Contents

Leftism: ADL Style
by Don Feder

Discovering World of Narnia
by William F. Jasper

Feminizing/Communizing the University
by George Gilder

21st Century "New" Socialism
by Jeans Erik Gould

Latin America Makes Left Turn
by Kelly Hearn

Thank You!
by David A. Noebel

Leftism: ADL Style
by Don Feder

A group of reputed Jewish leaders met in New York last week to devise a strategy to deal with what kosher Chicken Littles like the Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman see as the emerging threat of the Religious Right.

If Christian conservatives are the menace Foxman and Friends believe, the problem is much worse than they imagine.

According to a late November FOX News poll, most Americans are what Foxman and Reform Jewish leader Eric Yoffie would call a clear and present danger to democracy and pluralism. To wit:

59 percent of Americans think Christianity is under attack here;

81 percent disagree with the statement that religion should be “excluded from public life”;

93 percent want “in God we trust” to remain on our currency and coinage;

90 percent are for keeping “one nation under God” in the Pledge of Alliance;

76 percent say public display of the Ten Commandments should be legal;

82 percent favor voluntary school prayer; and

77 percent believe “the courts have gone too far in taking religion out of public life.”

As for opposition to same-sex marriage, which Rabbi Yoffie considers the hallmark of irrationality and bigotry, more than two dozen states have passed constitutional amendments defining marriage a la Genesis, and always by lopsided margins. These amendments have passed everywhere they’ve appeared on the ballot—including in such un-Bible Belt states as Oregon and Ohio.

Prior to his December 5th meeting, Foxman said the ADL needed “to come together with other Jewish organizations…and to find allies beyond our community.” And find them they will—in the Democratic National Committee, the ACLU, People for the American Way, and MoveOn.org, but hardly anywhere else.

If the FOX polling is accurate, there are few Americans who share Foxman’s perspective. He has met the dreaded Christianizers, and they are…Middle America.

Foxman launched his latest crusade in a November 3rd speech to the ADL leadership, wherein he warned: “We face a better-financed, more sophisticated, coordinated, unified, energized, and organized coalition of groups in opposition to our policy positions on church-state separation than ever before. Their goal is to implement their Christian worldview. To Christianize America. To save us.”

Holy Torquemada! Is the auto-da-fe about to make a comeback? Apparently, Foxman does expect the Spanish Inquisition—but one run by evangelicals, who will make us all sit in the comfy chair and view the Ten Commandment monument while listening to the Regent University choir sing “Silent Night.”

In a November 25th Wall Street Journal article (“Biting the Hand: Why is the ADL going after evangelical Christians?”), David Brog, former chief of staff to Senator Arlen Specter, comments: “Just because Christian activists are motivated by their Christian faith does not mean that they are seeking to “Christianize” America….Christian churches have been the driving force behind some of the most important social movements in America, from the abolition of slavery to the civil-rights movement.”

Still, the “Christianizing” drumbeat continues. Rabbi Yoffie has the distinction of making Foxman look rational by comparison.

In a November 19th speech in Houston, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism declared: “We understand those who believe that the Bible opposes gay marriage, even though we read that text in a very different way.” However, “We can not forget that when Hitler came to power in 1933, one of the first things he did was ban gay organizations.” And one of the second things he did was ban Communist organizations. So what?

How the Left loves to play the you’re-just-like-the-Nazis game. Yoffie may be unaware of the fact that Ernst Rohm and the leadership of the storm troopers were homosexuals, as was Nazi Party Secretary Rudolf Hess. In his book The Hidden Hitler, German historian Lothar Machtan offers convincing evidence that the fuhrer himself was a closet gay.

Most of the Jews murdered by the Nazis were Orthodox from Eastern Europe. Being Torah-observant, they were more likely to share Dr. Dobson’s perspective on homosexuality than Yoffie’s. There aren’t different ways to read the Bible’s prohibition on homosexual acts. The problem is that while conservative Christians take Jewish scriptures seriously, modernist Jews like Yoffie interpret it metaphorically. “Rabbi” Yoffie reads the Torah the way Justice David Souter reads the Constitution.

And that’s the bottom line: Christians like Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and Jerry Falwell embrace Jewish values. Jews like Foxman and Yoffie spurn them.

What Foxman calls a campaign to Christianize America is actually an effort to return Judeo-Christian morality—the Biblical code on which this nation was founded and through which it grew to greatness—to the councils of government. The ethical code conservative Christians are fighting for comes from a Jewish book that’s topped the best-sellers’ list since Sinai.

According to The Jewish Week, at the Foxman-Yoffie summit, the way Christians mobilized to save Terri Schiavo was seen as another ominous portent.

But when exactly did starving to death a brain-damaged woman become a Jewish value? Eric Yoffie, that student of history, may recall that one of the other first-things the Nazis did on assuming power was to murder the severely disabled and mentally ill through euthanasia.

A deep reverence for human life is authentically Jewish—particularly in light of the wanton destruction of Jewish life, from the Pharaoh in the Exodus, to the Holocaust, to jihadist suicide-bombers.

The Talmud tells us that whoever saves a human life saves the entire world. But Foxman and Yoffie view the efforts of religious conservatives to place limits on abortion and stop medical murder as fateful steps on the road to “Christian America.”

Was America a theocracy prior to 1962, when we had prayer (and in some cases Bible reading) in the schools, abortion was illegal, Nativity scenes were displayed in parks, and the idea of the state sanctioning homosexual “marriage” was too funny for words?

What Christian conservatives seek is a return to the moral status quo of 40 years ago. I was alive in America then, and don’t recall forced-baptisms, inquisitions, or a state church.

I do recall that this blessed land—which took in my immigrant, Jewish grandparents—was founded by Christians on a Christian worldview.

As I recall, it was young Christians (some only teenagers) who went to Europe in 1944-45, liberated the death camps, and plunged a bayonet into the evil heart of Hitlerism, thus saving world Jewry from the ovens.

I also recollect that it was a Christian, from the Bible-belt no less—Harry S. Truman—whose diplomatic support at a crucial time helped create the state of Israel.

And today, those evangelicals Foxman calls Christianizers are the backbone of American support for the Jewish state. Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein is the founder of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. Last year, his group raised almost $45 million to help Israel, almost all of it from evangelical Christians. In a 2002 IFCJ poll, “conservative, church-going Christians” had the highest level of support for the Jewish state (62 percent) among non-Jewish religious groups.

My grandparents pondered the question often asked during 2,000 years of exile: Is it good for the Jews? Apparently, Foxman and Yoffie believe that a secular America, severed from 3,300 years of Judeo-Christian tradition, is just ducky for the Jewish people.

Charges of “Christianizing” are red herrings. Foxman’s real issue with Christian conservatives is his opposition to their moral/political agenda. The ADL is a leftist group masquerading as a Jewish group. (The same could be said of much of Yoffie’s Reform movement.)

If they have a problem with Christian America, they should try a Muslim America.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Europe is decades ahead of us in the business of secularization. The proposed constitution for the European Union can’t even acknowledge the religious roots of what used to be called Christendom.

Europeans stopped going to church. Then they stopped having children, having lost the spiritual impetus for procreation.

Demographic winter set in. Then the Muslims moved in. They’re the ones having large families, supported by Europe’s very generous welfare benefits. It’s said there are now more mosques than churches in southern France.

A glimpse of Europe’s future may be seen in the recent Muslim riots around Paris. Besides burning cars, the rioters firebombed churches and synagogues.

For the past five years, Europe has experienced a wave of anti-Semitism not seen since the Second World War. It’s not evangelicals beating Jews in the streets of Paris, attacking Jewish day schools and kosher restaurants, and vandalizing Jewish cemeteries. (Christian conservatives like Gary Bauer are among the loudest voices speaking out against Kristallnacht, Part II.)

Twenty years ago, Joshua O. Haberman, a reform rabbi, wrote an article entitled, “The Bible Belt Is America’s Safety Belt.” It’s what keeps us from careening into a moral abyss of death-on-demand, sex divorced from values, a Roman orgy and demolition derby passing as entertainment, drugs used to fill lives devoid of meaning, and a generation of strutting savages in Calvin Kleins.

While Foxman is busy looking for allies outside of what he calls our “community” (by which, I assume, he means those who read The New York Times religiously and support Public Television), America is caught in a pincer move—the moral decadence of the Left on one hand, and militant Islam on the other.

But, not to worry, Foxman and Yoffie know where the threat to America (and American Jews) lies, and are here to fight the Judeo-Christianizers.

—FrontPageMagazine.com, December 13, 2005

Discovering the World of Narnia
by William F. Jasper

—The New American, December 12, 2005, p. 22f

Feminizing/Communizing The University
by George Gilder

Why would any self-respecting boy want to attend one of America’s increasingly feminized universities? Most of these institutions have flounced through the last forty years fashioning a fluffy pink playpen of feminist studies and agitprop “herstory,” taught amid a green goo of eco-motherism and anti-industrial phobia. They routinely showcase such trendy trumperies as The Vagina Monologues, while sacrificing thousands of men’s athletic teams at the altar of Title IX. They happily open their arms to the recruiting efforts of gay and lesbian student centers, while banning the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and other military groups from campus. And, as they launch bidding wars for the few women who qualify for tenured appointments in math and science, they stint on male-oriented pursuits such as engineering and mechanics.

Perhaps this explains why American men have taken a demographic plunge in higher education. Men now constitute less than 43 percent of the U.S. college-student population, and receive only 41 percent of new bachelors’ degrees. Similar figures appear throughout the Western world, implying that the emergence of an unschooled male underclass is not only an American problem. In a world where male talent in mathematics and engineering confers significant national advantages in wealth and power, these numbers are portentous indeed.

Disturbing as it is, this pattern is no mystery. Inferior male performance in school is chiefly associated with fatherless families. Among major industrial countries, only Sweden, Norway, and Denmark significantly surpass the U.S. in the female dominance of higher education; these Scandinavian countries also lead in female-headed families. In all of Europe, only Switzerland shows a drastically lower level of fatherlessness, with an 11 percent illegitimacy rate in 2001 as compared with 32 percent in the U.S. and 42 percent in Sweden. And, sure enough, Switzerland displays continued male dominance of higher education, with men constituting around 60 percent of the college-student population.

The ill effects of fatherless families should come as no surprise. Around the globe and throughout human history, mothers left alone have foundered on the challenge of raising and disciplining boys. As I stated in my 1986 book, Men & Marriage, family dissolution in the modern world leads to “a welfare state to take care of the women and children and a police state to handle the teenaged boys.” I might add today that it also entails immigration or outsourcing to do much of society’s work and to support the childless in their old age.

On the police-state side, the decline of men in higher education relates to the 93 percent male composition of America’s world-leading prison population. As Bill Bennett has pungently observed, America’s prisons are dominated by blacks from the fatherless families that make up close to 80 percent of inner-city households. The Department of Justice estimates that fully 32 percent of all black males will enter state or federal prison during their lifetimes, as compared with less than 6 percent of white males. More than a third of American black men between the ages of 17 and 35 are currently in jail, on probation, or on the lam. In Scandinavian countries, the police are similarly busy with truants. Prison populations there remain radically smaller, but, unlike in the U.S., crime rates are still soaring. Sweden leads Europe with a six-to-tenfold rise in various property crimes and sexual assaults since the 1970s.

Family breakdown drives the ever-expanding police state to extend its webs and ensnare men far beyond the prison population. Beadles from divorce courts, welfare agencies, child-support administrations, and child-abuse constabularies use massive computer surveillance to track the jobs and movements of so-called deadbeat or DNA dads. They treat unmarried or divorced fathers, in Bryce Christensen’s words, as “quasi-criminals, perpetually under corrective supervision.”

As Margaret Mead famously declared, the key social issue in every society is how to deal with the aggressiveness and competitiveness of males. The traditional solution is marriage, which ties men to the future through their children and channels their aggression into supporting their families through competitive success in both education and the workplace. In families that are intact, boys tend to socialize upward toward their fathers and other adult men, such as teachers and coaches, rather than sideways toward the gang and the street. They also tend to readily accept the educational disciplines required by upward mobility. Even today in intact middle- and upper-class families, where fathers usually perform as chief providers, more boys than girls go to college.

The sexual skew in American universities reflects a condition widely reported in anthropological studies: The nuclear family always must compete with polygyny (derived from the Greek for “many women”). Enabling the most powerful men (by whatever relevant measure) to dominate the nubile or childbearing years of several young women, polygyny can be pursued through harems and mistresses or extended over time through a series of divorces and remarriages. Monogamy is egalitarianism in sex; it means one to a customer. When this institution breaks down, it leaves behind an underclass of young men who cannot marry and who are prone to addiction to homosexuality and pornography. It also creates cohorts of abandoned women who are left to struggle with their sons and then grow old alone.

As Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck pointed out in the 1980s, the pattern of family breakdown is fed by the excesses of the welfare state. “Progressive” systems skewed to tax the so-called rich (the top 20 percent of earners) necessarily bear most heavily on intact families with children who do the lion’s share of society’s productive work. Recent data show that the top fifth of households perform some 33 percent of the hours worked, earn roughly 50 percent of the income, and pay 68 percent of federal income and payroll taxes, all while raising most of the boys who pursue higher education. The progressive taxes paid by these families finance programs and institutions such as child support, daycare, job quotas, affirmative action, divorce courts, foster homes, abortion clinics, nursing homes, and cradle-to-grave health care, all of which reduce the unique value of the personal-care functions provided by father-supported families. In this way, state-provided welfare provisions create an anti-family feedback loop in social policy, reducing incentives for families to stay together and creating what Allan Carlson has called a multi-trillion-dollar “lifestyle subsidy” for careerist singles and broken families.

Yet despite the state-assisted breakdown of the nuclear family and the resulting dearth of young men in higher education, males continue to dominate the educational statistics in advanced mathematics (and the math-intensive fields of science and engineering) all around the world. The news may prompt the tenured ladies at Harvard and MIT to burst into tears and summon lawyers to sue God, but the evidence for a biological source of male mathematical superiority is overwhelming. Boys are better at math, and the harder the math the greater the male superiority. Indeed, throughout human history, female mathematicians and engineers have made almost no significant contributions to these fields. The absence of boys in colleges does not mean that women suddenly begin writing most of our leading-edge software programs or designing microchips for our missile defenses. The feminization of the universities simply deprives the economy of the technical skills and competitive energies of new generations of men.

In response, the powerful polygynists in charge of many large global corporations range the world to tap male talent wherever it may be. They tend to find it in Asian universities, such as India’s fiercely meritocratic IIT campuses, where males constitute at least 90 percent of the students. The visible results of this are high-tech outsourcing and immigration. But the roots are nurtured by the breakdown of families, the feminization of American universities, and the flight of boys from them.

—National Review, December 31, 2005, p. 25f.

21st Century “New” Socialism
by Jeans Erik Gould

CASERIO EL PEON, Venezuela – Surveying a vast, lush farm he hopes to make his own, Pedro Artiaga said social justice is finally being served in Venezuela.

The privately owned, 3,000-acre Santa Isabel Farm has grown sugar cane for decades. Mr. Artiaga said the government will help him use the land to grow pumpkins, beans and squash.

Under a land redistribution campaign led by President Hugo Chavez, thousands of rural poor such as Mr. Artiaga are being granted rights to farm arable land that had been concentrated in the hands of the wealthy.

But Mr. Artiaga isn’t waiting for the government to take the lead—he and other farmers are slashing the Santa Isabel cane with machetes to lay claim to land they say is rightfully theirs.

State or private land?

“We’re obligated to take this land because it is state land,” Mr. Artiaga said, clad in a torn shirt dirtied by the rich soil. “Commander Chavez is with our movement.” Venezuela’s land reform campaign has won support from these rural poor, but criticism sparked that it could infringe on private-property rights.

“In Yaracuy [state], there is no rule of law,” said Santa Isabel owner Vicente Lecuna, who accuses state officials of encouraging peasants to settle on his property by declaring his and dozens of other farms state land. He said farming cooperatives such as Mr. Artiaga’s have destroyed 40 percent of his sugar cane.

After founding the farm in the 1950s, Mr. Lecuna’s father started the 2,000-acre Santa Elena cattle ranch in Madisonville, Texas. The family said he decided to invest his assets overseas when the land expropriations during the 1959 revolution in Cuba led him to fear that similar takeovers could occur in his country.

His daughter Josefina Lecuna, who now owns the Texas ranch and whose cattle have won Grand Champion Bull medals at the Houston Livestock Show, said the basic private-property rights guaranteed in the United States are at risk in Venezuela.

In the United States, “you pay your taxes…you’ve got rights over here,” she said in a telephone interview from her ranch. “I feel really bad about what’s happened to my father… that was my grandfather’s place, and for sure we would like to keep it because we have a lot of memories.”

Chavez defends reform

Mr. Chavez insists that his government respects private-property rights and says land expropriations are being carried out only for public use or out of public necessity in a country where most non-state land is owned by a small elite.

The Venezuelan leader, who is engaged in a war of words with the Bush administration, said last month on national television that the U.S. practice of eminent domain is a greater threat to private-property rights than his government’s expropriations.

He faulted the June decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Kelo v. New London for allowing New London, Conn., to condemn privately owned homes for the private development of a resort and offices – a departure from expropriations for public uses such as constructing roads or public buildings.

“Idle” land up for grabs

In what he deems the “new socialism of the 21st century,” Mr. Chavez has called on state officials to confiscate private land deemed “idle” or lacking property transfer titles dating to 1848. Troops have enforced some of the takeovers, at times denying owners and workers access to their land.

In recent months, the government has extended the campaign to corporate-owned land. One state government expropriated an idle tomato processing plant from U.S.-based H.J. Heinz Co., and another has seized a silo installation from Empressas Polar, Venezuela’s largest food company.

The state government paid Heinz $256,000 for the seized plant, distinguishing Venezuela’s reform from Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s massive land redistribution effort, which has not reimbursed thousands of white landowners for seized farms.

With agriculture a small player in Venezuela’s oil-dependent economy, it is unlikely that a fall in food production might cause food shortages or other crises like in Zimbabwe, said Orlando Ochoa, an economics professor at Andres Bello Catholic University in Caracas.

New owners can’t sell

Critics say the expropriations concentrate power in the government by giving peasants only farming licenses, not ownership of the land.

“In Venezuela, we still have the king,” said Carlos Machado, an agribusiness professor at Caracas’ Institute for Higher Administration Studies business school.

But Carlos Escarra, a constitutional lawyer and professor at the Central University of Venezuela, rejects this common criticism, saying peasants do become property owners, but without the right to sell their land.

Mr. Chavez said letting farming co-ops such as Mr. Artiaga’s produce on expropriated land will lessen Venezuela’s dependence on food imports. His government also has begun a campaign to plant a half-million more acres of sugar cane and cassava to produce sugar-based ethanol gasoline.

Sugar cane targeted

Yet farm owner Vladimir Rodriguez in Yaracuy said the government has not prevented cooperatives and extortionists from destroying more than $15 million worth of sugar cane on 33 farms in his state, according to his count.

The government-run agrarian fund known as Fondafa also grants loans for farm machinery to co-ops that have seized private property without state permission and uprooted sugar cane crops.

In one case of extortion, local delinquents—who farm owners said posed as landless peasants—killed farm owner Antonio Vierira after he refused to pay them not to destroy his sugar cane crop.

Col. Angel Yarza, secretary-general of Yaracuy, who called on the government to take over 48 ranches, denied seeing large amounts of sugar cane destroyed. He insisted the state does not encourage land invasions, but said it will not intervene to protect private farms.

Mr. Artiaga said Col. Yarza and other state officials are helping his group take land away from the Lecunas, who he said represent a system of traditional landownership that prevents the rural poor from acquiring land or sustainable jobs.

“We’re human beings too, and we have to eat,” he said.

But as big farm owners see it, seizing private property and issuing loans to poor farmers is no solution to poverty and unemployment.

The co-operatives “just want credits that they won’t pay back,” Mr. Lecuna said. “‘They’re not going to produce.”

—The Washington Times, December 13, 2005, p. A15

Latin America Makes Left Turn
by Kelly Hearn

BUENOS AIRES—The rise of indigenous leader Evo Morales will embolden leftist groups in an upcoming string of elections that could reconfigure Latin America’s political map for years to come, according to analysts.

The intense election cycle, which started in November and will run to the end of 2006, includes 12 presidential and 13 legislative contests.

Brazil and Mexico, two of Latin America’s largest nations, will elect a president next year, as will Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Peru and Venezuela.

In recent years, South American voters have favored leftist governments over those supporting neoliberal economic models backed by Washington during the 1990s.

Mr. Morales underscores the rising role of nationalism in Latin American politics, and his victory will have a symbolic impact on an “ethnic political agenda” that is “absolutely new in Latin American, and especially South American, politics,” said Juan Tokatlian, a political scientist at the University of San Andres in Buenos Aires.

“As part of that, we are seeing more intense demands for more state, less market and a new social and ethnic agenda that was either overshadowed by other issues or repressed or co-opted by traditional elites,” Mr. Tokatlian said.

In resource-rich nations such as Ecuador and Bolivia, ethnic agendas have centered on efforts to nationalize natural resources such as gas and oil, leading to the ouster of free-market presidents favored by the United States.

Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, and now Bolivia are controlled by governments that fall, to varying degrees, left of center.

Right-of-center governments are in power in Peru, Colombia, Mexico and the bulk of Central America.

The Bolivia example could shift the dynamic.

“A Morales victory will add steam to the prospects for leftist victories in Nicaragua and Mexico in 2006,” said David Dent, political scientist at Towson State University. “If the trend plays out in this fashion, Washington will decide the Latin American ‘hot spots’ deserve more attention.”

In recent years, many Washington observers have cited the region’s leftist turns as evidence that Washington is losing influence over “America’s back door.”

In February, CIA Director Porter J. Goss referenced the upcoming election cycle in Senate testimony. In Venezuela, Mr. Goss said, President Hugo Chavez “is consolidating his power by using technically legal tactics to target his opponents and meddling in the region, supported by [Cuban President Fidel] Castro.”

Mr. Goss said Colombia’s “progress against counternarcotics and terrorism” under President Alvaro Uribe, a key U.S. ally, could be affected by its election in March.

He also warned that presidential campaigning in Mexico “is likely to stall progress on fiscal, labor, and energy reforms.”

Michael Shifter, analyst at Washington’s Inter-American Dialogue, said references to a leftward drift across Latin America are too simplistic and stressed that leaders, including Mr. Morales, will vary sharply in approaches, depending on political and economic pressures.

“What is common throughout the region is widespread disenchantment with politics of all colorations and a need for new policies to remedy mediocre economic growth, scant job creation, and stubborn poverty,” he said.

Mr. Morales’ victory in tiny, poor Bolivia is seen as a win for his proclaimed ideological mentor, Mr. Chavez. But larger, more developed nations such as Argentina, Brazil and Chile have shied from hard leftward turns, opting instead to blend free-market principles with deepened emphasis on social spending.

Chile, where a January presidential runoff is expected to bring center-left candidate Michelle Bachelet to power, is an economic jewel praised by the United States. As populist rhetoric echoed throughout the continent, President Ricardo Lagos has grown the economy by promoting it as a business hub and pursuing free-trade agreements with the U.S. and other nations.”

—The Washington Times, December 21, 20005, A 13

Thank You!

I want to take this opportunity to thank every one of our Schwarz Report readers for their outpouring of goodwill toward our November/December appeal letter.

Thank you for your cards, notes, asides, and financial help. Our financial year ended on December 31, 2005 and you will be happy to know that all our bills are paid.

As I have said many times, the Lord has been so good to this ministry. For that I am thankful.

Sincerely in Christ Jesus our Lord,

David A. Noebel, President, Christian Anti-Communism Crusade