Terrorists and George W. Bush

By Bill Murchison

Monday, April 22, 2013

 

While presiding over a war someone else started, George W. Bush received abuse and vilification unprecedented for a U. S. president. He still does, as a matter of fact, if you troll news sites featuring stories on the Boston atrocity of last week.

 

The president's -- now the ex-president's -- offenses were practically historic. He was a liar! He was a warmonger and torturer and violator of civil rights, not to mention a cheap show-off (that "Mission Accomplished" business)! If only we could be cleansed from the touch of the man who stole the hanging chads and, with them, the election!

 

The George W. Bush Presidential Center opens this week in Dallas, and the shouting, spitting, eye-gouging match over Bush's stewardship of the nation from 2001 to 2009 can commence with renewed fury. Not the least point of dispute will be the war on terror, which conflict we seem to be re-fighting in the aftermath of the Boston slaughter.

 

On Monday, as the federal government levied criminal charges against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, newspapers and newscasts agonized over potential mistakes in handling the case -- the subjects' Miranda Rights, whether to prosecute him as a domestic criminal or a foreign enemy, what to make of the Islamic connection to the Tsarnev brothers' plotting, what future precautions to take against homegrown terrorists and so on. In respect of the terror war, we are no more past the tumult and shouting and slander and rage of the Bush years than we are past their most visible internal consequences -- mistrust and national division.

 

Among the George W. Bush Center's spacious missions is that of evaluating the prospects for protecting and encouraging human freedom around the world. It may take some time. I would venture all the same that out in such a context, larger appreciation of Bush's fight against terrorism is likely to be born.

 

I am saying neither of two ridiculous things: 1) that the explicit game plan at the Bush Center is to make America's Iraq experience smell as good as it did for a few heady days in 2003; or 2) that the experience itself was exploited with peerless ingenuity and resolution. Neither point is true.

 

What is true, I venture, is that our national trip into the vortex of the Iraqi-Afghan-Muslim-terror-war whirlpool was predestined under existing circumstances -- an aspect of fate; postponable, maybe, but unavoidable.

 

A Muslim-directed terror war goes on, and we are the targets. Boston was only in part the follow-up to 9/11; it was the follow-up to the birth, following World War II, of seething, boiling hatreds among much of the world's Muslim population. The hatred surely has less to do with religious scruples than with antagonism toward winners (us) by losers (members of stagnant Arab and Muslim cultures). "Losers" was in fact the word used by the Tsarnaev brothers' uncle to characterize his nephews.

 

The roots of anti-Americanism are hard to get at. We don't hate the people who hate us. We just know they do hate us and that measures -- defensive and aggressive when occasion demands it -- are part of modern life.

 

Second-guessing George W. Bush for a war supported in its initial stages by two senators from Boston -- Ted Kennedy and John Kerry -- is simplicity itself. It's enough for many to know there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Conclusion: Bush lied. Liars are evil. Bush is evil.

 

The Bush Center, I believe, has no intention of making out any kind of a case for a war marked by strategic miscalculations of the gravest sort. I think -- I pray -- the center will serve as a forum, one of many, for looking at both sides of the War on Terror question. We need such a forum. Was Bush 43 always wrong? Hardly. Was he always right? Same answer.

 

This he knew, even so --- Our generally honorable nation can come under the gaze of killers, and that the law of mankind has left us an unchallengeable precept -- kill or be killed.

The Muslim World Hates the U.S. More Than Ever

By Mona Charen

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

 

If there was one thing the left was certain about in 2008 it was this: George W. Bush had catastrophically undermined America's world reputation with his unprovoked aggression and use of torture. The advent of Obama would reverse the damage. As Andrew Sullivan wrote in 2007, among best assets Obama brought to the "rebranding" of America was "his face." The election of Obama and his friendly approach to the Muslim world would make the United States safer as well as more just.

 

No one believed this tale more fervently than Obama himself. His first official act was to direct the closing of Guantanamo Bay within one year and the elimination of harsh interrogation techniques. The "message we are sending around the world," he intoned, "is that the United States intends to prosecute the ongoing struggle ... in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals." In Cairo a few months later, he declared, "a new beginning" of relations between America and the Muslim world.

 

Obama participated in erecting a Bush straw man -- a Bush who disdained and caricatured Muslims in general and committed war crimes in the name of national security. In fact, Bush had gone to great pains, within hours of the 9/11 attacks, to appear with imams and to stress that Islam was a "religion of peace."

 

Because Iraq had been Bush's war, as Obama saw it, he squandered the hard-won victory by failing to obtain an agreement that would have kept a stabilizing American force on the ground, electing instead to withdraw completely. And because Afghanistan was the war that Bush allegedly neglected, Obama sent 33,000 more troops (fewer than the generals requested) -- a surge that, unlike Bush's in Iraq -- failed, but not before causing 70 percent of the American deaths in that conflict.

 

Most of all, the Obama administration fled from the concept of a struggle against Islamic terrorism as if fighting jihadis (the smalls subset of Muslims who've declared war on us) were equivalent to warring against all Muslims. Orwellian language flowed. The war on terror became "overseas contingency operations." When Major Nidal Hassan gunned down his fellow soldiers shouting "Allahu Akbar!" the president warned against jumping to conclusions (a caution he failed to show himself in the Trayvon Martin and Henry Louis Gates cases). His administration later dubbed Hassan's attack "workplace violence" rather than jihadism or terrorism.

 

When Faisal Shahzad attempted to explode a car bomb in Times Square, the administration at first declared it to be a lone wolf attack, only later reluctantly conceding that the Pakistani Taliban had been culpable. When the consulate in Benghazi was attacked (undermining the administration narrative that al-Qaida had died with bin Laden), the administration conducted a prolonged disinformation campaign designed to deny the obvious.

 

Tiptoeing through language after the Boston bombings, the administration at first declined to use the word "terror," perhaps fearing that to use the word would imply a Muslim connection. "You use those words and it means something very specific in people's minds," explained David Axelrod. Besides, he continued, the president suspected "tax day" protesters.

 

What has this excruciating torture of the language and elaborate "rebranding" achieved? The U.S. is not safer. Terror attacks have been attempted at the same rate as during the Bush years (and have been thwarted slightly less successfully). As for U.S. standing in the Muslim world, the Guardian reports that a 2011 poll found favorability ratings for the U.S. have plummeted. "In most countries they are lower than at the end of the Bush administration, and lower than Iran's favorable ratings." A 2012 Pew poll of six predominantly Muslim nations -- Turkey, Lebanon, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and Pakistan -- found U.S. approval ratings below those during the Bush Administration and well under the popularity of China.

 

It's one thing to create a bogeyman for political purposes. Obama did it to Bush in 2008 (for use against McCain), and he did it to Romney in 2012. It's quite another to believe your own propaganda and make policy in response. Bush was no anti-Muslim bigot. If he erred, it was in believing too credulously in the readiness for western-style democracy in the Arab world.

 

As for Obama, his doubletalk about the nature of our enemies -- jihadis -- has achieved neither greater safety for Americans nor improved popularity in the Muslim world. He's 0 for 2.

Why Do Radical Muslims Hate Us?

By Michael Brown

Monday, April 22, 2013

 

What would motivate two young Muslims to blow up innocent men, women, and children? What did America do to deserve such an outpouring of irrational, blind hatred? In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, it is clear that most Americans still do not understand the ideology of radical Islam.

 

Bill O’Reilly noted that America had been very kind to the Tsarnaev family, wondering how they could have paid back our generosity with such barbaric acts of terror. America is a great, open-hearted country that welcomed this immigrant family and made the American dream accessible to them. Now they kill and maim our people?

 

More than two decades ago, Daniel Coleman, an American intelligence agent, wondered what it was that fueled the fires of an obscure Islamic radical named Osama bin Laden. Reading one of bin Laden’s writings, Coleman observed that “one of the striking features of the document was that time seemed to have stopped a thousand years ago. There was now and there was then, but there was nothing in between. It was as if the Crusades were still going on in bin Laden’s universe. The intensity of the anger was also difficult for Coleman to grasp. What did we do to him? he wondered” (as recounted by Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower).

 

As Coleman was to learn, and as all of America should have learned by now, in the eyes of radical Muslims, America has done much to deserve their wrath.

 

First, America’s wars in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan are considered to be Western intrusions into the Muslim world, power-grabbing moves aimed at world domination, sometimes motivated by greed (= oil), always motivated by a sense of the superiority of American democracy.

 

What we view as wars of liberation at the cost of precious American lives, they view as acts of exploitation, as murderous incursions that are wiping out hundreds of thousands, if not millions of their people. (I am not supporting these views; I am simply stating how radical Muslims view us.)

 

How many Iraqi and Afghani citizens have been killed by American bombs? they would ask. How many innocent Muslim men, women, and children have been slaughtered? They will now inflict that same terror on us, not by dropping bombs on us from the air (since they don’t have the capability of doing so), but by planting bombs on our busy city streets.

 

Second, while Israel is known as the Little Satan in the radical Islamic world, America is called the Great Satan, and not only because of our support for Israel (although that is obviously one of our greatest evils in their eyes). We are seen as the champion of Western decadence, the chief exporter of sexual immorality to the rest of the world. (Tragically, the Muslim world in general sees this as the fruit of Christianity, since America is a perceived as a “Christian nation,” whereas the reality is that we have a great and wonderful Christian heritage but we have largely departed from it.)

 

In a USA Today interview in 1997, Islamic radicals in Egypt expressed their views: “They cite figures on the divorce rate in the United States. They point to crime and drug use. They talk about America’s preoccupation with sex. ‘You will never find these things where true Islam exists,’ argues Ziad Ali, 34. ‘Islam is the only answer, not Christianity, not Judaism, not Buddha. Without it, America is going to hell.’ He points to a young Muslim woman . . . who is fully clothed from head to toe and even wearing gloves. . . . . ‘That is how a woman must dress, not the way they dress in America, in Britain,’ Ali says. ‘In America, your women dress like harlots. They have no dignity. We want to change that here in Egypt so our harlots don’t go to hell.’” (Cited in my book Revolution.)

 

They see Islamic dress as preserving the dignity of their women; we see it as suffocating and oppressive. They see Sharia laws that call for the beheading of adulterers as safeguarding the honor of marriage; we see them as primitive and barbaric. (Is it any surprise that the media is now reporting that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was married and that his wife is an American convert to Islam who wears a black hijab?)

 

Third, young, radicalized Muslims love death the way Americans love life, being taught that martyrdom for the cause of Allah guarantees them entry into the heavenly kingdom, replete with 70 virgins (per man!) and many other sumptuous pleasures. In contrast, even the most devout Muslim in the world is not guaranteed acceptance into Paradise, since he might somehow have fallen short of the mark.

 

And if, in fact, there is a connection between the Boston bombings and Chechnyan Muslims, the tradition of martyrdom is very relevant, as General Mashkadov, a Muslim leader of the breakaway republic, commented on the tenacity of his troops in the late 1990’s as they fought against Russia: “I can only wonder at the strength with which my men fight. . . . All we can do is fight on, to show not only that we want our independence, but that we are willing to die for it.”

 

Fourth, our killing of Osama bin Laden is viewed as the cold-blooded murder of one of their most revered leaders. If Islamic soldiers assassinated one of our greatest heroes, how would we respond?

 

And so, bin Laden may be dead, but radical Islam is far from dead. We had better wake up to reality.

Letters to a Young Progressive

By Mike Adams

Monday, April 22, 2013

 

Some say the third time is a charm. So I've tried to be a little more charming in my third book than I was in my first two. Make no mistake about it, though: I'm glad to have written two hard-hitting books on life in the academy. The first was needed to expose the intellectual shallowness of the campus diversity movement. Another book was needed to chronicle the absurdity of campus feminism. But my latest book is written from the heart.

 

I see kids going off to college and losing their faith every year. I also see them adopting radical political positions soon after enrolling in college. I understand what they are going through because I went through the same thing thirty years ago. I abandoned my faith my very first semester in college. Later on, I embraced left wing politics that only made sense in conjunction with a secular worldview. But circumstances and, ultimately, Providence turned that all around.

 

In 1993, an unarmed fraternity brother of mine was shot and killed execution-style by the side of a highway near Starkville, Mississippi. I immediately abandoned my support for a full federal ban on handguns. In fact, I went out and bought my first revolver.

 

In 1994, I sat on my first university hiring committee and learned how race-based affirmative action really worked. I immediately abandoned my support of affirmative action.

 

In 1996, I abandoned atheism in a prison near Quito, Ecuador. I saw some human rights abuses in that prison but had no moral standard by which to judge them. I learned that day that there was a Moral Law that transcended cultural norms. I realized that it meant there must be a moral lawgiver.

 

I eventually made my way back into the church. It was largely an intellectual journey and it served me well when I got the call to enter the campus cultural wars shortly after 911. The details on how I got drawn into those wars are less important than the lessons I learned fighting them. First and foremost, I learned that the main problem in higher education is not that we don't teach religion at the university. The problem is that we teach false religion.

 

We teach kids that they may define the unborn as property if it will facilitate their sexual lifestyle or their economic well-being.

 

We teach kids that both their conduct and idea of right and wrong are determine by society and culture respectively.

 

We teach kids that man has the capacity to construct a utopian society so long as he is freed from the constraining idea that he is broken by sin and separation from God.

 

All of this is dangerous because it amounts to self-worship. That is dangerous because it requires a rejection of God, not just a rejection of tradition. Somewhere in the process, the idea of inalienable rights gets lost. Rights suddenly come from man. And that means man can take them away. These ideas have consequences.

 

Because the secular progressive worldview is so pervasive and because I was once led astray by it, I decided to write Letters to a Young Progressive: How to Avoid Wasting Your Life Protesting Things You Don’t Understand. It all began when a young man had an angry outburst in one of my classes. He was angry over something he learned in college that simply wasn't true. After I wrote to him asking him to consider a different point of view, I realized it was wrong to only write to him. So I started writing to an entire generation. I published the final collection of thirty five letters as a book. Today is the official release date. (You can pick it up in any major book store.)

 

I could have called it Letters from a Former Progressive. Because that's what my third book really is. I hope you read it and enjoy it. But I also hope you share it with a young progressive who is inclined to protest things he really doesn't understand.

Britain's Hateful Politics

By Cal Thomas

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

 

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- The death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has prompted reactions from Britain's far left that takes bad taste to new extremes. During its Top 40 music countdown Sunday night, BBC Radio 1 was "forced" to play a seven-second clip of "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead" from the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, because Thatcher haters had bought enough copies during a feverish online campaign to bump it to the top of the pop charts. It ultimately reached the number two spot, 5,000 sales short of the top position.

 

If you think U.S. politics has become too corrosive, consider the British variety. Call it patty cake vs. cage fighting.

 

"Death parties" have been held across the UK at which anti-Thatcherites celebrated her passing. Anarchists, who demonstrated their hatred for Thatcher over the weekend, plan to join other haters for a demonstration at her funeral on April 17, which has prompted Scotland Yard to make preparations to defend heads of state, or their representatives, along with celebrities against terrorist attack.

 

A veteran Metropolitan Police officer, Sergeant Jeremy Scott, tweeted that he hoped Thatcher's death was "painful and degrading," adding the world would be a "better place" if Prime Minister David Cameron and some of his cabinet members were also dead. Scott has since resigned.

 

The Daily Mail reported that a drama teacher named Romany Blythe called Baroness Thatcher a "despot" and said: "They danced in the streets when Hitler died, too."

 

Some students who attended death parties were too young, or not yet born, to be aware of the Thatcher years. The Daily Telegraph quoted 21-year-old Aamna Mohdin, a biology student at Queen Mary, University of London, who called Thatcher a "terrible person" and a "draconian woman" who did nothing for women or feminism.

 

These are the products of "higher" education. One student who attended a death party was quoted as saying she didn't become a liberal until she went to university. No surprise there.

 

Why such visceral reactions to a woman who served her country for 11 years as prime minister? For many, government is a drug to which they have become addicted. They need the drug to survive. Margaret Thatcher tried to break that addiction and get her people to support themselves. Anyone who suggests it is possible even desirable to break the government "habit" becomes the target of the "addicts" and their enabling politicians, both in life and now in death.

 

The British press has reported on families in which several generations have been on "benefits" with no expectation of ever working, and no motivation for finding work. They are offended by suggestions they look for a job.

 

Thatcher sought to break that cycle and in so doing angered many who thought it their "right" to be on the receiving end of other people's money. The debate in the UK mirrors that taking place in the United States as too many politicians, reluctant to tell anyone "no" for fear of losing votes, indulge people in their social and economic addiction to government.

 

The battle being fought in both countries is between those who value the individual as supreme and others who regard the state as supreme. In the UK and U.S., government has exceeded its boundaries and just as last winter's floods in the UK have caused severe damage, there has been similar damage to liberty and the promotion of capitalism in both countries.

 

The Cameron government has cautiously tried to emulate Thatcher in its reform attempts. These include the costly and underperforming National Health Service -- a preview of coming attractions if Obamacare is fully implemented in the U.S. next year.

If Cameron succeeds, the left will probably celebrate his eventual demise, too. Such is the poisoned well of British politics.

Sragow’s Leftist Rants

By Dennis Prager

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

 

Last week, a student at the University of Southern California released 15 minutes of excerpts from videos he had made of his political-science professor, Darry Sragow.

 

Here is some of what the USC professor said to his students:

 

“California Republicans [are] really stupid and racist.”

 

“Republicans are 82 percent white. Losers.”

 

“The Republican party in California . . . is the last vestige of angry old white people.”

 

“The Republicans are trying to prevent people of color and people of lower income from voting by requiring voter ID.”

 

“We discovered, and this is generally true, the least flexible voter in America, the person who’s less likely to change their mind about anything, is an old white guy. Old white guys are stubborn sons of bitches.”

 

“There are tens of thousands of people who are now dead because George Bush, even though he got fewer votes, became the president of the United States. That’s a fact. . . . I think the election got stolen. That’s what I think. . . . [The Republicans] stole the election. And this happens all the time.”

“Probably the biggest vulnerability that Romney has . . . [is] that the guy doesn’t understand normal human beings.”

 

“All campaigns have a message it communicates to the voters: [The Democratic message is] ‘Vote for Obama because he’s gonna create jobs and keep the peace and protect Social Security.’ [The Republican message is] ‘Vote for Romney because Obama is all f***ed up . . . ’”

 

“The Republican party is increasingly the last refuge of old, angry white people who don’t like what’s going on in this country.”

 

Some points regarding Sragow’s statements:

 

1. None had anything to do with teaching.

 

2. They are all left-wing propaganda, examples of the widespread attempts at our universities to indoctrinate rather than educate.

 

3. Some are not merely indoctrination, they are also false. For example, blacks are considerably less likely than whites “to change their mind about anything” political. Since 1964, the black Democratic vote has been consistently over 80 percent.

 

4. Sragow has no compunction about cursing while “teaching.” Cursing in public is characteristic of leftism. I provide many examples and explain why in my book Still the Best Hope.

 

5. If he had substituted “old black” for “old white,” Sragow would have been suspended, if not fired. If he had substituted “old white gal” for “old white guy,” Sragow would have been suspended, if not fired.

 

6. According to his fellow liberal Tom Brokaw, “old white guys” are “the Greatest Generation.” Which is it?

 

What was USC’s official response?

 

As reported in the campus newspaper, the Daily Trojan: “The university responded Friday with a statement affirming faculty members’ right to express their views.”

 

And in the words of Provost Elizabeth Garrett: “The freedom to take unpopular positions and the freedom to express those positions publicly are at the foundation of what it means to be a faculty member of a university.”

 

For the record, in 2009 Vice President for Student Affairs Michael Jackson published “an open letter to the USC community” in the Daily Trojan, attacking the College Republicans for inviting conservative activist David Horowitz to campus. But USC in no way condemned Sragow.

 

Furthermore, Garrett was wrong about universities and dishonest about USC. She was wrong about “what it means to be a faculty member of a university.” It is not about taking “unpopular positions”; it is about teaching truth to the best of one’s ability. And attacks on Republicans are hardly “unpopular positions” at USC, or at virtually any other American university. On the contrary, they are the dominant positions there.

 

For Provost Garrett’s sake, therefore, here are some positions that are surely unpopular at USC:

 

• Marriage should remain defined as the union of a man and a woman.

 

• A human fetus should have at least as much right to life as, let us say, a dog.

 

• America is the greatest force for good in the world.

 

• Fighting Communism in Vietnam was a morally noble venture.

 

• The greatest problem in black American life is not racism or poverty but the absence of fathers.

 

• The most effective — often the only — way to stop great evil is through war.

 

• More men than women are willing to work long hours at a job.

 

• Women are more likely to find happiness in a successful marriage and family than in a successful career.

 

• At this moment in history, the world has more to fear from fundamentalist Muslims than from fundamentalist Christians, Jews, Hindus, or Buddhists.

 

Provost Garrett might want to inquire as to how many USC professors subscribe to, let alone advocate in class, any of those positions.

 

At the Daily Trojan website, one commenter after another articulated what may be the only solution to USC’s and other universities’ having become left-wing seminaries:

 

Scott: “I am paying $65,000 per year for my son to be fed this hateful nonsense? The fact that the administration is not mortified by these statements is telling. Shame on USC.”

 

Mike: “Lost a lot of respect for my alma mater today. They won’t get another $ from me.”

 

KJM: “I am alum and hereby withholding any further support of my alma mater.”

 

Non-leftists who give money to an American university are usually funding the erosion of that university as well as the erosion of their own values.

North Korea: A Prison without Bars

By Nina Shea

Monday, April 15, 2013

 

North Korea’s Kim dynasty considers religion a hindrance to the nation’s socialist evolution. For 50 years, its secret police has waged a brutal campaign to eradicate religious belief. It has nearly succeeded. But the numbers of Christian believers are now slowly rising (maybe even in the low hundreds of thousands) and they must be prepared to pay with their lives for their faith.

 

In the early Sixties, Buddhist shrines and temples and Christian churches were shuttered, and all religious literature and Bibles destroyed. Religious leaders were either executed or sent to concentration camps. Some temples that have reopened are mainly historical cultural sites, not active religious centers. Pyongyang was known in the 1950s as “Asia’s Jerusalem” for its robust Christian communities, but the five Christian churches that now exist, all in the capital, are state-operated for international propaganda purposes.

 

Run like an impregnable fortress, North Korea bans human-rights investigations, and the persecution of religious believers, like other aspects of daily conditions, is barely known. Nevertheless, an important study by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) and a white paper by the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (NKDC), all based on the testimony of refugees over the past ten years most of whom are not religious, help piece together a grim picture of what life is like for Christians and more generally.

 

These interviews, taken at different times, of different refugees, by different interviewers, corroborate each other and provide powerful evidence of pervasive ideological control, religious persecution, human-rights violations, and government surveillance. These searing voices need to be heard. A representative sample of them follows:

 

• “North Korea is a prison without bars. The reason why the North Korean system still exists is because of the strict surveillance system. When we provide the information like ‘this family believes in a religion from their grandfather’s generation,’ the [National Security Agency] will arrest each family member. That is why entire families are scared of one another. Everyone is supposed to be watching one another like this. All organizations, the Kim Il Sung Socialist Youth League, and the Women’s League are [gathering information].”

 

• “There are churches and Buddhist temples in Pyongyang . . . built only for . . . foreigners to attend. When foreigners visit Pyongyang they would go to churches and temples to pray and bow. I never heard of religious books until I came to China.”

 

• “A forty-something woman, who lived in a city of North Pyongan Province, North Korea, was caught with a Bible in her home. She was seized, dragged from her house, and publicly shot to death. Her execution took place on the threshing floor of a farm. . . . I was curious why she was to be shot. Somebody told me she had kept a Bible at her home. Guards tied her head, her chest, and her legs to a post, and shot her dead. It happened in September 2005.”

 

• “Based on a tip-off, around January 2005, agents from the Central Antisocialist Activities Inspection Unit raided my home in a county of North Hamgyong Province. As a result of their search, they found a Bible. I was taken into custody to a political prison camp alongside my wife and daughter. My son, who was staying in China, entered the North without any knowledge about his family’s detention. He, too, was later taken to the camp.”

 

• “One cannot even say the word ‘religion.’ North Korea does have Christians and Catholics. They have buildings but they are all fake. These groups exist to falsely show the world that North Korea has freedom of religion. But [the government] does not allow religion or [independent] religious organizations because it is worried about the possibility that Kim Jong Il’s regime would be in danger [because] religion erodes society.”

 

• “In 2001, a woman was taken into custody at a political prison camp for having talked with her neighbors, who had been to China, about religion. One of the neighbors was a government spy. She was forced to divorce her husband, and was detained at a political prison camp and died there.”

 

• “At Christmas time we used to sing familiar Christmas carols such as ‘Silent Night’ and ‘Joy to the World.’ Older North Korean Christians know these too. They sang these carols when they were young. Their parents were Christians at the time of the great revival in 1907. Now they are no longer allowed to sing them, because all Christian activity is forbidden.”

 

• “‘Underground believers’ would be a more appropriate term than ‘underground church.’ Church would be something like a place where people can gather and listen to a sermon, but it’s impossible to exist for long. Instead, underground believers can exist. There is a chance that two people pair up and hold their hands together to pray. However, a gathering of three or more is dangerous.”

 

• “In 2003, I watched three men being taken to a place of public execution in a county of North Hamgyong Province [in North Korea]. Among them was a man with whom I had studied the Bible together in China. He was gagged with rags before his execution. When told to say what he wanted to say before dying, he said, ‘O Lord, forgive these miserable people.’ And he was shot dead.”

 

• “You cannot say a word about [religion or] three generations of your family can be killed. People who lived before the Korean War knew [about religion.] But religion was eradicated. We can only serve one person in North Korea [Kim Jong Il].”

 

• “Hanging pictures of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il on the wall is an obligation. The purpose of hanging the pictures is to worship Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. There is a ritual done before the pictures. [We] worship Kim Il Sung, the Great Leader who saved us from death and emancipated us from slavery. If a fire breaks out, people would show their loyalty by running into the fire to save the portraits. Anyone who gets burned doing this would win commendation.”