I have always cherished and fought for the most valuable possession any people can obtain: freedom. When Churchill came to Westminster, he termed our shared values and democratic principles the “title deeds of freedom.” The Iron Curtain he warned about has been buried beneath the sands of history. But the essence of his warning has not been diminished.

New threats to freedom will always emerge. There will always be people who try to enslave others with the chains of evil and all-controlling ideologies. And tyrants and terrorists will always target America because we are the leading guardian of freedom.

Today no one can ignore the horrible aggression in the Middle East. A democratic government is fending off an orchestrated onslaught of death. The State of Israel has been targeted by groups committed to her complete elimination. And on the basis of our shared principles and democratic values, America has an undeniable obligation to stand squarely with our democratic ally against those attempting to end the State of Israel.

Early in life, I saw the consequences of tyranny firsthand. When I was a boy, my family moved to South America. My father took a job [in] the oil fields of Venezuela during the 1950’s. There were very few people living in our little town. It was basically families of oil field workers and the caballeros—the cowboys of Venezuela.

Venezuela’s rural heartland offered adventures that would be the envy of Huck Finn. In the beginning it was an innocent, idyllic childhood. Unfortunately, Venezuela’s political structure was unstable and chaotic. When I was seven, I was exposed to my first revolution. The revolutionaries killed several local politicians and hung them in the town plaza. There were three revolutions during our years in South America.

The worst incident happened when I was eleven. [W]e saw revolutionaries ransacking houses and rampaging through the town. They destroyed my friend’s house. Later we learned that revolutionaries had arrived at our house just fifteen minutes after we left. They destroyed the ranch house. They killed all the people and every animal at the ranch.

I carried two great lessons home from Venezuela. In many ways, they are the lessons of the Twentieth Century. First, every human life is sacred and precious. Second, power unconstrained by principle and unchecked by accountability is an awful and evil force.

We must begin by acknowledging that tyranny is evil. Ronald Reagan said that we must begin by calling it like it is. He warned that we could not place ourselves above the struggle by naively equating democracy and tyranny as two different, but morally equal systems. And I urge you, to draw the moral distinction between two distinct worldviews. We must not let our foreign policy be crippled by the false fear that speaking explicitly about our commitment to freedom and democratic ideals will complicate rather than clarify the conflict.

On September 11, we saw the visible hand of evil. In Israel, they are seeing it almost everyday. The so-called “martyrdom operations” that Palestinian suicide bombers carry out against Israel’s buses, markets, and restaurants differ from the attacks against America only in scale—the underlying evil that motivates them wells up from the same awful source.

Suicide attacks against innocent civilians violate every principle America upholds. No one should expect the people of Israel to negotiate with groups pursuing the fundamental goal of destroying them. During four decades of terrorism, Yasser Arafat has proven his total contempt for human life. He is completely untrustworthy.

So we should support Israel as they dismantle the Palestinian leadership that foments violence and fosters hate. Arafat and his Authority have been an impediment to peace and a threat to the emergence of moderate Palestinian voices. The hellish strategy of destruction menaces far more than the State of Israel. It is a threat to the entire civilized world.

Since our founding, the United States has been the world’s greatest force for good. And today, our commitment to liberty has never been more vital to the world. If we summon the will to stand firmly for freedom and strive boldly to spread our democratic principles, we can, once again, liberate millions of men and women from the grip of tyranny. Doing so will mean security and freedom not only for us and our children, but for all those with a God-given yearning for the precious rights they are denied today.


 

There was a time in this country when public school teachers could focus on teaching the basics. Today, unfortunately, they are all too often preoccupied with accommodating the silly concerns pervading our society.

To what concerns do I refer? Oh, those such as banning the innocent children’s games of dodge ball, cops and robbers, musical chairs, steal the bacon and tag. You heard me right—it’s not just the allegedly sadistic and violent game of dodge ball that schools are trying to outlaw.

Call me nostalgic for my childhood if you wish, but I long for the times when cockamamie ideas didn’t pass for reasonable. Bring back the days when kids were allowed to have some harmless fun without certain harebrained, social engineers coming unglued. Dodge ball is an easy target for the sourpusses because it involves students—heaven forbid—trying to hit other students with a dastardly rubber ball. And at least once in recorded history, one of those children was hurt.

So, under pretense that dodge ball is too dangerous, there is an increasing trend among school districts across the country to ban it. But this seems more of an convenient excuse, as does the objection that the game provides a poor cardiovascular work-out. Give me a break; softball involves more standing around than movement, and many other games cannot be said to be cardiovascular, being more anaerobic than aerobic.

Reading below the headlines, we find that other reasons are motivating those who seek to purge these schoolyard games. One major reason, according to the Los Angeles Times, “is that the game can hurt the children’s feelings.”

How does dodge ball cause this irreversible emotional trauma? Well, it is a contest of elimination where the last player to avoid being hit wins. So like the perilous games of cutthroat in billiards, and the heartless musical chairs, dodge ball is a game of exclusion—a capital crime in these times of politically correct inclusion.

Diane Farr, a curriculum specialist in Austin, Texas, explained that her school district implemented the ban to satisfy a panel of professors, students and parents who wanted to “preserve the rights and dignity” of all students in the district. So dodge ball is a dignity thief? Of course, claims Farr. “What we have seen is that it does not make students feel good about themselves.”

There’s more. According to one anti-dodge ball crusader, “at its base, the game encourages the strong to victimize the weak…. Schools preach the values of harmony, community and cooperation. But then those same schools let the big kids loose to see if they can hit the skinny nerd in the head with the hard, red ball.”

Educators also fear that the dodge ball is not only violent, but that it and other games convey “a message of violence.” “With Columbine and all the violence that we are having, we have to be careful with how we teach our children,” says Farr. They actually want us to believe that there is a logical continuum between dodge ball (and cops and robbers) and student on student massacres.

The Washington Times recently detailed a litany of examples: a threatened suspension in CA of a 9-year-old for playing cops and robbers, two NY 2nd-graders suspended and criminally charged with making terrorist threats for pointing paper guns and saying, “I’m going to kill you,” and a 9-year-old NJ boy suspended and ordered to undergo psychological evaluation because he told another student that he planned to shoot a classmate with spitballs.

These ideas are ludicrous on their face, but there is obviously something else at work here. While the secularists are paranoid lest any vestige of Western values remain in the classroom, they are eager to impose their own values at school. They tell us that they want to promote harmony, community and inclusiveness when what they really want is to push the notion of pacifism and discourage our traditions of competition and rugged individualism.

Maybe it’s time to urge some of these educators, instead of students, to seek psychological evaluations.

Editor’s Note: Columnist David Limbaugh, Rush’s brother, along with Phyllis Schlafly, will be a speaker at Texas Eagle Forum’s fund-raising banquet, honoring Rep. Tom DeLay, on Thursday, June 6 at the Dallas Hyatt Regency Hotel. For more information, call our office at 972-250-0734.

 

One of the unintended consequences of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, was the dashing of feminist hopes to make America a gender-neutral or androgynous society. New York City’s firemen dared to charge up the stairs of the burning Twin Towers, and the firefighters’ death tally was: men 343, women 0.

The feminists had made repeated attempts to sex-integrate New York’s fire department through litigation, even though the women could not pass the physical tests. They even persuaded a judge to rule that upper body strength is largely irrelevant to firefighting.

Sept. 11 called for all the masculine strength that strong men could muster. Firefighting is clearly a job for real men to do the heavy lifting, not affirmative-action women.

President George W. Bush sent our Special Forces to the rugged and remote Afghan hills and caves to get the terrorists, dead or alive. Fighting the Taliban is a job for real men. America is fortunate that the warrior culture has survived 30 years of feminist fantasies and that some men are still macho enough to relish the opportunity to engage and kill the bad guys of the world.

For several decades, the feminists have been demanding that we terminate the discrimination that excludes women for “career advancement” in every section of the U.S. armed forces, assuring us that hand-to-hand combat is a relic of the past and that all our wars now involve only pulling triggers and pushing buttons. Tell that to our troops who trudged over land mines and jagged rocks where there are not even any roads.

In the 80s and 90s, the feminist assault on the right to be a masculine man became increasingly obvious and hostile. It was not just a semantic parlor game when they insisted that the words manly, masculine and gentleman be excised from our vocabulary.

The feminists are playing for keeps. They attacked the right to be a masculine man in the U.S. armed services, the kind of man who would rush into a burning building to save a woman or search the Afghan caves for Osama bin Laden.

The feminists have intimidated our military into using a training system based on gender-norming the tests, rewarding effort rather than achievement, and trying to assure that females are not “underrepresented” in officer ranks. It’s bad enough that men are forbidden to question the double standards or preferential treatment given to women; it is dishonorable to induce them to lie about it.

The feminists have used the courts to try to criminalize masculinity. Feminist lawyers first created judge-made law to expand the statutory definition of sex discrimination to include sexual harassment, and they now prosecute sexual harassment on the basis of how a woman feels rather than what a man does.

The feminists’ attack on the right to be a masculine man is in full swing at colleges and universities. Feminism is a major tenet of political correctness, and the female faculty are the watchdogs of speech codes. Subservience to feminist orthodoxy on campuses is not only mandatory, it is nondebatable. Women studies courses and many sociology courses are tools to indoctrinate college women in feminist ideology and lay a guilt trip on all men.

The feminists use Title IX, not as a vehicle to ensure equal educational opportunity for women, but as a machete to destroy the sports at which men excel. Since 1993, 43 colleges have eliminated wrestling teams, 53 have eliminated golf, 13 have eliminated football, and the number of colleges offering men’s gymnastics has dropped from 128 to 23.

The feminist battalions are even on the warpath against the right to be a boy. In elementary schools across America, recess is rapidly being eliminated, a shocking number of little boys are drugged with psychosomatic drugs to force them to behave like little girls, and zero-tolerance idiocies are punishing boys for indulging in games of normal boyhood as cops and robbers.

Of course, when you wipe out masculine men, you also eliminate gentlemen, the kind of men who would defend and protect a lady—like the gentlemen who stepped aside so that, of the people who survived the sinking of the Titanic, 94% of those in first-class and 81% if those in second class were women.

 

Since the terrorist attacks last Sept. 11, the surveillance technology sector has turned into a growth industry, and many politicians have rushed to buy into it. But before “In God We Trust” turns to “In No One We trust,” Americans need to ask themselves important questions about the direction of democracy.

• Will any of the existing, planned or proposed infringements on our freedoms and privacy do anything to stop the terror?
   
• What will be the financial costs of these systems, and the cost to our society and our freedom?
   
• Will these surveillance regimes be temporary or permanent? And if temporary, when, exactly, will they be dismantled?
   
• Most importantly, must defending freedom and defeating terror really be contradictory concerns? Or can they co-exist?

America’s high-tech industry has shifted gears since Sept. 11 to build a surveillance state. In what could become a truly sinister symbiotic relationship, many of these companies are now pitching and pandering to political leaders an astonish array of public-surveillance technologies so advanced that they’re almost incomprehensible.

Some are already in use. Many are planned. Many are in development. And all of them, when used, represent subtle but seismic shifts in our relationship between ourselves and our government and between one another.

A year before our Constitution was ratified, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” Today we’re seeing that precious real estate annexed on a continental level.

• The FBI’s Carnivore software lurks on Internet service provider network computers, sniffing e-mail traffic for keywords and words of interest.
   
• The government’s Tempest technology allows investigators to log keystrokes, collect passwords or view a computer monitor through the walls of a house.
   
• The National Security Agency’s Echelon system uses a global ring of satellites and mountaintop listening posts to intercept international e-mails, faxes, and telephone calls.
   
• Video cameras with facial-recognition software are being installed in airports, casinos, stadiums, and public streets all around the country to scan every passerby and screen for wanted runaways, gang members, gambling cheaters and other undesirables.

These are just technologies already in use. Meanwhile, many are pushing to establish a national ID card for the U.S., complete with “biometric identifiers.” The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators is lobbying to make driver’s licenses the basis of a national ID system, and it says its members need $100 million to implement it—in part by linking databases in all 50 states.

If ever such a database is established, it’s not difficult to foresee it containing records ranging from credit history and banking transactions, to medical and mental health files, ATM withdrawals, turnpike use, library checkouts, movie rentals, pharmacy prescriptions, voting information, phone call logs, firearm inventories, and whatever else any government bureaucrat can ever think of.

And not only can our past be reconstructed—we can also be followed in real time. A company called Applied Digital Solutions is now aggressively pitching government officials on its so-called Digital Angel, a self-contained, self-powered microchip-based Global Positioning System transceiver that can be syringe-injected under a person’s skin and can report a person’s exact location, heart rate and body temperature over wireless networks to remote monitoring facilities of any time and any day.

Responding to the rush by many toward a total-surveillance state, National Rifle Association Executive Vice-President Wayne LaPierre urged caution. “Many of these proposals amount to wholesale attacks on Americans’ precious freedoms,” he said. “When any one of those freedoms is diminished, all of our freedoms are endangered. People have fought and died for these freedoms…. They’re not ours to give away now.”

The greatest concern at the International Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico was that the United Nations (UN) would adopt a global taxing scheme. That did not materialize…nonetheless, the UN moves in incremental steps.

For the first time ever, the UN General Assembly mandated that the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) meet under the UN umbrella (in Monterrey) in order to find the money to execute the Millennium Declaration Development Goals (www.un.org/millennium/declaration/ares552e.htm) that 146 heads of state and 191 nations adopted at their Millennium Summit held in 2000 in New York City.

The first step toward global taxation was accomplished at the 2000 Millennium Summit, when an agreement was reached on development goals requiring new funding to “free the entire human race from want.” In Monterrey, nations reached “consensus” (the second step) on implementing those development goals which requires increasing foreign aid funding, forgiving Third World debts and replacing future loans with grants. The UN wants “rich” nations to increase their annual foreign aid to 0.7% of their gross national product (GNP) and to implement a global taxing scheme. If the 0.7% GNP was implemented in the U.S., foreign aid spending would escalate from about $15 billion annually to about $70 billion!

The European Union (EU) has already adopted the 0.7% GNP foreign aid goal (although they are not giving at that rate yet) and they tried to badger Americans in Monterrey to adopt their aims by nagging about “equity.” French President Jacques Chirac went a step further, adding that nations “need to ponder more deeply the possibilities of international taxation.” The UN and EU hope that America will eventually agree to the socialistic notion that uniting the global economy through global taxation would bring peace to the world.

While U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Negroponte made it clear on the opening day of the conference that the U.S. rejected the idea of global taxation, President Bush did announce U.S. support for the development goals in UN Millennium Declaration (www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/03/print/20020314-7.html). Mr. Bush told conferees that he would ask Congress for a $5 billion annual increase (50%) over current foreign aid levels, and he proposed giving more aid in the form of grants rather than loans.

World Bank President James Wolfensohn was giddy during a press conference following President Bush’s announcement of a 50% increase in foreign aid, saying, “The first check is always the best check. What we have seen from the U.S. is the first check.” Mike Moore, Director-General of the WTO was excited too saying, “This is simply fulfilling those (Millennium Development) goals.” 

The Monterrey conference was the second of a three-part series of UN conferences. The UN wants its own funding source, thereby eliminating the need to extort money from nations around the world in the form of dues. The U.S. has cooperated in the first two steps toward global taxation even though it is an affront to our national sovereignty and individual freedoms.

The third UN conference is to take place in Johannesburg, South Africa in August 2002. I plan to be there so that I can report to you about the snares and ambushes set by the UN as it moves toward its ultimate goal: global taxation that would grant it global governance, a.k.a. global government.

Editor’s Note: The anti-American International Criminal Court went into effect on April 11 with the signatures of 66 countries. Even though the U.S. Senate has not ratified the ICC, former President Bill Clinton signed it the night before he left office, and UN bureaucrats are claiming jurisdiction over U.S. citizens based on his signature. Senator Jesse Helms and Majority Whip Tom DeLay helped Congress pass an American Service Members’ Protection Act to protect our troops from the ICC, which the Bush administration endorsed, but it has never become law. President Bush needs to sign this legislation and un-sign the ICC Treaty immediately.

EAGLE CLIFF NOTES

NATIONAL DAY OF PRAYER
Psalm 46:1 says, “God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.” The theme for the 51st Annual National Day of Prayer on Thursday, May 2, is “America United Under God.” Now more than ever it is important to express our dependence on almighty God. Pray for our country and its leaders and attend a prayer event in your community. For more information, log onto: www.nationaldayof prayer.org.

ACLU FIGHTS FOR UNLIMITED PORN IN LIBRARIES
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) recently filed a suit in federal court to ensure that every American of any age has an unrestricted right to access pornography in public libraries. ACLU’s web site reports that it is contesting the Children’s Internet Protection Act, passed in December 2000, requiring libraries that accept certain federal funds and discounts to design internet safety policies and eventually install blocking hardware on their computers to prevent hard core pornography from being seen by children. The ACLU sees this as a violation of the First Amendment, as does the American Library Association.
Source: EF News & Notes, 4/4/02

BUSH’S MORAL CLARITY ON CLONING
President Bush gave a major speech on cloning that was full of moral clarity. He urged the Senate to ban all forms of human cloning, saying that we must not seek medical progress “at the expense of human conscience” and “life is a creation, not a commodity.” By speaking so clearly, the President signaled to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle that he won’t get away with tying up the legislation currently pending in the Senate that would ban human cloning (the bill overwhelmingly passed in the House).
Source: Gary Bauer fax, 4/10/02 & EF News & Notes, 4/12/02

UNFPA MONEY: BUSH HAS DECIDED NOT TO DECIDE
After a hard fought legislative battle, the U.S. Congress has approved $34 million to be given to the United Nations Fund for Population Activity (UNFPA). This bill contained a clause that the dispersal of the money required the approval of the President. Recent findings show that the UNFPA was deeply involved with China’s coercive abortion and sterilization program. Pro-life leaders pleaded with President Bush not to approve using taxpayer’s money to continue this genocide. In response, Bush has announced that he has decided not to decide but is “keeping all my options open.” Let’s hope he doesn’t decide for a long, long time.
Source: International Right to Life Newsletter, March/April 2002