Liz Cheney On 60 Minutes: Silence enables the liar: "We cannot live in a post-truth world"

CASPER AND JACKSON, WYOMING:

Echo report published in the Christian Science Monitor, by Christa Case Bryant:

On the evening of January 6, 2021, Rep. Liz Cheney (R) had a rendezvous with Clio, the muse of history.

Cheney: "I do not recognize those in my party who have abandoned the Constitution to embrace Donald Trump".

Evil White Supremacists' and insurrectionists on January 6, storming the U.S. Capitol

Congress was just about to reconvene to confirm Joe Biden’s victory after being disrupted by a riot that ricocheted round the world. The Wyoming congresswoman strode into Statuary Hall, where officers in tactical gear were leaning against the marble figures of great American men and women, exhausted after hours battling their countrymen.

Above the door, Clio watched over them. She sits atop a clock fashioned by an octogenarian clockmaker from Roxbury, Massachusetts, where 15 of the first Cheneys, who came to America, are buried. 

Clio the Greek muse of history: "to make famous". 

Clio, sometimes referred to as "the Proclaimer", is often represented with an open parchment scroll, a book, or a set of tablets.

William Cheney arrived in 1640 as part of the wave of Puritans fleeing religious persecution. Two centuries later, Samuel Fletcher Cheney fought to save the Union. And now, here stood Elizabeth Lynne Cheney, leader of the House Republican Caucus, on the threshold of an era of division unseen since the Civil War.

It was a solemn moment for the scion of one of America’s most influential Republican families. Perhaps it was no mistake that she had dressed all in black that day. 

Only a few generations in American history, President John Kennedy once said, have been “granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger.”

“Today, that role is ours, as we face a threat we have never faced before: a former president attempting to unravel our constitutional republic,” Representative Cheney would later say. “The question for every one of us is, in this time of testing will we do our duty?”

The No. 3 Republican then went back into the House chamber and was among a minority of her party who did not object to the Electoral College count in two swing states. A week later, she was one of only 10 in her party to vote to impeach President Donald Trump, saying he “summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame.” Within months, she lost her leadership position.

Now, she is vice chair of a Democratic-led committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol, which will hold the first of a series of highly anticipated hearings on Thursday evening.

To Ms. Cheney, January 6, represents an existential battle for the American republic – one for which she is willing to sacrifice her political career. 

Supporters herald her as a rare example of courage in an age of partisanship, one of the few Republicans of national stature willing to confront the former President Trump and call out her party for enabling his lies. 

Indeed, it was at the John F. Kennedy Profiles in Courage ceremony, where she was one of the five honorees, that she shared her reflections on history and duty.

May 22, 2022: For the first time ever, the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award honored five individuals — Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, U.S. Representative Liz Cheney, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, Arizona Representative Russell “Rusty” Bowers, and Wandrea’ ArShaye Moss — each for their courage to protect and defend democracy in the United States and abroad.

Critics, however, say her myopic focus on Trump has abetted a politically motivated investigation. It has also undermined her ability to serve her constituents, who decry her lack of help in fighting Biden policies that are hurting Wyoming’s farms, ranches, and oil fields.

As the January 6, committee begins revealing to the public what it has learned so far, Ms. Cheney will be front and center, both documenting – and etching her place in – history. Meanwhile, her Republican primary opponent has logged 23,000 miles crisscrossing Wyoming’s vast plains and mountain ranges to meet with voters.

At a rally in Casper last month, Trump – who won Wyoming by the largest margin of any state – denounced Ms. Cheney for doing the bidding of “corrupt” Democrats, and urged voters to instead back Harriet Hageman, an attorney who has built a career battling federal bureaucrats. In many ways, this is the biggest test of the former president’s influence over the Republican base.

“I think this is a watershed election,” says GOP state Sen. Cale Case of Lander, who is supporting Ms. Cheney. “We know that the nation is looking at us.”

The view from Wyoming....Casper has been at a national crossroads before. In the 1800s, settlers streamed over the North Platte River en route to a new life in Oregon or the gold mines of California. Five different routes once converged here, including the Mormon Trail that two of Ms. Cheney’s great-grandmothers trod. 

As homesteaders hewed cabins from trees, Buffalo Bill Cody transformed the image of cowboys from social outcasts to romantic icons of strength and courage.

Now, Wyoming is debating who should represent the state in Congress – and how independent the voters will be, especially those who supported Mr. Trump.

Ms. Hageman, a fourth-generation Wyomingite and daughter of a longtime legislator, was raised on a ranch and has developed a reputation for sticking up for the state’s farmers and ranchers.

“I know Wyoming, I love Wyoming, I am Wyoming,” Ms. Hageman told the crowd at the Trump rally. “I know what it means to be loyal to the outfit that hired you (HELLO? Even if the mafia crowd that hired you expects for you to be their puppet?)

“As soon as I defeat Liz Cheney ... ” she continued, before deafening cheers drowned out the rest.

In Casper, Wyoming, the Cheney's name looms large. A young Dick Cheney would shoot game on the prairie and bring fried rabbit in his lunchbox the next day. A key player in multiple Republican administrations, Mr. Cheney was the youngest White House chief of staff in history, served as Wyoming’s sole congressman for 10 years, and oversaw the Gulf War as secretary of defense under George H.W. Bush. Many still regard him as the most influential vice president ever, for his role in orchestrating the Iraq War during the second Bush administration.

Today the local high school’s field bears his name, as does the federal building downtown, not far from an old-fashioned soda fountain and a movie theater with a vertical neon AMERICA sign.

But Liz Cheney, his elder daughter, has struggled to convince voters she’s a real Wyomingite. Raised mainly in the Washington, D.C., area, she and her husband bought a house in the state in 2012, before she made a short-lived run for Senate, challenging the popular Republican Mike Enzi in a move some saw as presumptuous. They chose the Jackson Hole area – a wealthy resort town at the base of the Grand Tetons, full of multimillion-dollar homes, in contrast with the ranches, bungalows, and rusting trailers that dot the rest of the state. If she and her family have ever lived here full time, it’s a closely kept secret in this close-knit state.

Since winning the election in 2016, however, Ms. Cheney has impressed many of her onetime detractors – including Tim Stubson, a former state legislator who ran against her in the GOP primary that year, and had criticized her as a carpetbagger.

6 in 10 Republicans Don't Believe Jan. 6 Capitol Attack Was Very Violent, Poll Finds- Newsweek.

Her argument was that with her connections in the Republican Party, she could come into Congress on Day One and help Wyoming – and she did, says Mr. Stubson. Within two months of taking office she spearheaded a resolution to nullify an Obama regulation that restricted public land use, a big issue in Wyoming, and stood next to President Trump as he signed it.

“She has been a super-effective legislator,” he says in an interview in his Casper law office.

Ms. Cheney is also one of the most conservative members of the House GOP caucus, voting with Mr. Trump more than 90% of the time during her first two terms, with their differences mainly related to foreign policy and fiscal discipline. 

Moreover, while she has continued to introduce legislation that could help Wyoming, including a bill challenging the Biden moratorium on oil and gas leasing, some constituents say her focus on January 6, has undermined her advocacy for Wyoming’s interests.

“She lost the ability to fight for Wyoming,” says Jack Mueller, who has known the family for decades, serving as a county co-chair for Dick Cheney’s first congressional campaign in the late 1970s.

“This whole January 6 thing – she’s been milking that like mad,” says Mr. Mueller, who supported the Laramie County GOP’s censure of her and says he got a call from Ms. Cheney a few days later. “I accused her of forming a cabal with Nancy Pelosi.”

He says he still doesn’t understand what her motive is. The two haven’t spoken since.

Even as her stance has alienated members of her own Republican party, however, it has won her accolades from the left.

“I consider her a person of great decency and character,” says Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a constitutional lawyer who has developed a warm working relationship with her on the January 6, committee, despite their policy differences. “She’s resilient and tough as nails.”

“To my mind,” he adds, “Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and Mitt Romney and the other Republicans who have stood up against Donald Trump are constitutional patriots.”

Her detractors see things differently.

If Ms. Cheney is so committed to the Constitution, one Trump rally-goer wondered, why isn’t she fighting for justice for the people who were arrested for, in their view, merely taking selfies in the Capitol on Jan. 6? 

When the Republican National Committee took the unusual step of censuring Ms. Cheney and Representative Kinzinger, it said that it was “unbefitting” of Republicans to participate in a Democrat-led committee that disregarded minority rights, traditional checks and balances, and due process, among other things.

“‘Hang Mike Pence’ is nothing”:  At the heart of these diverging viewpoints is a fundamental disagreement between Ms. Cheney and her critics about what actually happened on January 6 – and how big a threat it posed.

At his “Save America” rally that day, then-President Trump had called the election “the most corrupt in history” and urged his supporters to march to the Capitol, where Vice President Mike Pence was overseeing Congress’s counting of the Electoral College votes.

“We’re going to have to fight much harder, and Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us,” he told them, urging the vice president to support a Republican challenge to some states’ votes.

Trump supporters then marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, where Ms. Cheney’s great-great-grandfather had once paraded to celebrate the end of the Civil War. 

Those leading the charge shattered windows and doors to break into the Capitol, clashing with police officers while rioters in the hallways chanted, “Hang Mike Pence!”

Lawmakers and police barricaded the doors with furniture, and at least one shot rang out when a policeman fired on unarmed veteran Ashli Babbitt as she tried to climb through the smashed glass of a door to the lobby outside the House entrance. Two other protesters also died in connection with the attack. Some 114 Capitol Police officers, as well as several dozen Metro D.C. officers, were injured that day after hours of what a bipartisan Senate report described as ”absolutely brutal” physical abuse. Five have died, including four by suicide.

Some grant that lawmakers in the building that day may have felt more danger than they feel was apparent to those watching on television. Still, many on the right believe Ms. Cheney is abetting what they see as the left’s exaggeration of Jan. 6 for political purposes.

Marti Halverson, one of Wyoming’s three electors in 2020, was watching the day’s events unfold on TV and texting with friends who had gone to Washington for Mr. Trump’s rally.

“I think the Capitol Police overreacted,” she says. How could the Capitol be “breached” when it is the people’s House? she wondered. As for threats chanted by the rioters, she says that as a former state legislator she received awful threats in her inbox but sees them as routine for any politician these days. “‘Hang Mike Pence’ is nothing,” says Mrs. Halverson, adding that she doesn’t believe the rioters meant it. (Hello? But, the insurrectionist rioters built a gallows with a noose!)

January 6, gallows and noose.  HELLO?  Rioters did not just walk into a hardware store and order a gallows and noose.  This was planned in advance!

Courage or ambition? Ms. Cheney’s stance has motivated some Wyoming Democrats – who can change their party affiliation even on voting day – to cast a ballot in the GOP primary.

“She won a lot of us over because of that,” says Sarah Konrad, who manages a federal grant program supporting scientific research at the University of Wyoming in Laramie and is planning on registering as Republican for the first time to support Ms. Cheney.

It also persuaded some conservatives like Helen Higby, by her own account an erstwhile “loud Trump supporter” who credits Ms. Cheney with changing her outlook after the 2020, election.

“Having her brave enough and willing to risk her political future and willing to cross swords with him – I admire her for that,” says Ms. Higby, a mountaineer in her youth who respects the congresswoman’s dogged focus. “My ethic is, you don’t just throw up your hands when things get tough.”

But where some see integrity and courage, others see willfulness and ego. “Liz is a very stubborn person. She is never wrong – never,” says former Rep. Barbara Cubin, the first woman to represent Wyoming in Congress, who endorsed Ms. Hageman shortly after she announced – a decision she says was hard, because she has “fond feelings” for the Cheneys.

“I think she has bigger political ambitions,” says Monte Hartman, sitting on a grassy knoll outside the Trump rally in Casper.

But just what those ambitions are is unclear. Many surmise she has her eye on the 2024 presidential race. It’s unlikely she could win either party’s nomination, however, having burned her bridges with the GOP, and still far too conservative for most Democrats.

“I can’t imagine that there weren’t political calculations, but I really thought she did it out of a sense of principle,” says Dino Wenino, a progressive who is registered as a Republican so he can have some sway in elections here. “She was riding high in the Republican Party and now she’s almost a pariah.”

Whatever her motives, in a state where 7 in 10 voters supported Donald Trump, many feel affronted by her decision to co-lead the committee investigating his role in that day’s events.

“I could give her all the credit in the world for operating in accordance with her highest principles when she cast her vote to impeach,” says Mrs. Halverson, the Wyoming elector, but adds that her congresswoman’s subsequent actions showed “seeming contempt.” 

In particular, she highlights Ms. Cheney’s decision to skip a GOP gala in Rock Springs earlier this year in favor of attending the Wyoming Press Association’s annual gathering, and her subsequent explanation to The New York Times that she’s “not going to convince the crazies.”

A Cheney spokesman says that comment referred to the leadership of the state party. A recent exposé of GOP Chair Frank Eathorne, who spearheaded not only the state party’s censure of Ms. Cheney but also the Republican National Committee’s censure resolution, depicts him as pursuing a purist strain of politics that critics say borders on extremist. 

But some took Ms. Cheney’s “crazies” comment as akin to Hillary Clinton calling Trump supporters “deplorables.”

“All she has done since Jan. 6 is dig herself deeper and deeper into a hole,” says Mrs. Halverson in her hotel lobby the afternoon before the Trump rally, sporting a Hageman for Wyoming button. “And I’m very disappointed.”

The next day, she took the stage to praise Mr. Trump and rally the crowd for Ms. Hageman.

“The most important election”:  While a handful of other Republicans have spoken out against Mr. Trump, few have the pedigree, national standing, and platform that Liz Cheney has had as daughter of a former vice president and vice chair of the Jan. 6 committee. There’s a lot riding on this race – not just for Ms. Cheney, but also for the party and its relationship with Trump.

“Wyoming, all of America is counting on you,” Mr. Trump told the crowd of about 8,000 in Casper. “We have a lot of elections coming up. I think this is the most important election that we have, right here.”

Cheney supporters think so, too. “If she’s reelected, she’s in a much stronger position to be a counterweight to Trump,” says Pete Scott, a Republican rancher outside Casper who has watched the former president’s “takeover” of the party in disbelief. “If she’s defeated, that does not augur well, because she is just about the only national Republican willing to stand up to Trump.”

Many interviewed here feel the momentum is with Ms. Hageman, but they haven’t counted Ms. Cheney out. A key question is how many Democrats, like Ms. Konrad, will cross over to vote in the GOP primary – something Mr. Trump tried unsuccessfully to persuade the state legislature to limit.

In 2018, Democrats made an eleventh-hour bid to influence the GOP gubernatorial primary. Of the more than 11,000 newly registered Republicans in 2018, almost 3,000 were previously registered as unaffiliated (independent) and almost 2,400 as Democrats. But some insiders say it’s looking increasingly unlikely that Ms. Cheney will pick up enough to compensate for the Republican voters, alienated by her relentless criticism of Mr. Trump.

“There’s a huge part of me that’s like Liz, just stop – I want you to win, and you don’t have to keep poking the bear,” says a Republican strategist in Wyoming. “Now it’s too late.”

Most agree she undoubtedly calculated the risks of coming out against Mr. Trump, and what it would mean for her influence going forward.

“The vast majority of people never reach that point where they’re willing to say, ‘OK, I’m going to jump off this political cliff because of principle,’” says Mr. Stubson, explaining that for many Republicans unenthused about Mr. Trump it’s easy to make the argument that it’s better to stay quiet and exercise what influence they have than to lose it. Even among the 10 House members who took the leap and voted for impeachment, Ms. Cheney stands out.

“Liz was in the unique position that she couldn’t be pushed to the side, even if she got kicked out of leadership, because of the national voice that she had,” says Mr. Stubson.

Indeed, whether she wins reelection or not, “she will have an avenue in America,” says Alan Simpson, a longtime former senator who campaigned alongside Ms. Cheney’s father when he was running for Congress in the late 1970s and Liz and her sister would tag along with a straw hat full of buttons.

“She is her father’s daughter – and Dick Cheney is one tough cookie. But he’s a big-hearted man and he loves this country with passion,” adds former Senator Simpson. “She is going to be a spokeswoman to take down the clandestines and the phonies and the fibbers. And the fakers – add them. That’s going to be her mission.”

Donald Trump has no experience with spreading trust

Donald Trump and Mike Pence are completely incapable of building the trust needed to prepare Americans about preventing the spread of the coronavirus.

An echo editorial opinion published in the Christian Science Monitor.

Antidote to coronavirus fears: Trust in leaders

The global outbreak puts a useful spotlight on governments that have built up credibility, transparency, and other traits of trustworthy leadership.

February 24, 2020  By the Monitor's Editorial Board

In South Korea, the first democracy to cope with a massive outbreak of the coronavirus, President Moon Jae-in is scrambling to be seen as a trusted leader against harsh public criticism of his response. “This is an unusual emergency situation,” Mr. Moon had to explain Monday. “Instead of limiting our imagination with regard to policy, we have to make bold decisions and implement them quickly.”

In Singapore, by contrast, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has largely kept the trust of citizens in his highly centralized island state. The government, for example, helped prevent panic on social media by setting up its own WeChat platform to provide accurate information. By being transparent and instructive, it maintained credibility.

Meanwhile in China, health officials admitted Friday they had created mistrust by constantly altering the “criteria” for what is a “confirmed case” of the virus. The confession may have been an attempt to regain trust and, with it, public cooperation.
With reports of more outbreaks beyond China, leaders in many countries are desperate to keep or restore trust in order to cope with both the virus and the viral fear that has come with it. The range of responses puts a favorable spotlight on those governments that already had built up competent health systems and honest communications to meet such a challenge.

In general, examples of trusted leadership are getting harder to find, according to the latest “Trust Barometer” from communications firm Edelman.

In its latest survey of 28 countries, it found two-thirds of people do not have confidence that “our current leaders will be able to successfully address our country’s challenges.” A similar number “worry technology will make it impossible to know if what people are seeing or hearing is real.” And 57% said news media is “contaminated with untrustworthy information.”

Edelman recommends all leaders try to be ethical as they also try to be competent in solving problems. Government, for example, must reduce partisanship, address problems at the community level, and partner with the private sector. Trust “is no longer only a matter of what you do – it’s also how you do it,” the report states.

Trust in leaders and their expertise to handle a health crisis is an essential “vaccine” in controlling public fears. Governments need the traits of trust – integrity, transparency, accountability, and compassion – long before a crisis hits. Or, as China and other countries are finding, they must scramble to build up trust. As they do, fears will lessen and help end this global outbreak.

Evangelicals oppose immigrant family separations ~ echo opinion

By Harry Bruinius echo published in The Christian Science Monitor and reprinted in BrooklynEagle.com

“I place an extremely high value on the authority of Scripture, and the place it should hold in our lives,” says Frady, a lay leader who often leads Bible studies at Northwest Free Methodist Church, a small congregation in Wichita, where she also plays tenor sax for morning worship. “I would not knowingly go against something I thought the Bible commanded, no matter how I felt about it.” 

Attorney General Sessions and proclaimed Evangelical Sarah Huckabee Sanders didn't bother reading the context of the Scripture upon which they based the evil immigrant family separation policy.

On family separation, evangelicals add their voices to the opposition

When Julie Frady planned to make a poster to protest the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, she wanted to find the perfect Bible verse to stand against it, she says, one nobody else would expect.

She’s voted Republican most all of her life, but Frady, an evangelical Christian who lives in Wichita, Kansas, says she’s been “appalled” by the Trump administration’s practice of separating immigrant children from their parents. And she’s been especially appalled, she says, at the administration’s stated purpose to use the practice as a deterrent to other immigrant families thinking of crossing the border illegally.

Since she joined about 60 protesters who marched in front of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (ICE.gov) office in Delano, Kansas, Thursday, more and more people across the United States, and from across its often-polarized political spectrum, have begun to express deep moral reservations at the logistical realities of the practice.

Former first lady Laura Bush called the zero-tolerance policy “cruel” and “immoral” on Sunday, and first lady Melania Trump spoke out in favor of a resolution that would reunite families as well. Conservatives in Congress, including House Speaker Paul Ryan and other Trump loyalists, have also voiced their opposition.

But in many ways, it was evangelical Christians, including some of President Trump’s most vocal supporters, who first began to change the course of the national conversation about immigration.

As federal agencies began to put into place the actual protocols of separating, detaining, and then finding suitable care for more than 11,400 immigrant children in custody — including about 2,000 taken from their parents since the Trump administration began its “zero tolerance” policy in April — many Evangelicals began to speak out against it.

Before opposition to the policy began to dominate the national conversation, Frady decided to use a verse from the small Book of Obadiah for her poster. The Hebrew prophet condemns the nation of Edom for closing its borders to Israelite refugees fleeing the Babylonians.

In multiple colors, she drew: “The LORD declares: You should NOT stand at the crossroads to cut down fleeing REFUGEES … in the day of their DISTRESS.”

It’s in many ways a defining feature of American Evangelical identity: the centrality of Scripture for both personal piety and political action.

“I place an extremely high value on the authority of Scripture, and the place it should hold in our lives,” says Frady, a lay leader who often leads Bible studies at Northwest Free Methodist Church, a small congregation in Wichita, where she also plays tenor sax for morning worship. “I would not knowingly go against something I thought the Bible commanded, no matter how I felt about it.”

Indeed, the Bible, and the voices of Evangelicals around the country, have become a focus of the debate.

White Evangelicals have been Trump’s most ardent supporters from the start, and as a group they remain the most supportive of his administration’s immigration policies, polls suggest.

And Evangelicals within the Trump administration, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, (MaineWriter ~ wrongly!) invoked the Bible to defend the policy of separating children.

Discussing the “concerns raised by our church friends about separating families,” Mr. Sessions told an audience in Fort Wayne, Ind., last week, “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.”

Later, Sanders told reporters that “it is very biblical to enforce the law. That is actually repeated a number of times throughout the Bible.”

On the one hand, it speaks to the power and influence that Evangelicals wield in U.S. politics, notes Gushee, given that a political debate over immigration policy became a debate over biblical interpretation. 

“Only in America, really, and only in America in the 21st century and with a conservative Republican government, would we be having these public Biblical arguments about immigration policy.”

Yet after Sessions invoked Romans 13, “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established,” 

Christians, including many white Evangelicals, pointed out the long history of this passage, a passage that Gushee says “has been used and abused by tyrants and governments doing injustice for centuries.”

“There are two dominant places in American history when Romans 13 is invoked,” said John Fea, a professor of American history at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, to The Washington Post. “One is during the American Revolution [when] it was invoked by loyalists, those who opposed the American Revolution.”

The other was in the middle of the 19th century, to support defense of the Fugitive Slave Act, Fea continued. “I mean, this is the same argument that Southern slaveholders and the advocates of a Southern way of life made.”

Steven Colbert, a devout Roman Catholic and the host of “The Late Show,” suggested Thursday that the attorney general continue reading the passage on submitting to civil authorities through Romans 13:8-10. “Love thy neighbor as thyself. Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.”

Trump has been backtracking from his policy of zero tolerance, falsely asserting that his hands are tied and that Democrats are the ones responsible for legal requirements that his administration is only enforcing.

But as the Monitor reported in March 2017, the Trump White House has been mulling separating children from their families as a deterrent policy from the first months of the administration. After an outcry from religious leaders, however, the plan was postponed.

The Obama administration, too, separated immigrant children from their parents, advocates note. And it also greatly expanded a policy of detaining mothers with children in expanded facilities. If a father crossed the border illegally with a child, they would typically be separated.

“The separation of families at the border is not new,” says Christina Fialho, co-executive director of Freedom for Immigrants, who advocates for immigrants being held at places like the private, for-profit Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego. “Under the Obama administration, we worked with hundreds of parents who were separated from their family in home raids, including mothers who were still nursing young children.”

The difference, however, was that the Obama administration maintained a policy of “prosecutorial discretion”: the focus of resources on known, dangerous individuals, rather than “zero tolerance,” an adherence to the letter of the law in all instances.

“We realized that we had limited resources in what we could do,” says Kevin Fandl, who worked as a senior counsel for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from 2007 to 2013. “We believed we should target those resources toward the most serious threats to the country, those threats being convicted felons or those with a criminal history, terrorists, threats for national security, and recent border crossers, those people with no ties whatsoever to the United States.”

And as Sessions put it earlier this month: “If people don’t want to be separated from their children, they should not bring them with them. We’ve got to get this message out.”

As a result, however, the system has been severely strained. Sessions said last week that taking care of unaccompanied minors was costing taxpayers more than $1 billion a year, most now under the care of the US Department of Health and Human Services and its Office of Refugee Resettlement.

Logistically speaking, the system is not prepared to handle the care of thousands of children, says Lisa Koop, associate director of legal services for the National Immigrant Justice Center, who represents a number of immigrant woman whose children were taken from them by the US government.

“They did not know what was going on with their kids, and when we finally managed to figure that one of the kids was being detained in New York, the child’s mother [being held at the Otay Mesa Detention Center] said to me, Where is New York? Is New York far away from here?’” says Koop, who recounts stories of mothers having their children literally torn from their arms. “They just have no concept of where their children are, and what conditions they’re in.”

“But the story is not just the Bible verses,” Gushee said. “The tears and suffering of human beings whose rights are being violated speaks. That is a language that should be taken seriously. In fact, one might even say this language is revelatory.

“To see children weeping, to see bereft parents not knowing where their children are, to learn about a man who killed himself in a detention center because he was torn apart over the destruction of his family — these stories speak, too.”

And they have spurred devout evangelical Christians, like Frady, to action.

“I love America,” says Frady, who wore a purple T-shirt with “Jesus was a Refugee” to the protest near her home in Wichita. “It is my homeland, and I am certainly blessed to be an American.”

“But I am also not naive to its warts,” she continues. “And this is more than a wart.”

Staff writer Henry Gass contributed to this report from Brownsville, Texas.

In multiple colors, Frady drew: “The LORD declares: You should NOT stand at the crossroads to cut down fleeing REFUGEES … in the day of their DISTRESS.”

It’s in many ways a defining feature of American Evangelical identity: the centrality of Scripture for both personal piety and political action.

France: "son et lumiere" c'est magnifique!

Why 'son et lumiere' shows light up French summer nights

"Light is exciting to the eye,” Pelz says. 

By Sara Miller Llana- Christian Science Monitor

JULY 17, 2017 AMIENS, FRANCE—I was feeling slightly wistful about our family missing the Fourth of July in the US – until the following weekend when we found ourselves in front of the cathedral of Amiens at nightfall, watching its facade splashed in color, the light show giving the sense that the Gothic cathedral, unmoved since the 13th century, was dancing before us.

Forget fireworks, we had son et lumiere. (video link)

While the French are old hands at the artform, I had the feeling we were experiencing the show “Chroma” the way spectators did in 1952, when Paul Robert-Houdin officially introduced them to a brand new genre. The architect and curator, fittingly also the grandson of a famous French magician, projected special lights, set to accompanied sound, onto the facade of the Chateau de Chambord, a Renaissance castle in the Loire Valley, playing with spectators’ sense of place and emotion.

The late French public official Jacques Rigaud was sent to Chambord to observe those rehearsals and premiere, and recalled beholding his first son et lumiere with a sense of “wonder.” “We had the feeling that a new way of discovering and understanding monumental heritage was perhaps being born,” he wrote in Le Figaro in 2002, in a commemorative piece marking the 50th anniversary of the form, noting that large numbers came to witness the show through the end of that summer of 1952.

In fact, 65 years later, visitors continue to flock to son et lumiere: to watch light shows, often set to historical narratives, projected onto gothic abbeys or baroque monuments, from its birthplace in the Loire Valley, to France at large, and today around the world.

Fireworks have their place in France too, especially during the country's annual independence day fête. 

Last weekend's Bastille Day, which President Trump attended, looked in many ways like the Fourth of July, save for the Eiffel Tower in the background of the grand feu d’artifice display in Paris. 

But, son et lumiere is, I dare say, that much more mesmerizing.

The art form has evolved over time with technology, with 3D projection mapping and changing cultural sensibilities. Marc Vidal, director of Spectre Lab, which created the Amiens show running through the end of the summer, says that “Chroma” was meant as a new experience for Amiens. The city has put on a light show for over a decade and a half, but the new version was meant to be something less historical, and overall more fun – which explains the punchy music and bursting colors – without forgetting the point of the show.

"It’s not the effects for the sake of effects,” he says. “The animations highlight the building, the architecture ... the pure history of the cathedral.” The final 30 minutes of Chroma are particularly moving, as lighting paints in the ornate sculptures that adorn the cathedral's principal facade, allowing visitors to experience it in polychrome the way it would have looked in the Middle Ages.

Mr. Vidal says the birth of son et lumiere likely owes to the tradition of grand fêtes tracing back to King Louis XIV at Versailles, France’s pioneering in cinema and projection, and its abundance of historic monuments.

Yet it is but a subset of light used as art that’s taken off around the world, including in the US.

Bettina Pelz, a German curator who wrote a chapter on art in the new book “Light beyond 2015,” after the UNESCO International Year of Light, says that light-related projects in the public space have grown in the past 15 years. While usually lumped together, they vary widely in their aesthetics and technical capabilities – not to mention in the visions of curators or local officials and institutions.

Europe remains the heartland of the art. 

Light shows, like the famous Festival of Lights in Lyon, have inspired many others. 

Such shows are common in northern Europe as the winter solstice nears. Many Asian projects today link with European initiatives, says Ms. Pelz.

"Light is exciting to the eye,” Pelz says. “We can detect the changes caused by light but light itself remains invisible. This interplay of visible-invisible is quite stimulating.... Light-based works play with the appearance and disappearance of space, with the change of position and perspective, as well with the performative qualities of color and shape. They stage the inextricable link between the image and its perception. Instead of observing an artwork, the viewer is experiencing it. Viewing and imaging become entangled processes.”

Russian return on investment - election espionage

"Russia if you're listening," Donald J. Trump, 2016

(Information literacy is a problem!)

Obviously, Russia was listening and will do so again, to influence our democratic process, a repeat of 2016.

According to the drip-drip information released by the FBI and Director James Comey, Russia was already listening in on the 2016 election, even before Donald Trump made his treasonous clarion call for illegal intervention.  In fact, Russia was so much into electronic espionage, that it actually influenced public opinion about Hillary Clinton and helped sway voters against supporting her election. All the while, the "listening"campaign was branded as "fake news". It's going to be tough to explain this weird confluence of events to future generations, when historians are asked to explain "what the hell happened?"

Nevertheless, in spite of the bizarre "connect the dots" of high level conspirators who participated in the successful Russian invasion of the US democracy (by the way, no need to remind ourselves about how our nation sends observers to monitor other nations' elections) the most salient fact we can anticipate is how the Russians will do a repeat performance, as soon as possible. Indeed, intelligence is, most likely, already prepared to influence the 2018 mid term elections.

Why did Russia do this?  Because they could. Also, because Vladimir Putin "hated" Ms. Hillary Clinton (said FBI Director, James Comey, when he testified on March 20th, to the House Intelligence Committee).

It's too trivial to label this intelligence, espionage and intrigue as bizarre. In the aggregate, the entire process smacks of treason by key players in the Donald Trump campaign, who were driven like wild horses at mating season to win the 2016 Republican election.

Will future US elections be free of Russian meddling? This article in the Christian Science Monitor reports on the possibilities.

Reports about Russian meddling in the US election are so complicated as to be nearly incoherent. Countering expected future attacks on US political integrity will require a comprehensive use of all levels of national power, experts say.By Peter Grier- CSM staff writer

MARCH 31, 2017 —Allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election raised lots of questions, from why so many Trump team members met with the Russian ambassador prior to inauguration day, to whether Moscow hacked any key party groups besides the Democratic National Committee.

But there’s one crucial uncertainty that’s perhaps been lost in the partisan wrangling over Russia’s actions: What is the US going to do when they try it again?
Because Russia is almost certain to repeat its efforts to undermine American voters’ faith in their electoral system, according to US officials. Why shouldn’t it? The Vladimir Putin regime appears happy with the way covert and overt techniques have worked so far.

Countering this unprecedented attempt at influence may require an equally unprecedented whole-government American response. According to experts, that could involve everything from better cyberdefense and more public exposure of hacking to a US-run debunking website devoted to the exposure of Russia-backed fake news. Common-sense measures at the personal level and efforts to strengthen democratic institutions at the public level also are needed, they say.

“I do believe it’s in our power to stop these Russian tactics, but what it will require is a very focused effort,” says Heather Conley, Europe program director for the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a co-author of the new report “Recalibrating US Strategy Toward Russia.”

In interviews and at hearings and think-tank conferences in Washington, officials and experts alike expressed a consensus that so far the known US response to Russian meddling has been limited and not entirely coherent.

Prior to November, the Obama administration seemed reluctant to name and shame Russia for meddling, for fear it would be criticized for attempting to influence the vote itself. 

Since January, the Trump administration seems most concerned that the subject might undermine the new president’s electoral legitimacy.

President Barack Obama did eventually expel dozens of Russian diplomats and impose some sanctions on Russia, while publishing a public summary of the attack on the DNC.

Still, on the whole “we have no organized response as a country. … Until we set boundaries, they are going to move as far as they can,” said Clint Watts, a former FBI agent and senior fellow at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University, at a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing Thursday.

Intentional swagger?

Russia hasn’t been bothering to take its shoes off and try to sneak around quietly, either. It’s been “loud” in its efforts to hack the US election, leaving behind bits of code and other cyber-clues that make it relatively easy to attribute computer break-ins to Russian-linked groups.

This swagger may have been part of the point, said FBI Director James Comey in his March 20 appearance at the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Moscow may have counted on the US picking up on the intrusions, publicly informing voters, and subsequently “freaking people out,” said the FBI chief.

Given their success, they’ll be back to try and affect the 2018 midterms and then return again for the 2020 presidential election, according to Mr. Comey.

“One of the lessons they may draw from this is that they were successful because they introduced chaos and division and discord and sowed doubt about the nature of this amazing country of ours and our democratic process,” he said.

The Russian effort for the 2016 vote began ramping up in mid- to late-summer of 2015, according to experts. It was a hybrid composed of the covert hacking of the DNC and other targets, the dissemination of slanted or completely fake news via such means as automated social media bots, and overt propaganda covered by the state-controlled RT news channel and other Russian media outlets.

US intelligence detailed the hacking effort in declassified reports at the end of 2016. In sum, two Advanced Persistent cyber-threats deemed linked to Russia, APT28 and APT29, emailed a malicious link to more than 1,000 recipients, including multiple government officials. At least one person – presumably Clinton campaign chief John Podesta – bit on the link, in part due to faulty information provided by the campaign’s tech team.

In the end, Russian hacking groups – also known by nicknames such as “Fancy Bear” and “GeminiDuke” and “Eviltoss” – reportedly got access to sensitive systems at the DNC and elsewhere. They merrily rummaged about, “likely leading to the exfiltration of information from multiple senior party members,” according to a joint FBI and Department of Homeland Security report.

This is the origin of much of the stuff that unknown intermediaries passed to WikiLeaks and other outlets for dissemination to the wider world.

“The US Government assesses that information was leaked to the press and publicly disclosed,” the report drily notes.

But hacking was only one prong of the effort. Russia also used the older, historic tool of out-and-out fake news and twisted propaganda – albeit disseminated with modern social media methods

Then there was the alleged Incirlik incident.
On the evening of July 30, 2016, RT and Sputnik News simultaneously released stories saying, falsely, that the US air base at Incirlik in Turkey was being overrun by terrorists. Russian news aggregators, trolls, and Russia-linked automated social media “bot” accounts quickly spread and amplified this story, including the assertion (also false) that there were nuclear missiles at the base that would be lost in the incursion.

More than 4,000 tweets in the story’s first 78 minutes were from accounts associated with Russian active propaganda measures, according to Clint Watts of the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security. Apparently based in many different places and communities, they used the same hashtags (#Nuclear) and keywords to try and spread the notion that a Benghazi-like attack was under way on a much larger scale. In reality, a small protest had simply gathered outside Incirlik’s gates.

“This pattern of Russian falsehoods and social media manipulation of the American electorate continued through Election Day and persists today,” wrote Mr. Watts in his prepared statement for the March 30 Senate Intelligence hearing. “Many of the accounts we watched push the false Incirlik story in July now focus their efforts on shaping the upcoming European elections, promoting fears of immigration or false claims of refugee criminality.”

So that’s what the US now faces. It’s a combination of old Soviet-era disinformation efforts and powerful modern communications and computer techniques.

The Incirlik incident

Consider the experience of Sen. Tim Kaine (D) of Virginia, Hillary Clinton’s running mate. He was the subject of a number of Russia-derived false stories during the campaign. At least three were so silly or unbelievable the mainstream media didn’t bother to mention them at all, Senator Kaine said in January at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

Out of curiosity he looked at one of the stories on social media to see what kind of reaction it was producing. He was astonished to learn it had been shared 800,000 times.

“These are stories that most fourth graders would find incredible,” said Kaine at the HASC meeting.

So that’s what the US now faces. It’s a combination of old Soviet-era disinformation efforts and powerful modern communications and computer techniques.

'A whole-of-government approach'
Lawmakers and US officials say that countering Russia’s attacks on US political integrity will require a comprehensive use of all levels of national power. 

Cyberdefense is crucial, but only part of the equation. Cyber-intrusions should not always be countered with cyber-based weapons.

“We must engage in a whole-of-government approach to counter Russia’s active measures,” said Sen. Richard Burr (R) of North Carolina, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, in a public hearing on the subject Thursday.

US operations need to improve in three areas: defense, detection, and deterrence, according to Ben Buchanan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Belfer Center Cybersecurity Project at Harvard University.

On defense, individuals should realize that if they have any kind of national role, their personal accounts might be Russian targets. They need to take basic steps such as two-factor authentication for computer access and activities and password managers so they don’t just reuse passwords, says Mr. Buchanan.

At the national policy level the US should spend the money to replace many of its aging legacy systems with systems built with security in mind. President Obama’s proposed IT modernization would be a good baseline from which to start, says Buchanan in an email response to a reporter’s questions.access.

“No perimeter defense is perfect, and security professionals should 
On detection, it’s important for federal systems to have good network visibility so defenders can spot intruders once they gain assume that compromise will happen and focus on detecting and remediating it as fast as possible,” says Buchanan.

Deterrence could involve a wide range of responses. But the US must act in some manner if its deterrence in this area is to remain credible. “Naming and shaming” is perhaps one place to start. Indicting Russian, Chinese, or Iranian hackers would show that the US can determine who is behind intrusions and limit their ability to travel abroad.

Exploiting US weaknesses

Looking at the situation more broadly, the first line of defense should be to strengthen Western democratic institutions, says Ms. Conley of CSIS. After all, Russia’s main aim is to weaken US leadership abroad and pull more of Europe into its own sphere of influence. Resisting that requires strong and resilient government.

That could mean more financial transparency, to track illicit Russia-linked money flows into the US and other nations. It could mean more efforts to root out corruption and strengthen the independent judiciary in troubled nations.

“The Russians are just exploiting weaknesses that exist in our society,” says Conley. “We have very low trust factors in our leaders and institutions. This is a long-term rebuilding.”

Information literacy is a problem, she adds. In today’s friend-based news environment, where many people get their news from links sent along by social media, it’s much harder to verify truth than it was in the cold war era of three main TV networks.

Perhaps a school or community-based public education effort on the dangers of “fake news” is what’s needed.

“How do we get community leaders, civic leaders, school leaders involved?” Conley says. “You have to educate.”

Some experts have suggested a government-sponsored version of the Snopes debunking website, devoted to exposing Russia-created fake stories and countering Russia’s twist on news events. (Maine Writer- IMO, this approach is too slow, won't work, only as good as it's continuously updated!)

Others push for the restoration of an independent US Information Agency, a cold war era organization that was dedicated to cultural and news outreach in nations subject to Soviet influence.

Many urge the US to do more, whatever it is. The response so far to Russia’s active measures of influence hasn’t been adequate, they say.

“It’s time the United States reminds the world, that despite our day-to-day policy debates and political squabbles, we stand united, alongside our allies, in defending our democratic system of government,” said Watts of the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security in his opening statement at Thursday’s Senate intelligence hearing. (Well therein is the issue!  With the chaotic leadership of Donald J. Trump, given the tenacious followers he hypnotically attracted to his cult, is it really possible for the USA to have any credibility with our allies in the forseeable future?)

In other words, "Russia if you're listening" will influence our democracy, at least until leadership is elected that will take this threat seriously. It's imperative and of national security urgency to do something, before it's too late and something worse than a "fake news" cycle happens. Republicans can't go on pretending they somehow didn't hear the clarion call. 

Meanwhile, "Russia if you are listening" received a "huge" (Trumponian bravado) return on investment by influencing the election of Donald J. Trump.  Hopefully, just like the defunct Russian Ruble (value at $0.18 on the U$Dollar) - the investment will fail.

Fake News - it was called Yellow Journalism now it's "lies"

Established, real news is crucial in a democracy- but producing real news requires readers who believe in supporting journalistic integrity.  Donald Trump has decided to trash "real media" and prefers, instead, the "Brietbart-barfcart' horror created with "fake news".

Fake news in 1938

There was a time, in the very recent past, when journalism was a source of truth. In fact, the New York Times mantra is "All the news that's fit to print". Now, the main streat media is trying to print and report truth before "fake news" consumes headlines. Lies in journalism were once called "yellow journalism". Now, the name for this propaganda is "fake news". Unfortunately, even tragically, the problem is that people believe it.

Yellow journalism, was journalism based upon sensationalism and crude exaggeration. Now, it's called "fake news".

Beating the 'fake news' trap- from the Christian Science Monitor November 22nd, by John Yemma

"Fake news is 'lies'".

On sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, articles generated by propagandists, pressure groups, mischief-makers, and page-view gluttons routinely pop up. They can be intriguing. They are often "liked" and recirculated by people who you know. 

Hundreds of fake news sites with names such as “NewsBuzzDaily” coexist with real news from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and, yes, The Christian Science Monitor.

Of course, satire is a venerable literary device for the discerning reader. From Horace to Jonathan Swift, Will Rogers to The Onion, satirists have left people both laughing and thinking. 

Tongue-in-cheek news reports – whether a TV station’s April Fools’ Day prank or the latest episode of “The Daily Show” – are a popular form of satire today. A media phenomenon continues to the reliving of the 1938 radio broadcast about Martians landing on earth.  People believed this story! In fact, I submit that people would believe it, even if this report was aired today.

But, if satire doesn’t, at some point, give you a wink, then it is just an old-fashioned lie. That's what "fake news is"- it's lies.

Fake news has been around since before the internet. 

More than a century ago, the founder of the Christian Science Monitor, Mary Baker Eddy, decried “those quill-drivers whose consciences are in their pockets” and went on to start the CSM, at least in part, as an antidote. The fakery of yellow journalism survives at the supermarket checkout line, where tabloids screaming about celebrity scandals, political conspiracies, and space aliens are racked alongside Time and Newsweek. And because cable TV is free from the Federal Communication Commission regulations that govern over-the-airwaves TV, shows trafficking in fake news are just a channel choice away from real news shows.

As with everything it has done, the internet has supercharged fake news. More than 60 percent of adult Americans now get their news from social media, according to the Pew Research Center. The average visitor spends almost two hours a day on it. After catching up on mainstream news, it’s tempting to click a headline touting a hidden secret or allegedly suppressed news, especially if it confirms what you suspected or supports your political leanings.

Established, real news is crucial in a democracy. But real news is difficult to nail down, especially when fakery is running wild. Americans have just emerged from a political campaign in which old-school news seemed passé, fact-checking made little difference, and outrageous claims were made. Meanwhile, from Russia to Syria to the Philippines, strongmen have been asserting that facts are irrelevant. “Who are you going to believe,” they ask, after silencing opponents or denying involvement in atrocities, “me or your lying eyes?”

Can fake news be defeated? Google, Facebook, and Twitter have promised to filter fake news. But if you value truth-seeking, please support it. Subscribe to publications like ours that pursue it. Click on links from news sources you trust. Give a thumbs up to news, not “news.”

Real news takes work to gather and produce. Those who practice real news are willing to be corrected if wrong. Fake news looks real but is cheap, feckless, and produced by page-view drivers whose consciences are in their pockets. Don’t be fooled. Fake news doesn’t wink.

People in 1938 believed the report about Martians landing on earth!

By John Yemma, Columnist NOVEMBER 27, 2016
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Jews and Muslims share fear of "Trumpziism"

Salaam-Shalom! 

Americans must stand against bigotry and racism, the social diseases now so caustic in our nation, post the Trumpzi election.

This report about Jews and Muslims, from the Christian Science Monitor (CSM) continues to remind me about the poignant relevance of the Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) poem titled "First They Came".  It's a startling poetic report about the cowardice of German intellectuals following the Nazis' rise to power in Germany and subsequent purging of their chosen targets, group after group. 

Pastor Martin Niemöller

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Many variations and adaptations in the spirit of the original have been published in the English language. It deals with themes of persecution, guilt and responsibility.

Why Jews are coming to the defense of mosques in America- reported in "Bridging Divides" (CSM): by Jessica Mendoza

Jewish-Muslim cooperation is on the rise. 

Their ability to work together despite decades of conflict on issues of foreign policy could serve as a model for embracing shared American values.

LOS ANGELES — When Sheryl Olitzky first broached the subject of a Jewish-Muslim women’s group, Atiya Aftab didn’t buy it. “Why is someone calling me because I’m Muslim?” Ms. Aftab recalls thinking. “This is creepy.”

But as Ms. Olitzky made her case over lattes at a Starbucks in suburban New Jersey, Aftab found herself drawn in.

“This is a woman extending her hand to me, saying, ‘I want to get to know you. I want to be your protector. I want to have your back because I know what you’re going through, because of what the Jewish community has been through,’ ” says Aftab, a professor at Rutgers University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. “That was so compelling, so honest.”

After that meeting in 2010, the two women launched the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom – then just a casual gathering of local Muslim and Jewish women talking about faith and family, and sharing their experiences as religious minorities in America. 

Today, the group has chapters in more than 50 cities.

The success of groups such as the Sisterhood point to a growing – and perhaps unprecedented – desire among American Muslims and Jews to work toward a common goal, some say.

Over the years, “More people have become aware of their common faiths given the rise of toxic anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic hate,” says Haroon Moghul, senior fellow and director of development at The Center for Global Policy, a New York think tank. “There’s been a definite change, and for the better.”

This spring, business, political, and religious leaders from both communities for the first time formed a joint advisory council that seeks to give the Muslim and Jewish Americans a national voice. And amid a post-election spike in anti-Islamic sentiment, local Jewish groups have stepped up their support for Muslims in their own communities.

When mosques in California this week received a threatening letter calling Muslims “a vile and filthy people” and saying that President-elect Donald Trump “is going to do to you Muslims what Hitler did to the jews (sic),” Jewish groups were among the first to reach out, says Ojaala Ahmad, communications director for the Council on Islamic Relations in Los Angeles. The letter was also sent to mosques in several other states, including Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, and Rhode Island.

One Jewish group out of New Haven, Conn., started an online campaign to raise funds for a Muslim nonprofit, urging fellow Jews to “hold ourselves accountable for the intersectional oppressions Muslim people are facing, and honor and join the movements Muslim Americans are building to combat white supremacy and advocate for their rights.”

“I think there’s more of a sense of urgency,” says Aftab at the Sisterhood. “We’ve heard from people all over the country, even all over the world, saying, ‘I need to reach out and do something constructive rather than be affected by this fear in a negative way.’ ”

The coming together of these two faith groups, despite decades of conflict on issues of foreign policy, could serve as an important model for others seeking to focus on shared American values, experts say.

Such efforts also demonstrate a continued drive among Americans to hold to ideals of democracy and pluralism by banding together and finding common ground in times of fear and confusion.

“Groups that are willing to talk and learn and still maintain their identities and distinctiveness represent a real promise for what a pluralistic society looks like,” says Brie Loskota, executive director of the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California.

“Difference is a fundamental reality of humanity,” she adds. “If we can’t negotiate that – if every disagreement is an existential disagreement – then the work of knitting together a society of 300 million people becomes almost impossible.”
Building bridges

In Los Angeles, an encounter that echoed Olitzky and Aftab’s led to the formation of another Jewish-Muslim partnership.

After meeting at a local community center, Michelle Missaghieh, a rabbi, and Aziza Hasan, a mediator with years of experience in coalition-building, started organizing local meetings for women to study the Quran and Torah. The program became a key part of NewGround, an organization that fosters interfaith relationships through programs, grants, internships, even a leadership council for high school students..

For both NewGround and the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom, the goal was to bridge a gap between two faith groups that shared a rich history and experience as religious minorities in Christian-majority America.

“For a Christian, to go to your weekly service generally means you don’t have to ask for a day off. Sunday is a day that most people don’t work,” says Ms. Loskota at USC. “If you’re Muslim, to get the middle of the day off on a Friday to go pray, that’s not easily accommodated.”

The same goes for dietary restrictions, modes of dress, and customs regarding behavior towards the opposite sex, Loskota says, not to mention more overt experiences of discrimination.

Crossing the boundaries of faith to form relationships around those shared realities not only allows Muslim and Jewish Americans to hear and understand each other’s stories. It also helps them create a community that can together compose a more powerful narrative about their place in American society, Loskota says.

“It’s moving the discourse from special privileges for a group or individual to an argument about who we are as a country,” she says. “Do we value people and their dignity?”
A symbol of cooperation

The Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council, which debuted just days after the election, represents the next step in community building between the two groups. Its main goals are to work at the policy level to fight discriminatory laws, as well as bolster support for grassroots efforts like the Sisterhood and NewGround, says Robert Silverman, the council’s executive director.

“This new council adds a leadership, national-level body that can talk about things happening throughout the country and get some change done,” he says. “You have to have community-based organizations; otherwise it’s just a bunch of talking heads. But if it’s only grassroots groups, it stays limited. You need both to work.”

At the same time, the council serves as an important symbol of cooperation for other groups seeking to build coalitions on the eve of Trump’s presidency.

For decades, Jews and Muslims in the US have clashed on the issue of Israel-Palestine, and the council is no different – Silverman notes its members often stand on opposite ends of the conflict. Yet all of them, he says, are dedicated to promoting both communities’ concerns in America.

“This [effort] is about the country we care about most, which also happens to be the country we live in,” Silverman says.

Jewish-Muslim relations are “the single thorniest interfaith issue of our time,” says Mr. Moghul at The Center for Global Policy. “And if we can find a way to talk and to understand and respect each other even as we disagree, then we are establishing a model.”

[Editor's note: This version was updated to clarify the circumstances in which NewGround was founded, and to correct the issue to which Mr. Moghul referred as 'the single thorniest interfaith issue of our time.']

With the obvious rise of white supremacy, (Trumpzism) and given the horrible Trump hire of Breitbart (aka, barfcart) news, a media where "fake news" rules, it's time for us who despise the diseases of bigotry and racism to remember the haunting words written in "First They Came".

Christian survivors in Iraq

A Christian Science Monitor report about the brave Irqai Christians who have (so far) apparantly survived ISIS, the evil Islamic Caliphate (self declared government).

"They’ve suffered a lot,"- Father Ammar Siman, priest of the St. George Syriac Catholic church in Bartalla

Their town now liberated, Iraqi Christians talk of life under ISIS
SPIRIT OF HUMANITY
The historic heartland of Assyrian Christians in Iraq was seized by the militants in 2014, and nearly all fled in the face of demands to convert, pay a tax, or die.

Ismail Ibrahim Matti and his mother, Jandark Behnam Mansour Nasi, are Assyrian Christians who pretended to convert to Islam to escape execution by the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), when their hometown of Bartalla, Iraq, was overtaken in 2014. They endured two years of beatings and captivity before finally escaping, under sniper fire, to the Iraqi Army in early November.

CSM: By Kristen Chick, Correspondent NOVEMBER 28, 2016

ERBIL, IRAQ — When Christians fled the small town of Bartalla in August 2014, as Islamic State militants swept toward them, then-14-year-old Ibrahim Matti and his elderly mother stayed behind. Without a car, they waited on a relative who promised to return for them after ferrying his own family to safety.

But by then, it was too late. Matti and his mother, Jandark Nasi, both Assyrian Christians, spent more than two years living under IS control in and around Mosul. They endured physical violence, constant threats and intimidation, and forced conversion before finally escaping as the Iraqi Army pushed into Mosul in recent weeks.

They are among just a handful of Christians who have so far emerged from territory controlled by the self-declared Islamic State amid the Iraqi offensive that has retaken parts of northern Iraq.

The historic heartland of Assyrian Christians in Iraq was part of the territory seized by the militants in 2014, and nearly all fled in the face of IS requirements: convert, pay a tax, or die. The ordeal of Matti and Ms. Nasi offers a glimpse of what life was like for those unable to escape.

Father Ammar Siman, priest of the St. George Syriac Catholic church in Bartalla, around 14 miles east of Mosul, says around 100 Christians were missing from the Christian villages around Mosul after August 2014. The relatives of many of the missing fear they did not survive.

Fr. Siman fled to Erbil in 2014. Although he has been back to see the church, he says no one has moved back to the town yet.

“We are very happy to receive them alive,” he says of those who had recently managed to escape. “Of course they need too much help. They’ve suffered a lot.”

Three days ISIS took Bartalla, Matti and his mother also tried to flee to Erbil, the capital of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region where many Christians took refuge. But militants stopped them at a checkpoint and sent them to a detention center in Mosul, and then to one in Bartalla. The prison was full of other Christians and Shiites, all of whom were being beaten, he says. There, militants told the teenager he must convert to Islam, urging him to say the Islamic profession of faith.

“I said there is no God but Jesus,” he recalled recently.

The militants then went to the next cell, where they were holding Shiite Muslims, whom they consider heretics. Matti could hear as an IS member demanded a man convert to Islam. “He didn’t accept, so they shot him in the head. Then they took me to his cell, showed me his body, and told me if you don’t convert to Islam, you will have the same fate,” he says. “I was frightened. I was scared.”

When the militants again demanded that the two recite the Islamic profession of faith, they complied. “We said it. But it wasn’t coming from our hearts,” he says. “I have strong faith, but with everything that happened, we were under threats and pressure. When you say something that’s not from the bottom of your heart, it’s not to be believed.”

Yet even that did not end their torment. Over the next two years, as they were living on the outskirts of Mosul and in the village of Bazwiya, IS militants regularly visited the two to test their commitment to Islam.

“I didn’t memorize their prayers, so they were beating me,” says Matti. “They beat my mother with sticks because she didn’t know how to pray.”

Militants would torture them with needles if they answered questions incorrectly, he says, and told him that if he missed three consecutive Fridays at the mosque they would kill him. Whenever he didn’t go to the mosque, they found and beat him, he says. He was forced to wear the short trousers preferred by the militants, and to grow his beard.

At the mosque, Matti listened to the imam proclaim the rest of the world infidels and urge residents to pledge obedience to the leader of IS and participate in jihad. Over the two years, he says he often saw members of IS who were not Iraqi. He also saw public executions, including the stoning of a woman accused of adultery, when he visited a central Mosul marketplace to buy food. But the two say that some Mosul residents secretly helped them, risking the ire of IS members by giving them food and supplies.

“I was always praying in my heart to Mary and Jesus,” says Nasi. “I was praying in the bottom of my heart, and crying. For the sake of my son, my gift from God.”

When the Iraqi Army offensive reached the area they were living on the eastern outskirts of Mosul, IS members gathered all the residents and forced them to retreat into the city. From there, Matti and Nasi were able to flee to territory taken by Iraqi forces.

Asked how it felt to finally be free, Matti smiles for the first time in an hour and a half of talking. “I still don’t believe it,” he says.

While Matti and Nasi lived in and near Mosul while under IS, two elderly Christian women stayed in the town of Qaraqosh.  Zarifa Baqous Daddo didn’t leave as all her neighbors fled the IS onslaught in August 2014 because her sick husband wasn’t able. He died after 15 days, and Ms. Daddo went to stay with another elderly Christian couple who’d stayed behind.

But one day, the man went out and never returned, she says, leaving the two frail women to spend the remainder of the two years alone. Militants briefly took them to Mosul before returning them to Qaraqosh and forcing them to recite the Islamic profession of faith under threats of violence.

She said the militants didn’t beat them, possibly showing some deference to their age, and regularly brought food and water to the house where the two women remained. But they terrorized them, including with false reports of territorial conquest.

“They were always telling us, you have no relatives left, we have taken over Erbil, we have taken over everything,” she says. Amid it all, she said she clung to her faith. “We didn’t have anything but our prayers. This was the only thing we had to do.”

Security forces found the pair after they pushed IS from the village.

Daddo, Matti, and Nasi say no one has blamed them for doing what they had to do to stay alive.

“We were visited by two priests, they told us not to worry about that,” says Nasi. “They said ‘you don’t have to fear anything now, we are your people, we are your family.’ ”

Siman, the priest from Bartalla, said they would receive only love from God and the church. “I think they were obligated to accept something they didn’t believe,” he says.“Do we blame them? No.”

Matti, a quiet and slight teenager, and his mother now live in a small room in a church-run center for displaced people in Erbil. Rosaries hang on the wall above the two simple beds, and the floor is covered by carpet scraps. A bare light bulb hangs from the wall. After more than two years without television, they enjoy a Bollywood film on a donated television – the pair are partial to Indian and Egyptian films.

Now out from under the caliphate, Matti says he wants to obtain medical care for his mother and to continue his studies, which stopped at 8th grade. But both see a future that lies outside of Iraq and their hometown.

“We spent two years [under IS], two horrible years. We don’t want to go back,” says Nasi. “We want to leave Iraq, to leave this pain.”