It's Friday, so you can watch our webcast at frankcam.com.
400-408 – Ken Timmerman, contributing editor at newsmax.com, who runs the Foundation for Democracy in Iran (iran.org), the author of many bestsellers is out with his latest about the persecuted church in Iraq St. Peter's Bones (kentimmerman.com).
• Ken Timmerman (Newsmax, 2/3/2011) Israel Prepares for Islamic Terror State Rising From Egypt's Ashes.
// Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned the Knesset on Wednesday that the future of Egypt and of Egypt's ties with Israel hung in the balance.
"We have two separate worlds here, two opposites, two worldviews: that of the free, democratic world and that of the radical world. Which one of them will prevail in Egypt? The answer to this question is crucial to the future of Egypt, of the region and to our own future here in Israel," Netanyahu told the Israeli parliament.
He made it clear that Israel would prefer to see the success of "the forces that promote freedom, progress and peace." But in the meantime, Israel has to gird its loins and prepare for the worst.
"We oppose the forces that seek to enforce a dark despotism, terrorism and war," he said.
Netanyahu's real fear is that Iran will use its influence on the Muslim Brotherhood to steer Egypt away from its peace treaty with Israel and into the camp of Muslim radicals.
"The Iranian regime is not interested in seeing an Egypt that protects the rights of individuals, women, and minorities. They are not interested in an enlightened Egypt that embraces the 21st century. They want an Egypt that returns to the Middle Ages. They want Egypt to become another Gaza, run by radical forces that oppose everything that the democratic world stands for," Netanyahu said.
Israel's border with Egypt has been at peace for so long that many members of the Israeli parliament were born in an era of peace, with no recollection of the battles that his generation waged, the Israeli prime minister said.
Israel traded the strategic depth of the Sinai desert, which it captured from Egypt in the final days of the 1973 war, for the Camp David peace accord signed with President Anwar Sadat in 1978. //
413-423 – Ken Timmerman,
• Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) (12/11/2007) Public Debate on the Political Platform of the Planned Muslim Brotherhood Party in Egypt. This is the political platform of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, i.e., "what they're all about," as posted on islamonline.net on August 25, 2007.
My Summary:
It would create an Iran-style Islamic Republic of strict sharia law, a theocracy ruled by a Supreme Council of Clerics, who would also rule over all branches of government. A "democracy" in which no woman nor any non-Muslim would be allowed to run for president or lead the military. A country that would "reassess" all of their existing international agreements, especially the peace treaty with Israel. A culture that would even impose sharia on tourists.
•• Pew Research Center (12/2/2010) Global Attitudes Project: Most Embrace a Role for Islam in Politics (pdf).
My Summary on the attitudes of Egyptians taken from the Pew study from June 2010:
Population 80 million. 10% unemployment. 43% in poverty, 20% live on less than a $1.00 a day, 25% on less than $2.
95% would welcome a greater Islamic influence in politics.
85% say Islam's influence in politics is a positive thing, just 2% say it is a negative thing.
59% back Islamists, only 27% back modernizers.
39% say there is a struggle in Egypt between modernizers and fundamentalists (just 20% saw a struggle in 2009).
59% prefer democracy to any other kind of governance, 22% prefer a non-democratic governance.
54% say suicide bombing is often (8%), sometimes (12%), or rarely (34%) justifiable. 46% say it is never justified.
49% support Hamas, 30% support Hezbollah, 20% support Osama bin Laden & al Qaeda.
54% support gender segregation in the workplace.
82% support stoning adulterers.
77% support whipping and cutting the hands off thieves.
84% support executing any Muslim who changes his religion.
428-437 – • Edward Luttwak (WSJ, 2/4/2011) A Quick Mubarak Exit Is Too Risky: It is not often recalled that Hamas is the Gaza branch of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. Mr. Luttwak, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is the author of "Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace" (Belknap, 2002).
// That the crowd refuses to wait is emotionally understandable, but the U.S. and other well-meaning governments should be more patient. It takes at least eight months to organize a meaningful election. Waiting until September would allow parties other than the Muslim Brotherhood time to organize.
If Mr. Mubarak leaves now, the result is likely to be an anarchical or Islamist Egypt, or some of both until another dictatorship emerges. It is not by accident that from Morocco to India there is no democracy except for the one built by the U.S. in Iraq: Mainstream Islam, not just Islamism, rejects the legitimacy of democratic legislation that could contradict Sharia law.
The U.S. is widely seen as the chief interested power because until the current crisis it had taken the lead in supporting the Mubarak regime and before that the regime of Anwar Sadat.
But it is Europe that will suffer the greater consequences if the Mubarak regime is toppled and followed by the Muslim Brotherhood or anarchy. Aside from lost exports to Egypt, there will be lost domestic investments, not least in tourism (no more bikinis in Sharm El Sheikh with the Muslim Brotherhood in power), and more illegal immigrants trying to enter Europe.
As for Israel, it is likely to lose an ally in Egypt but unlikely to face a military threat any time soon: The U.S.-equipped Egyptian armed forces could not fight a war without U.S. supplies—and it would take at least $20 billion and 10 years to re-equip them with non-U.S. weapons.
In any event, Egyptian democrats should not be denied eight months to build viable opposition parties before the next election.
443-452 – Ken Timmerman,
• Stratfor (2/4/2011) The Muslim Brotherhood and Egyptian-Israeli Relations.
• Jerusalem Post (2/4/2011) Muslim Brotherhood: 'We are against Zionism'.
458-508 – • RWFilm.com (2/3/2011) Randall Wallace Delivers National Prayer Breakfast Keynote Address. (The TRANSCRIPT pdf of his prepared comments is below, but he ad-libbed). Writer-Director Randy Wallace has given us such memorable films as Braveheart, Pearl Harbor, We Were Soldiers, and Secretariat, and yesterday he gave the keynote address at the 59th National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. The breakfast has been held the first Thursday of February since 1953, when President Eisenhower started it. The identity of the keynote speaker is kept completely secret until the morning of the breakfast. And interestingly, Randy Wallace gave an unprecedented address at the National Prayer Breakfast – he talked about prayer.
(1:56) WALLACE01: Wallace started things off telling stories about his grandfather, and then about his own father, whom he so clearly revered. His dad, who was a successful man, suffered a great setback in his life – like we all do. Wallace took us back to those moments – moments he remembers so clearly to this day.
My father, and mother, worked extremely hard so that I could go to school. He was a salesman who loved his customers, and he rose in his company, with promotion after promotion...until one day the family-owned company he had worked for for twenty years was sold to a professional investment group, who knew nothing about the business itself but who believed it would prosper if they fired all the old guys and hired cheaper young guys. My father was one of the old guys. He was 38. I've always wondered if my father lived his life hungry for the father he'd never had; his own father had died before he was born--the Grandfather he'd told me about was my mother's father, not his. He had never been fired from anything. The strongest and best man I ever knew, and he had a complete breakdown.
While he was in the hospital my sister and I were farmed out to relatives. For awhile we lived in a house that had no indoor plumbing. When I told my father about that he said, "Well...rich people have a canopy over their beds--and we've got a can 'a pee under ours." That's when I knew my Daddy would be all right.
The last sale he had made for his old company was for ninety-thousand dollars--in 1961. The first sale he made when he started his next job was for ninety cents. Working one hundred hours a week, he clawed his way back to success. God bless America.
(2:08) WALLACE02: Wallace then chronicled his own life as a writer, starting with the tough early times, and up to the point where he had gotten a very good gig in TV, and was gaining some success. Then came the writers' strike, and from that devastation came tough times, but also the beginning of a whole new life as a screenwriter, and the seeds of his greatest success.
Then the Writer's Guild went out on strike, which caused the company I worked for to void its contract with me. The strike went on forever, and when it was over the company was barely there anymore. I was out of work, my savings were gone. No one would return my phone calls--I'm sure that's never happened where you work.
I kept trying, of course, I was always good at trying. But one day I was sitting at home, at my desk, staring at nothing, my stomach in a knot, my hands trembling, and I realized I was breaking down, as my father had. I feared I had failed my father, and my mother, and my Grandmother. And my greatest fear was that I would fail my sons. I was afraid they would see me come apart, as I had seen my father come apart, and it would be something they could never forget.
I got down on my knees; I had nowhere else to go. And I prayed a simple prayer. I said, "Lord, all I care about right now are those two boys. And maybe they don't need to grow up in a house with a tennis court and a swimming pool. Maybe they need a little house with one bathroom, or no bathrooms at all. Maybe they need to see what a man does when he gets knocked down, the way my father showed me. But I pray, if I go down, let me go down not on my knees, but with my flag flying."
And I got up, and I began to write the words that led me to BRAVEHEART.
512-523 – (2:16) WALLACE03: Then things got downright inspirational, as Wallace talked about his success with Braveheart, about Jesus Christ, and about the power of prayer.
Was that moment of prayer the single determining factor in the arc of my whole life? Of course not. My teacher and mentor in college, the great Thomas Langford, of Duke University, once told us in class that no decision in our lives stands alone; the trajectory of all the other decisions we've ever made points our direction for the future.
Our lives are unfolding stories, they are moving pictures. If we took a freeze frame of Golgotha, on the day that Jesus was crucified, and showed that picture to anyone unfamiliar with the story and asked them to judge who the victor was in that scene, they'd be unlikely to say: "The one hanging on the cross in the middle."
It was from that cross that Jesus cried, "My God! Why have you forsaken me?"
That cry does not amaze me. What does amaze me is that while one of the two thieves hanging on either side of Jesus mocked Him, the other acknowledged the justice of his fate and asked Jesus for help; and Jesus, in the agonies of the crucifixion, told him, "Today you will be with me in Paradise." That does more than amaze me. It makes me believe that any Power that could enable Jesus to say that, then, could do anything.
And it seems to me that Jesus' response is the answer to every prayer that thief never prayed. If God is God, then God knows our prayers whether we pray them or not.
(:51) 04 WALLACE: Then Wallace talked about the difference one man can make, and how prayer has served him during the peaks and valleys of his life.
Tolstoy wrote in WAR AND PEACE that in a battle, one man throwing down his weapon and running away can panic a whole army, and in a panic one man lifting up the flag and running back toward the enemy can rally a whole army, and no one but God knows which will happen, and when.
What if prayer is the way to glimpse God's true intentions--the divine purpose for each of us? I'm no theologian, I'm not looking for logic; I'm only trying to find an understanding for my experience that prayer matters. Does it change the mind of God? I don't know. I can only tell you that it changes me.
(2:05) 05 WALLACE: Wallace closes out his speech with great grace, eloquence – and power. You could see grown men with tears in their eyes as Wallace's speech came to an end.
When I was a child we sang a hymn called "Footsteps Of Jesus." Not everyone grew up as I did. I'm sometimes described as a rarity, a filmmaker who might speak freely about prayer. But really I'm not so unusual. All of us dreamers in Hollywood are keenly aware of the falseness of fame, the fleeting nature of beauty, the illusions of power. And when I pray with or for my friends, my first concern is not whether they follow the footsteps of Jesus, but whether I do.
If I've led you to believe my life is any example of righteousness, then maybe you aren't familiar with the Tennessee talent for stretching the truth. And even if I could've stolen Mrs. Carter's Bible, I couldn't have kept it. You might own the pages but you don't own the Bible until you've lived it.
Some of you here lead nations. Some of you here lead the world. All of us here have one heart inside us, and it is in that one heart where the whole battle is fought.
There are as many ways to approach the great questions of life as there are people on the earth. But every one of us must stand alone before all that made us, and all that we have been, and that we might be. And dying in your bed, many years from now, would you not trade all the days from that day to this, for one chance, just one chance, to open your heart before God Almighty, and to tell Him, "I will lose my life, and I will find it by loving in all the ways You lead my heart to love."
You have a prayer. Pray it. Amen.
528-539 – Calls
544-554 – Calls
558-608 – Calls
612-623 – Calls
628-639 – Calls
644-656 – Calls
• Steven Hayward (NRO, 2/4/2011) Reagan Reclaimed. Steven F. Hayward is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counter-Revolution, 1980–1989. This article originally appeared in the February 7, 2011, issue of National Review.
• Peggy Noonan (NRO, 2/4/2011) Ronald Reagan at 100: Being a good man helped him become a great one.
• Peter Wehner (Commentary, 2/4/2011) More on the Freedom Agenda.
