Contents

Joy to the World
by Isaac Watts, George Friedrich Handel

Latin America Again
by Gordon Frisch

Europe on Fire
by Mark Steyn

Jihad in Europe
by Robert Spencer

Luke 2:1-20

Joy to the World

Joy to the world! The Lord is come:
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare Him room,
And heaven and nature sing,
And heaven and nature sing,
And heaven, and heaven and nature sing.

Joy to the world! The Savior reigns:
Let men their songs employ;
While fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat, repeat the sounding joy.

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground,
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found,
Far as the curse is found,
Far as, far as the curse is found.

He rules the world with truth and grace,
And makes the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness,
And wonders of His love,
And wonders of His love,
And wonders, wonders of His love.

—Isaac Watts, George Friedrich Handel

Latin America Again
by Gordon Frisch

In today’s global geopolitical theater, many stages and acts are running simultaneously. While the audience is held mostly spellbound by center stage—the Mideast and terrorism with all of its high drama—almost unnoticed, but barely less important, are the strategic acts playing out on other stages: Russia and the former Soviet Union, North Korea, Central Asia, African genocide and AIDS, China and Latin America. Of considerable importance is Latin America, a knife poised at the soft underbelly of one of the main actors on center stage: the United States.

In 19th-century wars of independence, strong leaders rose to power whose commanding legacies persist to this day in every nation of South America and into Central America and the Caribbean. These strongmen embodied the best (and worst) of large landowners, generals, and beguiling charm, all rolled into one, and they were called caudillos. One of the greatest caudillos was Simon Bolivar (1783-1830), called El Liberator, and “the George Washington of South America,” who led the nations of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama and Venezuela to independence from Spain. Bolivar still commands vastly more respect than modern-day oligarchs, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, both wannabe caudillos who are in reality just tinhorn communist dictators. But that doesn’t stop Castro, and especially Chavez, from falsely hitching their wagons to Bolivar’s star to further their own goals of uniting Latin America into a single anti-U.S. communist bloc.

Sadly, and not without some basis, most Latin Americans categorize U.S. involvement in their affairs as either commercial opportunism (e.g., corporate banana empires) or militaristic imperialism (such as Nicaragua and the Iran-Contras or Colombia’s ongoing drug wars), punctuated by long periods of outright neglect. This sets the Latin American stage for anti-U.S. sentiment in a region of massive poverty and which, with the exception of Chile, has never known real democracy, and where doors open to anyone promising to alleviate misery—Che Guevara, Castro, Chavez, or Red China. Preoccupied at center stage, most U.S. citizens are ignorant of developing political threats in Latin America, but ignorance is perilous. Here’s a rundown of the political state of affairs in various Latin American nations highlighting the need for concern.

Venezuela: Hugo Chavez originally came to power by military coup, although polls today indicate he is supported by less than one-third of the country’s population. Chavez, whose personal hero is Fidel Castro, and who visited and praised Saddam Hussein, now rules Venezuela, which is the U.S.’s second most important oil provider. He has nationalized Venezuelan oil and many other companies and put them under direct government control.

In September 2001, Major Juan Diaz Castillo, Chavez’s former pilot and Air Force Operations Chief, who defected, said Chavez used the Venezuelan Air Force to send humanitarian aid to the Taliban. He wanted to send troops to help the Taliban but couldn’t circumvent U.S. blockades. He donated large amounts of money to al Qaeda. Intelligence indicates the Chavez regime may also be protecting and training thousands of Colombian and Arab terrorists, including members of Hezbollah. Margarita Island marks the key location for these terrorist operations and funding.

Chavez rules by near martial law. Cuban intelligence officers train his security and intelligence forces and operate key naval facilities. Venezuela’s government is permeated with Cuban intelligence personnel. Chavez has hired hundreds of Cuban teachers to insert anti-American, pro-socialist propaganda into the educational system. Analysts warn that Chavez’s plans for Venezuela bear an uncanny resemblance to Castro’s blueprint to turn Chile into a Marxist state in the 1960s-70s, when Castro sent thousands of Cuban paramilitaries there to assist Allende.

In January 2003, Major Diaz gave critical insight about Chavez to interviewer J.R. Nyquist: “Hugo Chavez is working to form a bloc of countries to fight the U.S. For Hugo Chavez the U.S. is the enemy. And he is convinced that by forming a bloc of countries he can attack the U.S. in various ways. One way would be an economic attack. And on top of this he is not only looking for an alliance with a bloc of countries but also an alliance with terrorist groups because this will give him a direct way to attack the U.S. He sees in the terrorists a force with a defined intention to attack the U.S.”

Major Diaz also said, “We have proof that Chavez has aided the Colombian [narco-] guerrillas in a big way. Hugo Chavez’s aspiration is that the guerrillas will soon take power in Colombia and join the anti-U.S. Latin American bloc.” Diaz also said that Venezuela’s march toward communism “is only a revolution of a minority… not a revolution of the people.” This offers scant comfort, as that’s the historic pattern for how all Communists have grabbed power. The U.S. and Latinos need to awaken to the reality that Hugo Chavez is no liberator or caudillo, but a ruthless emerging communist dictator bent on destruction of the U.S. in league with worldwide terrorists.

Brazil: President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva is at best a far left socialist whose heroes are Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein and Hugo Chavez. On the day he took office, da Silva embraced an “axis of good” running through Brazil, Venezuela and Cuba. Ryan Mauro reports that da Silva placed “Trotskyites, Communist Party officials, and open radicals in power in high places as Cabinet ministers, government officials and advisors, and throughout the government, intelligence, and military.” Da Silva’s foreign policy chief, Marco Aurelio Garcia, is a communist and founder and director of the Sao Paulo Forum, a group that actively supports terrorism.

Argentina: The Pew Research Center says that anti-Americanism is the highest in Argentina of any Latin American country, at 73%. In the wake of its severe political and economic crisis and financial collapse, far left candidate Nestor Kirchner, favored by Castro, da Silva and Chavez, became president in May 2003. His election fit well into plans for the “Cubanization” of Latin America and gave an immediate boost to similar movements in Uruguay, Bolivia and Peru.

Ecuador: Lucio Gutierrez became president shortly after da Silva in Brazil and praises Chavez and Castro. He was a militant member of the Marxist left Peronist Party.

Bolivia: It appears that Evo Morales of the leftist MAS (Movement Toward Socialism) Party may be the next president.

Peru & Uruguay: Both Peru’s Alejandro Toledo and Uruguay’s Tabare Vazquez are leftist.

Colombia: A significant portion of the country is controlled by FARC, communist narco-terrorists who supply most of the drugs used on the streets of America.

Panama: Following U.S. withdrawal from the Panama Canal Zone, Hutchison Whampoa—a Hong Kong-based Chinese front company for the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) and Beijing’s Communist Party—leased and now controls the ports on both ends of the Panama Canal. Panama’s population is only 2 million, but it now has 40,000 legal Chinese residents and 150,000 illegal Chinese residents. Chinese Triads (organized crime) have a foothold in many Panamanian companies and Panama is close to becoming a de facto Chinese puppet. China-Cuba agreements mean far left radicals in Panama, loyal to Castro, could gain power.

Chile: Since the 1970s, a U.S. ally and the only free and democratic country in South America. However, Chile’s new president, Ricardo Lagos, is a militant socialist who was Chile’s ambassador to the Soviet Union under Marxist Allende’s government from 1970-73.

Mexico: Nowhere does corruption run more rampant than Mexico. And despite his apparent friendship with the U.S., President Vicente Fox has formed a strategic alliance with Brazil’s da Silva. The Mexican government infrastructure is made up largely of socialists, who exert real control, and a radial leftist, Lopez Obrador, may become Mexico’s next president. Obrador is currently Mexico City’s mayor, has an approval rating of 80%, and the Washington Post describes him as a Mexican version of Brazil’s da Silva.

Haiti: The country is in chaos and the stage is set for the return of Marxist Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Nicaragua: The communist Sandanistas are back in power.

Terrorism in Latin America: It’s believed about 20,000 Lebanese Muslims live in the frontier area where Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina meet, and that it is a Hezbollah terrorist operational base. Al Qaeda, the Party of Islamic Unification, the Egyptian branch of Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas are also reported in the area. Muslims are spreading into Chile, Ecuador and Venezuela. Ryan Mauro reports: “The Sao Paulo Forum in December 2001 was attended by Fidel Castro, da Silva, Daniel Ortega (former communist dictator of Nicaragua), and representatives from the Communist Parties of Argentina, Peru, Cuba, Chile, Colombia, Uruguay and Venezuela; the ELN and FARC terrorist rebels of Colombia; Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement of Peru; and according to some sources, Middle Eastern terrorist groups. The chief of the Latin American division of the Iraqi Baath Party, as well as representatives of Venezuela, Brazil, Syria, Libya, Iran, North Korea and Cuba attended. Other regular attendees include representatives of Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, El Salvador’s FMLN, Irish Republican Army, Basque ETA, and PFLP-GC.”

The China Factor: In November 2004, Chinese President Hu Jintao conducted a two-week tour of Latin America and concluded several major trade agreements and over 400 business deals with several emerging leftist governments. China’s rapidly industrializing economy needs massive natural resources, and Latin America is natural resources rich. China is capital rich, and Hu Jintao promised to spend over $100 billion in the next decade on Latin American infrastructure, natural resources and trade and investment deals, including oil. Politically, it appears business agreements between communist China’s “state capitalism” and dysfunctional, left-leaning, anti-U.S. governments in Latin America are marriages made in Marxist utopia. China has now been granted observer status at the OAS (Organization of American States), and is likely to conclude a bilateral trade deal with Chile (formerly the staunchest U.S. ally in Latin America) by the end of 2005.

The Domino Theory: In The New American magazine (Jan 24), William F. Jasper reminds readers of The Domino Theory that was central to the Vietnam War. It was believed that “If the West didn’t oppose the Communist forces backed by Moscow and Beijing, the theory went, the countries of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam would fall to Communism, one by one, in quick succession. Millions of people would be slaughtered, and whole nations would be turned into concentration camps. The Asian nations in the region that didn’t fall to overt Communist takeover would come under Red China’s dominance, nonetheless. The liberal intelligentsia sneered at such ‘simplistic’ and ‘paranoid’ notions. They were wrong, of course—fatally, horribly wrong. The ‘simplistic’ theory proved to be fact. Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam did fall like dominoes. Millions were slaughtered, and the survivors were enslaved in concentration camps. The rest of Asia has come under China’s economic and military dominance.” The implications of The Domino Theory for Latin America ought to be glaringly obvious. Judging from events, it appears the dominos have already begun to fall.

Strategic Implications: Whoever controls the Panama Canal—that’s now China—has a chokehold on a huge portion of global commerce (200 million tons of cargo pass through the canal each year). Anti-U.S. Venezuela, the U.S.’s second most important oil provider, wants to conclude oil supply agreements with thirsty China. If so, delivery should not be a problem, as China now controls the Panama Canal through which the oil would transit, but that means critical U.S. oil supplies could be diverted.

Brazil, now closely allied with Red China, is a nuclear-capable nation. China and Brazil have a joint space venture with two satellites already in orbit, thus the potential clearly exists to develop nuclear missile delivery systems.

It’s been reported that terrorists are among illegal immigrants crossing the U.S. southern border. In view of all the above, control of U.S. borders is a growing and strategic issue central to U.S. homeland security. U.S. citizens are probably faced with both increased danger from terrorists and more Big Brother controls.

Clearly, the global geopolitical theater has stages where monumental historical performances are unfolding largely unnoticed. Center stage could shift dramatically at some point to the western hemisphere. Hopefully the U.S. will wake up to the danger in its own backyard before a fatal surprise collapses the set.

—www.jrnyquist.com/frisch_2005_0305.htm

Europe On Fire
by Mark Steyn

Ever since 9/11, I’ve been gloomily predicting the European powder keg’s about to go up. “By 2010 we’ll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on the news every night,’’ I wrote in Canada’s Western Standard back in February.

Silly me. The Eurabian civil war appears to have started some years ahead of my optimistic schedule. As Thursday’s edition of the Guardian reported in London: “French youths fired at police and burned over 300 cars last night as towns around Paris experienced their worst night of violence in a week of urban unrest.’’

“French youths,’’ huh? You mean Pierre and Jacques and Marcel and Alphonse? Granted that most of the “youths” are technically citizens of the French Republic, it doesn’t take much time in les banlieus of Paris to discover that the rioters do not think of their primary identity as “French:’’ they’re young men from North Africa growing ever more estranged from the broader community with each passing year and wedded ever more intensely to an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything you’re likely to find in the Middle East. After four somnolent years, it turns out finally that there really is an explosive “Arab street, “but it’s in Clichy-sous-Bois.

The notion that Texas neocon arrogance was responsible for frosting up trans-Atlantic relations was always preposterous, even for someone as complacent and blinkered as John Kerry. If you had millions of seething unassimilated Muslim youths in lawless suburbs ringing every major city, would you be so eager to send your troops into an Arab country fighting alongside the Americans? For half a decade, French Arabs have been carrying on a low-level intifada against synagogues, kosher butchers, Jewish schools, etc. The concern of the political class has been to prevent the spread of these attacks to targets of more, ah, general interest. They seem to have lost that battle. Unlike America’s Europhiles, France’s Arab street correctly identified Chirac’s opposition to the Iraq war for what it was: a sign of weakness.

The French have been here before, of course. Seven-thirty-two. Not 7:32 Paris time, which is when the nightly Citroen-torching begins, but 732 A.D.—as in one and a third millennia ago. By then, the Muslims had advanced a thousand miles north of Gibraltar to control Spain and southern France up to the banks of the Loire. In October 732, the Moorish general Abd al-Rahman and his Muslim army were not exactly at the gates of Paris, but they were within 200 miles, just south of the great Frankish shrine of St. Martin of Tours. Somewhere on the road between Poitiers and Tours, they met a Frankish force and, unlike other Christian armies in Europe, this one held its ground “like a wall . . . a firm glacial mass,’’ as the Chronicle of Isidore puts it. A week later, Abd al-Rahman was dead, the Muslims were heading south, and the French general, Charles, had earned himself the surname “Martel’’—or “the Hammer.’’

Poitiers was the high-water point of the Muslim tide in western Europe. It was an opportunistic raid by the Moors, but if they’d won, they’d have found it hard to resist pushing on to Paris, to the Rhine and beyond. “Perhaps,’’ wrote Edward Gibbon in The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, “the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.’’ There would be no Christian Europe. The Anglo-Celts who settled North America would have been Muslim. Poitiers, said Gibbon, was “an encounter which would change the history of the whole world.’’

Battles are very straightforward: Side A wins, Side B loses. But the French government is way beyond anything so clarifying. Today, a fearless Muslim advance has penetrated far deeper into Europe than Abd al-Rahman. They’re in Brussels, where Belgian police officers are advised not to be seen drinking coffee in public during Ramadan, and in Malmo, where Swedish ambulance drivers will not go without police escort. It’s way too late to rerun the Battle of Poitiers. In the no-go suburbs, even before these current riots, 9,000 police cars had been stoned by “French youths’’ since the beginning of the year; some three dozen cars are set alight even on a quiet night. “There’s a civil war under way in Clichy-sous-Bois at the moment,’’ said Michel Thooris of the gendarmes’ trade union Action Police CFTC. “We can no longer withstand this situation on our own. My colleagues neither have the equipment nor the practical or theoretical training for street fighting.’’

What to do? In Paris, while “youths’’ fired on the gendarmerie, burned down a gym and disrupted commuter trains, the French Cabinet split in two, as the “minister for social cohesion’’ (a Cabinet position I hope America never requires) and other colleagues distance themselves from the interior minister, the tough-talking Nicolas Sarkozy who dismissed the rioters as “scum.’’ President Chirac seems to have come down on the side of those who feel the scum’s grievances need to be addressed. He called for “a spirit of dialogue and respect.’’ As is the way with the political class, they seem to see the riots as an excellent opportunity to scuttle Sarkozy’s presidential ambitions rather than as a call to save the Republic.

A few years back I was criticized for a throwaway observation to the effect that “I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark.” But this is why. In defiance of traditional immigration patterns, these young men are less assimilated than their grandparents. French cynics like the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, have spent the last two years scoffing at the Bush Doctrine: Why, everyone knows Islam and democracy are incompatible. If so, that’s less a problem for Iraq or Afghanistan than for France and Belgium.

If Chirac isn’t exactly Charles Martel, the rioters aren’t doing a bad impression of the Muslim armies of 13 centuries ago: They’re seizing their opportunities, testing their foe, probing his weak spots. If burning the ’burbs gets you more “respect’’ from Chirac, they’ll burn ’em again, and again. In the current issue of City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple concludes a piece on British suicide bombers with this grim summation of the new Europe: “The sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility has been replaced by the nightmare of permanent conflict.’’ Which sounds an awful lot like a new Dark Ages.

—www.suntimes.com, November 6, 2005

Jihad in Europe
by Robert Spencer

Has an intifada begun in France—an all-out jihad? Are the French facing what is by now, as the riots are well into their second week and have engulfed virtually the entire country, a full-scale insurrection from immigrant youth who simply resent being marginalized and shunted to the fringes of French society? Or does the unrest have something to do with the agenda of jihadists worldwide? As is becoming increasingly well known, Osama bin Laden and others all over the world want to unify the Islamic world under a restored caliphate, reestablish the rule of Islamic law, and extend the hegemony of that law, Sharia, to the rest of the world also. Does that play any role in the French riots?

Evidence so far is somewhat sketchy. Mainstream media reports have centered on the rioters’ economic and cultural marginalization. “Theirs,” laments AP, “is a drab life of days spent smoking hashish, hanging out on street corners.” An 18-year-old named Ahmed complains: “You wear these clothes, with this color skin and you’re automatically a target for police.” Some analysts, indulging in various degrees of schadenfreude, have alleged that France’s ingrained racism, snobbery toward outsiders, and mistreatment of Muslim immigrants are responsible for the riots.

Yet the horror stories detailing this mistreatment that are now filling the news do not entirely ring true. France has not neglected its sizable Muslim minority. Not too long ago it established an official organization to oversee French Islam, the French Council for the Muslim Religion (CFCM), and has even discussed revising France’s secular laws to allow the government to fund mosques in France, in order to wean them away from “extremist” foreign influences.

Nor have Muslims been marginalized in French public life. Dalil Boubakeur, leader of the CFCM and imam of the Paris mosque, enjoys high visibility. After the French government announced plans to expel jihadist imams from France in May 2004, then-Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin told Boubakeur that he wanted to “reassure the Muslim community” of “his willingness to treat it as he treats other faiths.” Boubakeur explained that as far as Raffarin was concerned, “there is no lumping together of the expulsion of imams and the Muslim community in general.” When two French journalists were kidnapped in Iraq in August 2004, then-Interior Minister (and current Prime Minister) Dominique de Villepin went to Boubakeur’s mosque to join Muslims in prayer for their release—and drew applause when he spoke of the unity between non-Muslims and Muslims in France.

De Villepin’s mosque visit was emblematic of France’s ongoing efforts to make its Muslim population feel included, loved, and French—efforts they are now being universally excoriated for not having made. And there are several indications that the riots are not wholly or solely about economic and social marginalization at all, and that the Islamic jihad agenda is a significant element fueling their continuing spread:

• It has long been established that there is a significant jihadist presence among French Muslims. Recently six Muslims in Paris were arrested for recruiting for the jihad in Iraq.

• The rioters have been shouting the jihad battle cry, “Allahu akbar.” As Muhammad Atta wrote in his final exhortation to himself, “When the confrontation begins, strike like champions who do not want to go back to this world. Shout, ‘Allahu akbar,’ because this strikes fear in the hearts of the non-believers.” While the mainstream media continues to identify the rioters as “French-born youths of Arab or African origin, many of them Muslim,” in fact the Islamic identity of the rioters is quite clear: rioters have avoided Muslim-owned businesses, preferring obviously non-Muslim targets.

• The rioters have thrown Molotov cocktails at two French synagogues, making it likely that they subscribe to the deeply rooted hatred of Jews that so many jihadists share. They have also set two churches on fire, further reinforcing the impression that they view their struggle as fundamentally religious, and consider the terrorizing of Jews and Christians to be part of their religious responsibility, in accord with Qur’an 9:29, which directs Muslims to wage war even against “the People of the Book”: the Qur’an’s term for—primarily—Jews and Christians.

• Mouloud Dahmani is a Muslim leader in France who is trying to prevail upon the French to allow for a group of Muslim Brotherhood sheikhs to negotiate an end to the riots. The Muslim Brotherhood, of course, is the first modern Islamic jihad organization and the direct forefather of Hamas and Al-Qaeda. Dahmani has declared: “All we demand is to be left alone.” This is a strange statement coming from the leader of a community that resents being marginalized and longs to enter the mainstream of French society. Left alone? Quite literally. Journalist Amir Taheri says that the Muslims in France are not actually interested in assimilation at all; rather, they want autonomy: “Some are even calling for the areas where Muslims form a majority of the population to be reorganized on the basis of the ‘millet’ system of the Ottoman Empire: Each religious community (millet) would enjoy the right to organize its social, cultural and educational life in accordance with its religious beliefs.” He reports that “in parts of France, a de facto millet system is already in place.” Muslim leaders control the area and French officials, including police, simply do not enter.

• Postings on Muslim weblogs indicate that the riots are not spontaneous outpourings of rage, but carefully planned endeavors. Some revealed not only the planning involved in the riots, which have now swept all across France and have spread also to Denmark, Belgium and Germany, but also the Islamic supremacist goal behind them. One wrote: “The cops are petrified of us, everything must burn, starting Monday, the operation ‘Midnight Sun’ starts, tell everyone else, rendezvous for Momo and Abdul in Zone 4 ... jihad Islamia Allah akhbar.” Another added: “You don’t really think that we’re going to stop now? Are you stupid? It will continue, non-stop. We aren’t going to let up. The French won’t do anything and soon, we will be in the majority here.”

Meanwhile, the Union for Islamic Organizations of France, which has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, has issued a fatwa declaring: “It is formally forbidden to any Muslim seeking divine grace and satisfaction to participate in any action that blindly hits private or public property or could constitute an attack on someone’s life.” There is a strange ambiguity in this, recalling that of the CAIR-backed American fatwa condemning attacks on innocent civilians without defining “innocent”: what constitutes attacking “blindly”? Is a focused, targeted attack somehow acceptable?

The time for such ambiguity is long past. And indeed, lines are being drawn everywhere.

—www.frontpagemagazine.com, November 8, 2005

Luke 2:1-20

And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.

(And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)

And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.

And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:)

To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.

And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.

And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.

And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.

And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.

And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds.

But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.

And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
from the Schwarz and Noebel Families

Thanking each and every one for your continuing
interest and support throughout 2005.