... there are streams of people crossing each other, and what is happening can have a multiplicity of meanings. That is how to think about the NAR, dominionism, all of these movements that people are involved in. In evangelical and Pentecostal churches, most people have a home church they identify with, but you have a favorite pastor or evangelist that you listen to occasionally. Studying scripture means you don't just read the Bible, you read devotional books, and books designed to help your spiritual walk or the church broadly construed. That is the problem with focusing in only on NAR and dominionism. If you don't know the everyday context of how people, churches, and organizations deal with these broad-based movements, it can sound like a vast conspiracy theory.

People who are in that web don't often recognize differences, or they don’t care about them. They care about their spiritual lives, and that's what keeps these movements going. They can go from one meeting to the next if they have the funds to do so, and the highs are good. Who doesn’t want to go to a meeting that feeds your soul where you meet like-minded people?

All of the groups are enmeshed in a symbiotic web. These evangelists', apostles’, and leaders’ messages are the commodity, and you have to buy the books, conferences, and other materials in order to get the blessings. I know that will seem distasteful and a caricature to some, but these events are well-attended, and at a hundred bucks a person, revenues from book and DVD sales. Conferences and meetings like Lou Engles’ The Call are not just prayer meetings, they are Christian marketplaces, with all sorts of spiritual wares being sold. [my emphasis]

... if you’ve ever been to a neo-Pentecostal conference or revival you’ve seen this sort of thing. And as [Carlton] Pearson's biography clearly demonstrates, if you give up that central idea that there is a hell (and hence a Satan), you'll be banished from not only friendships, but the lucrative ministries that Pearson himself helped to create.

All that said, there are different ways that people experience this, or faith healings, or other performances you find in these environments. Not everyone is in lockstep, when you sit down and talk with them. I remember vividly the 2007 event at Gimenez's church in Virginia Beach—this was before John Gimenez passed away—and there was quite a lineup of different preachers (I mean entrepreneurs)! I remember Lou Engle was on what I might, looking back, call a prophecy bender: rocking, as he does, and really doing an extended sequence on some dream he had about Jerusalem. People were wandering out of the sanctuary, as I did, and I was chatting with a woman in the hall. She commented about she hadn't seen him preach in a while. And she seemed pretty unimpressed with this one.

I point this out only to emphasize how these individual players do not necessarily always enrapture the audience; I've seen this at various events. On the other hand, I've seen others, like Rod Parsley and Kenneth Copeland, have the audience eating out of their hands (and also putting money in their hands).

These events are, like I said, performances that are carefully staged and mapped out; there may be a series of speakers who seem like they are reacting spontaneously to what's happening, moved by the holy spirit. But it's carefully orchestrated, along with mesmerizing music, for maximum impact. It's big business.

Just a year ago, Victor Hugo Perez Vargas was a leader in Peru’s vast but secretive occult movement. His strange ability to curse people and cause accidents seemed to be increasing. He was being mentored by a well-known satanist master and he attended witchcraft conferences. ...

Victor, who is 36, was drawn into this occultism as a teenager in the city of Moyobamba, where friends convinced him to have sex with dogs in order to receive supernatural power. Witches told him to do this so he could hear better and see in the spiritual realm. After the perverse initiation rites, he began to hear voices—and he discovered his ability to kill people with his words.

Victor’s transformation showed me how the Holy Spirit is working in Peru, where occultism has been a tradition ever since ancient Incas sacrificed children on altars to their sun god. Today, occultists from Africa, Europe and the United States attend witchcraft gatherings in Peru because they consider the country a central power center for New Age energy.

Observers say witchcraft is growing in Peru today, and human sacrifice still occurs—although it is rarely reported. (Several weeks ago, a girl’s dismembered body was found in Mayobamba.) Teresa Gomez believes this is all a last-ditch effort by satanic forces.

"These satanists want to take over the nation of Peru," she says. "Witches come here because there was so much blood sacrifice during the Inca times." She also noted that poor families, especially in jungle areas, have been known to sell their children to be sacrificed in occult rituals.

Perhaps the lessons would be worth the price had we learned from what has transpired, but there is little evidence to show that we have.

There are those who are urging us toward yet another war and other voices who want us to continue the folly of this one.

Where are the voices of reason? Where are the voices of peace?

The failure, until now, to move away from the cold war has its roots not only in various forms of inherited bigotry, but also in very strong interests within the US security establishment. This establishment was a product of the cold war, and it needs a cold war-type enemy: huge, identifiable, and, most importantly, armed with either high-tech conventional arms or with old-style nuclear missiles. Hence the endless insistence on the danger of a restoration of the Soviet Union. [my emphasis]

One way of combating the kind of attacks we saw is of course better security in the US; but this will not necessarily prevent a terrorist attack, as long as that terrorist is prepared to die. In the end, the key to fighting this war successfully has to be good intelligence - and given the difficulty that American agents have of penetrating the world of the Islamist extremists, for such intelligence the west desperately needs Arab and Muslim allies. The Saudis in particular will have to be persuaded to drop the decades-old strategy begun by Saudi Arabia’s founder, King Ibn Saud, according to which the House of Saud has turned a blind eye to Saudi-based radicalism beyond the borders of the kingdom, as long as the radicals do not cause trouble within Saudi Arabia itself.

The help of leading Muslim states will also be essential if there is to be an invasion and occupation of some part of the Muslim world. For, in their different ways, the US bombardment of targets in Sudan and Afghanistan, and the aftermath of the Nato bombardment of Yugoslavia, have shown the inadequacy of long-range bombardment when it comes to destroying enemies on the ground, who are dispersed and hidden in a friendly civilian population. [my emphasis]

In these depressing circumstances, adherence to a radical Islamist network provides a sense of cultural security, a new community and some degree of social support-modest, but still better than anything the state can provide. Poverty is recast as religious simplicity and austerity. Perhaps, even more importantly, belief provides a measure of pride: a reason to keep a stiff back amidst continual humiliations and temptations. In the blaring, stinking, violent world of the modern "third world" Muslim city, the architecture and aesthetic mood of the mosque is (like the Catholic churches in central America described by Graham Greene in The Lawless Roads) the only oasis, not only of beauty but of an ordered and coherent culture and guide to living. Of course this is true ten times over for a young male inhabitant of an Afghan, Chechen or Palestinian refugee camp.

In a phone call, Ronn Torossian, a public relations executive serving as ACLJ’s spokesman, portrayed Sekulow as a great lawyer getting by on modest pay.

"You are asking about one of the most successful lawyers in the country whose income is very small and owns a very small home," he said.

Property records show Jay and Pam Sekulow own three homes, including one they bought in 2008 in Franklin for $655,000 and another in Norfolk, Va., bought in 2005 for $690,000. Their third home, which once belonged to CASE, is in Waynesville, N.C., and is assessed at $262,800, according to Haywood County, N.C., tax records.

Faith can become a family business ...

High-profile examples exist in which financial gain is spread throughout a faith-based family organization, and family members seek control of the organization from generation to generation.

Some examples illustrate that passing organizational control from the founder to his children is seldom successful:

• Faith-healer Oral Roberts passed his mantle to son Richard Roberts, who was forced to resign as president of Oral Roberts University due to financial improprieties.

• With his wife and children in the faith business, Robert Schuller named son Robert as his successor. When that didn't work out, he gave the mantle to his daughter, Sheila. The Crystal Cathedral is now in bankruptcy.

• Billy Graham passed the leadership mantle to son Franklin, who has squandered the credibility of the Graham name with extremist statements and had extremely generous compensations from two nonprofits.

Other examples of an entrepreneurial evangelical founder passing the mantle of leadership to the next generation include Pat Robertson naming son Gordon the CEO of Christian Broadcasting Network.

The fact that it has not always been this way should be food for thought in Israel. But as usual, the question of why does not come up for discussion here. Why is there terror? Because. Why is there hatred? Because. It is much easier to think that Egypt hates us and that's that, and divest ourselves of responsibility. Peace with Egypt, which is considered an asset only when it is at risk, was a peace that Israel toyed with and breached from the beginning.

It required recognizing the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and granting it autonomy within five years. Israel conducted ridiculous negotiations, headed by its interior minister (Yosef Burg ) with the intention of making the negotiations go away, and never met its obligations. The invasion of Lebanon the day after the treaty was completed in 1982 was dangerous and impertinent. Against all odds, Egypt withstood this baiting.

People who ask why Egyptians hate us should think back to these two pivotal actions by Israel. Public memory may be short-lived, but hatred is not. Its flames have been fanned since then. People who want to understand why the Egyptians hate us should recall the scenes of Operations Cast Lead and Defensive Shield, the bombing of Beirut and the shelling of Rafah. If Israelis were exposed to scenes in which some country acted in the same way toward Jews, such hatred would burn within us toward that country as well. The Arab masses saw terrible pictures and its hatred increased.

As for Somalia, the inconsequential American landings there, more a public relations than strategic operation, were no gauge of the powers of the Pentagon. The effect of both Afghanistan and Somalia seems to have been simply to lure him into illusions of US fickleness and weakness.

Connected to these miscalculations is the nature of his religious vision itself. One of its most striking features, displayed throughout the texts in this book, is the absence of any social dimension. Bin Laden was barred from the kind of analysis that would have allowed him to distinguish the different structural features of the various Muslim societies in which jihad was to be awakened, and made him hesitate in inflecting the notion of "One, Two, Three, Many Afghanistans." Morally, he does denounce a host of evils. Some of them­ - unemployment, inflation, and corruption - are social. But no alternative conception of the ideal society is ever offered. There is an almost complete lack of any social program. This alone makes it clear how distinctive al-Qaeda is as a phenomenon. The lack of any set of social proposals separates it not just from the Red Army Faction or the Red Brigades, with which it has some­ times mistakenly been compared, but - more significantly - from the earlier wave of radical Islamism, whose leading thinker was the great iconoclast Sayyid Qutb [whose similar-minded brother was a professor of Osama bin Laden's]. In place of the social, there is a hypertrophy of the sacrificial. Bin Laden's messages rarely hold out radiant visions of final triumph. His emphasis falls far more on the glories of martyrdom than the spoils of victory. Rewards belong essentially to the hereafter. This is a creed of great purity and intensity, capable of inspiring its followers with a degree of passion and prin­cipled conviction that no secular movement in the Arab world has ever matched. At the same time, it is obviously also a narrow and self-limiting one: it can have little appeal for the great mass of believers, who need more than scriptural dictates, poetic transports, or binary prescriptions to chart their everyday lives, whether as individuals or as collective members of a commu­nity, local or national. Above all, there is no rush to restore a Caliphate today. Bin Laden seems at some level to recognize the futility of a quest for restitution [i.e., restoration of the Caliphate]. He sets no positive political horizon for his struggle. Instead, he vows that jihad will continue until "we meet God and get his blessing!" [my emphasis in bold]

Mr Obama wishes to be president of a country that does not exist. In his fantasy US, politicians bury differences in bipartisan harmony. In fact, he faces an opposition that would prefer their country to fail than their president to succeed. [my emphasis]

Yet all is not lost. In particular, the US and German governments retain substantial fiscal room for manoeuvre – and should use it. But, alas, governments that can spend more will not and those who want to spend more now cannot. Again, the central banks have not used up their ammunition. They too should dare to use it. Much more could also be done to hasten deleveraging of the private sector and strengthen the financial system. Another downturn now would surely be a disaster. The key, surely, is not to approach a situation as dangerous as this one within the boundaries of conventional thinking. [my emphasis]

He doesn't realize he's getting pummeled. He thinks this is all still a genius strategy to capture centrists by compromising on every single little thing. He is not trying to put on an appearance of weakness to lull his opponent into a false sense of complacency. He doesn't even realize he is being weak. He's the one with the false sense of complacency. As he's getting knocked around the ring, he thinks he's winning.

These guys in the Obama camp are in for a horrible, rude awakening. Sometime in the next year, they are going to blink and realize they are lying flat on their back on the canvas. Then as they finally stumble up, they'll realize they should have started fighting 11 rounds ago. Then a panic will set in, but I'm afraid it will be too late by then.