U.S. State Dept. Bars Christians From Testifying About Persecution, Planned Parenthood Hires Crisis Management Firm As Third Video Is Released

Raymond Ibrahim: U.S. State Dept. Bars Christians from Testifying about Persecution

During the height of one of the most brutal months of Muslim persecution of Christians, the U.S. State Department exposed its double standards against persecuted Christian minorities.

Sister Diana, an influential Iraqi Christian leader, who was scheduled to visit the U.S. to advocate for persecuted Christians in the Mideast, was denied a visa by the U.S. State Department even though she had visited the U.S. before, most recently in 2012.

She was to be one of a delegation of religious leaders from Iraq — including Sunni, Shia and Yazidi, among others — to visit Washington, D.C., to describe the situation of their people. Every religious leader from this delegation to Washington D.C. was granted a visa — except for the only Christian representative, Sister Diana.

After this refusal became public, many Americans protested, some writing to their congressmen. Discussing the nun’s visa denial, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said:

This is an administration which never seems to find a good enough excuse to help Christians, but always finds an excuse to apologize for terrorists … I hope that as it gets attention that Secretary Kerry will reverse it. If he doesn’t, Congress has to investigate, and the person who made this decision ought to be fired.

This is not the first time the U.S. State Department has not granted a visa to a Christian leader coming from a Muslim region. Last year, after the United States Institute for Peace brought together the governors of Nigeria’s mostly Muslim northern states for a conference in the U.S., the State Department blocked the visa of the region’s only Christian governor, Jonah David Jang.

According to a Nigerian human rights lawyer based in Washington D.C., Emmanuel Ogebe, the Christian governor’s “visa problems” were due to anti-Christian bias in the U.S. government:

The U.S. insists that Muslims are the primary victims of Boko Haram. It also claims that Christians discriminate against Muslims in Plateau, which is one of the few Christian majority states in the north. After the [Christian governor] told them [U.S. authorities] that they were ignoring the 12 Shariah states who institutionalized persecution … he suddenly developed visa problems…. The question remains — why is the U.S. downplaying or denying the attacks against Christians?

The testimony of another nun, Sister Hatune Dogan, also made in May, indicates why the State Department may not want to hear such testimonials: they go against the paradigm that “Islam is peace.” According to Sister Hatune:

What is going on there [Islamic State territories], what I was hearing, is the highest barbarism on earth in the history until today… The mission of Baghdadi, of ISIS, is to convert the world completely to the Islamic religion and bring them to Dar Al Salaam, as they call it. And Islam is not peace, please. Whoever says ISIS has no connection to Islam or something like this is, he’s a liar. ISIS is Islam; Islam is ISIS… We know that in Islam, there is no democracy. Islam and democracy are opposite, like black and white. And I hope America will understand. America today has the power that they can stop this disaster on the earth, with other Western countries.

The rest of May’s roundup of Muslim persecution of Christians around the world includes, but is not limited to, the following accounts, listed by theme.

Blog: Planned Parenthood hires crisis management firm as third video is released

The Center for Medical Progressreleased their third undercover videoof Planned Parenthood’s involvement with the sale of fetal tissue for research. The video features an interview with Holly O’Donnell, a phlebotomist who used to work for Stem Express as a procurement technician.

Viewers should be aware there are parts of the video that are extremely graphic.

O’Donnell provided detailed testimony, stating that Stem Express wanted her to collect as many samples as possible in order to make as much money as possible.

The harder and the more valuable the tissue, the more money you get. So if you can somehow procure a brain or a heart, you can get more money than just like chorionic villi or umbilical cord…I guess that’s an “incentive” to try and get the hard stuff because you get more money.

In a powerful segment of the video, O’Donnell recounted her first day on the job when she was brought to a Planned Parenthood clinic as part of her training. As they entered one of the rooms, she noticed a light tray with pie dishes on it.

She had no idea what was going on.

Then someone came in with a bottle that appeared to be filled with blood, went over to the sink, emptied the contents into a strainer, put it on one of the pie dishes, and lit it up from below. O’Donnell watched in confusion.

And my trainer comes over and she puts on gloves and she grabs some tweezers and she’s picking the parts away from the vaginal tissue. And I’m, I’ve never had anxiety before this at all. So I’m looking and I don’t know what’s going on. I had no idea this was what was going to be happening, especially my first day. And, uh, she’s literally she has tweezers and she’s like, “OK. Well, this is a head. This is the arm. This is a leg.” And then she hands them over to me, “Oh, here you go. Can you show me some of the parts I just showed you?” And I grabbed the tweezers because I didn’t want to lose this job. I didn’t know…

the moment I took the tweezers, I put them in the dish, and I remember grabbing a leg and I said, “This is a leg.” And the moment I picked it up I could just feel, like, death and pain. Like, never felt that before. Like shoot up through my body…. I remember leaving that day, like, “What have I gotten myself into?”

The video then cuts to one of the “buyers” talking with two people in the lab area about the viability of the tissue they are picking through, including a physician by the name of Dr. Grinde. After the “buyer” expresses enthusiasm about how many samples an “11-6” (referring to the age of the fetus) would have provided, Grinde exclaims, “Excellent!” The conversation then turns to matters of money as Grinde says: “…I think a per-item thing works a little better, just because we can see how much we can get out of it.”

No commentary is needed. Anyone who has an ounce of humanity knows this is depraved.

Planned Parenthood has continued to dig in, standing behind their practices. Having been exposed (with many more videos to come) they are now in full panic mode and have hired SKDKnickerbocker, a crisis communications firm. Anita Dunn, the former White House Communications Director who listed Mao ZeDong as one of her favorite philosophers, is their managing director. (‘Nuff said.) Apparently the firm has jumped into action as Planned Parenthood sent letters to some media outlets instructing them not to air the videos. 

Planned Parenthood, the left, and now SKDKnickerbocker will continue to use whateer means necessary to silence the truth and spin this until Planned Parenthood is perceived as the righteous victim. In the Age of Obama it’s anyone’s guess how this will all turn out.

God bless the brave souls at the Center for Medical Progress and Holly O’Donnell for her wisdom, integrity, and willingness to speak out.

Planned Parenthood Can’t Abort the Truth | TheBlaze.com

Clinton admires racial purist Margaret Sanger

Lawmakers Vote to Let Obama Take Your Passport Without Trial - Trunews: Trunews:

In a radical attack on the due-process rights of Americans that received virtually no media attention, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted to give the Obama administration the unilateral power to strip you of your passport and right to travel without a trial or even criminal charges. The scheme does not even include a way to challenge your status as a non-person involuntarily trapped inside U.S. borders on orders from the secretary of state. Lawmakers, some of whom could themselves be caught in the dragnet along with myriad administration officials, praised the effort as a way to stop alleged terrorists from travelling. But critics said it was yet another attack on the fundamental rights of Americans, such as due-process protections, and that it must be resisted.

Under the bill, “the Secretary of State may refuse to issue a passport to any individual whom the Secretary has determined has aided, assisted, abetted, or otherwise helped an organization the Secretary has designated as a foreign terrorist organization,” the text states. “The Secretary of State may revoke a passport previously issued to any individual” whom Secretary of State John Kerry, or future administrations that could be even more radical, unilaterally decides may have done any of those things. The terms are left undefined, opening up widespread potential for abuse, and there is no appeals process outlined in the legislation.

In essence, if approved by the Senate and signed into law by Obama, one man — far-left radical Kerry, for now — would have the power to strip you of your unalienable, God-given rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Under the measure, individuals targeted by Kerry or his successors would have no right to due-process of law — no trial by jury, no chance to contest the findings in open court (or anywhere else), no right to be presumed innocent before proven guilty, not even a right to see the accusations. Indeed, even actual criminal charges are unnecessary under the scheme for somebody to be permanently trapped in or out of the United States based on secret evidence, with no mechanism to appeal.

Will Donald Trump Save America and the World by Making a Deal with Putin? / Sputnik International

[This article deals more with the current situation between the U.S. and Russia]

Washington hawks want regime change in Russia, no more and no less. Their hatred of Putin, who has the guts to have his own opinion of world affairs, and who stands firm for his country’s right to look after its security interests, makes him the ultimate evil.

For the past few weeks we have heard plenty of statements from Washington about the huge threat to U.S. National Security coming from Russia. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter and top Pentagon brass are convinced — or say they are — that the Russian threat is an absolute reality. The latest in this row is the statement by the Head of the US Special Operations Command General Joseph Votel, who also views Russia as an "existential threat" to the United States, repeating accusations against Moscow over the Ukrainian crisis.

In Congress, the party of war keeps pushing the same line but If this were only related to the upcoming budget sequestration discussion — which, among other things, can affect the Pentagon — one could dismiss this incessant talk of an imminent Russian threat as a simple money extortion exercise. However, I am afraid it is not just about money.

Washington hawks want regime change in Russia, no more and no less. Their hatred of Putin, who has the guts to have his own opinion of world affairs, and who stands firm for his country's right to look after its security interests, makes him the ultimate evil — someone who has to go and be replaced by a more malleable character. A person like Boris Yeltsin, who knew who is running the show on the world stage and humbly accepted this sober fact.

It's a different question how to achieve Putin's overthrow without a major military confrontation with Russia, a conflict that can well end in a conflagration engulfing the whole planet. It is one thing to perform regime change in Iraq, Libya or Ukraine but dealing with nuclear-armed Russia is quite a different matter.

Presently the hawks' thinking is still at the stage where they believe they can get rid of Putin through economic sanctions and by using the conflict in Ukraine to exhaust Russia's strength, ruin its economy and undermine its stability. There is no question that substantial damage to Russian economy has been done. It is not "in tatters," as Mr. Obama recently gloated, but is definitely shrinking and the number of people living below the poverty line has indeed increased. However, Putin's popularity is not heading south; on the contrary, his ratings jump a point or two every time another angry anti-Putin rebuke from Washington hits the airwaves.

Instead of accepting the failure of the current policy of sanctions and start searching for some kind of reasonable compromise, the party of war is pushing for escalation in tensions which can end up really badly for everyone. Any incident, however unintentional and insignificant in itself, can grow into something that we all — or rather those who will have survived — will remember with a sense of everlasting wonder at human stupidity.

What we see now resembles the hysteria in 2003 prior to and during the Iraq invasion. The party of war is so hell-bent on its perilous course that it can hardly be swayed by any reasonable arguments of those against warmongering. Nowadays even the most ardent supporters of the Iraq and Libya wars admit that they were huge mistakes which resulted in hundreds of thousands dead and wounded, millions of refugees, trillions of dollars wasted and the rise of ISIS on top of that.

Besides, there is another question that needs to be considered coolly and factually. Does Russia really represent the great or even greatest threat to America or for that matter to any NATO country?

Many Russians believe that actually it is America that represents the greatest threat to their country. Was it Russia that instigated a military coup in Mexico and installed an anti-American corrupted oligarch as its president? Was it Russia that imposed devastating economic sanctions on America — or is it the other way round? Is it Russia that supplies weapons and trains Mexican nationalists who are thinking of getting back territories lost during an armed conflict between the United States and the Centralist Republic of Mexico in the wake of the 1845 US annexation of Texas, which Mexico regarded as its inalienable part. Is it Russia that funds and supports American protest groups, something that we do around the world through the democracy promotion crusade?

As for the huge crowd of presidential candidates, it looks like so far the only one who promises to fix the U.S. — Russia relations thus avoiding a looming disaster is Donald Trump. In his recent interview on CNN he said that he would be able to work well with the Russian president.

No matter how the media and Republican Party establishment are trying to humiliate Trump, I for one would give him a chance.

Trump Schools the Republican Establishment - Matt Latimer - POLITICO Magazine

To many voters, rightly or wrongly, Trump is the antidote to years of Washington’s cynical, manufactured outrages, the petty punishments of those who deviated from the party line, its broken promises, meaningless “show votes,” careful, poll-tested politician speak and a multitude of backroom deals that have solved exactly zero of our nation’s problems. How deliciously humiliating it must be for the political pros of DC. The guy who somberly handed out goofy busywork assignments to people like Stephen Baldwin and the star of Sharknado on “Celebrity Apprentice” has just wandered in, delivered a few speeches off the top of his head and totally taken over the presidential race without breaking a sweat.   

Unlike the DC crowd, Trump knows something about building “brands”—and for now at least he has one that sells. The business guy who can’t be bought. The iconoclast who won’t be controlled. The unrepentant loudmouth who will tell the Boehners and Pelosis and Putins and Kim Jong Uns of the world to stuff it. The quip machine—or insult generator if you prefer—who stands in sharp contrast to the dry, safe, meaningless drivel that passes for most political discourse today.

Intentionally or not, Trump also lets people in on the little DC secrets that those inside the Beltway wouldn’t dare share with regular America. He’s exposed, for example, the fact that office seekers like Rick Perry sucked up to him for millions before he started attacking him. Or that politicians like Lindsey Graham have turned to him for help to get on various TV programs. Or pointing out that the wife of a well-respected political pundit on Fox News works for rival Scott Walker.

Because he is defiantly not a part of the political class, he is impervious to conventional political weaponry. In fact, the attitude of the DC class toward his candidacy—temper tantrums and bouts of monumental arrogance—is only making him stronger.

The fault for the Trump phenomenon lies not only with the GOP, however. In a first for a news organization, the Huffington Post announced that it was unilaterally relegating a legitimate frontrunner for a major political party’s nomination to the entertainment pages. This was the perfect manifestation of the arrogance and elitism Americans despise. The Huffington Post did not perform this “public service” with other presidential candidates whose chances were even more farcical than Trump’s, like Al Sharpton, the professional attention hog. Nor did they exile to their funny pages former Senator Mike Gravel—whose campaign seemed to exist only to publicize its weird “performance art” campaign ads.

Similarly, the Des Moines Register recently demanded that Trump exit the race, even as he scored at or near the top of opinion polls in Iowa, and long before the voters had any say in the matter. Trump replied in a pointed manner that few politicians could muster: “The Des Moines Register has lost much circulation, advertising and power over the last number of years. They will do anything for a headline, and this poorly written ‘non-endorsement’ got them some desperately needed ink.” He made the Register’s action look pompous and silly.

The Daily Beast's effort this week to use Trump's ex-wife, Ivana, against him—a la Marianne Gingrich in 2012—also backfired spectacularly. Rather than labeling her former husband a "rapist," the first Mrs. Trump warmly endorsed him for the White House. 

Thanks to this sort of clumsy incompetence, Trump has been handed every Republican candidate’s dream: the chance to run against both the GOP leadership and the mainstream media.  

Also see:

Washington Pharmacist to be Forced to Provide Morning After Pill Against His Will - Freedom Force

‘Libya is McDonalds for US’: How Gaddafi’s ‘pro-democracy’ son stood up against the West — RT News

Several killed in reported Israeli strike in Syria | The Times of Israel

Destruction of Beit El buildings begins amid continued riots - Israel News, Ynetnews

An Expert That Correctly Called The Last Two Stock Market Crashes Is Now Predicting Another One - The Daily Coin