Onward, Christian Soldiers

from Talk to Action

Like both James Dobson and Tony Perkins’ pro-war Family Research Council prayer team, Conservative Woman is hell on both Islamist plots and abortion – but what happens when their twin “Christian” crusades collide?

What is happening is exactly what anyone should have expected. Pregnant Iraqi women and their babies are dying in unprecedented numbers – and women who fear adding to that horrendous death toll with their own lives and those of their children are taking what they see as a lesser gamble by seeking out illegal and unsafe abortions.

The War on Terror is making us all safer, one tiny terrorist at a time.

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Blogger Psychie at Conservative Woman pitches a wall-eyed hissy over the “anti-Christian agenda” of those who point out the existence of terrorists claiming any religion but Islam.

Since the attacks of 9-11, and in particular the re-election of George Bush, who is a born-again Christian … it’s been the mantra of the irreligious left to refer to our President as a “terrorist” and Christians as terrorists as well.

Tossed into the mix of “Christian terrorists” are the likes of Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma City bombing); various anti-abortion bombers/shooters; the KKK; Olympic bomber Eric Rudolph; etc.
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Sure, they have their groupies. The Army of God is still hanging out but is “underground” according to the MIPT anti-terrorism website. Michael Bray, who is considered the “Pastor” of the group, served prison time for clinic bombings. He’s also written some “how to” commit violence against abortion clinic books, which appeal NOT to the New Testament, but to Old Testament passages. The eye-for-an-eye stuff. Not the “love your enemies” stuff.

Army of God has a few boys in detention: Richard (sic) Rudolph, James Kopp, and Clayton Waagner are all doing time for their crimes. The last attack attributed to them was 1998, which could explain why they’re not on the terrorist watch list: they’ve been mouthing off, but as any good liberal will tell you, free speech means you can say some pretty distasteful things, even make threats, so long as said threats fall within the law, like, oh, I don’t know…. DEATH TO AMERICA?

If Psychie really doesn’t know that, as MIPT says, the Army of God has always been an underground network, she should know. And her mild disavowal of sympathy for their cause might have carried a little more weight had she not illustrated her rant with this photo of the bombed-out ruin that was a Birmingham clinic after Rudolph had detonated the bomb that killed a police officer and maimed a nurse for life.

However, Psychie does know the face of terrorism when she sees it. The face of terrorism looks like this ...

... and when it comes to real terrorists, that "'love your enemies’ stuff" is for godless liberals.

WHO ARE THE TERRORISTS AMONG US? In July of this year, the FBI announced that they were introducing the STAR system, a database which collects information and assesses the information as a sort of profile of would-be terrorists. The system focuses primarily on foreign suspects but does look at US residents as well.

And of course, nobody will be “labeled” a terrorist. Even if he has a stock-pile of AK-47’s in his trunk, a computer with a layout of Kennedy Airport on the hard drive, bank receipts from CAIR, and a card reading “72 Virgins await you in heaven” signed by bin Laden himself. No, we must not label anyone, right?
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Of course we here in the US have this bad habit of shooting ourselves in the foot when it comes to “spiritual enemies.” We’d rather chase after Mel Gibson as an anti-semite than take a close look at some of the whacked out spiritual leaders here in the USA who are teaching crap to mush minds in our prisons, Mosques and yes, schools.
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Let’s face it. We cannot possibly know who is, or is not, a potential terrorist until they get arrested for something. Or, until we get the gonads to actually start investigating- seriously investigating- NGO’s, bookstores, café’s, hookah bars, and internet café’s. We need to get the “Noble Quran” out of our schools and universities. And we need to start realizing that anyone who changes their name from Jack Smith to Muhammed Abd Bakiri is probably going to become an extremist.
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And maybe, while we’re at it, we need to demand that our government stop sleeping with the enemy. Why in the world we tolerate the Saudi influence in America is beyond my comprehension.
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And for what? Some oil? Dancing girls? A lone military base in the middle of Camelass, Saudi Arabia?

In a critique of Christine Amanpour’s CNN report God’s Warriors, Psychie staunchly supports Jerry Falwell’s notorious post-9/11 accusation.

”The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way - all of them who have tried to secularize America - I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’"

For Psychie, condemning anti-abortion violence is only an instrument for stirring up anti-Christian prejudice.

“Radical opponents” Amanpour says, “had long waged their holy war” against abortion clinics. “Bombings, arson, assassination that frightened many women.”

I wasn’t frightened. Nobody I knew was frightened. Yes, pro-abortion women were frightened …

After all, Psychie continues, “In general, the incidents resulting in deaths were minimal.”

Not so in Iraq, ground zero of the War on Terror, where years of war ostensibly waged against the only kind of terror that the Christian right is willing to name is killing both women and their children in record numbers. Tony Perkins bewails the declining birth rate in Europe, but what he calls Europe’s “demographic winter” has settled in upon the women of Iraq with the chill of the grave.

Even four years ago, the UN Family Planning Agency was reporting a dire state of affairs, with the number of Iraqi women dying of pregnancy and childbirth already having tripled since 1990. In 2003, a UNFPA survey reported that 50-70 per cent of all pregnant women in Iraq suffered from anemia, as well as malaria and other illnesses. Barely a few months after the invasion, only 60 per cent of women were receiving any form of prenatal care. And due to a breakdown in the delivery of condoms and other birth control supplies – which Tony Perkins calls "exporting death" – contraceptives were already becoming scarce, a scarcity even then leading to an increase in unsafe abortions.

Now, and altogether predictably, women and children who were already living on the brink have descended into the depths of hell.

According to a new report from Save the Children, “Iraq’s child mortality rate has increased by a staggering 150 percent since 1990. Some 122,000 Iraqi children died in 2005 before reaching their fifth birthday. More than half of these deaths were among newborn babies in the first month of life.”

At AlterNet, Iraq Slogger paints a horrific picture of the price being paid by Iraqi women and children for what Tony Perkins sees as one more chance to sing Onward, Christian Soldiers.

According to doctors, dozens of women in Iraq each day face delivery difficulties caused by violence and the curfew that is preventing access to health care during the night.

"For at least two women in every 12 who seek emergency delivery assistance here, either the mother or her child dies," Dr Ibrahim Khalil, a gynaecologist at Al-Karada maternity hospital, said.

Constant road closures, curfews and gun battles ensure that even women who manage to gain the relative safety of a hospital often don’t make it in time.

Noor Ibrahim lay shivering underneath two blankets on a bed at al-Jarrah Hospital. Steps away was a red plastic bassinet. It was empty.

A few doors down, her recently born son lay wrapped in a pink blanket. He was a chubby boy of nearly nine pounds with a big patch of black hair. His eyes were closed, his head cocked to the left, his mouth slightly open, his skin soft and pale.

The boy was not in a bassinet. He was in a cardboard box. He was not heading to his mother's room. He was heading to the morgue.

"Fresh death," Ibrahim's obstetrician said as she reached into the box and lifted the boy's limp right arm, still covered in blood and amniotic fluid.

Two al-Jarrah doctors have been kidnapped and killed, and two others kidnapped and released. One of the hospital's most experienced obstetricians has received death threats, has had her ultrasound machine stolen, and now carries a pistol to work. An al-Jarrah anesthesiologist says, "It's spiraling downward. It's getting worse each day.”

Noor Ibrahim found this hospital only after enduring more than 24 hours of labor, and after first seeking aid at another hospital where no doctor was to be found. There, desperate but unqualified nurses attempted a forceps delivery doomed to failure.

Ibrahim arrived at al-Jarrah on the afternoon of Dec. 24. She was in shock with a ruptured uterus and tears in her vagina.

The obstetrician performed an emergency Caesarean section. It was too late to save the baby. Now, the doctor had to concentrate on the mother.

The baby, the obstetrician said, died because the forceps had crushed his head. Ibrahim lived but might never be able to have another child.

"Look at this disaster," the obstetrician said as she lifted the baby's head, the top of which was slightly caved in. On the right side of his forehead was a spot of blood and a dark purple bruise.

"They killed her baby," the obstetrician said. Then she wrapped him in the pink blanket and sealed the box.

Thousands of women unable or unwilling to risk the dangers inherent in travel to a hospital – and who know that even a hospital cannot guarantee them help or safety -- now receive no prenatal care at all, and doctors in various areas of Iraq report six to 30-fold increases increases in the incidence of birth defects [graphic photos] – many attributed to the effects of depleted uranium.

Dr Zenad Mohammed, from a hospital in Basra, herself pregnant … was so terrified of giving birth to a severely malformed child, that she was doing her own monitoring of the problem. Her notes begin "In August we had three babies born with no head. Four had abnormally large heads. In September we had six with no heads, none with large heads and two with short limbs. In October, one with no head, four with big heads and four with deformed limbs or other types of deformities."

An ever-increasing number of women are so fearful of the wages of pregnancy in wartime that they seek out anyone who will offer them a backstreet abortion – an abortion unsafe by definition, in a country where almost any abortion is against the law.

In a report translated from Arabic, the Iraqi Red Crescent reports that "pregnant women, infants and children are unable to get...required medical care, and criminal abortion became [sic] the norms."

“Criminal abortion” also has become the norm for the tens of thousands of women displaced from their homes by what promises to be unending military conflict, and for the thousands forced into prostitution just to feed their children.

The International Committee of the Red Cross tells us, “The outlook is bleak, and likely to worsen.”

But hey, war is hell -- and Psychie and Tony know a terrorist when they see one . . . so onward, Christian soldiers.

Title Image: © David P. Young(PCUSA)/ACT International, courtesy of World Council of Churches

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