But I don’t think the president understood whether it was British or American or wrong. It was just an indication that he probably hasn’t spent a lot of time lately reading two Corinthians.

For the current vice president Democratic nominee, the book of the Bible that seems to be the problem is Ecclesiastes, which came out Ecclesiastics. Well, the bottom line is this. You don’t have to look at 2 Corinthians to find out that neither one of these candidates is an ecclesiastic. That is simply a fact. In other words, they’re not church people. And that’s not really headline news. But it was headline news yesterday, according to NBC News, that the two major Democrats did attend different churches in order to make a political public attendance. The vice president and current Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, appeared at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church outside Atlanta. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the vice presidential nominee, visited a church known as Victorious Believers Ministries in Saginaw, Michigan. Now, Michigan and Georgia are key states in the 2024 election, and both of those churches reflected key constituencies, in particular, the African-American church when it comes to the Democratic ticket.

But NBC news reported, “The United States has grown even more secular in the eight years since President Obama left office with a record 28% of U.S. adults now identifying as religiously unaffiliated, according to Pew,” as the Pew Research Center, “surpassing evangelical protestants and Catholics to now be the largest religious group in the country.” So, NBC is explaining that one of the reasons why religion hasn’t factored much in terms of the 2024 election is because America’s growing more secular. As the report says, “While candidates and both parties have traditionally sought to play up their piety to appeal to religious voters and signal their personal integrity, Harris, Trump, and their running mates have not centered their faith this year.”

Well, that’s certainly true. And even though evangelical protestants, for example, are overwhelmingly likely to vote for Donald Trump, there should be no delusion that, somehow, Donald Trump qualifies in any sense as an evangelical Christian. And frankly, it’s not just his church identity. His early identity was associated with the Marble Collegiate Church and with the late Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, who was a prophet of prosperity theology. And then you go down to where the former president and the former first lady were married there in a church on Palm Beach. It is an episcopal church. And let’s just say, rainbow flag out front, everything you could imagine inside.

Furthermore, I think it’s also pretty clear that, at least, in recent months, if you had a security camera outside America’s churches, you’re not likely to catch a surreptitious Vice President Harris or Former President Trump attending those services. When they attend now, it’s pretty ostentatious. And on the Democratic side, these were clearly political appearances. Now, as I’m saying, that’s pretty much true for politicians across the board.

The big thing in this news report is that this is only happening now, that this hasn’t been the routine in the campaign, thus far, and that both sides seem basically to, at least, until this point, have been basically ignoring, say, church attendance as a matter of political attention. I think that does tell us something. I think it tells us something about the secularization of this country and about a major shift in the electorate.

And I’ll just say that, on the Republican side, you’ve got a really interesting picture. We really don’t know much sincerely about Melania Trump’s religion in terms of day-by-day religious practice or faith or the absence of the same. We really don’t know much about Donald Trump’s religion because, if you’re going to read his heart, he has identified as a non-denominational protestant in recent years. And again, he does have that history in the Marble Collegiate Church prosperity gospel, prosperity theology Norman Vincent Peale. And he also has some other interesting connections as well. But no one has associated Donald Trump with any level of genuine religious piety. That hasn’t even genuinely been claimed. The former president himself, in some speeches, identifies with Christians. He sometimes identifies with Christians. But let’s just say that’s an awkward embrace and everybody knows it.

But when it comes to Kamala Harris, well, as I mentioned before, she’s a member of a very liberal Black Baptist church, which was very much involved in the civil rights movement, not so much to find theologically with a pastor who’s very much a democratic activist and has been very involved in democratic politics. The NBC story made something very clear. Here’s the report. “Harris is a Baptist who was raised by a Black Anglican father and an Indian Hindu mother, and is now married to a reformed Jewish husband.”

Now, I don’t even say that as a criticism. I just raised that because, number one, NBC reported it this way, and I do think it’s important. I think it indicates much about religious change in the United States. I don’t think further editorial comments are necessary. I think it is just a picture of an increasing number of Americans. We not only have blended families, with no fault divorce, and all kinds of marital arrangements, and all kinds of domestic arrangements. We not only have that happening. We also have the secularization of the United States. And we have religious mixing in a way that was inconceivable in previous generations, but increasingly now becomes, more and more, for many Americans, the norm, right down to the nominee for president of one of America’s two major political parties.

And you know this hasn’t even been really a big issue. It just makes this news report by NBC News in the last days of the campaign, in which someone seems to have thought, “There must be a religious dimension to this, maybe we ought to look at it.” Well, we, as Christians, know, there is, not only a religious dimension to this, there is a Christian worldview dimension to this. There is a theological analysis, worldview analysis aspect to this. It’s our business to try to think these issues through. And yes, the secularization of the electorate, the secularization of the American people, that turns out to be a very real and very challenging reality. At the same time, it also tells us something that, with the race coming to a close and with most pollsters on both sides saying it’s a very close race, some of the candidates went to church and made sure they were very visibly seen there.

But then, maybe, the vice president felt she had to go to church because, rather infamously now, last Thursday, a heckler cried out at one of her events, “Jesus is Lord,” and the vice president interrupted her remarks and responded, “Oh, you guys are at the wrong rally. No, I think you meant to go to the smaller one down the street.” Now, let’s be clear. I didn’t say that. She said that. So, I’ll simply say, America may be growing more secular, undoubtedly so, but politicians continue to act like politicians on both sides of the aisle. And going to church is a political act, and it is interesting to see that, on the Democratic side, they decided yesterday to go to church. Just a coincidence.