The comments come from Stephen Coughlin, a lecturer for leading Department of Defense institutions such as the Naval War College, Marine Corps HQ-Quantico and for the FBI. Coughlin is a retired major in the U.S. Army reserves and was assigned to USCENTCOM, with a military intelligence specialty.

His assignments included the Pentagon’s National Military Joint Intelligence Center, the National Security Council’s Interagency Perception Management Threat Panel and the intelligence staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, so he has the credentials required for such assessments.

He recently addressed the Northern Virginia Chapter of ACT! for America, where he quoted terrorist Carlos the Jackal, who said, “Only a coalition of Islamists and Marxists can destroy the United States.” Thus, Coughlin said, “If we’re going to get a grip on this, we have to know their narrative and understand it. We know that when the other side has language that’s locked into doctrine, we need to hold them to it.”

He showed al-Qaida’s agenda for lone jihadists too.

He cited the case of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, killed during a confrontation with police.

Tsarnaev reportedly sent a text message to his mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaev, saying he was “ready to die for Islam.” ABC News Radio reported that his surviving brother and fellow suspect told investigators both “were ready to die.” According to The Christian Post, “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev indicated that his older brother hated America and Christianity, especially for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Al-Qaida is one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s many branches and it preaches that individual Muslims should act as lone jihadists, lone terrorists. Therefore, after the bombings in Boston, after the two Muslim Tsarnaev brothers were named as the primary suspects, Coughlin made an in-depth video on the Muslim Brotherhood’s narrative on this subject.

In it, he says, “A couple years ago, in June 2010, I was asked to brief a couple members of Congress about what this concept of the ‘lone wolf’ was. It’s the first time I brought the fact that what the FBI and DHS call ‘lone wolf’ is actually a formal part of jihad.”

In the video, Coughlin also highlights the cold calculation of al-Qaida’s leaders telling their followers who to murder and where to murder them.

And there are some surprising details. For example, he said al-Qaida urges against killing Jews in their synagogues. Coughlin believes that’s because it’s bad publicity that damages the Muslim Brotherhood’s deceptive “interfaith” dialogues with Christians and Jews.

He quotes an article from the al-Qaida magazine “Inspire,” which says: “The confrontation with America is fundamental, while the confrontation with Europe is secondary, aimed at making Europe lead the alliance by putting pressure on her.”

His presentation follows:

The U.S. government has known of the Muslim Brotherhood’s goal of defeating the U.S. since 2004, when federal investigators raided a terrorist’s home in Virginia and found “An Explanatory Memorandum: On the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.”

That was written in 1991 by Mohamed Akram for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Shura Council.

The FBI’s discovery of the memo led to the 2008 federal trial entitled the United States of America v. Holy Land Foundation, through which the federal government shut down HLF for sending millions of dollars to the terrorist group HAMAS, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch.

In the memo, Akram addresses his fellow Muslim Brotherhood members with various titles, including the organization’s official name: the Islamic Movement, the Movement and Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun in Arabic.

Akram wrote: “In order for Islam and its Movement to become ‘a part of the homeland’ in which it lives, ‘stable’ in its land, ‘rooted’ in the spirits and minds of its people, ‘enabled’ in the [life] of its society and [have] firmly-established ‘organizations’ on which the Islamic structure is built and with which the testimony of civilization is achieved, the Movement must plan and struggle to obtain ‘the keys’ and the tools of this process [to] carry out this grand mission as a ‘Civilization Jihadist’ responsibility which lies on the shoulders of Muslims and – on top of them – the Muslim Brotherhood in this country. …

“The process of settlement is a ‘Civilization-Jihadist Process’ with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their [own] hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim’s destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes…”

The 1991 memo lists 29 of the Muslim Brotherhood’s public organizations working to conquer the U.S. and North America. Subsequently, other front groups were established, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Coughlin pointed to Tariq Ramadan as a protégé of “Rules for Radicals” author Saul Alinsky. He is the grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Sheikh Hassan Ahmed Abdel Rahman Muhammed al-Banna.

Among his many occupations, Ramadan is a professor at Oxford University, where he concentrates on “Islamic revival in the world and Muslims of the West.” He’s president of the European Muslim Network, and Ramadan is widely published and widely received as a charismatic speaker of English, French and Arabic.

Coughlin said Ramadan wasn’t allowed in the United States because he was on the terrorist watch list, but last July 27 he went to the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamic Circle of North America fundraiser in Dallas, Texas, and said, “We should all be very careful not to be colonized by something which is coming from the consumerist society. It should be us with our understanding of Islam, colonizing positively the United States of America.”

“It’s very important to hear the Alinskyist narrative,” said Coughlin. “What do they do? How many times do you hear them talk about core values? Part of Alinskyism is to take core, hallowed terms, both in the sacred governmental space of our Constitution and religiously because they are just as virulent and powerful in the interfaith community. Take core ideas, use them but redefine them.”

Apart from Coughlin’s lectures, WND columnists have written about Alinsky developing the strategy of infiltrating government through “community organizers,” and the fact that some of his most successful students are former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Barack Hussein Obama.

WND also covers the Islamist infiltration of our government and school systems.

Ironically, some 10 hours before the bombings in Boston, Coughlin’s CSP colleague Clare Lopez, a former CIA staffer, released “History of the Muslim Brotherhood Penetration of the U.S. Government.”

In the report, Lopez shows how the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated presidential administrations from Bill Clinton to Obama. For example, Bill and Hillary Clinton welcomed Muslim Brotherhood operatives, including Abdurahman Alamoudi, who was convicted during the Bush administration in 2004 for financing terrorism.

Lopez also reveals that Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide Huma Abedin, wife of the leftist philandering former Congressman Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., is rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood. Lopez further shows how Muslim Brotherhood officials infiltrated President George W. Bush’s administration, and how they influenced his speeches on Islam as a religion of peace, plus his policies.

Both Lopez and Coughlin point to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which is the Islamist version of the United Nations. Lopez says: “Another senior affiliate, Rashad Hussain, is the Obama administration’s envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Hussain’s background is replete with Muslim Brotherhood associations… In his official capacity, Hussain is responsible for providing advice on national security and Muslim outreach. He assisted in writing the president’s June 2009 Cairo speech, in which Obama announced a new approach to the Muslim world and essentially declared war on his host, then-President Hosni Mubarak, by publicly signaling his recognition of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. Hussain also acts as point man for the Obama administration’s cooperation with the Istanbul Process, the OIC effort to criminalize internationally any criticism of Islam. The current administration’s weeks-long duplicity in the aftermath of the 11 September 2012 terror attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, when it repeatedly and mendaciously claimed that an internet video trailer sparked a protest there that got out of hand, appears to have been carefully scripted not just with the OIC but Muslim Brotherhood organizations in the U.S., as well.”

As one FBI official anonymously told WND, he saw the “scrub” of Muslim words from his agency’s lexicon take place in 2007.

The most obvious victory for the Islamist/Marxist coalition is Clinton’s and Obama’s reaction to the murders of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans by Islamists at the embassy in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012.

Months prior to the 9/11 anniversary, Stevens expected terrorism on that anniversary and he asked for help. Stevens alerted State Department officials when he was under attack but no military assistance was sent.

After the murders in Libya and more Islamist attacks on other American embassies on 9/11, Obama and Clinton apologized to Muslims for an obscure video on YouTube that portrays Mohammad in unflattering terms, even though the video had nothing to do with the reasons for the attacks.

Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood president of Egypt, allowed protesters to mob, threaten and vandalize our embassy there. And, according to Islam expert Robert R. Reilly, Morsi was recruited to the Muslim Brotherhood while he was a doctoral engineering student at the University of Southern California.

The Islamists and Marxists built their coalition with the common agenda of killing both Christianity and Judiaism. It’s an odd coalition because Marxists despise God and religion, while Islamists intend to impose their religion on everyone.

But the evidence is mounting. On April 4, the Catholic Archdiocese for the Military Services USA and the Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty together announced they had uncovered a U.S. Army Reserve “Equal Opportunity” training brief that identifies “Evangelical Christianity” and “Catholicism” as examples of “religious extremism” along with al-Qaida, HAMAS and the Ku Klux Klan.

A slide from that training brief and its corresponding script reveals that in addition to grouping Catholics and Evangelical Christians with real terrorists, the Army Reserve added Islamist/Marxist propaganda by classifying “Islamophobia” as extremism.

“Freedom-loving Muslims must help America and the free world fight against Islamists and jihadists.”

That comes from a Muslim, Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and author of the book “A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot’s Fight to Save His Faith.”

It’s his appeal to Muslim Americans and all Americans to fight political Islam.

“The only way for Islamists to abort their dream of a theocracy under their version of Islam is for them to be overwhelmed with a better vision – a better interpretation – of an Islam and our Quran based in liberty: an Islam that articulates and defends pluralism, tolerance, free speech, free markets and all the other fruits of a free society where all citizens are equally protected ‘under God,’ not ‘under Islam’ – an Islam that rests at home with the freedoms that Americans claim as their birthright and will defend at all costs,” he told WND.

Jasser’s mission is in striking contrast to that of groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, which has established aggressive operations in the United States to infiltrate government and school systems. Jasser’s work isn’t kindly regarded by terrorists: In January 2012, al-Qaida threatened him on one of its websites.

In addition to meetings with religious leaders and government officials both here and abroad, Jasser testifies before Congress. Last June, he spoke to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security at a hearing on “The American Muslim Response to Hearings on Radicalization within Their Community” and praised lawmakers for the public discussion.

“My last testimony to Congress lays out what I feel are the problems and what America’s course should be,” he told WND.

Essentially, he warned against the Islamization of America and cautioned: “One of the most profound results we have seen from this national discussion is the important recognition that American Muslims are not a monolithic community that shares one set of values and one single voice. American Muslims are very diverse in our ideological structure and many, if not most, of us do not support the victimization and denial mantra that has been defining our communities for decades.”

Fight back against the legal attack from the Council on American-Islamic Relations on the First Amendment by making a contribution to WND’s “Legal Defense Fund.” Donations of $25 or more entitle you to free copy of “Muslim Mafia” – the book so devastating to CAIR that the group is trying to ban it.

However, Jasser believes Muslim citizens and immigrants are highly susceptible to Islamist propaganda. He’s deeply concerned at Al Gore’s sale of his Current TV network to “anti-American” Al Jazeera, which broadcasts to its Arabic-speaking audiences the “Shariah and Life” show hosted by Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a Sunni Muslim cleric who calls for the crucifixion of those who leave Islam.

To Congress, Jasser explained: “If you witness the public response of Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups in the United States to these hearings you will see the lengths they go to in vilifying anyone who dares address the threat at its source – Islamism. An observant Muslim becomes labeled by the Muslim Public Affairs Council and Council on American-Islamic Relations as ‘astro-turf’ or ‘Uncle Tom.’ The term ‘Islamophobia’ is used incomprehensibly against devout Muslims as a battering ram to shun us within our own local faith communities for having the audacity to say that we have a problem and they are contributing to it. These groups wrap themselves in the blanket of my faith and imagined civil rights abuses in an attempt to deny Muslims like me a voice in this argument.”

Jasser, medical doctor and former U.S. Navy lieutenant commander, takes his oath to uphold the Constitution and defend America seriously. Therefore, he urged Congress and the Obama administration to stop the “political correctness” and set up an effective counter-terrorism strategy. He cited the failures in dealing with terrorist Maj. Nidal Hasan and Army Pvt. Naser Abdo, who attempted to imitate Hasan’s Fort Hood massacre.

“The crucial and difficult question a Muslim soldier needs to be asked is this: ‘Do you have any sense of loyalty to the ummah and its Islamic state?’ Those who answer in the affirmative pose a problem,” Jasser told Congress. “The Army’s approval of [Abdo’s] status as a conscientious objector deeply damaged the perception of Muslims in the military because it implicitly validated Islamism as a protected belief system synonymous with being Muslim.”

Jasser’s faith and reason

Like many Christians and Jews, Jasser accepted the religion of his ancestors. He believes Muhammad is the true and last prophet, yet his understanding of human rights seems to mirror Christian doctrine. In keeping with his ancestors’ method of study, a classically Western method, Jasser believes in natural law and personal responsibility.

Jasser’s family tradition of faith and reason puts him in the minority of Muslims, if Ash’arite Kalam is the school of theology embraced by 85 percent of the world’s Sunni Muslim population, as Islam scholar Robert Reilly states. This school denies God has the power of reason and also denies the human powers of reason and free will.

When asked for his positions on offensive Quran verses about Jews, other non-Muslims and the premise that everyone must convert to Islam, Jasser replied in extensive detail.

He noted that he has addressed these questions at length in his book, “A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot’s Fight to Save His Faith.”

Jasser said that while “scholarship and reason are a central and very important component to an analysis of normative Islam and its theology, most Muslims that I have known throughout my life do not believe in a ‘central authority’ that defines what is and what is not Islam.”

“While the president of Turkey and other Islamist demagogues may say that ‘there is no moderate Islam, there is only one Islam,’ the reality on the ground is that most Muslims that I know, as I was raised, believe that our relationship with God and our scripture is very personal, and ultimately our manifestation of free will is being judged by God individually for that interpretation with no one else being responsible for our interpretation, including our parents.”

He pointed to quotations cited frequently since 9/11 to argue that the Quran is anti-Jewish.

He said the website prophetofdoom.net translates Quran 2:64 as: “But you [Jews] went back on your word and were lost losers. So become apes, despised and hated. We made an example out of you.”

“This is the entirety of what is quoted. My father spent over 10 years translating the Quran, and based on his translation and explanations on his knowledge of the classical Arabic … he felt that it stated: ‘Even after all that, you still abandoned your obligations and if it were not for God’s favor to you and mercy upon you, you would have been lost.’ Quite a difference from ‘lost losers’!” said Jasser.

“After that, he follows with ‘You know those among you who violated the Sabbath, and We made them disgraced apes,’ and then follows with ‘We made their ending an example for those who lived with them and those who lived later and an appropriate reminder for those who are pious.’

“The point here is not whether my father or my grandfathers, each of whom was a scholar in his own right, had the street cred to offer Islamic exegesis,” said Jasser. “I believe they did, but history will judge how what they taught me fits into Islamic modernization. The point is that my father’s lifetime of rational work and daily conversations with me about our scripture, my grandfather Zuhdi Jasser’s Islamic defense and advocacy of secular Western principles for democracy in Syria, and my other grandfather Subhi Sabbagh’s modern leadership and interpretations of Islam from the bench of the supreme court in Syria, empowered me to use my own free will and cognitive skills to complete my faith narrative and interpretations.”

Jasser said that as a Muslim and also as a Navy veteran, he reads such passages in their historical context.

“That Muhammad, just like any military commander, had to spur on his troops when they were at war does not mean that I am obligated to go and slay the ‘unbeliever’ wherever I may find him,” he explained. “If wholesale war was formally declared on all Muslims everywhere, I would certainly have an obligation to defend myself and my family, but that is not the case in Phoenix where I live or in the United States or in the world at large, despite what the Islamists and the jihadists may claim.

“Nowhere in the Quran does God tell Muslims how to establish and run their governments,” Jasser said. “Nowhere in the Quran does God tell Muslims that they must repeat and thus emulate the Prophet Muhammad’s role and actions as a military or governmental leader. Nowhere in the Quran does God tell Muslims that they must impose their beliefs, practices and rituals upon others. And most certainly, nowhere in the Quran does God tell myopic automatons to instigate murderous, terrorist actions against civilians and other noncombatants who, by definition, are incapable of causing them harm.”

Jasser said his interpretation of the Quran “has always included the overriding idea that the Prophet Muhammad’s example, spiritually and morally, is for all times – but that his political and military actions were an example that cannot be taken out of the context of the times in which he lived and its specific conflicts.”

He and other Muslims say the Arabic language is very complex and translation is key. Unlike Wahhabi and Salafist translators, Jasser finds a “merciful” Allah in the Quran.

“Choosing the wrong [meaning] can completely change the context of what is said,” Jasser explained. “Add to this the far more complex issue of explanation and interpretation (tafsir) based upon the history and context of the passage’s timing and revelation and one can see how easy it can be for an oppressive global network of well-funded petrodollar tribal theocrats to manipulate and push forward a dominant literalist (Wahhabi or Salafist) version.”

For Muslims, he said, “the authenticity of the Arabic script of the Quran revealed to the Prophet Muhammad has the same sort of divine status as the Prophet Jesus has for Christians.”

“My understanding is that in our belief, this was the language chosen by God in which to reveal the Quran because this language was the one perfectly suited for it, a language of a pagan community that had not yet been exposed to God’s revelation,” he said.

“So, essentially this is more evidence that Islam was not revealed to convert Jews or Christians to Islam, but rather to pagans as an updated version of the message from the God of Abraham,” said Jasser. “It was not only one of the most complex and rich languages in the world, but was a language through which God’s message had not yet been revealed.”

Jasser said it’s also important to know that for Muslims there is a significant theological difference between the Hadith – the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad – and the Quran, especially with regard to authenticity.

“So many of the passages portrayed as ‘authentic’ hadith are actually rather ‘weak,’ and, many Muslims believe, were never the actual words of the Prophet Muhammad but rather were fabricated by theo-political power interests to advance a supremacist agenda of some kind,” he said. “It saddens me to see so much in the public space about Islamic scriptural guidance that is driven by certain hadith that most Muslims intellectually dismiss in our daily lives as being false.”

Jasser’s organization calls for a “separation of mosque and state,” but he clarified this when questioned by WND.

“I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment that America is not a secular nation and the Founders did not call for a total separation of church or mosque and state, but did explicitly call for the prevention of the establishment of one religion through government and its law,” said Jasser. “That is the premise of my book, that in fact European-style – anti-religious – secularism will not defeat Islamism. It actually makes it thrive. I essentially believe that only an American-like understanding of religious liberty will defeat political Islam.

“My biggest concern for the United States is that we continue down this blind path of neglect toward Islamism. The Islamists are ascending globally while our nation is either asleep or actually helping the Islamists and their enablers ascend.”

Christians beware

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the USCCB, has been holding dialogues and conferences with Muslim organizations and leaders since 1996. In 2012, they collaborated with the Islamic Society of North America.

Since the presidency of George W. Bush, Jasser has warned that the federal government is collaborating with the wrong Muslim groups – groups such as ISNA who are hostile to America and hostile to individual liberty. Jasser believes Christian leaders such as the USCCB and evangelical megachurch pastor Rick Warren are misled and misleading their flocks. Considering that Christians are the majority of American voters and many voted to re-elect Obama despite his Islamist agenda, apparently Islamist propaganda has consequences.

Jasser said: “Most interesting is this position of the Catholic Church [USCCB] in the U.S. because of how out of step it seems with Pope Benedict’s understanding of the challenges Muslims have in confronting societies based in reason as articulated, for example, in his Regensburg speech.

“While as a devout Muslim I may not agree with all of Pope Benedict’s points in that lecture, the essence of the conflict between Islamism and reason is very important and one entirely ignored by this unfortunate relationship between Catholic leadership and ISNA,” he said.

“They are simply reaching for the lowest hanging fruit to represent Muslims,” warned Jasser. “They are ignoring their ideologies and trusting their superficial condemnations of terrorism and the ideologies that feed it.

“I dissect ISNA in my book and my own experiences with their conventions and leaders, like when I saw Imam Siraj Wahhaj call for the replacement of the U.S. Constitution with the Quran in his keynote address to their annual convention of 1995,” explained Jasser.

He said Islamists, for example, are silent on the plight of Christians in Muslim-ruled nations like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Egypt.

“What they say in a free nation like the U.S. about interfaith beliefs does not matter. What matters is what they believe the law should be in nations where they would be a majority.

“ISNA, MPAC, CAIR and other so-called leading Muslim groups are silent on the crimes against humanity committed by Islamists in so many Muslim majority nations,” said Jasser. “Try to find a statement by ISNA condemning the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for their desire to eradicate churches. They refuse to call Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood or Jamaat Islamiya terrorist or radical groups and are entirely silent on political Islam.”

WASHINGTON – Catholic psychologist Dr. William Kilpatrick is warning that Christian Americans are naïve about Islam and working towards their own extinction.

“We often hear that the true Islam is a religion of peace that has been hijacked by a minority of violent extremists,” Kilpatrick told WND. “If that’s true, why not open the books on Islam? Islam deserves the kind of inspection and scrutiny that Christianity has received for decades.”

Kilpatrick, author of “Christianity, Islam and Atheism: The Struggle for The Soul of The West,” said alarms should be sounding.

“Muhammad said that he came as a ‘warner,’” wrote Kilpatrick in his book, published in November. “Among the banners that can be seen in various Muslim demonstrations in Europe is one that reads, ‘Islam – our religion today, your religion tomorrow.’ For anyone who follows the pronouncements of Islamic religious authorities around the world, there can be little doubt that this is their goal.”

Kilpatrick chronicles Islam’s war on Christian civilization as a war on universal human rights. He cites three factors working against all people of goodwill: cowardice or malice by secular governments, naïve Christian leaders and irreligious or atheist news media preaching indifference.

Indifferentists purport that all religions are equal and valid, except Christianity. Among them are secular media who whitewash Islam’s history and agenda, charging instead that Christianity is guilty of intolerable extremism.

Islam on the rise

Islam certainly is on the rise, but it’s difficult to discern whose demographic statistics are accurate, if any. The latest Vatican research shows 1.2 billion Catholics worldwide, while the Pew Research Center claims Muslims slightly outnumber Christians at 2.2 billion compared to 2.18 billion, respectively.

Fight back against the legal attack from the Council on American-Islamic Relations on the First Amendment by making a contribution to WND’s “Legal Defense Fund.” Donations of $25 or more entitle you to free copy of “Muslim Mafia” – the book so devastating to CAIR that the group is trying to ban it.

In America, U.S. Census Bureau figures, released by the Association of Religion Data Archives, are incomplete because some 158 million people refused to reveal their religions. Still, 2.6 million U.S. residents declared themselves Muslim; roughly 137.2 million claimed to belong to a branch of Christianity; and 58.9 million of the Christians declared themselves Catholic. A higher count of 77.7 million Catholics, courtesy of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, is probably more accurate as it’s based on parish registration.

Why, however, does the Obama administration appear to favor Muslims and adopt policies that infringe on the rights of Christians?

Kilpatrick told WND he’s “alarmed” that critics of Islam, such as himself, eventually could be charged with “hate crimes.” As noted in WND exposés, Obama’s Justice, Defense and Homeland Security Departments refuse to classify religiously motivated attacks by Muslims as terrorism. As WND reported, after Obama took office in 2009, DHS sent a memo to law enforcement officials in the states labeling outspoken Christians and others “right-wing extremists,” further urging them to monitor such Americans as likely terrorists.

Robert R. Reilly, author of “The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist,” criticized the Obama administration for favoring political Islam but said Islamists won’t win if Americans return to their Judeo-Christian roots.

Kilpatrick likewise criticized Obama’s policy toward the Islamic world.

“In our failure to understand Islam, we’ve helped to bring to power some of the most extreme Islamists, such as the Muslim Brotherhood,” he said.

But the problems don’t begin with government. Many professing Christians, the majority of voters who elect lawmakers and the president, ignore religious differences to everyone’s peril.

“Excessive emphasis on tolerance and sensitivity has resulted in a dangerous knowledge gap for Christians,” said Kilpatrick. “The main victims of Islam are Muslims. Should Christians be more worried about offending the sensibilities of some Muslims or should they be concerned about the men, women and children who are oppressed by Islamic laws?”

Several refugees from Islamic countries, whose identities are being kept confidential, spoke to WND verifying Kilpatrick’s claims.

One Muslim lady happily dresses like an American when she’s in the U.S. On Islamist requirements for women to be suppressed under a burqa or hijab, she said, “Those are men’s rules.”

A young woman who fled with her widowed mother and sister from one Muslim-ruled country to another said until they gained asylum in the U.S., almost none of their human rights were recognized.

Still others said that before the Arab Spring, they had befriended Catholics or other Christians and secretly converted to Christianity.

Christian refugees from Islamic nations are deeply concerned about Obama’s domestic and international agendas.

While some Muslims come to the U.S. to wage jihad, others say coming to America was “everything” because they believe in freedom as it’s expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

Where should Christians begin?

“Tolerance needs to be balanced with justice, and justice seems to require that Christians be provided with a fuller account of Islam, because their survival may depend on that knowledge,” said Kilpatrick.

Jihad “isn’t an interior spiritual struggle,” he said, “but a serious obligation to subdue non-Muslims.”

That means, he said, many Western Christians “are going to be woefully unprepared for the kinds of things that are already happening to Christians in Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Nigeria and Sudan.”

“The Islamic faith is founded on a blunt rejection of basic Christian beliefs, but you would hardly know it from reading official church statements or from listening to prelates,” Kilpatrick stressed. “Instead of informing their flocks that Islam rejects Christ and requires its people to work toward the eventual subjugation of Christians, many Christian leaders have been more intent on emphasizing the common ground that Christians and Muslims share.”

Kilpatrick pointed to the Second Vatican Council declaration “Nostra Aetate” as focusing almost exclusively on the similarities between Muslims and Christians.

“That approach was in keeping with the spirit of change and openness that marked the [1960s] council because it seemed to fit with the prevailing circumstances in the Muslim world at the time,” he said. “The search for shared beliefs and values arose when the militant side of Islam was kept in check by secular rulers.”

Despite Kilpatrick’s critique, the last two popes haven’t shied away from criticizing political Islam.

In his 1994 book “Crossing the Threshold of Hope,” Pope John Paul II praised Muslims for their “fidelity to prayer,” but critiqued the impersonal depiction of God in the Quran.

In part, he wrote: “Whoever knows the Old and New Testaments, and then reads the Quran, clearly sees the process by which it completely reduces divine revelation. It is impossible not to note the movement away from what God said about Himself, first in the Old Testament through the prophets, and then finally in the New Testament through His Son. In Islam all the richness of God’s Self-revelation … has definitely been set aside.”

Pope John Paul wrote of his efforts to stop human rights violations of fundamentalist Muslims trying to impose their religion on others, especially Christians, but ended the chapter diplomatically by saying the Church is always open to dialogue.

Pope Benedict XVI doesn’t accept Islamic violence against Christians when, for example, someone publishes an irreverent cartoon of Muhammad.

“Intolerance and violence can never be justified as response to offenses, as they are not compatible responses with the sacred principles of religion,” he said.

The reaction to Benedict’s 2006 address on faith and reason at the University of Regensburg was cause for pause because Islamists waged international riots, they bombed Catholic churches in Israel and shot a Catholic nun to death in Somalia. Despite death threats and numerous Islamic governments calling for a retraction, Benedict continued preaching the Gospel and human rights with delicate diplomacy, even in Muslim majority countries.

Shortly after the violence, Pope Benedict issued two apologies but no retraction. He said, “At this time, I wish also to add that I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims. … Yesterday, the cardinal secretary of state published a statement in this regard in which he explained the true meaning of my words. I hope that this serves to appease hearts and to clarify the true meaning of my address, which in its totality was and is an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with great mutual respect.“

Even at Regensburg, Benedict XVI was diplomatic in discussing the widespread Muslim rejection of reason.

“Without descending to details,” he said, “such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the ‘Book’ and the ‘infidels,’ [Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus] addresses his [Muslim] interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness that we find unacceptable, on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: ‘Show me just what Mohammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.’ The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable.”

In part, the fury was ignited by media who merely featured Pope Benedict quoting the emperor without the pontiff”s critique of his “unacceptable” “brusqueness.”

In America, Kilpatrick is worried about the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has been holding “dialogues” and conferences with Muslim organizations and leaders since 1996. The USCCB has made blanket statements condemning critics of Islam, but cites no examples. Last year they collaborated with the Islamic Society of North America, and Kilpatrick urges the bishops to investigate ISNA before taking further action.

Kilpatrick said, “Any adequate response to the threat from Islam will require us to push Muslims to rethink their faith on the most basic level. Critics of Islam tend to avoid the main question in favor of secondary questions. The secondary questions are: Is Islam a religion of peace? Is Islam compatible with modern values? Are women treated fairly under Shariah law?

“The main question is: Did Muhammad receive a revelation from God? That’s the heart of the matter. As long as Muslims believe that Muhammad received his marching orders from God, the Islamic jihad will continue.”

The Quran says Allah first gave his doctrines and rules to the Jews, but they changed His sacred word. He then revealed His doctrines to Christians, but they lied in saying Jesus was His son. So, according to Islam, Jews and Christians are infidels. The Quran also condemns the concept of the Holy Trinity and incorrectly states Christians believe the Trinity is God the Father, Jesus and His mother, Mary. Therefore, according to the Quran, Muhammad was the last prophet.

“First of all, the God of the Quran is sort of a dictator,” Kilpatrick said. “Muslims refer to themselves as ‘slaves of Allah,’ and He’s a very capricious dictator. Muslims describe Him as ‘pure will.’ Therefore, He’s not really held to the rules of reason: He can say one thing and then contradict it a little bit later in another verse.”

Muslims have developed a doctrine of “abrogation,” the overriding of teachings that appear first in the Quran with others that appear later, he said.

“If two passages in the Quran contradict each other, the earlier passage is abrogated by the latter passage,” Kilpatrick explained. “Thus, almost all the peaceful passages are in the early part of the Quran, and so they’re canceled by the latter more warlike passages.”

One could argue that Christians also consider themselves slaves of God. However, Christian slavery – Christian servitude – is voluntary. Paul, in Romans 6:20-23, describes it this way: “When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But then what return did you get from the things of which you are now ashamed? The end of those things is death. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the return you get is sanctification and its end, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Kilpatrick discussed Muslim doctrines on hell and heaven.

“Unbelievers are going to hell, and it’s described in detail in many, many places. Of course, they believe in Paradise, which is described as a garden of earthly delights with food, refreshments, couches, pavilions and jewels – for the men,” he said.

“According to the Hadiths, Muhammad is reported to have said that when he looked at hell, he saw many more women than men. So there’s a bias against women.

“I might point out that ideas have consequences,” Kilpatrick continued. “Given the account of heaven in the Quran, it might make men want to shortcut the process of getting there, and the only sure way of doing that, according to Islamic tradition, is by killing and being killed in the way of Allah. And so we see all the martyrdom operations and bombings.

“It’s quite interesting that on September 11, the airline apparently made a mistake and Mohamed Atta’s luggage was left behind in Boston. When [authorities] opened his luggage, they discovered a wedding suit, a bottle of cologne and a long letter expressing his desire to meet his 72 wives in heaven.

“The best way to secure peace and show our love for Muslims is to offer them something better,” Kilpatrick advised.

He believes the “something better” is the truth about God as the rational creator and redeemer, Whose love, justice and mercy are the keys to everlasting joy.

WASHINGTON – America needs to interact with Muslims and encourage them, but not all Muslims, and especially not those the U.S. government has taken under its wing, says noted Islam expert Robert R. Reilly of the American Foreign Policy Council.

Even while branches of al-Qaida strategize how to kill Americans, the U.S. is giving gifts of fighter jets and billions in taxpayer dollars directly to Islamist organizations and nations like Egypt that are controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaida’s parent organization. There also is evidence that the U.S. was supplying the radical Muslim rebels in Syria, all of which raise strategic, political and economic questions – and religious concerns.

“We’re doing more harm now to ourselves than good,” Reilly told WND in an interview about the issues of Islamism in the world today.

“The problem exists at the theological level and so it requires a theological solution. Once we do that, we ought to support the Muslims in the world who are advancing that solution. Instead, we’re supporting the Muslim Brotherhood – we’re supporting the side that is against our own interests.”

Reilly, a Catholic who served in the Defense Department and Voice of America under President George W. Bush, has authored “The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist.”

“If the title of my book wasn’t incendiary enough,” Reilly told WND, “the subtitle actually comes from my introduction, in which I quote one of the great Muslim scholars of the 20th century, a Pakistani by the name of Fazlur Rahman [1911-88]. He served at the ministerial level in Pakistan before he was driven out of the country for his ideas on educational reform.”

Rahman taught at American universities until he ended up a highly honored professor at the University of Chicago and Reilly quotes his statement in full: “A people that deprives itself of philosophy, necessarily exposes itself to starvation in terms of fresh ideas; in fact it commits intellectual suicide.”

Fight back against the legal attack from the Council on American-Islamic Relations on the First Amendment by making a contribution to WND’s “Legal Defense Fund.” Donations of $25 or more entitle you to free copy of “Muslim Mafia” – the book so devastating to CAIR that the group is trying to ban it.

While Reilly engages in many dialogues with critically thinking Muslims, he’s upfront about his thesis. He told WND, “Islamism is a spiritual pathology based on a deformed theology that has produced a dysfunctional culture. If you get the idea of who God is wrong, you’re going to get a lot of other things wrong too. That’s the problem.”

The closing of the Muslim mind, he says, is rooted in Ash’arite theology, which denies the God-given human powers of reason and free will. This is precisely the opposite of Christian doctrine, which says that personhood is defined by the powers of reason and free will.

Christians believe the Bible is divine revelation of one God in three divine Persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. According to the Bible, humans are the only creatures made in God’s image as individual persons each possessing a soul and a body.

“When I read the account of creation in the Quran, the first thing that jumped out at me was the fact that man was not made in the image and likeness of God. In Islam, it’s blasphemous to suggest in any way that man is like God or can be compared to God,” said Reilly. “The closing of the Muslim mind occurred over a struggle concerning the role of reason in Islam, its relationship to revelation and ultimately to Allah.”

“I’m only talking about the majority within Sunni Islam,” Reilly specified, “but it’s the vast majority of the Muslim world.”

“In the ninth century, there was a great infusion of philosophy and Hellenic thought that influenced the first Muslim theological school and inspired the first Muslim philosopher, al-Kindi [of Bagdad, Iraq]. At that time, Islam became a Hellenized faith, just as Christianity had before it.”

Al-Kindi and his fellow scholars, the Mu’tazalites, employed a rational approach to religion and life. They believed “it’s obligatory for you to carry out what accords with reason; you have to do that which is reasonable,” said Reilly.

“However, reaction arose in opposition to that and denied reason could come to know anything, including the difference between good and evil; and that revelation was not in any way subject to reason; nor was God reason, He was pure will and power.”

There was no civil discourse on the matter. A caliph named al-Mutawakkil suppressed the Mu’tazalites. And so, 85 percent of Muslims today are within Sunni Islam and the majority of Sunnis are within the Ash’arite Kalam, said Reilly.

Consequently, Sunni Muslims thought nothing could be known outside of what Muhammad and caliphs declare to be divine revelation.

“The side that won said there’s nothing obligatory by reason, but only by Shariah,” said Reilly. “So reason was extirpated, philosophy was banned. After that theology was banned and Islam was reduced to a form of memorization and imitation called ‘Taqlid.’”

Metaphysical chaos

“What made this worse,” explained Reilly, “is that the metaphysics behind the delegitimization of reason is the thought that Allah is not only the first cause – the primary cause – but He’s the only cause for everything.”

According to this school, there are no secondary causes for creatures or actions. This means fire doesn’t burn cotton, God directly burns the cotton; acorns don’t grow into oak trees; animals and human beings don’t beget offspring; man-made machines don’t heat or cool our buildings; and no human persons can choose their own actions.

“Denying cause and effect in the natural world makes the world incomprehensible – unintelligible,” said Reilly. “But anyone who would suggest that natural law has a role in the world would be accused of shirk blasphemy, of somehow demeaning God’s omnipotence.

“In addition to that, the world is constituted by these time-space atoms that in themselves have no nature, but they are agglomerated in any instant directly by the will of God to make something. The fact that acorns grow into oak trees has nothing to do with the nature of an acorn or oak tree,” said Reilly. “This process and all other acts are discreet and independent acts by God and anyone who says that an acorn grows into an oak tree because of its nature would, again, be committing blasphemy.”

So, if God – if Allah – is directly responsible for all acts, then several premises follow for the classical Western thinker: (1) No human acts could be morally wrong; (2) God is directly making some persons Jews, some Christians, some Hindus, others Mormons, still others atheists and so on; (3) Therefore, humans who don’t convert to Islam must be doing God’s will; (4) God would have to be the cause of all conflicts; and (5) God would have to be the author of contradiction, confusion and chaos.

To these objections, Reilly replied, “Ah, but see, you are applying logic to Allah, Who’s above it all.

“And since God is above reason and acts for no reasons, neither can one understand what God does and God Himself becomes unintelligible. Therefore, reality recedes from the Muslim mind.

“This is what accounts for the dysfunctional cultures you see primarily in the Middle East,” said Reilly. “This is a product of the Ash’arite Kalam, the school of theology for the majority of Sunni Muslims. It predominates in the Middle East, Pakistan and South Asia. So if you wonder why there’s so much unreasonable behavior, it’s simply because reason has lost its status as a normative guide to ethical action.”

Islamism in America

WND has covered the Islamist agenda around the globe and Obama’s support of it.

John Brennan, who according to former FBI agent and Islam specialist John Guandolo converted to Islam while living in Saudi Arabia, is today deputy national security adviser for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, assistant to the president and nominee for director of Central Intelligence. Some Islam experts, such as Reilly,  doubt Guandolo’s allegation because so far it’s a single source and, for example, there’s no evidence Brennan has taken an Arabic name as required for converts.

Nevertheless, since Obama took office in 2009, variations of the word “jihad” and other Muslim terms have been deleted from the FBI and Homeland Security lexicons. Under Obama, Maj. Nidal Hasan’s massacre at Ft. Hood was an incident of “workplace violence,” not terrorism.

In April 2009, Obama’s Department of Homeland Security sent a terror-watch memo to law enforcement officials in the states, labeling conservative Americans as “right-wing extremists” and urging law enforcement officials to monitor Christians, pro-lifers, returning military veterans, gun owners and people with Ron Paul bumper stickers as potential domestic terrorists.

In public schools, Judeo-Christian history and prayers are banned – even though Christianity dominates the development Western civilization. But as WND reported, CSCOPE lessons in Texas public schools promote Islam, its conversion methods and verses from the Quran that denigrate other religions. Meanwhile, teachers neglect history lessons about Islamists’ violent attacks on Christians, Jews and other non-Muslims in many countries over the centuries, including al-Qaida’s Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

According to James Lafferty of the Virginia Anti-Shariah Task Force, in school districts where Muslim communities are loudly vocal, such as Northern Virginia and Dearborn, Mich., prayer time is observed for Muslims. Lafferty doesn’t object to the prayer time, but wonders why Christians and Jews aren’t afforded the same privilege.

In addition to supporting the Muslim Brotherhood’s agenda in Egypt and arming the current regime, ordering the U.S. military to assist in the takeout of Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, and effectively ignoring the jihadist attack on Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans murdered in Benghazi, Obama  also pushed for passage of the pro-Shariah constitution in Kenya and sent Vice President Joe Biden there, who told Keyan voters: “We are hopeful, Barack Obama is hopeful, I am hopeful that you will carry out these reforms to allow money to flow.”

Reilly wrote of President Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood taking totalitarian control of Egypt, and told WND, “It’s clear that Obama has been supportive of the Islamist agenda, the Muslim Brotherhood, from the time of his famous Cairo speech, where Muslim Brotherhood members were placed in the front row making it impossible for members of Mubarak’s administration to attend. The fact the Obama administration expressed surprise when Morsi delivered his dictate over the Egyptian judiciary, I don’t know whether that was feigned surprise or stupidity, because anyone who knows the Muslim Brotherhood couldn’t have been surprised. What Obama has done is dumbed-down the problem to the existence of one group, al-Qaida. That’s why he’ll never talk about Islam, only al-Qaida as the problem.”

What should the U.S. government do?

“First of all, stop doing everything we are doing!” said Reilly. “Just stop it until we understand the nature of the problem and whom we should support.”

He said, “The Islamist agenda is to curtail free speech. Free speech exists only very tenuously in some places in the Muslim world. There is no freedom of conscience in Islam – there is not even an Arabic word for conscience. So it’s no surprise that they have no notion of freedom in something for which they have no word. It’s part of their religion that no one ‘insults’ Islam or Mohammad. They can’t distinguish between their religion and the state.”

He said the expansion of Islamism is due to many Americans abandoning the Judeo-Christian traditions of faith and reason: the tradition of encouraging people to seek the truth and protect the human rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Reilly concluded, “The only way they [Islamists] can succeed is if we let them. Islam is only a threat because the West has lost – or is losing – its Judeo-Christian faith.”

WASHINGTON – A new advertisement featuring “Necessary Roughness” actor Mehcad Brooks and titled “Happy 40th Anniversary, Baby” celebrates the deaths of an estimated 56 million unborn lost to abortion since the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision 40 years ago this week, and is being called “skanky,” “sick” and “disgusting.”

The ad, from the pro-abortion Center for Reproductive Rights, comes as hundreds of thousands prepare to attend the March for Life Friday in Washington, D.C.

Brooks, who plays a philandering athlete on USA Network’s series “Necessary Roughness,” is spiffed up, holding a rose and fondling a glass of liquid. He says, “Hey baby, you think I forgot it?”

In front of a glowing fireplace, he continues, “How could I ever forget our anniversary? All these years. So many people said we’d never make it. They’ve been trying to tear us apart. Take you away. Put limits on you. On me. On us.

“But every time we’ve proven ourselves stronger. Anniversary like this is not something you forget.”

Alveda King, member of the legendary King family, personal mentor to many young women, and director of African American Outreach at Priests for Life, was upset by the spot.

“A young woman in her 20s sent me her reaction and I think it’s so compelling. This young woman wrote: ‘I feel molested after seeing it. Skanky, fitting for what it celebrates, sick. Is he married to abortion?’”

King explained the young lady had watched “Necessary Roughness,” but vowed to never watch it again. King said many others also wrote to her saying they’ll no longer watch the show.

“I felt violated and felt like I was observing evil personified,” said King, whose voice cracked with sorrow. “These abortion people think they can say anything. Women should be outraged. I’m post-abortive and it just brought my emotions to the surface. As an African-American man, Mehcad Brooks should be shielding women from abuse and working to foster new generations of good men.”

Day Gardner, a former Miss Delaware and president of the National Black Pro-Life Union, was equally horrified.

“I found it totally disgusting. It turned my stomach. I thought the whole thing was very demonic because he’s sitting there as a member of the black community and we have the highest abortion rate. As a man, he’s a bad example when the black community has such a problem with its men stepping up to be the fathers their children need. This is so evil and so wrong on many levels.

Think of Planned Parenthood as a health provider? Here’s the real story, in “Planned Bullyhood.”

“Every time he said the word ‘baby,’” Gardner emphasized, “I kept seeing all the babies that were tortured and brutally killed since the Roe v. Wade ruling. More than 55 million children have been killed and this idiot is laughing.”

“In the 40 years since Roe v. Wade was set down, more than 55 million unborn children have been killed while that many mothers were wounded by abortion,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, founder and president of the Susan B. Anthony List, told WND. “Ask the post-abortive women who stood on the steps of the Supreme Court yesterday if the abortion they now painfully regret was sexy or romantic.

“The Center for Reproductive Rights and Mehcad Brooks should be ashamed for attempting to glamorize abortion in this way – women deserve better,” she said.

In fact, Feminists for Life wrote the slogan, “Women deserve better than abortion.”

Lila Rose, whose organization Live Action exposes the abortion chain Planned Parenthood with sting videos, shared the same reaction as her sister activists.

She told WND, “As abortion supporters celebrate Roe as a romantic anniversary, I have to think about the 56 million children who will never celebrate an anniversary with anyone. It’s beyond disrespectful to draw the line with Mehcad Brooks and make a joke out of the violent deaths of millions of unborn children.”

Rose also is disgusted because millions of mothers and fathers mourn the loss of their children to abortion.

“This video represents an all-time low for the pro-abortion movement,” Janet Morana told WND. She’s executive director of Priests for Life, co-founder of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign and author of the new book “Recall Abortion.”

“It’s misogynistic and exploitive,” said Morana. “Even worse, it’s making a joke of something as serious as abortion. Treating this issue so cavalierly is really insulting, not only to the pro-life movement but to all women. I can’t imagine this will appeal to even the most ardent abortion supporters.”

Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, a founder of New Wave Feminists, went right to Brooks.

“I actually went and commented on this guy’s Facebook, as many in my group are doing, just thanking him for showing us what abortion really is: the selfish and unapologetic exploitation of women.”

As for the real “Jane Roe” toasted by Brooks, Norma McCorvey is now a Catholic pro-lifer who has mourned being used to decriminalize abortion.

In 2005, she petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to hear McCorvey v. Hill, an effort to expose the fraud in Roe v. Wade and reveal the harmful effects of abortion on women. That same year, after the court rejected her appeal, McCorvey testified before the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.

“I am the woman once known as the Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade. But I dislike the name Jane Roe and all that it stands for. I am a real person named Norma McCorvey and I want you to know the horrible and evil things that Roe v. Wade did to me and others. I never got the opportunity to speak for myself in my own court case,” she told the Senate.

“It is like a living hell knowing that you have had a part to play, though in some sense I was just a pawn of the legal system. But I have had to accept my role in the deaths of millions of babies and the destruction of women’s lives,” McCorvey said.

She appears in the movie Doonby,” which will be screened for free in Washington, D.C., before and after the 2013 March for Life.

A woman dubbed “Marie, 97 years old” says, “My first vote was in 1940 for Franklin D. Roosevelt. And I have not missed an election since, and I want the Republican Party to know if your voter suppression throughout this beautiful country enables Romney to oust Barack Obama, we will burn this mother f—er down.”

The ad is attributed to Michael Moore, and the old woman threatens arson because some states will enforce new voter ID laws. I live in Virginia, where Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell wants our voter ID law enforced.

To put things into perspective, my neighborhood is racially diverse, and I hope it always will be.

In 2008, however, most of my black neighbors placed Obama campaign signs in their yards. Distressed by racial identity politics, I wrote an op-ed called “Christ, Obama and America.”

This year, Obama/Biden campaigners and self-proclaimed “community organizers” have been knocking on every door – including my family’s door – for months. But Obama/Biden signs weren’t yet on display, so we thought the majority of their 2008 supporters had changed their minds due to Obama’s and Biden’s record. Then, in mid-October, two black households near mine put out Obama/Biden signs.

These two neighbors declare themselves Christian. One declares herself Catholic and pro-life, but something is amiss in the thought process of many Christians.

For example, our Catholic neighbor has blamed the ills of Obama’s presidency on George W. Bush. And she asked me, “Do you not believe that the eternal God made Obama president?”

“No. God didn’t make Obama president,” I replied. “We, the people, made Obama president. There’s a distinction between God’s ordained will and His permissive will. God made us in His image with free wills to choose life or death. In the United States, voters like you and I are free to elect or reject Obama’s deadly agenda.”

In two WND articles, “America’s salvation depends on Catholics” and “Did Catholics forget about Obama’s record?,” I explain the necessity for Catholic integrity during this election. Instead of arguing with this couple, I taped a Romney/Ryan sign to the inside of our glass storm door.

I also taped a homemade sign beneath it: “Choose Life, Not Death.” Under that headline, I placed the words of Moses from Deuteronomy 30:19-20: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live, loving the LORD your God, obeying his voice, and clinging to him …”

Within minutes of closing the door, someone shattered the glass in broad daylight. As I was on the phone with police, I saw someone steal our American flag.

So there it was: a striking example of Obama supporters’ tolerance.

White conservatives and adults aren’t the only targets of leftists. After black conservative Ron Miller published his Christian memoir, “Sellout: Musings from Uncle Tom’s Porch,” which I edited, his home property was vandalized.

In October, Wisconsin radio host Mark Belling reported the ugly bias of a 78-year-old New Berlin public school-bus driver who supports Obama. After she picked up a 12-year-old Catholic school student where his parents display a Romney/Ryan sign, she harassed the boy about their politics. The boy defended his parents by explaining that Obama is “pro-abortion.”

Then the driver said, “Maybe your mom should have chosen abortion for you.”

The boy’s mother filed a complaint, eyewitnesses verified the story and thankfully the driver was fired. Still, the Obama supporter’s death wish for a pro-life boy speaks volumes.

Likewise, Obama’s Justice Department refused to prosecute the New Black Panthers who attempted to intimidate voters by standing with a billy club and claiming to be “security” forces outside a Philadelphia polling place in 2008.

But as WND reported, in 2009 Obama’s Department of Homeland Security sent a memo to state officials labeling conservatives as “rightwing extremists” and urging them to watch combat veterans, Christians, pro-lifers, gun owners and Ron Paul and Bob Barr supporters as if they are likely terrorists.

In the memo, DHS also insinuates that white constitutional conservatives are racists: “The DHS/Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) has no specific information that domestic rightwing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence, but rightwing extremists may be gaining new recruits by playing on their fears about several emergent issues. The economic downturn and the election of the first African American president present unique drivers for rightwing radicalization and recruitment.”

While New Black Panther leaders are on record urging blacks to murder white men, women and newborn babies, it seems Obama’s Justice Department has done nothing.

Instead, as WND reported, it sent FBI agents to Andy Moore’s home in Texas. Moore is a pro-life activist, the founder of AbortionWiki.org and the son-in-law of pro-life leader Jill Stanek.

Obama’s Justice Department is also prosecuting Richard Retta, an 80-year-old Catholic who goes to daily Mass and often stands outside the Planned Parenthood abortion facility near the White House.

Retta has persuaded 400 abortion-minded mothers to bring their children into the world, and apparently this displeases Obama, who promises government-funded abortions and made a White House commercial for Planned Parenthood, which, despite his repeated claims, does no mammograms.

In 2010, Obama’s FBI and DOJ collaborated with Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion Federation and the Feminist Majority Foundation by holding a seminar for abortionists and handing out the groups’ inflammatory document entitled “Resource Guide: Violence Against Reproductive Health Care Providers.”

Is free speech dead? Not yet.

A few days after our door was broken, the other Catholic family took down their Obama/Biden sign. We don’t know what it means, but several other neighbors – whites, blacks and Hispanics – came over to say they’re watching out for my family and voting against Obama. So we neighbors are forewarned and forearmed.

As one man quipped, “Great campaign technique. Did breaking your door win votes for Obama?”

Below, William Enders explains why he won’t vote for Obama in “Dear Mr. President”:

Amid some 50 Catholic lawsuits and 50 other religious lawsuits against Obama and his signature health-care legislation, this past week Cardinal Dolan, the archbishop of New York and president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, welcomed Obama and his challenger, former Gov. Mitt Romney, to the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner. It’s a longtime charitable event where presidential candidates humorously campaign while speaking in honor of the first Catholic presidential candidate.

This year, many Catholics criticized Cardinal Dolan for inviting Obama because they claim it sends a mixed message, especially while the Archdiocese of New York is simultaneously suing the Obama administration. Critics believe that voters who don’t research Obama’s aggressive abortion record coupled with his attacks on the Catholic Church and other pro-life institutions will interpret Dolan’s hospitality as approval for Obama.

Their fears were partly realized at the dinner when Dolan praised both Obama and Romney as men of honor and faith: “I’m privileged to be in the company of two honorable men, both called to the noble vocation of public service, whose love for God and country is surpassed only by their love for their own wives and children, and who, as happy as I hope they are to be here with us tonight, would rather be home with Michelle, Ann, and their families.”

Dolan also celebrated the “two Catholic” vice presidential candidates as if the Democratic incumbent Vice President Joe Biden and his Republican opponent, Rep. Paul Ryan, are both faithful to God, church and country, but as WND reported, only Ryan qualifies.

Prior to the dinner, Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life said, “I’m all in favor of protocol and understand the difference between respecting the president’s policies versus respecting his office. But there comes a time when the polite putting aside of differences for a while amounts to scandal. There comes a time when enough is enough and we can no longer afford to give people a reason to doubt our position as a church.”

Priests for Life is suing the Obama administration too.

At the dinner, Romney complemented his respect for Catholics with zingers at Obama.

For example, he said, “Your kind hospitality tonight gives me a chance to convey my deep and long-held respect for the Catholic Church. I have special admiration for the apostle St. Peter, to whom it is said, ‘Upon this rock I will build my church.’ The story’s all the more inspiring when you consider that he had so many skeptics and scoffers at the time who were heard to say, ‘If you’ve got a church, you didn’t build that.’”

Obama made fun of his own underwhelming performance in the first presidential debate, targeting one of several publicly anti-Catholic Catholics at the dinner for his punch line: “I particularly want to apologize to [TV host] Chris Matthews. Four years ago, I gave him a thrill up his leg. This time around, I gave him a stroke.”

Video of the speeches can still be seen on C-SPAN’s website.

Too little too late?

Cardinal Dolan and his fellow Catholic bishops have tremendous power to teach and motivate 77.7 million Catholics, some 25 percent of the U.S. population.

Since Dolan was elected president of the USCCB, secular media have dubbed him “the American pope.” The USCCB is the “official organization of the Catholic hierarchy in the USA [and a] canonical entity governing the church, and a public policy arm.”

There is, however, only one Vicar of Christ, and the USCCB has no jurisdiction over the faithful. Official doctrine is available to the world in the Catholic Catechism, and when the USCCB makes statements contrary to Catholic teaching, it neither speaks for the Church nor all bishops.

Against the Church’s rightful condemnation of Marxism, for example, the USCCB lobbied Congress for “universal” government health care, and we got Obamacare.

As explained in my previous article, “America’s salvation depends on Catholics,” Obama has ordered the Catholic Church, other organizations and individual citizens to pay for health insurance policies that cover abortions. Singles and families who can’t afford health insurance will be taxed per person and left without health care. That’s Obama’s plan for helping the poor – tax them. Obamacare empowers the government to deny health care to anyone, especially disabled persons and the elderly. It takes $716 billion from Medicare, and those without Part B supplemental insurance will pay new fines starting in 2013.

Companies who refuse to pay for abortion insurance – even religious institutions – will be fined $100 per day per employee. It also established Obama’s “Ready Reserve Corps,” an unconstitutional “emergency” military/police force to manage health-care “access” domestically and internationally at the cost of $5 million per year from 2010 to 2014.

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli alerts Catholic students

In April, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, also a 2013 candidate for governor, spoke to students at Christendom College about the need for faithful Catholics to be active beyond voting.

Cuccinelli is the Catholic who filed the first lawsuit against Obamacare, and he explained, “Every single thing the government does to expand its power comes directly at the expense of your liberty. Everything. … Once they have told you what you can do, they have thus told you what you can’t, and your freedom is reduced.”

On Obamacare, he stressed, “There will be more denials of choice in how you live your life and how you die, because your liberty has been taken from you in that piece of legislation. And government does it all over the place. It’s connected everywhere. This is the mistake our bishops have made for 50-plus years. The Conference of Catholic Bishops has been lobbying governments everywhere, including the federal government, to do more and to do more and to do more. And they never understood that there was always a cost – until the cost was higher than they were willing to pay. It’s the first one they ever noticed. … Everything they asked the government to do came at the cost of a little bit more liberty, your liberty, and they’ve been dragging it in.”

To whom should Catholics go?

As the Catholic Church teaches, all human persons will answer to God during their final judgment. In this life, Catholics are subject to the pope in matters of faith and morals (Matthew 16:18-19). And in the United States, bishops have jurisdiction over the Catholics in their dioceses, so it’s their duty to correct Catholics known for obstinately living in a state of mortal sin, especially if they harm society by defying non-negotiable doctrines on the human rights to life, liberty and matrimony as it was established by God.

Corrective measures include the bishops’ duty to ban offenders from Holy Communion, as Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, Kan., banned Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. Since her bishop did his duty, Sebelius is formally banned worldwide from Communion.

The purpose of this ban is to protect the Eucharist from sacrilege; to bring the sinner back to the state of grace; and to prevent the sinner from misleading the public.

Thus, St. Paul said, “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For any one who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself” (1 Corinthians 11:27-29).

For decades abortion zealots such as the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Senators John Kerry and Dick Durbin, plus Biden have gone undisciplined by their bishops. As a result, Durbin is one of several “Catholics for Obama” officially listed by the Obama/Biden re-election campaign. Moreover, Biden has advanced Obama’s Marxist agenda in the U.S., Islamist agendas abroad, widespread abortions and “gay marriage.”

In the 2008 election year, Bishop Joseph Martino formally banned Biden from Holy Communion in the Diocese of Scranton, Pa. And prior to the Oct. 11 vice presidential debate where Biden lied about being a “practicing Catholic,” Daniel Cole of The Gazette interviewed Bishop Michael Sheridan of Colorado Springs, who announced Biden is banned from Communion in his diocese. These bans are supposed to stand until the sinner confesses and is absolved. If the offender is a public personality, he/she also must publicly repent.

In 2004, Cardinal Raymond Burke, then-archbishop of St. Louis, was one of a few bishops who banned presidential candidate John Kerry from Holy Communion. In 2008, Pope Benedict XVI appointed him as prefect of the Apostolic Signatura or chief justice of the Vatican supreme court.

Cardinal Burke is the world’s leading authority on canon law, and after some accused him of “politicizing the Eucharist,” he replied, “It is not a question of politicizing the Eucharist. It is a question of showing the right respect for the Eucharist and also safeguarding individuals from committing sacrilege. And so we have to refuse Holy Communion to public officials who persist in supporting legislation contrary to the natural moral law, after they have been duly admonished.”

Burke verified that all Eucharistic ministers – priests, deacons and extraordinary ministers – are required to withhold the Eucharist from Catholics known to be in the state of mortal sin.

He said, “The discipline does not open a way to give Holy Communion to those in public and grave sin by failing to admonish them. The bishop and his priests have the gravest obligation to admonish them. If not, they will answer before God.”

Meanwhile, many lay men and women have arisen to inform and activate Catholics. Among the most prominent is Stand Up for Religious Freedom, which is led by Eric Scheidler and has united priests, lawmakers and lay people in nationwide protests against the perils of Obamacare. WND covered the June 8 Washington lineup with vocal lawmakers. More rallies took place on Oct. 20.

Adriana Gonzalez, a homeschooling mother of seven, and her husband Dr. Manuel Gonzalez, a busy internist in Florida, started a national phenomenon with Catholics Called to Witness.

Mrs. Gonzalez told WND she was concerned because there’s “a disconnect” between Catholics knowing our God-given rights and “what a lot of us are doing in the public arena: the political arena and the voting booth.”

The couple made “Test of Fire,” a video featured by Lou Dobbs on Fox Business Channel, Fox News Channel’s Fox & Friends and it runs often on the global Catholic network EWTN. It also earned enthusiastic support from non-Catholic celebrities Glenn Beck, Kirk Cameron and Mike Huckabee.

On Sept. 10, Cameron urged his fans to watch it and wrote, “We who say we love God and our neighbors are called to fight for what is good and true, love and obey God, protect our families and defend the weak and innocent. I’m not Catholic, but my hat is off to whoever produced this powerful video.”

With permission from Catholics Called to Witness, Huckabee narrated a version of this video for non-Catholic Christians, due for release before Election Day.

Mrs. Gonzalez never expected “Test of Fire” to go viral. Nearly 2.2 million people have watched the original Catholic version on YouTube and she explained, “The video idea came as a whim; it wasn’t strategy, we did no marketing.” Now several variations, including a Spanish version, are on YouTube for people to share.

“Test of Fire” can be seen below:

Father John Trigilio, president of the Confraternity of Catholic Clergy and a popular EWTN host, spoke to WND about Biden and CCC’s free Voting Guide App.

On Biden’s debate claim that he won’t “impose” his Catholic beliefs on others, Fr. Trigilio said, “I really take offense at that. It’s disingenuous because if that were the case, then we shouldn’t outlaw racial segregation or slavery. We’re not imposing morality, we’re defending morality. Segregation is immoral, slavery is immoral.

“We’ve got a lot of good faithful Catholics, they know right from wrong, they’ve got a pretty good conscience, but it’s not properly formed all the way,” said Fr. Trigilio, so the goal of the CCC app is to give people the timeless moral principles for voting.

In conclusion, the Catholic priest known as Father Pontifex, an urban poet, calls everyone – not just Catholics – to vote for freedom in his video “We Hold These Truths,” filmed at St. Thomas More Parish in Obama’s hometown of Chicago:

'Christ in Majesty' mosaic by Jan Henryk de Rosen in dome of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Washington, D.C.

“The religious group that seems to be figuring most prominently in the presidential election right now is the Roman Catholic Church,” wrote AP’s Rachel Zoll in an article about vice presidential candidates Republican Rep. Paul Ryan and the incumbent, Democrat Joe Biden. While that one sentence is true, Ms. Zoll doesn’t seem to know what makes someone truly Catholic or not. Worse yet, a vast number of Catholic voters may not know, either.

Why does this matter? According the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, 77.7 million Americans declared themselves Catholic in 2011. That’s a hefty 24.9 percent of the U.S. Census Bureau’s estimated population for last year, and Catholics are supposed to be the champions of human rights. However, according to Brian Burch of CatholicVote.org, 20 percent of eligible Catholics – 15 million – are not registered to vote in this crucial election.

The Catholic Church rightly condemns all forms Marxism (collectivism, communism, socialism) – but few Catholics know it. The Church also condemns human laws permitting or coercing the crime of abortion, but many Catholics ignore it. (See more in the searchable Catholic Catechism.) Yet Barack Obama and the nominally Catholic Joe Biden are imposing Marxist dictates and abortions upon the American people, while Mitt Romney and his truly Catholic running mate, Paul Ryan, want to liberate Americans by protecting our rights to life, liberty and free enterprise. In keeping with human rights, they pledge to repeal Obama’s health-care law and reform insurance law.

Thus, when Ryan was named as Romney’s running mate, his bishop, the Most Reverend Robert Morlino of Madison, Wisc., publicly rejoiced in a column, where he also explained why Catholics may never support intrinsic evils and further highlighted Catholic doctrine on economics and helping the poor.

“It was no shock at all for me to learn that our diocesan native son, Paul Ryan, had been chosen to be a candidate for the vice presidency of the United States,” wrote Bishop Morlino. “I am proud of his accomplishments as a native son, and a brother in the faith, and my prayers go with him and especially with his family as they endure the unbelievable demands of a presidential campaign here in the United States.”

To the contrary, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights recalls many bishops rebuking Biden.

Paul Ryan's bishop, Most. Rev. Robert Morlino of Madison

Catholics are duty bound to see the big the picture and vote accordingly. At this moment, all Americans are subject to President Obama’s policies here – and billions more vulnerable persons are subject to his policies around the world. Here, Obama and his administration have ordered the Catholic Church, other organizations and individual citizens to pay for abortion insurance policies. Thanks to Obama, his allies in Congress and the Supreme Court, singles and families who can’t afford health insurance will be taxed per person and left without health care. That’s Obama’s plan for helping the poor – tax them. Obamacare also empowers the government to deny health care to anyone, especially disabled persons and the elderly. And if the Romney/Ryan claims are true, Obamacare takes $716 billion from Medicare. Furthermore, companies that refuse to pay for abortion insurance – even religious institutions – will be fined $100 per day per employee, and they’ll quickly be bankrupted.

But Catholics can save lives and empower Americans if we decide to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves. As Jesus says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15).

Catholics empowered Obama

In 2008, the Obama/Biden campaign tirelessly fought for the souls of Catholics and won many votes through Catholic politicians who sold out Christ for political power.

This year at the Democratic National Convention, Obama and Biden shamelessly paraded abortion speakers from Planned Parenthood and NARAL (the National Abortion Rights Action League), plus Sandra Fluke, the non-Catholic abortion/contraceptive activist and Georgetown University grad. So their message is clear. Obama and Biden reduce women’s rights to being used as sexual objects, using men as sexual objects and resorting to violence if children are conceived.

Ironically, when I tell Muslims about Obama’s abortion agenda, including his White House commercial for the abortion chain Planned Parenthood and his 2012 Democratic Party platform promising free abortions, they all – male and female – have the same reaction. They all open their eyes wide and ask “Whyyyyyy?” for a full five seconds because the murder of unborn babies is incomprehensible to them – as it should be to everyone.

Likewise, Father Paul Schenck of the National Pro-Life Center wrote: “My friend, Nat Hentoff, a founding editor of the Village Voice newspaper in New York City, who is a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, a prolific commentator on the Constitution and a jazz music critic, is a left-wing atheist and thoroughly pro-life. The defense of human life is an eminently human position.”

When I further tell Muslims from various countries that in 2010 Obama spent at least $18 million in Kenya campaigning for the new constitution which decriminalizes abortion and establishes Islamist courts, they are shocked because they fled Islamist tyrannies. They are appalled that Vice President Biden went to Kenya and announced: “We are hopeful, Barack Obama is hopeful, I am hopeful that you will carry out these reforms to allow money to flow.”

As WND reported, Kenyan voters passed the dangerous constitution and now at least $480 million is set to “flow” from America to Kenya.

Obviously, those who vote for Obama/Biden and other abortion politicians become accessories to mass murder. Nevertheless, when I go to Catholic parishes in the Washington metro area, I see Obama/Biden bumper stickers on cars in the parking lots.

Warnings from Pope Benedict

“If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic. Despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep,” wrote G.K. Chesterton in “The Everlasting Man.”

Over the centuries, popes have condemned despotism and cultures of death. In April 2008, Pope Benedict XVI came the United States and warned the Catholic bishops, saying: “[I]t cannot be assumed that all Catholic citizens think in harmony with the Church’s teaching on today’s key ethical questions. Once again, it falls to you to ensure that the moral formation provided at every level of ecclesial life reflects the authentic teaching of the Gospel of life.”

In January of this election year, Pope Benedict summoned the Catholic bishops of the United States, he warned them about coming government attacks on the Church and he commanded them to fight the good fight.

In part, the Holy Father said: “[I]t is imperative that the entire Catholic community in the United States come to realize the grave threats to the Church’s public moral witness presented by a radical secularism which finds increasing expression in the political and cultural spheres.”

Shortly thereafter, Kathleen Sebelius, the Catholic secretary of Health and Human Services who is forbidden to receive Holy Communion, announced Obama’s deadly mandates and every single Catholic bishop in the U.S. announced that his diocese would not comply. Since then, some 50 Catholic dioceses, institutions and businesses filed lawsuits against the Obama administration. As WND reported, a federal court ruled that the Newland family, Catholic owners of Hercules Industries in Denver, doesn’t have to comply with Obama’s immoral orders.

On Sept. 17, Obama attempted to counter the protests of Catholics, other Christians and Jews by posting a video claiming his “unwavering” support for “religious freedom.” Days later on Sept. 25, he contested the Newland family’s religious freedom in federal appeals court.

While the savagery of abortion isn’t the Obama administration’s only threat to life and liberty, we have a holocaust on our hands because at least 55.5 million innocent little Americans have been gruesomely slaughtered in the names of freedom and choice since the Supreme Court’s ruling on Roe v. Wade.

Back in 2006, the World Health Organization assembled reports showing that oral contraceptives are carcinogens. So with Obama mandating free contraceptives, a larger environmental disaster looms because synthetic hormones in contraceptives are poisoning water supplies, thereby neutering wildlife, rendering humans infertile and increasing the risk of cancer.

The late papal adviser Father John Hardon, S.J., now up for canonization, said abortion victims are martyrs and keenly observed: “Most zealous Catholics are not as well organized or cooperative as those in the world. One of the hardest things is to get orthodox Catholics to cooperate. For their own projects, God will bless them, but they are no match for the organized efforts of those on the other side. This is a weakness.”

The “fiercely pro-life” Catholic Judge Andrew Napolitano concurred when he said: “If Catholics kept the faith, Roe versus Wade would never have happened.”

So Catholics, do you love Christ? And do you love your neighbors as yourselves?

I hope so because, as Bishop Thomas John Paprocki of Springfield, Ill., says, your own salvation is at stake.

If Barack Obama weren’t black, would most black voters really have reason to support him?

Rev. C.L. Bryant

Rev. C.L. Bryant, a former chapter president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, is boldly challenging whether the expanding government programs and progressive ideals espoused by Obama and his allies are actually helpful to black people or whether “the sons and daughters of former slaves traded one form of slavery for yet another.”

“Black people are very uninformed,” Bryant told WND, one of the key reasons he has made “Runaway Slave,” a powerful new movie blowing the lid off racial politics.

Bryant is a descendent of American slaves and Choctaw Indians. He’s also a Baptist minister who resigned from NAACP leadership when they required him to host an event directly violating the commandments of Christ. In Bryant’s film, leaving the NAACP was just one step on his journey away from the slavery of anger and one step towards the truth setting him free.

What, then, is the reaction of blacks who’ve seen “Runaway Slave”?

Bryant told WND: “I have not yet had an encounter with anyone black who has been confrontational.”

He said that at screenings most tell him they didn’t know a lot of facts in the film. Still others get choked up and want to hug him. And he’s got video to prove it. Audience reactions to the Atlanta screening of “Runaway Slave” can be seen in the video above.

Yet as Bryant’s film shows, there is black-on-black bigotry towards those who defy the Democratic Party’s agenda.

“There have been some black pastors who have not seen the film at all and told their congregations not to support it,” Bryant told WND. “In essence, they wanted to boycott it, and the odd thing is they hadn’t seen it. And that’s the foolishness of it. But everyone who has seen the film, even if you’re a white liberal, it’s not nearly what they anticipated. In fact, you come out with somewhat of an epiphany.”

In “Runaway Slave,” Bryant travels to historic civil rights cities, including Washington, Atlanta, Birmingham and Philadelphia, interviewing high profile leaders and fellow citizens, urging everyone to “run harder” from “tyranny to liberty.” He questions the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, NAACP President Ben Jealous, radio host Joe Madison and Black Panthers.

But this isn’t a story of Bryant against the world. “Runaway Slave” also features a growing base of black leaders working to restore everyone’s constitutional rights. There are men and women, young people and civil rights veterans, grassroots and national leaders. Bryant interviews Timothy Johnson of the Frederick Douglass Foundation, Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson of BOND and the South Central L.A. Tea Party, K. Carl Smith of Frederick Douglass Republicans and WND columnist Star Parker – to name a few.

“Runaway Slave” opens juxtaposing Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor Rally with Al Sharpton’s counter-protest. Bryant and his fellow filmmakers documented both events, and Sharpton was outraged that Beck had scheduled his event on the anniversary of Rev. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech (WND covered Beck’s rally here and here). In the film, we see Sharpton urging some 200 followers to “sucker punch” the allegedly racist hundreds of thousands of tea-party types attending Beck’s rally.

Ironically, Martin Luther King’s niece Alveda King and numerous other black leaders took the stage at Beck’s 2010 event – and in “Runaway Slave,” King tells Bryant the priorities for honoring her family’s legacy.

There are many surprises on Bryant’s journey. For example, a black African tells Bryant why he and other people from his continent don’t care to associate with black Americans.

Another surprise occurs as Bryant stands on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, scene of the historic Bloody Sunday, where some 600 Americans attempted to complete their Selma-to-Montgomery March for black voting rights. On Bloody Sunday, marchers were merely six blocks away from their destination when state and local officers attacked them with tear gas and billy clubs. In “Runaway Slave,” as Bryant stands on the bridge, along comes a man who had marched with his mother on that day back in 1965.

“And the odd thing about him is this: When we finished interviewing him, he pushed his shopping cart away – and we feel there was no time for him to get off the bridge, yet we don’t know where he came from and we don’t know where he went,” said Bryant. “Now, I don’t read anything into it or out of it, but many people have told me his story is a very touching thing, and the last thing he said to us was: ‘Out of all the things that have happened, this country is the greatest country in the world.’

“I think it was a God thing, personally,” said Bryant.

Barack Obama isn’t once named in “Runaway Slave.” But considering most black voters helped to elect him in 2008, Bryant told WND: “You take away the color of this president – let’s look at his white side. All of a sudden, he’s not black. Then the question to any black person should be: ‘Why would I then vote for him?’ You take away his skin color and there is absolutely no reason for a black person to vote for him.”

Rev. Bryant is a fellow of the Washington-based FreedomWorks, which co-produced “Runaway Slave” with Ground Floor Video of greater Atlanta.

Bryant’s documentary is showing in Atlanta, Philadelphia and Louisiana and now is expanding to the Dallas area and St. Louis. Later this month, it’s scheduled to open in Charlotte, Indianapolis, Jacksonville and Obama’s hometown, Chicago. Like most independent films, wide release of “Runaway Slave” depends on the box office returns in its premier markets. Click here to follow “Runaway Slave” and get movie tickets.

A trailer for the film can be seen below:

Dinesh D'Souza

WASHINGTON – Dinesh D’Souza, a former policy adviser to President Reagan and the director of a controversial new film about Barack Obama’s past, told WND he believes the roots of the current president’s infamous “you didn’t build that” speech go back to Kenya and the anti-colonialism seeded in his worldview.

At the beginning of his new film “2016: Obama’s America,” D’Souza states, “We are all shaped by our pasts, and we carry elements of the past into our future. But we have to be careful, because nothing can threaten the future quite as much as the debts of the past.”

And after the Washington, D.C., screening of the film, D’Souza told WND he believes Obama’s anti-colonialist past was the driving force behind telling a crowd at Roanoke, Va., on July 13, “If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

In brief, D’Souza explained European colonialism as fundamentally about occupation, rule, conquest and acquiring wealth; whereas anti-colonialism is fundamentally about redistributing the wealth of the world “so that it is enjoyed equitably by everyone in the world.”

D’Souza told WND, “Anti-colonialism’s core idea is that the wealth America has now is not earned wealth, but stolen wealth. And I believe that is a very influential idea with Obama and his recent comment that business owners didn’t earn their success, they used the public school system and public roads. That is the intellectual equivalent of me saying to Obama, ‘You didn’t really win the election. You, after all, drove on the public roads to your rallies, so you don’t deserve to be president.’

“The reason Obama makes such arguments – bogus though they are – is because he’s trying to say ‘If you didn’t earn it, I have the right to take it,’” D’Souza said. “And that is an idea rooted in anti-colonialism that the rich people and rich countries don’t deserve what they have. They didn’t earn it, they stole it and he has every right to use the power of the state to confiscate it back.”

D’Souza’s unique take that Obama is an anti-colonialist stems from personal experience. After all, D’Souza emigrated from India, where his father and grandfather were anti-colonialists.

As WND reported in its interview with producer Gerald Molen, D’Souza moved to the United States to attend Dartmouth College and today is president of The King’s College in New York City. In “2016: Obama’s America,” he humorously explains his rise to working in the Reagan White House, becoming a bestselling author and debating against the likes of Jesse Jackson.

In the film, D’Souza takes his audience to Kenya, Hawaii, Indonesia and elsewhere to interview those who know Barack Obama or his mother and father figures. He also interviews Paul Kengor, biographer of Obama’s primary influence, Communist Frank Marshall Davis.

In Kenya, D’Souza tried to interview the president’s step-grandmother Sarah Obama. But once the family found out he had interviewed Barack’s half-brother, George Obama, they refused to talk. They also banned him from the family homestead.

As D’Souza said, George is “the black sheep of the family” because wrote a book expressing conservative ideals and disputing anti-colonialism. Moreover, George is poor but insists on earning his own living.

D’Souza also interviewed psychologist Dr. Paul Vitz about the father figures in Obama’s life. He interviewed experts on the impending crisis of our mounting national debt and examines Obama’s military/defense agenda.

And while most regular WND readers know much about Obama’s murky past, this film is likely to stun the scores Americans who haven’t looked into their president’s formative years.

“I think this is a film that, whatever your politics, you’re going to leave the theater saying, ‘I know a lot more about Obama than I did 90 minutes ago,’” said D’Souza. “And I think that makes the film a contribution to the debate.”

After the Washington screening of “2016: Obama’s America,” one journalist told WND, “It scared the h— out of me!”

When D’Souza was told about the reaction, he replied, “Well, I think what makes the film shocking is that much of the material was unreported by mainstream media, even though the information was not that hard for me to collect. For example, when I was down in Kenya, talking to people related to Obama and those who knew Barack Sr., I asked, ‘Who has interviewed you so far?’ And they said, ‘Nobody. Nobody’s interviewed us.’ And I was shocked. So I kind of felt like I had large areas of territory, and I think that’s why people come out of theaters saying, ‘How come I didn’t know all this?

“I wanted a film that wasn’t like a TV documentary, but was like a real movie and appealed to people both on the intellectual level and the emotional level,” D’Souza explained. “I wanted to make a film by which people could understand Obama, and by that I mean even to empathize with Obama – understand how he became the man that he is above the give and take of political squabbling. I think it’s an interesting film on a human level. The Obama story to me is a riveting story, quite apart from politics.”

The trailer for “2016 Obama’s America” can be seen below:

“2016: Obama’s America” is currently showing in producer Gerald Molen’s home state of Montana and Houston-area theaters. Doug Sain, another producer, said distribution will expand to 300 theaters by Aug. 10 and 500 theaters by Aug. 17. Click here to see the growing list of theaters showing the film.