Podcasts about iraqi christians

Former CIA intelligence officer Michele Rigby Assad knows better than anyone what it means to venture into uncharted territory. Michele explains in the Bend Dont Break Podcast her experience to help you embrace the often uncomfortable path to success. She will talk about how to escape your comfort zone and realize your full potential! Michele has played a pivotal role in high-stakes missions both as a counterterrorism official and as a human rights defender in the civilian world, culminating in the 2015 airlift operation and relocation of 149 persecuted Iraqi Christians. Michele also provides security advice to nonprofit organizations working against human trafficking and in support of women rebuilding their lives.  

Russia launched attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure on Christmas Day, with explosions reported across the country. Soldiers are away from their families as civilians hide amid air raid alerts. Displaced Christians in Gaza gathered to celebrate Christmas amid the ongoing war. Across the Middle East, families and communities marked the holiday, including Iraqi Christians celebrating despite the risks. An Azerbaijan Airlines flight with 67 people onboard crashed in Kazakhstan Wednesday. A Kazakh official has confirmed the deaths of 38 people. Azerbaijani authorities said they are still investigating why the plane tried to make an emergency landing. ⭕️Watch in-depth videos based on Truth & Tradition at Epoch TV

Russia launched attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure on Christmas Day, with explosions reported across the country. Soldiers are away from their families as civilians hide amid air raid alerts.Displaced Christians in Gaza gathered to celebrate Christmas amid the ongoing war. Across the Middle East, families and communities marked the holiday, including Iraqi Christians celebrating despite the risks.An Azerbaijan Airlines flight with 67 people onboard crashed in Kazakhstan Wednesday. A Kazakh official has confirmed the deaths of 38 people. Azerbaijani authorities said they are still investigating why the plane tried to make an emergency landing.

October 18, 2024 ~ Max Primorac, senior research fellow in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at The Heritage Foundation, wrote a op-ed for The Detroit News about how Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have failed Iraqi Christians. He joins Marie Osborne to share more.

Iraqi journalist Rody Sher from EWTN News' ACI Mena, joins us to remember the anniversary of the fall of Mosul and the driving of Christians from Iraq's Ninevah Plains. Then, we turn to Venezuela, where tens of thousands of citizens have taken to the streets in protest after Nicolas Maduro claimed victory in the presidential elections late last month. Venezuelan journalist Andres Henriquez from EWTN News' ACI Prensa gives us a report.

Iraqi journalist Rody Sher from EWTN News' ACI Mena, joins us to remember the anniversary of the fall of Mosul and the driving of Christians from Iraq's Ninevah Plains. Then, we turn to Venezuela, where tens of thousands of citizens have taken to the streets in protest after Nicolas Maduro claimed victory in the presidential elections late last month. Venezuelan journalist Andres Henriquez from EWTN News' ACI Prensa gives us a report. Episode: https://i.listen.ewtn.com/~IK/~IK20240810.mp3 Podcast: https://www.ewtn.com

Ten years after Islamic State, known as ISIS, invaded Iraq, the country's Christians are still suffering. Iraqi journalist Rody Sher from EWTN News' ACI Mena, joins us to remember the anniversary of the fall of Mosul and the driving of Christians from Iraq's Ninevah Plains. Then, we turn to Venezuela, where tens of thousands of citizens have taken to the streets in protest after Nicolas Maduro claimed victory in the presidential elections late last month. Many countries including the United States are demanding the release of detailed poll data. Venezuelan journalist Andres Henriquez from EWTN News' ACI Prensa gives us a report.

Shownotes and Transcript We are delighted to welcome Jacki Deason, who is the host of The Jacki Daily Show on blaze.com to help Peter delve into the recent presidential debate.  They begin by critiquing candidate performances and discussing political strategies before touching on cultural Marxism's impact on institutions, advocating for balanced history education, and prioritizing national interests in industries like energy.  The conversation extends to renewable energy challenges, highlighting the need for informed decision-making, stressing the importance of nuanced understanding and thoughtful discourse on complex societal issues. Jacki Deason hosts The Jacki Daily Show, a weekly show and podcast airing on BlazeMedia, on the dial in Texas, and podcast on iHeartRadio, iTunes, Spotify, and Stitcher. Previously, Jacki worked for an engineering firm specializing in energy production, national security, and environmental cleanup.  She served as legal counsel on Capitol Hill to the Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Constitution and the former Ranking Member of the Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee, advising on the oversight of federal agencies.  Prior to her career in Washington, she worked as a corporate litigator, and as an Assistant Vice President for a national bank. Jacki studied Economics, Spanish, and World History at Marshall University (U.S. Society of Yeager Scholars), Oxford University (U.K.), and the University of Zaragoza (Spain).  She is an alum of the Vanderbilt University Law School, where she served as the President of the law school's Federalist Society chapter. Jacki has an extensive network from which the show draws its guests—including industry leaders representing all parts of the energy sector, government officials, journalists, and political insiders.  Often, Jacki will know the day's most-wanted guest and be able to secure the guest with a personal call. Jacki is from the Ohio River Valley, where the shale runs deep. She descends from a long line of energy workers, including roughnecks, railroaders, coal miners, and nuclear energy specialists. Connect with Jacki... WEBSITE                jackidaily.com/ X/TWITTER            x.com/JackiDailyHost TRUTH                   truthsocial.com/@jackidaily INSTAGRAM           instagram.com/jackidaily/ Interview recorded  28.6.24 Connect with Hearts of Oak... X/TWITTER        x.com/HeartsofOakUK WEBSITE            heartsofoak.org/ PODCASTS        heartsofoak.podbean.com/ SOCIAL MEDIA  heartsofoak.org/connect/ SHOP                  heartsofoak.org/shop/ TRANSCRIPT (Hearts of Oak) It's wonderful to have a guest on, first time, who I met over when I was stateside last time, Jacki Deason. Jacki, thank you so much for your time today. (Jacki Deason) Thank you so much, Peter, for the opportunity. I'm looking forward to this. Not at all. I know you've got a lot happening in everything, in media world, and everything else, so it is great to have you on. And, of course, you host the Jacki Daily Show, a weekly show airing on Blaze Media. And I had the privilege of actually getting a tour of the fantastic Blaze Studios, which made me feel a little bit jealous as a Brit. But great. And I know on your tagline, it says, entertains and educates a worldwide audience, dispels fear with facts and all things energy, freedom, happiness and prosperity. And I love that uplifting message. And your background you worked in energy and then before that legal counsel on Capitol Hill and then before that you worked as a corporate litigator and assistant at the president for a national bank. So, a lot in there in your background a lot of experience you bring and I love talking to those in the media who actually have a wealth of background experience they bring to that and it's It's not just another podcast. So, great to have you with us. And obviously, people can find you @JackiDailyHost on Twitter or X. And JackiDaily.com is the website. And all the links for your Facebook and Instagram are all up there on the website and on Twitter. Now, the first thing I need to ask you, of course, Jacki, is the presidential debate last night. And I didn't subject myself to the whole two hours. I watched snippets of it, maybe snippets more on the Trump side, because you get what feed Twitter gives you. But what were your thoughts on that? And I've read a lot of newspaper headlines, but what were your thoughts? So, I watched it from start to finish and I went and got a massage and took a nap before the debate just to get rested up for it. Like everyone here was so jacked up, amped up for it. You know, I mean, we couldn't wait, because we actually thought this moment might never come, either because Biden would just refuse to debate, which is the new thing, or because, you know, Trump could be in jail. Literally, it's possible. So, we didn't know what was going to happen. Out of nowhere came this early debate, which is weird. I'm telling you, the Democrats are doing that strategically, agreeing to that so that they can show the world why they have no choice but to replace him at the convention. Probably with Michelle Obama, could be Gavin Newsom. But it's Michelle Obama who, who, you know, they put these books out for her, book tours all over the place. She's all over these shows that are, you know, supposedly mainstream culture shows, but they're really run by Democrat loyalists at the top. She's the one that's being traipsed out all the time, not Gavin Newsom. They did have a debate with Gavin Newsom and DeSantis earlier in the year. So, some people thought they were, like, trying him out. But, I really think that's the whole purpose of this debate. I think it came from the Democrat side. They know the problem they have. I mean, there's no way that Biden can not have major gaps showing that he's cognitively not there anymore. He wasn't in 2016 either, really, but they could hide it well enough. People scorned me for saying that he was being drugged up in advance of national media appearances. But you know what? Like about 95 percent of conservatives believe that. And now probably 90 percent of liberals would believe that. I don't know. But anyway, you heard Biden say that there were a thousand trillionaires in America. I mean, whoa, that people were being raped by their in-laws and their brothers and sisters, that he beat Medicare, that Democrats are against late-term abortion. Abortion, I'm sure that disgusted and shocked his base, who think therefore, or at least if they actually correct that, most Democrats are not, but the party apparatus, the people at the highest levels most certainly are. So anyway, those were all major flaws in his performance, I thought, aside from the obvious the name calling and moodiness and all that. Trump actually, I thought, performed just like last time, which is that, you know, I watched and he is, he missed a lot of opportunities to lay out. Well, there were a lot of opportunities, I agree. I mean, I think it's just that he refuses to prepare, right? So because, like you said, He said, I saw the quote, he says, I've been preparing for this debate all of my life. He is off the cuff because he is, in fact, a performer. He is an entertainer. And that works to his benefit a lot. People don't know, if you haven't been to a Trump rally, he's a completely different person. He is like a stand-up comedian. He is very relaxed. He's having a great time. He's witty and clever. Last night, he was agitated. You know, it wasn't, it's a very different Trump. And so, you know, I heard a lot of repetition in there. And, you know, John McCain did the same thing. They're two very different people, two very different people. But, you know, I thought Trump was passable. I don't think it changed really anyone's minds. Campaigns, the only person who changed minds was Biden, because now he did his job, which was to convince the Democrats that they don't want him on the ticket, even though they voted for him in the primary. That's the issue. And he has to want to step down. I mean, I actually thought that maybe going after his son criminally was about coercing him to step down. They did the same thing to General Flynn on the Republican side, you might remember. So, that either didn't work or he didn't get it. He really cognitively might not even understand threats at this point. So, it's very interesting. But there's a total meltdown this morning on the Democrat side, which I think is orchestrated, foreseeable. I try to not get too political on my, X account. You know, I actually try to avoid the words Democrat or Republican. It's not a partisan show. It's a policy show. So, I don't, but I don't mind when I go into other people's shows. It's your show. So, you can ask anything you want. And the truth is I love talking politics. I don't get to do it very often on my show. So, this is a real treat for me. Good. Well, I want to ask you everything. And I've had the privilege of being at three Trump rallies, including my picture with the man himself, so it's it's phenomenal and from someone who's been at steeped in U.K politics nothing beats a trump rally. So, anyone watching this you have to get out to a trump rally before November, because nothing beats that atmosphere the excitement the the electric environment that is. But I was kind of thinking, and I agree with your assessment fully. I'm glad I'm not more down the rabbit hole than you are; Michelle Obama: I agree it ticks those boxes. I wonder why kind of you the trump team would want to debate Biden, because you don't want him to look too decrepit because then it plays into the hands of those who want to remove him, but the media have portrayed him as mentally unable over the last maybe one, two, three, months and it of seems to be playing up and this seems to be the the culmination in that. So, maybe the Trump team couldn't actually do anything about it that they had to push for the debate, agree, and then whatever happens-happens. So, what... Yeah, what were your I thought why would he want to debate debate Biden, because he seems to be winning on immigration on the border and economy, so why go into that. You know, I don't communicate with the Trump team, so I don't have any special insight into that decision making process. But I will tell you, I do believe what they should have done is waited until after the Democratic convention, which is the normal course of things. I mean, that's the way it normally works. I mean, the fact that they would agree to this should have tipped off some alarm bells. So, I do think that was a tactical mistake myself. I think I think that part of what they must have been thinking is literally it's possible Trump will be in jail between now and the election. What the debates represent, and few people appreciate this, even in the States, is it is the one event where you have both sides watching, listening, meaning President Trump can get through to even the Democrat supporters of Biden with zero media filter. And that almost never happens. It almost doesn't exist. Everything we get is filtered through our media source of choice. And so it's really scary that we live in these echo chambers and now you have social media so you can cultivate your own reality and universe and friend set. So, I love debates because it's the one opportunity we get to really speak directly to the other side. We have to find all of those opportunities we can. And even people like you and me, who we might not be running for president, but we do have a platform and a voice. And I try very hard to find those opportunities to speak directly to people on the other side, especially at the highest levels. Levels because once you spend time around them, which is so rare these days, unfortunately, you realize something. Many of them are just human beings. They really do believe in what they're doing sometimes. Some of them do. And so I've spent a lot of time lately trying to hack the filter that they're seeing through and figure out how do we get to them? Because here's what I come away with every single time. Every single time I spend time with a high profile liberal, like having drinks or spending social time, you know, just really downtime. It's that both sides maybe are being deceived. What the really bad guys, the really bad guys don't want is for us to communicate directly and get around the filters that are put on us. By both sides of the corporate media. So... I just, we have to remain humanized to each other. We become objectified as some big, horrible, awful other out there. And they believe the worst things imaginable about us. And it has to be shocking for them to be around us and find out that we're just normal, decent, caring, respectful human beings. And so I just come away with this. I'm not going to give you the names, but it was just a couple of months ago. I was out in Palo Alto, California with two extremely high profile liberals. You would know their names right away in the UK too. And so we were meeting for this kind of side reason. It's not the core of what I do at all. I just happened to be there. In fact, I wasn't really an invitee and clearly they had no idea who I was, because I walk in and spend half an hour talking to one of them before this thing gets started. And she's like, so what do you do? And I'm like, well, I do energy and environment research. And she goes, oh, how lovely. She has no idea who I am, which is great. So, we have this amazing conversation. And here's the bottom line. At the end of this long event, we then go have drinks. And it's just a few of us, like less than five. And these two to say to me, every day, we were on the phone this morning and we said, every day we become more conservative, because they're like, you know what? Pro-Hamas protests, we're out. This business of, you know, operating on children, removing their genitals, so they can't reproduce before they're even old enough to know, you know, you're four years old. Every other day you think you're a dinosaur, much less the opposite sex. They're like, we're out. We're having no part of that. We cannot be a part of that. It's a violation of our conscience. And then, you know, men in our transition, men in women's sports, we're out. We can't be a part of that. And even one of them was in a gay marriage and said that the other one, the spouse, had just been let go from a job for refusing to identify pronouns, because that person objected. You know, there are actually people on the other side who are reasonable. They know what's happening is not the truth. They know they're being asked to be part of something that cannot be right. And so, I really just came away with a lot of hope after speaking with them. Like I said, they'd been drinking. I feel like they were like loosened up and it was like a truth serum coming out. And it was really very reassuring. And then they said to me, they said, you know, people just believe that Republicans don't care about people. I said, that is just emphatically false. It is emphatically false. I feel like most of my day is filled with trying to figure out how to protect people. And so anyway, what I'm saying to you is that conversation was so valuable. It was so valuable because that's a humanizing conversation. I think it's exactly the conversation that the really bad guys don't want us to have. hey don't want us to figure out that the people on the other side are probably actually decent human beings who just, that what's happened is we, we all have, different information sets, different life experiences, different, friend sets. And so that's probably the biggest difference between the average liberal and average conservative. It's different. You've been exposed to different information. And so, but you're not that different. So, I just want this unifying message. I had a separate conversation with a guy who was the founder of the Bloods street gang here in Dallas. There's the Bloods and the Crips in LA, very famous. There've been films made about it. There are rap songs about it. These are very violent criminal gangs, but they are a family to the people who join them, because often they don't have family. Anyway, I was speaking with him him. And I could tell you other things about him that make him different from me. We're racially different. We're at this point, socioeconomically different, but I just, we had this amazing conversation and I just thought this is exactly, again, I came away thinking, this is the conversation that the people who work to divide us don't want us to have. We have to force those conversations in those social settings where it's not a debate. You're not at a panel, right? You know, where it's scripted in front of a lot of people. You're just talking one-on-one. I want to pick up, because that's a really interesting line, because often we see the other side as the enemy, or we see them as actually as maybe evil in what they push forward and forget that they are probably misinformed. And that may be a better place to start. I want to pick up on that, but I wanted to ask you one more question on the debate, because some of the headlines, I mean, even CNN talked about 67% thought that Trump won. From their viewers and 33% thought the Biden one, I don't know where how those 33% were watching; maybe they were sleeping, I don't know. You were pulling The White House staff. They could have been but and then a lot of the headlines. I mean, New York post: this debate was a blowout for Trump, political Democrats really have no way to spin this. And New York Times piece: Joe Biden is a good man a good president, but he must buy out of the race. And then CNN did that fact check and and showed a lot of the stuff was incorrect. Independent in the U.K: I really didn't know what he said and I think, I don't think he does either, which was a quote from Trump. That was the headline of the article. Trump pulls no punches as Biden struggles in debate Sky News an unmitigating disaster for Biden and tv debate with Trump as he faces calls from democrats to step aside which is what you touched on. Then The Guardian, who will replace Joe Biden, and a lot of other publications beginning to talk about who will replace for the first time ever, actually. It's been more the conservative side, but actually seeing the left. And it seemed as though simply on the end with Joe Biden taking him by the hand and leading the poor guy off stage where Trump just walks off. All of that. Seem to be put out to say, actually, he's not able to continue. And I'm firmly of the view, not that I would put money on it, even after our conversation, but actually, Michelle Obama seems to tick all the boxes the Democrats want. So they think. I'll tell you what, here's my thought about it. And maybe I'm totally wrong, not like I had my finger on the pulse of the average Democrat voter. But she seems to me to check the boxes for the elite Democrat set. The elites, they're the ones that you the only ones you're allowed to hear from, really, on cable news. So, Michelle Obama, she is, I think I was saying I grew up beneath the poverty line. I'm now very much not. The liberals in the suburbs and the really nice neighbourhoods think she's the greatest thing since sliced bread. I'll tell you who I don't think thinks that. Union Democrats, people working with their hands, which historically was a huge voting bloc for Democrats. And they've already been peeling off a lot long before she came along. Then Hispanics. I mean, again, Hispanics are very practical people. There's no cocktail circuit that they're going to care about as much. These are like, some of them are new Americans, but a lot of them are not. People forget. We have a very large Hispanic community that's Cuban in South Florida and Venezuelan from the central and South America. You've got the Puerto Ricans in New York. [20:39] You've got Mexicans in Texas. [20:42] And we we have in this southwestern part of the country, Hispanics who were here long before we were, like literally, they didn't immigrate anywhere in the last probably thousand years. So, they're a huge demographic that's now flipping Republican. And people marvelled at this last election. These were once Native American tribes. Then they were conquered by the Mexicans, specifically the Spanish government when they were still in control of Mexico. Then they were Texians because they'd won their independence from Mexico. Then they joined the United States. So, the borders just keep running over top of these folks. That's a huge demographic. What is it about Michelle Obama that appeals to them at all? I can't think of really one reason why. What has she accomplished, really? They don't care about checking boxes and woke politics. These are people who care about inflation and crime and immigration, obviously, for where they live is going to be the big issue for them. I'm just not at all sure. Then how about all of the new immigrants who come from countries? Where women don't have the status that they have here? How about countries where, you know, if women testify in court, their testimony is worth half of a man's? We're importing immigrants from countries where that is the practice. That is the belief system. Why are they going to go for Michelle Obama? I just don't, I don't see it. Okay, well, we'll watch it and see if her surname carries her forward or whether they choose someone else. But I 100% agree, that everything was played out to show that Biden is not able to stand us, whether Jill Biden accepts us, maybe that could be the sticking point. I'm sure she's enjoying that position in the White House. Jacki, I'm interested in your thoughts on the whole march of cultural Marxism, which you've seen over the past couple of decades, really, through every institution, not only in the US, but here in the UK and across Europe. And during this election, immigration and the economy are the two big issues, whether it's in the European elections just passed or the French elections just happening, the UK elections coming up in days or the US election in November. It's actually interesting the same issues which is border control, immigration, and the economy, but the whole issue of cultural Marxism and how it's torn up a lot of our institutions and I'm wondering how that kind of fits in in regards to rewriting American history, and then we'll get on to kind of education, the whole gender debate, but where does that fit into this, presidential election? So, I mean, we now have reached, the Marxists have now reached a critical mass of young people. So, let's say people under the age of maybe who genuinely are buying into what they're. Which is that there's an us versus the oppressor. So they're permitting the people teaching them to divide us. That's the first issue. And it's just a modern application. And because they don't have enough evidence, I mean, they tried earlier in American history in the last 100 years to divide us, lower income bracket, upper income bracket. They introduced the words class. That's why I try so hard to avoid using the words working class, upper middle class. The word class itself is dividing. It just means, you know, let's call them upper income, lower income. It didn't work in America because frankly, I mean, I grew up in a lower income family. Our lives were not that bad. You know, I don't recall ever going hungry, ever going homeless. We were free. We could say what we wanted, do what we wanted. It wasn't like Europe where only the elite could hunt. We could hunt, we could fish and feed ourselves and grow our own crops. We all had gardens growing up. Our lives were pretty good. The socioeconomic Marxism really never caught on here. gear. So, they shifted gears. And now it's all about your immutable characteristics, race, sex, or now they'll fluid it with gender. Race and sex, you inherited those completely beyond any control of your own from the moment of your conception, not the moment of your birth, the moment of your conception. You were encoded with your DNA as male or female, black, white, whatever. And so this has been success. What's amazing is they had to do the bag of checks and go back 400 years to the 1619 Project to be able to find sins big enough to cause people to begin to question whether or not America was good, whether or not they are good, whether or not their parents are any good and their grandparents. And so what I see happening, and it's the critical theory school, the Frankfurt School and all that, you're seeing them use critical theory, which in my mind is the cheapest theory. Easiest, lowest bar school. And all it does is say, all right, let's take whatever it is we want to destroy, zoom in on the worst moments in the history, moments in a person's life, blow them up out of all proportion and pretend they're representative. And by all means, what you will never want to do is actually show the other side of that person or that country. Here's the truth, right? You can destroy any country or people or person with that approach. There is no people group that didn't practice slavery. And in fact, Americans were one of the first to abolish it. I mean, slavery is going on right now all over the world. There are more people enslaved right now than in any other time in history. Do people even know that? They don't, because if they did, the fault wouldn't break down along racial lines that the Marxists need to get what they want politically in this country. It's just a matter of changing the perspective of the kids they're brainwashing and saying, just a minute, let me ask you one question. What country would you rather live in, the United States or pick a Marxist country? Pick one. Cuba, Russia, some of the middle America countries have hard left governments. Some of the South American countries, you know, I don't see you rushing their border the way the people from those countries are rushing our border. Why is that? Why do they want to be here? We must be doing something right. Would you like to talk about what we're doing right? You know, would Would you like to talk about what's so great about America or the West or Christendom as it was once known? Countries that have a Christian background? I mean, one of the things I thank God for is that I was born in this country and I wasn't born an Iraqi Christian in the last 30 years. Or a Syrian Christian or a Lebanese Christian. The war on Christians and the genocide that's happened against Christians around the world, not just in the Middle East and North Africa, but all over the place, is an outrage. And no one seems too concerned about that. Why? Why aren't Americans under the age of 40 taught about that? Why not? Instead of learning about the genocide that's happening today. They're learning about something that happened 400 years ago. They have to reach back 400 years. And still, if I were born, you know, check their boxes. If I were a young, black, female, bisexual, I'd far rather live in the United States than live in any other country. Period. Period. And so what are we doing right? Why is that true? And why is nobody asking these questions? So, I guess what I'm saying is it's a critical theory. [29:50] And you can get people to understand this by applying it to one human being, rather than looking at countries, rather than needing a command of world history, which most people don't have, because the Department of Education scrubbed that out of the curriculum a long time ago to make sure you can't do this analysis I'm asking you to do. Let's look at one person. Let's take the Christian view of this, which is you can take any human being and, and take the worst moments of their lives where they behave the worst, they did the worst thing that they're most ashamed of, that they most regret. You can zoom in on that and put it up on a big, you know, overhead projector. Let me show you how old I am and overhead projector and, or put it up on your social media and pay for it to go viral and show the world that one worst moment in that human being's life and pretend like that represents their life. There's nothing else to know, right? They've never done anything good in their life. There's no redeeming anything about that person. This is it. That's what the Marxists do. That's what the politics is about today. And it's about dehumanizing and demonizing that person or that country or that culture or that faith off the very worst moments in history three with the very worst people who ever phony put on the mantra and that, that label. So, I guess it's just, it's the critical thinking that we have to teach to the younger people so they don't fall victim to this warring against their own people, their own family, you know, people who won't even speak to their parents anymore because they, they believe something different about supply side economics or taxation or something. It's ridiculous. And that's brainwashing. And it's what What brainwashers do, they isolate you from everyone who ever loved you. So, they can have their way with you in your brain. And so it's not that the kids are bad, and it's not that they're stupid. It's none of those things. And you have to refrain from getting angry about it and calling people names, because it's actually that nobody has ever taught them real history. No one has ever taught them how to think critically, because that's the last thing that the Marxists want. I was talking to a lady yesterday in Texas who is doing education reform. Now, she said, this is in Texas now, they don't even want to give the kindergartners pencils or crayons. God forbid they might learn how to read and write. You know, it was illegal in slave-holding countries to teach the slaves how to read. You know why? They might actually advance in society. They're harder to subdue. And now they're doing the exact same thing in Texas schools or someone's trying to make that the policy. This is an outrage. And they do it on the basis of not every kid can read and write. Not every kid can succeed. We need to care about the people at the lower end who can't succeed. And that is a thinly veiled excuse for keeping them down. We got to call this what it is. That is victimization. That's a predator trying to keep those kids down. It's really disgusting. And there are very few people who are truly the bad people. Again, it's only the operatives who want to keep us divided and want to keep people ignorant. We have to recognize this is so important. It's a teeny little sliver of the population. It's not the Democrat party. Most Democrats don't feel that way. It's some of the people at the top of the apparatus who are funding things, who run the media. And we all need to kind of get together against that teeny little sliver of bad people trying. And why do they do it? You know, it's about power and money. It's about separating people from their rights and their money and their autonomy and their self-determination. Anyway, I could go on for a long time. As you can see, I'm very passionate about this and reframing the debate so that people aren't having their heritage stripped from them. Americans should be very proud to be Americans. There's a lot we do right. And that's why there are millions of people flooding our border to get in here. And nowhere else in the world do you see that. Yeah, I agree. We're seeing British history rewritten where the British Empire is now something awful instead of looking at how William Wilberforce was the forefront of actually freeing, stopping slavery and then looking at the educational side, the health side, transport, all those things that were provided and history is rewritten. And it kind of fits into in the US where Make America Great Again is an uplifting message of hope, of actually bringing the country to where it should be. And that's now degraded as evil and hateful. It's curious where making a country great is regarded as awful. It's, yeah, a curious mix. It's a very difficult mantra to try to demonize, but people have certainly tried. And so, you know, they're like, what he's trying to say, they make this up. Okay. They're saying what Trump is trying to say is that somehow we were great when we were less diverse. It's like, actually, this country has always been diverse. Always. There's never been a day, a day since America existed from the 1700s that we didn't have have. Native Americans, especially all over the frontier, wherever that was, we have, you know, always had, at least since the 1700s, a hefty percentage of Black Americans. We had, as you know, the Spanish were in Florida, the French were in the North, the Dutch, you know, it used to be Dutch in New York before it was English, before we renamed it York. Yeah. But anyway, and of course, as I told you, the people in the Southwest, they were always tribal and they're still there. They're not on reservations. They live in Laredo. They live in El Paso. So anyway, it's always been a diverse country. Therefore, the slogan, Make America Great Again, in, does not hearken back to some, this is what they, his enemies want you to believe, like it harkens back to some time when America was all white. When was that? But because their sense of history is about as deep as their lifetime, or maybe not even that long, they became politically conscious five years ago. So, nothing existed before five years ago. And so anyway, I mean, sometimes I make fun of the the people on the other side just because you have to laugh or cry. You got to have some fun sometime. But really, there's a great mission in front of us to educate people about real history and some of it is dark, some of it is bad, and then we have to own it. When you were in Texas, for example. My studio, part of the studio is a museum. It's called the American Journey Experience. And the museum highlights all kinds of things from Hollywood and its history to, you know, to the Geneva Bible, to crime and punishment. There's an electric chair in there showing you some of the really dark stuff. And Glenn Beck is, you know, running that project. And he's like the the lead host at the Blaze Media. He thought it was important to take all the horrible things in history and showcase them accurately, which sometimes it's actually worse than you think. Sometimes it's better than you think. But also there's American greatness in the museum. You can also see a whole library of burned books that the Nazis burned in World War II. So, you know, it's just a lot of great stuff that you can't really get anywhere else. And so that's the importance of history. We have to tell it all. The good and the bad. Concede the bad points. But make sure the good points are taught. And you're making me jealous again and I did see some of that. I thought it's so essential that that story, that history is preserved because there seems to be an onslaught everywhere. One of the other tidelines is America first. First and this is something that actually Europe are struggling with actually nations being the priority for the government which should be the first duty of any government putting the country and citizens first and we've ended up a duty of the government seems to be putting the citizens last. I mean when Trump was in the White House he there were many things that he wanted to do with manufacturing, with energy, and I know your background in energy, and he always talked about being energy independent. And we've moved away, not only in America, but in Britain, we've got gas in the North Sea, and we were energy independent for decades. But we've moved away from that to shipping LPG from foreign countries, and that seems better than actually producing it under our own feet. But that must be another part of Trump's call for November to actually put America first and to use the resources that America has instead of relying on other countries. Right. So, you know, COVID should have taught us about strategic commodities. There were all kinds of things that we needed and we weren't sure that we would have them, whether it's pharmaceuticals like antibiotics or whether it's PPE is what we call it. But that's basically during COVID, it's all the sterile stuff, the masks, you know, the gloves, the simple stuff, plastic barriers. America doesn't manufacture anything anymore. Well, take that problem and put it on steroids when you're talking about oil and gas. Oil and gas run the world, even now and even for the foreseeable future, at least 20 years from now. Anything to the contrary is just a lie. It's just a lie. Imagine this in in the first two world wars the united states supplied about 70 percent of the oil and gas or the fuel to the allies that was needed to win those wars if it weren't for American oil and gas and American steel as well those wars would have gone the other direction, understand it. So, that's why you know Hitler was trying so hard to get Baku Azerbaijan on. That's the oldest oil field in the world. It's huge. And he really needed that to continue the war. That's a lot of what went wrong for him. And thank God it went wrong for him. And so it was us storming the beaches of Europe at this time with oil and natural gas. And it's one reason why the pipeline that the Russians lost was such a big deal too. Because everyone knows fossil fuels are still what run the world. It's the reason why China's building all these coal plants, because they're smart. They have to somehow take care of 1.3 or more billion people. You can't do that without fossil fuels. We are watching this bizarre suicide that our federal government is trying to impose upon us. Right now, the U.S. is the number one oil producer on Earth. We're the number one natural gas producer on Earth. That wasn't true before the fracking revolution. So first you saw the attack on fracking. It supposedly is destroying groundwater. It's destroying the air and all that proved false. It was debunked. Then it was methane. Then it's attack pipelines. Suddenly pipelines are evil, even though they're obviously the most green way of moving the hydrocarbon because the alternatives are rail and truck. When you stop the pipeline, all you're doing is moving it to rail and truck, which has like 20 times the carbon footprint of a pipeline. So anyway, back to what Trump needs to do is make clear to people, number one, face the reality. With math and with physics, it is not possible to run this country on wind and solar, nor is it green, by the way, but that's a much longer conversation. But when you watch people make really bad decisions like like RFK Jr. And Governor Cuomo, who banned fracking in New York, an outrage. New York is rich in shale. It has one of the most monstrous shale plays in the country. Pennsylvania chose to develop it. So, you have like a lot of wealth in Pennsylvania. These poor farmers up in New York, they can't have any of that money and the New Yorkers can't have any of the gas. So guess what? The result is that the Russians are pulling their tankers into the Northeast to give New York its natural gas. And the New Yorkers are paying the Russians and therefore or have been since over the time when they did the ban, which I think was 2014. Russians are a little more suppressed at this point. But for a long, long, long time, that's what happened. Now you're paying Russia for your fuel. Congratulations. You didn't change one thing about the amount of fossil fuels you're burning. All you're doing is giving Putin money to fuel a war. And so this is what happens. But the New Yorkers really believed that if they voted for the fracking ban, they were all going to just magically hop over to wind and solar, which can't even fuel that state. Apparently, all the battery storage in the country right now could run New York City for an hour. So, yeah, but they were lied to. They were lied to. And so they didn't know that. hey would never have made that choice if they'd had the real facts that people like Governor Cuomo and RFK Jr. Miseducated them because they were miseducated themselves. Yeah, not huge. I think energy needs to be; without energy actually economy collapses nothing works and energy is is absolutely central and forefront to to anything.. Jacki, I really do appreciate your time covering obviously the debate that we've just had and touching on some of those key issues which I think will be front and foremost in this election campaign. So, thank you so much for giving us your time today. Thank you, Peter. And thank you for the opportunity. It's really fun to connect across the ocean here, have this conversation. I really appreciate everything you do. Oh, thank you. You keep up the great work.

This Week: A powerful new alliance poses dangers to Israel & Jews worldwide; Day of the Christian Martyr. Iraqi Christians under siege; The immigrant combat veteran who hopes to unseat a former VP candidate; Beaten & bloodied. Antisemitic violence in L.A.

Today's HeadlinesMuslims associate Iraqi Christians with the West and increase persecutionBuilding businesses in BelizeChristian camps in South Africa connect fatherless sons with male mentors

Al-Iraqiya news recently started a Syriac-language broadcast in an attempt to preserve the ancient language, which derives from Aramaic, the original language of the Bible and Jesus. They are based in Baghdad. People at the network and in the Iraqi Christian community talk about what this means for them.

As ISIS sweeps through the Middle East, the regions' minority groups face brutal oppression. In Northern Iraq, ex-CIA officers Michele Rigby Assad and her husband, Joseph Assad, feel compelled to do what they can to help. Michele joins Sophia Di Martino to recount the steps that led to a dramatic evacuation of Iraqi Christians from Erbil in 2015. From SPYSCAPE, the home of secrets. A Cup And Nuzzle production. Series producer: Joe Foley. Produced by Ashley Clivery. Music by Nick Ryan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A daily news briefing from Catholic News Agency, powered by artificial intelligence. Ask your smart speaker to play “Catholic News,” or listen every morning wherever you get podcasts. www.catholicnewsagency.com - The roof of a Catholic church in the Mexican city of Madero collapsed on Sunday, killing at least 10 people while they were attending Mass, authorities said following the disaster. https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/255545/roof-of-church-collapses-in-mexico-killing-at-least-10 Pope Francis sent his condolences on Saturday to an Iraqi Christian community in Qaraqosh, northern Iraq, that was devastated by a massive fire at a crowded wedding reception that killed over 100 and injured 150. https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/255549/pope-francis-sends-telegram-to-iraqi-christian-community-after-tragic-wedding-fire An annual Requiem Mass that has been held at Westminster Cathedral in London, England, for more than 50 years has been relocated amid the continued restrictions on the celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass issued by the Vatican. https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/255543/annual-requiem-latin-mass-canceled-at-westminster-cathedral-in-london-after-50-years The Vatican has released Pope Francis' original responses to a set of dubia on highly-charged doctrinal questions submitted by five cardinals earlier this summer — and criticized the cardinals for going public with the matter just days before the start of the Synod on Synodality. https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/255540/vatican-releases-pope-francis-responses-to-pre-synod-dubia-criticizes-cardinals Today, the Church celebrates Saint Mother Théodore Guérin. A Frech Sister of Providence, Mother Théodore Guérin was sent to Indiana in 1840 to found a convent of the Sisters of Providence in the diocese of Vincennes. There she pioneered Catholic education, opened the first girls' boarding school in Indiana, and fought against the anti-Catholicism prevalent in the day. She was well known for her heroic witness to faith, her hope, and her love of God. https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/saint/st-mother-theodore-guerin-382

For more information about Embrace the Middle East, visit www.embraceme.org.To find out more about Ankawa Humanitarian Committee, visit: www.ankawahc.org.

This Sunday at 9PM EST! The War on Christianity Part II. What about our own country and our life style? What are we living through? What are we accepting as everyday norm now and is ok by today's standard? Look around the world! In effect, the world is witnessing the rise of an entire new generation of Christian martyrs. The carnage is occurring on such a vast scale that it represents not only the most dramatic Christian story of our time, but arguably the premier human rights challenge of this era as well. To put flesh and blood on those statistics, all one has to do is look around. In Baghdad, Islamic militants stormed the Syriac Catholic cathedral of Our Lady of Salvation on 31 October 2010, killing the two priests celebrating Mass and leaving a total of 58 people dead. Though shocking, the assault was far from unprecedented; of the 65 Christian churches in Baghdad, 40 have been bombed at least once since the beginning of the 2003 US-led invasion. The effect of this campaign of violence and intimidation has been devastating for Christianity in the country. At the time of the first Gulf War in 1991, Iraq boasted a flourishing Christian population of at least 1.5 million. Today the high-end estimate for the number of Christians left is around 500,000, and realistically many believe it could be as low as 150,000. Most of these Iraqi Christians have gone into exile, but a staggering number have been killed. India's northeastern state of Orissa was the scene of the most violent anti-Christian pogrom of the early 21st century. In 2008, a series of riots ended with as many as 500 Christians killed, many hacked to death by machete-wielding Hindu radicals; thousands more were injured and at least 50,000 left homeless. Many Christians fled to hastily prepared displacement camps, where some languished for two years or more. An estimated 5,000 Christian homes, along with 350 churches and schools, were destroyed. A Catholic nun, Sister Meena Barwa, was raped during the mayhem, then marched naked and beaten. Police sympathetic to the radicals discouraged the nun from filing a report, and declined to arrest her attackers. In Burma, members of the Chin and Karen ethnic groups, who are strongly Christian, are considered dissidents by the regime and routinely subjected to imprisonment, torture, forced labour, and murder. In October 2010, the Burmese military launched helicopter strikes in territories where the country's Christians are concentrated. A Burmese Air Force source told reporters that the junta had declared these areas 'black zones', where military personne were authorised to attack and kill Christian targets on sight. Though there are no precise counts, thousands of Burmese Christians are believed to have been killed in the offensive. In Nigeria, the militant Islamic movement 'Boko Haram' is held responsible for almost 3,000 deaths since 2009, including 800 fatalities last year alone. The movement has made a speciality out of targeting Christians and their churches, and in some cases they seem determined to drive Christians out altogether from parts of the country. #Demons #Occultism #Supernatural #Satanism #Exorcism #antichrist #Possession #DarkArts #EvilSpirits #InfernalHierarchy #Summoning #Demonology101 #DemonicPowers #ForbiddenKnowledge #Paranormal #DemonWorship #DemonicPossession #Sorcery #BlackMagic #HellishCreatures #TheologyofEvil #MythicalBeings #DarkForces #SpiritualWarfare #DemonHunter #DemonologyResearch #OccultKnowledge @DemonologyExperts @OccultResearch @Supernaturallnsight @SatanicStudies @ExorcismNews @PossessionHelp @DarkArtsAcademy @EvilSpiritinsights @InfernalHierarchy101 @SummoningGuide @DemonsUnleashed @ForbiddenKnowledge @ParanormalEnigma @DemonWorshipers @DemonicPossessionTips @SorcerySecrets @BlackMagicMastery @HellishCreatures @TheologyOfEvil @MythicalBeingsRealm @DarkForcesAlert @SpiritualWarfare101 @DemonHunterHQ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/grizzly-onthehunt/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/grizzly-onthehunt/support

Almost half of Christians say the Bible is ambiguous on its teaching on abortion. Why didn't Jesus speak on abortion or homosexuality-- Was He pro-LGBT and pro-abortion-- The Old Testament law is important to establish a biblical standard of ethics on abortion. But, some use Old Testament law unlawfully. They do not handle the law in the right way. How would we handle the law as Jesus did, or as the Apostles did in-Acts 15-and-Matthew 15-- --This program includes---1. The World View in 5 Minutes with Adam McManus -John Eliot- Puritan -Apostle to the Indians-, Iraqi Christians remember The Black Day, Biden admin pressured Big Tech to suppress criticism of COVID mandates---2. Generations with Kevin Swanson

https://paranormalhub.com/grizzly-hunt What about our own country and our life style? What are we living through? What are we accepting as everyday norm now and is ok by today's standard? Look around the world! In effect, the world is witnessing the rise of an entire new generation of Christian martyrs. The carnage is occurring on such a vast scale that it represents not only the most dramatic Christian story of our time, but arguably the premier human rights challenge of this era as well. To put flesh and blood on those statistics, all one has to do is look around. In Baghdad, Islamic militants stormed the Syriac Catholic cathedral of Our Lady of Salvation on 31 October 2010, killing the two priests celebrating Mass and leaving a total of 58 people dead. Though shocking, the assault was far from unprecedented; of the 65 Christian churches in Baghdad, 40 have been bombed at least once since the beginning of the 2003 US-led invasion. The effect of this campaign of violence and intimidation has been devastating for Christianity in the country. At the time of the first Gulf War in 1991, Iraq boasted a flourishing Christian population of at least 1.5 million. Today the high-end estimate for the number of Christians left is around 500,000, and realistically many believe it could be as low as 150,000. Most of these Iraqi Christians have gone into exile, but a staggering number have been killed. India's northeastern state of Orissa was the scene of the most violent anti-Christian pogrom of the early 21st century. In 2008, a series of riots ended with as many as 500 Christians killed, many hacked to death by machete-wielding Hindu radicals; thousands more were injured and at least 50,000 left homeless. Many Christians fled to hastily prepared displacement camps, where some languished for two years or more. An estimated 5,000 Christian homes, along with 350 churches and schools, were destroyed. A Catholic nun, Sister Meena Barwa, was raped during the mayhem, then marched naked and beaten. Police sympathetic to the radicals discouraged the nun from filing a report, and declined to arrest her attackers. In Burma, members of the Chin and Karen ethnic groups, who are strongly Christian, are considered dissidents by the regime and routinely subjected to imprisonment, torture, forced labour, and murder. In October 2010, the Burmese military launched helicopter strikes in territories where the country's Christians are concentrated. A Burmese Air Force source told reporters that the junta had declared these areas ‘black zones', where military personnel were authorised to attack and kill Christian targets on sight. Though there are no precise counts, thousands of Burmese Christians are believed to have been killed in the offensive. In Nigeria, the militant Islamic movement ‘Boko Haram' is held responsible for almost 3,000 deaths since 2009, including 800 fatalities last year alone. The movement has made a speciality out of targeting Christians and their churches, and in some cases they seem determined to drive Christians out altogether from parts of the country. #Demons #Occultism #Supernatural #Satanism #Exorcism #antichrist #Possession #DarkArts #EvilSpirits #InfernalHierarchy #Summoning #Demonology101 #DemonicPowers #ForbiddenKnowledge #Paranormal #DemonWorship #DemonicPossession #Sorcery #BlackMagic #HellishCreatures #TheologyofEvil #MythicalBeings #DarkForces #SpiritualWarfare #DemonHunter #DemonologyResearch #OccultKnowledge @DemonologyExperts @OccultResearch @Supernaturallnsight @SatanicStudies @ExorcismNews @PossessionHelp @DarkArtsAcademy @EvilSpiritinsights @InfernalHierarchy101 @SummoningGuide @DemonsUnleashed @ForbiddenKnowledge @ParanormalEnigma @DemonWorshipers @DemonicPossessionTips @SorcerySecrets @BlackMagicMastery @HellishCreatures @TheologyOfEvil @MythicalBeingsRealm @DarkForcesAlert @SpiritualWarfare101 @DemonHunterHQ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/grizzly-onthehunt/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/grizzly-onthehunt/support

Come with us to the Middle East as VOM Radio host, Todd Nettleton, and his wife, Char, share stories from a recent visit to persecuted Christians in the region. Listen as they share updates on Iraqi refugees who fled from ISIS more than five years ago and what the Lord is currently doing in the lives of persecuted Christians – even one who has only been a believer one week! You'll hear about an Iranian woman who, in just two years as a believer, has planted almost 40 churches! She uses every opportunity to pray for others in Jesus' name. When those prayers are answered, they instantly want to know more about the Lord she serves. Learn about Christians in the Middle East sacrificially staying with Muslim family members—in spite of persecution—in the hope of seeing their relatives know Christ. Listen also to hear about a service where former Muslims were baptized into new life in Christ—and the joy radiating from the new believers' faces. As ISIS drove across the Nineveh plains, many Iraqi Christians fled to surrounding countries as refugees. More than five years later, many are still waiting for a new beginning in another country. They are unable to work, and their children can't attend school. But the church is welcoming them—both Muslim and Christian refugees. VOM continues to partner with churches to help meet Christian refugees' needs and encourage them in this discouraging season. Learn how you can pray for them and for the church in the Middle East.

What's it like to invest in real estate in Canada? Are you tired of government overreach, wary of the “fixes” the government is putting into the economy? Do you avoid investing in rules and restriction-heavy environments like California, New York, and New Jersey? If so, you'll be interested in hearing just how much WORSE it is in Canada. Today's show will make you proud to be an American, although that was surely not the point when we recorded it. Matthew Ablakhan is a young motivated investor, the son of displaced Iraqi Christian parents. He and his brother started investing, then set up a mortgage company, and then a real estate brokerage. Together they lead a growing company in suburban Toronto. Canadian law rules out all but the wealthiest developers. Mortgage rules essentially require homeowners to make plans based on future interest rates (and who knows what they will be?). These and other issues make it challenging to make money in Canadian real estate. In fact, many Canadian investors choose to put their real estate investing money elsewhere. But Matthew and his team are sticking it out for now and doing well. We are going to hear all about that in a few minutes.

Today's HeadlinesMENA Leadership Center helps Iraqi Christians overcome persecutionAzerbaijan, Armenia could see further conflictExtreme hunger is the next crisis on Lebanon's horizon

Yes, Howard Brown is a two-time cancer survivor. As you will discover in our episode, he grew up with an attitude to thrive and move forward. Throughout his life, he has learned about sales and the concepts of being a successful entrepreneur while twice battling severe cancer.   Howard's life story is one of those events worth telling and I hope you find it worth listening to. He even has written a book about all he has done. The book entitles Shining Brightly has just been released, but you get to hear the story directly from Howards' lips.   About the Guest: Howard Brown is an author, speaker, podcaster, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, interfaith peacemaker, two-time stage IV cancer survivor, and healthcare advocate. For more than three decades, Howard's business innovations, leadership principles, mentoring and his resilience in beating cancer against long odds have made him a sought-after speaker and consultant for businesses, nonprofits, congregations, and community groups. In his business career, Howard was a pioneer in helping to launch a series of technology startups before he co-founded two social networks that were the first to connect religious communities around the world. He served his alma mater—Babson College, ranked by US News as the nation's top college for entrepreneurship—as a trustee and president of Babson's worldwide alumni network. His hard-earned wisdom about resilience after beating cancer twice has led him to become a nationally known patient advocate and “cancer whisperer” to many families. Visit Howard at ShiningBrightly.com to learn more about his ongoing work and contact him. Through that website, you also will find resources to help you shine brightly in your own corner of the world. Howard, his wife Lisa, and his daughter Emily currently reside in Michigan. About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast app.   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.     Transcription Notes Michael Hingson  00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i  capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson  01:20 Hi, and welcome to another episode of unstoppable mindset. Today, we get to interview Howard Brown, I'm not going to tell you a lot because I want him to tell his story. He's got a wonderful story to tell an inspiring story. And he's got lots of experiences that I think will be relevant for all of us and that we all get to listen to. So with that, Howard, welcome to unstoppable mindset.   Howard Brown  01:44 Thank you, Michael. I'm really pleased to be here. And thanks for having me on your show. And excited to talk to your audience and and share a little bit.   Michael Hingson  01:54 Well, I will say that Howard and I met through Podapolooza, which I've told you about in the past and event that brings podcasters would be podcasters. And people who want to be interviewed by podcasters together, and Howard will tell us which were several of those he is because he really is involved in a lot of ways. But why don't you start maybe by telling us a little bit about your, your kind of earlier life and introduce people to you and who you are. Sure, sure.   Howard Brown  02:23 So I'm from Boston. I can disguise the accent very well. But when I talked to my mother, we're back in Boston, we're packing a car. We're going for hot dogs and beans over to Fenway Park. So gotta get a soda. We're getting a soda, not a pop. So we add the Rs. They call my wife Lisa, not Lisa. But I grew up I grew up in the suburbs of Boston, a town called Framingham. And I'm a twin. And I'm very unusual. But a girl boy twin, my twin sister Cheryl. She goes by CJ is five minutes older. And I hold that I hold that now against her now that we're older and she didn't want to be older, but now she's my older sister, my big sister by five whole minutes.   Michael Hingson  03:09 Well, she's big sister, so she needs to take care of her baby brother   Howard Brown  03:12 says exactly. And she did. And we're gonna get to that because it's a really important point being a twin, which we'll get to in a second. But so Britta she Where does she live now? So she lives 40 minutes away from me here in Michigan.   Michael Hingson  03:25 Oh my gosh, you both have moved out of the area.   Howard Brown  03:27 So she she moved to Albany, New York. I moved to Southern then California, LA area and the beaches, and then Silicon Valley. And then the last 17 years we've all lived close. And we raised our families together here in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan.   Michael Hingson  03:40 What got you to all go to Michigan?   Howard Brown  03:43 Well, for me, it was a choice. My wife is from Michigan, and I was in Silicon Valley. And we were Pat had a little girl Emily, who's four. There's a story there too. But we'll we decided we wanted her to grow up with a family and cousins and aunts and uncles and my in laws live here. My wife grew up here. And this made it closer for my parents and Boston suburbs to get here as well. So great place to raise a family very different from Silicon Valley in Palo Alto, California.   Michael Hingson  04:12 Yeah, but don't you miss Steve's ice cream in Boston?   Howard Brown  04:15 I do. I miss the ice cream. I missed the cannolis in the Back Bay. I missed some of the Chinese food. So in the north end, but it just it I do, but I have not lived there. I went to college there at Babson College number one school for entrepreneurship. And then when I got my first job, I moved out to Ohio but then I moved back and well there's a whole story of why I had to move back as well but we'll get   Michael Hingson  04:41 there. So are your parents still living in Boston?   Howard Brown  04:46 They are and so my dad I call myself son of a boot man. My dad for 49 years has sold cowboy boots in New England in the in the in the western you know the states New York Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts. And that's, you know, anyone who stayed somewhere for 49 years got to be applauded. And he's a straight commission boot salesman and he sold women's shoes prior to that. So he he's, he's a renaissance man.   Michael Hingson  05:15 Wow. So does he sell cowboy boots with snow treads as it were for the winter?   Howard Brown  05:21 No snow trends but, you know, like out west when you're working on, you know, on with cattle and working out west and sometimes it's a fashion statement. Not not too many places in New England like that. But he, he made a living, he enjoyed it. And he's, he's just about to retire at the age of 79. This year.   Michael Hingson  05:39 I remember living in Boston and and when I wear shoes with just leather soles, I slid around a lot on the sidewalks and all that so did get rubber rubbers to go over my boots and then later got real boots.   Howard Brown  05:54 Right. So I have the big hiking boots, the Timberlands, but I too have a pair of a you know, in Boston, we call them rabbits, rabbits, robins. And they basically are slip ons that gave you grip. They slipped right over your leather shoes. And you wore them when anyway in the snow and in those sloshing in the mess. Yeah.   Michael Hingson  06:12 And they worked really well. They did. So you went off to college. And I gather kind of almost right from the beginning you got involved in the whole idea of entrepreneurship.   Howard Brown  06:23 Well, I did I transferred to Babson from a liberal arts school called Connecticut College. I just I found out it wasn't for me and Babson College changed the trajectory of my entire life. i i I knew that I wanted to do sales and then later technology. But Babson was the catalyst for that. They just they support entrepreneurship of all kinds, no matter how you define it, and I just drank it in and I loved, I loved my time there. I love my learning there. And I continue to stay involved with Babson very closely as a past president of the Alumni Association, a former trustee, and very actively recruit students to go there and support student businesses. So it was a big impact on me and I continue to give back to it.   Michael Hingson  07:11 That's pretty cool. So how, how did you proceed as far as a career and entrepreneurial involvement as it were in in sales and all that?   Howard Brown  07:22 So I had an internship, I had wanted cellular one when cellular phones came out and I was basically learning the business. This is really early 1984 And five, and then I got another internship at NCR Corporation if you remember national cash register 120 year old company based out of Dayton, Ohio, and now it's in Atlanta, and it's, it's just not the same company. But I took an internship there a lot of Babson folks work there. And I worked as a trainer, sales installation rep. I trained waitresses, waiters, bartenders, hotel clerks, night audits, how to use cash register computer systems. So I was the teacher and a trainer. And I would, you know, talk to waitresses and waiters and bartenders and say you can make more tips by providing better service. But the way that you do that is you type you the order into a computer, it zaps it to the order station or the back to the back of the house to cook to prepare the foods or for the drinks. And you can spend more time servicing your table which should translate into higher tips. Well, about a third of them said nope, not for me, a third of them were need to be convinced and a third of them are like I'm in. I had a lot of fun doing that. And then after the shift, the either the manager or the owner would come over and they'd give you a savior at a Chinese food restaurant. They give you a poopoo platter to go to take home to your dorm room.   Michael Hingson  08:46 So I had a lot of fun, a lot of fun and a lot of good food.   Howard Brown  08:50 Sure sure. So that's what really started me off and hired me   Michael Hingson  08:55 so did that did that concept of tips and all that and advising people ever get you to translate that to Durgin Park?   Howard Brown  09:03 I actually did install the cashiers to computers area ago Daniel hall so the checkerboard you know draped you know cloth on the table and so you know it's there's a lot of good restaurants in Boston, you know the union Oyster House with a toothpick but I did countless restaurants hotels bars, you know it was I was basically at the whim of the Salesforce and there was a couple of us that went to go train and teach people and take the night shift and make sure everything was going smoothly as they installed the new system of course the no name restaurant and other one but well you know for for your listeners that no name was a place to get, you know, really great discounted seafood but you sat on a park bench. Remember that?   Michael Hingson  09:50 Right? Oh yeah, definitely. It wasn't. Well, neither was Durgin park, but I haven't kept up Is it still there?   Howard Brown  10:00 Yes, I believe it's still there.   Michael Hingson  10:01 Oh, good. I heard somewhere that, that it might not be because of COVID. But we enjoy   Howard Brown  10:07 down it shut down for a while during COVID I hope it's back open. I'm gonna have to go now. Yeah, you're gonna make me go check to see if it's open. But you know, many of them are still there. And obviously restaurants turn over. But that's a mainstay that's got a lot of history.   Michael Hingson  10:19 Oh, it does. And we had a lot of fun with the waitresses and so on at their Compac. I know, once we went there, and you know, the whole story, that Durgan is a place where you sit at family tables, unless we actually have four people then they'll let you sit at one of the tables for for around the outside. Well, there were three of us and my guide dog when we went in one time. And the hostess said, we're gonna put you at one of the tables for for just to give more room for the puppy dog. And she sat us down there. Then the waitress came over and as they are supposed to do at Durgan Park, she said, you're not supposed to sit here. There are only three of you. And I said there's a dog under the table. No, there's not. You can't fool me with that. And the waitress isn't supposed to be snotty, right. And she just kept going on and on about it. And I kept saying there is a dog under the table. She went away. And then she came back a little bit later. And she said, You've got to move and I said no. Why don't you just look, there's a dog under the table. You're not gonna make me fall for that. She finally looked. And there are these Golden Retriever puppy eyes staring back at her. She just melted. It was so much fun.   Howard Brown  11:26 Wouldn't be Boston if you didn't get a little attitude. Well, yeah, that's part of what it's all about your right next seating. And they just they sit you in a and they say, meet each other and be married.   Michael Hingson  11:38 Yeah, yeah. And it was a lot of fun. So how long did it take you to get to Silicon Valley?   Howard Brown  11:44 Well, so the story is that I did. I worked for NCR and I got hired by NCR, but I wanted out of the hospitality business. You know, even though he's young work until two, three in the morning, once they shut the restaurant or bar down or the hotel down, and then you do the night audit and you do the records. It was a hard life. So I looked and I did my research. And I said, you know who's who's making all the money here at NCR in the banking division. And it was really the early days of the outsourcing movement, punch cards, and you're outsourcing bank accounts, over 1200 baud modems. And I said, Well, that's interesting. And so I went to NCRs training at Sugar camp to learn how to be a salesperson were they actually in the early days, they filmed you, they taught you negotiation skills, competitive analysis, Industry Skills, it was fantastic. It's like getting an MBA today. But they did it all in six months, with mixing fieldwork in with, you know, training at this education facility in Dayton, Ohio. And I came out as a junior salesperson working for for very expansive experience, guys. And they just, I knew one thing, if I made them more productive, they'd make me money. And I did. And I, they sent me to banks and savings and loans and credit unions all over New England. And I basically learned the business of banking and outsourcing to these banks. And they made a lot of money. So that was how my career started. You can't do better than that. But to answer the question, because it's a little more complex than that. But it took me NCR in 1988. And then I moved out to Los Angeles in 1991, after a big health scare, which we'll talk about, and then I moved up in 2005. So there's the timeline to get me to Silicon Valley.   Michael Hingson  13:29 So you, you definitely moved around. I know that feeling well, having had a number of jobs and been required to live in various parts of the country when going back and forth from one coast to another from time to time. So you know, it's it's there. So you, you did all of that. And you You ended up obviously making some money and continuing to to be in the entrepreneurial world. But how does that translate into kind of more of an entrepreneurial spirit today?   Howard Brown  14:00 So great question, Michael. So what happened was is that I built a foundation. So at that time when you graduated school, and as far as for technology, the big computer shops like IBM Unisys, NCR, Hewlett Packard, what they did is they took you raw out of college, and they put you through their training program. And that training program was their version of the gospel of their of their products and your competitors and all that. And that built a great foundation. Well, I moved to Los Angeles after this big health scare, which I'm sure we're gonna go back and talk about, and I moved into the network products division. So I didn't stay in the banking division. I looked at the future and said voice data and video. I think there's the future there and I was right and AT and T bought NCR and, unfortunately, this is probably 1992. They also bought McCaw cellular they had just bought all of Eddie computer. They were a big company of five 600,000 employees and I have To tell you, the merger wasn't great. You felt like a number. And I knew that was my time. That was my time where I said, I got my foundation built. It's now time to go to a startup. So your time had come. My time had come. So at&t, offered early retirement for anyone 50 and older, and then they didn't get enough takers. So they offered early retirement for anyone that wanted to change. And so the talk around the watercooler was, let's wait they'll make a better offer. And I was like, I'm 26 and a half years old. I what am I waiting for? So they made a tremendously generous offer. I took early retirement, and I moved to my first true startup called avid technology that was in the production space. And we basically were changing film and television production from analog to digital. And I never looked back, I basically have been with startups ever since. And that, but that foundation I felt was really important that I got from NCR, but I prefer smaller companies and build the building them up from scratch and moving them forward.   Michael Hingson  16:07 Yeah, when you can do more to help shape the way they go. Because the the problem with a larger a lot of larger companies is they get very set in their ways. And they tend not to listen as much as maybe they should to people who might come along with ideas that might be beneficial to them, as opposed to startups as you say,   Howard Brown  16:27 Well, it depends. I mean, you know, you want to build a company that is still somewhat innovative. So what these large companies like Google and Facebook do, and Apple is they go acquire, they acquire the startups before they get too big or sometimes like, it's like what Facebook did with Instagram, they acquired six people, Google acquired YouTube, and they acquire the technology of best of breed technology. And then they shape it, and they accelerate it up. So listen, companies like IBM are still innovative, Apple, you know, is so innovative. But you need to maintain that because it can get to be a bureaucracy, and with hundreds of 1000s of employees. And you can't please everybody, but I knew my calling was was technology startups. And I just, I needed to get that, get that foundation built. And then away away I went. And that's what I've done. Since   Michael Hingson  17:16 you're right. It's all about with with companies, if they want to continue to be successful, they have to be innovative, and they have to be able to grow. I remember being in college, when Hewlett Packard came out with the HP 25, which was a very sophisticated calculator. Back in the the late 19th, early 1970s. And then Texas Instruments was working on a calculator, they came out with one that kind of did a lot of the stuff that HP did. But about that same time because HP was doing what they were doing, they came out with the HP 35. And basically it added, among other things, a function key that basically doubled the number of incredible things that you could do on the HP 25.   Howard Brown  17:58 Right, I had a TI calculator and in high school.   Michael Hingson  18:02 Well, and of course yeah, go ahead HPUS pull reverse Polish notation, which was also kind   Howard Brown  18:09 of fun. Right and then with the kids don't understand today is that, you know, we took typing, I get I think we took typing.   Michael Hingson  18:19 Did you type did you learn to type on a typewriter without letters on the keys?   Howard Brown  18:23 No, I think we have letters I think you just couldn't look down or else you get smacked. You know, the big brown fox jumped over the you know, something that's I don't know, but I did learn but I I'm sort of a hybrid. I looked down once in a while when I'd say   Michael Hingson  18:39 I remember taking a typing course in actually it was in summer school. I think it was between seventh and eighth grade. And of course the typewriters were typewriters, typewriters for teaching so they didn't have letters on the keys, which didn't matter to me a whole lot. But by the same token, that's the way they were but I learned to type and yeah, we learned to type and we learned how to be pretty accurate with it's sort of like learning to play the piano and eventually learning to do it without looking at the keys so that you could play and either read music or learn to play by ear.   Howard Brown  19:15 That's true. And And again, in my dorm room, I had Smith Corona, and I ended up having a bottle of or many bottles of white out.   Michael Hingson  19:25 White out and then there was also the what was it the other paper that you could put on the samosa did the same thing but white out really worked?   Howard Brown  19:33 Yeah, you put that little strip of tape and then it would wait it out for you then you can type over it. Right? We've come a long way. It's some of its good and some of its bad.   Michael Hingson  19:43 Yeah, now we have spellchecker Yeah, we do for what it's worth,   Howard Brown  19:49 which we got more and more and more than that on these I mean listen to this has allowed us to, to to do a zoom call here and record and goods and Bad's to all of that.   Michael Hingson  19:58 Yeah, I still I have to tell people learning to edit. Now using a sound editor called Reaper, I can do a lot more clean editing than I was able to do when I worked at a campus radio station, and had to edit by cutting tape and splicing with splicing tape.   Howard Brown  20:14 Exactly. And that's Yeah, yeah, Michael, we change the you know, avid changed the game, because we went from splicing tape or film and Betamax cassettes in the broadcast studios to a hard drive in a mouse, right? changed, we changed the game there because you were now editing on a hard drive. And so I was part of that in 1994. And again, timing has to work out and we had to retrain the unions at the television networks. And it was, for me, it was just timing worked really well. Because my next startup, liquid audio, the timing didn't work out well, because we're, we were going to try to do the same thing in the audio world, which is download music. But when you do that, when you it's a Sony cassette and Sony Walkman days, the world wasn't ready yet. We we still went public, we still did a secondary offering. But we never really brought product to market because it took Steve Jobs 10 years later to actually sell a song for 99 cents and convince the record industry that that was, you know, you could sell slices of pizza instead of the whole pizza, the whole record out   Michael Hingson  21:17 and still make money. I remember avid devices and hearing about them and being in television stations. And of course, for me, none of that was accessible. So it was fun to to be able to pick on the fact that no matter what, as Fred Allen, although he didn't say it quite this way, once said they call television the new medium, because that's as good as it's ever gonna get. But anyway, you know, it has come a long way. But it was so sophisticated to go into some of the studios with some of the even early equipment, like Avid, and see all the things that they were doing with it. It just made life so much better.   Howard Brown  21:52 Yeah, well, I mean, you're not I was selling, you know, $100,000 worth of software on a Macintosh, which first of all the chief engineers didn't even like, but at the post production facilities, they they they drank that stuff up, because you could make a television commercial, you could do retakes, you could add all the special effects, and it could save time. And then you could get more revenue from that. And so it was pretty easy sale, because we tell them how fast they could pay off to the hardware, the software and then train everybody up. And they were making more and more and better commercials for the car dealerships and the local Burger Joint. And they were thrilled that these local television stations, I can tell you that   Michael Hingson  22:29 I sold some of the first PC based CAD systems and the same sort of thing, architects were totally skeptical about it until they actually sat down and we got them in front of a machine and showed them how to use it. Let them design something that they could do with three or four hours, as opposed to spending days with paper and paper and paper and more paper in a drafting table. And they could go on to the next project and still charge as much.   Howard Brown  22:53 It was funny. I take a chief engineer on to lunch, and I tried to gauge their interest and a third, we're just enthusiastic because they wanted to make sure that they were the the way that technology came into the station. They were they were the brainchild they were the they were the domain experts. So a third again, just like training waitresses and waiters and bartenders, a third of them. Oh, they wanted they just wanted to consume it all. A third of them were skeptical and needed convincing. And a third of whom was like, that's never going out on my hair anywhere. Yeah, they were the later and later adopters, of course.   Michael Hingson  23:24 And some of them were successful. And some of them were not.   Howard Brown  23:28 Absolutely. We continue. We no longer. Go ahead. No, no, of course I am the my first sales are the ones that were early adopters. And and then I basically walked over to guys that are later adopters. I said, Well, I said, you know, the ABC, the NBC and the fox station and the PBS station habit, you know, you don't have it, and they're gonna take all your post production business away from you. And that got them highly motivated.   Michael Hingson  23:54 Yeah. And along the way, from a personal standpoint, somebody got really clever. And it started, of course at WGBH in Boston, where they recognize the fact that people who happen to be blind would want to know what's going on on TV when the dialog wasn't saying much to to offer clues. And so they started putting an audio description and editing and all that and somebody created the secondary audio programming in the other things that go into it. And now that's becoming a lot more commonplace, although it's still got a long way to go.   Howard Brown  24:24 Well, I agree. So but you're right. So having that audio or having it for visually impaired or hearing impaired are all that they are now we're making some progress. So it's still a ways to go. I agree with you.   Michael Hingson  24:36 still a ways to go. Well, you along the way in terms of continuing to work with Abbott and other companies in doing the entrepreneurial stuff. You've had a couple of curveballs from life.   Howard Brown  24:47 I have. So going back to my promotion, I was going driving out to Dayton, Ohio, I noticed a little spot on my cheekbone. didn't think anything of it. I was so excited to get promoted and start my new job. up, I just kept powering through. So a few weeks after I'd moved out to Dayton, Ohio, my mom comes out. And she's at the airport and typical Boston and mom, she's like, What's that on your cheek? What's that on your cheek? And I was like, Mom, it's nothing. I kind of started making excuses. I got hit playing basketball, I got it at the gym or something. And she's like, well, we got to get that checked out. I said, No, Mom, it's okay. It's not no big deal. It's a little little market. Maybe it's a cyst or pebble or something I don't know. So she basically said she was worried, but she never told me. So she helped set up my condo, or an apartment. And then she left. And then as long Behold, I actually had to go speak in Boston at the American Bankers Association about disaster recovery, and having a disaster recovery plan. And so this is the maybe August of 1989. And I came back and that spot was still there. And so my mom told my dad, remember, there was payphones? There was no cell phones, no computers, no internet. So she told my dad, she didn't take a picture of it. But now he saw it. And he goes, Let's go play tennis. There's I got there on a Friday. So on a Saturday morning, we'd go do something. And instead of going to play tennis, he took me to a local community hospital. And they took a look at it. And they said off its assist, take some my antibiotic erythromycin or something, you'll be fine. Well, I came back to see them on Monday after my speech. And I said, I'm not feeling that great. Maybe it's the rethrow myosin. And so having to be four o'clock in the afternoon, he took me to the same emergency room. And he's and I haven't had the same doctor on call. He actually said, You know what, let's take a biopsy of it. So he took a biopsy of it. And then he went back to the weight room, he said, I didn't get a big enough slice. Let me take another. So he took another and then my dad drove me to the airport, and I basically left. And my parents called me maybe three weeks later, and they said, You got to come back to Boston. We gotta go see, you know, they got the results. But you know, they didn't tell us they'll only tell you. Because, you know, it's my private data. So I flew back to Boston, with my parents. And this time, I had, like, you know, another doctor there with this emergency room doctor, and he basically checks me out, checks me out, but he doesn't say too much. But he does say that we have an appointment for you at Dana Farber Cancer Institute at 2pm. I think you should go. And I was like, whoa, what are you talking about? Why am I going to Dana Farber Cancer Institute. So it gets, you know, kind of scary there because I show up there. I'm in a suit and tie. My dad's in a suit down. My mom's seems to be dressed up. And we go, and they put me through tests. And I walk in there. And I don't know if you remember this, Michael. But the Boston Red Sox charity is called the Jimmy fund. Right? And the Jimmy fund are for kids with blood cancers, lymphoma leukemias, so I go there. And they checked me in and they told me as a whole host of tests they're going to do, and I'm looking in the waiting room, and I see mostly older people, and I'm 23 years old. So I go down the hallways, and I see little kids. So I go I go hang out with the little kids while I'm waiting. I didn't know what was going on. So they call me and I do my test. And this Dr. George Canalis, who's you know, when I came to learn that the inventor of some chemo therapies for lymphomas very experienced, and this young Harvard fellow named Eric Rubin I get pulled into this office with this big mahogany desk. And they say you have stage four E T cell non Hodgkins lymphoma. It's a very aggressive, aggressive, very aggressive form of cancer. We're going to try to knock this out. I have to tell you, Michael, I don't really remember hardly anything else that was said, I glossed over. I looked up at this young guy, Eric Rubin, and I said, What's he saying? I looked back out of the corner of my eye, my mom's bawling her eyes out. My dad's looks like a statue. And I have to tell you, I was really just a deer in the headlights. I had no idea that how a healthy 23 year old guy gets, you know, stage four T cell lymphoma with a very horrible prognosis. I mean, I mean, they don't they said, We don't know if we can help you at the world, one of the world's foremost cancer research hospitals in the world. So it was that was that was a tough pill to swallow. And I did some more testing. And then they told me to come back in about a week to start chemotherapy. And so, again, I didn't have the internet to search anything. I had encyclopedias. I had some friends, you know, and I was like, I'm a young guy. And, you know, I was talking to older people that potentially, you know, had leukemia or different cancer, but I didn't know much. And so I I basically showed up for chemotherapy, scared out of my mind, in denial, and Dr. RUBIN comes out and he says, we're not doing chemo today. I said, I didn't sleep awake. What are you talking about? He says, we'll try again tomorrow, your liver Our function test is too high. And my liver function test is too high. So I'm starting to learn but I still don't know what's going on. He says I got it was going to field trip. Field Trip. He said, Yeah, you're going down the street to Newton Wellesley hospital, we're going to the cryogenic center, cryo, what? What are you talking about? He goes, it's a sperm bank, and you're gonna go, you know, leave a sample specimen. And it's like, you just told me that, you know, if you can help me out what why I'm not even thinking about kids, right now. He said, Go do it. He says what else you're going to do today, and then you come back tomorrow, and we'll try chemo. So thank God, he said that, because I deposited before I actually started any chemotherapy, which, you know, as basically, you know, rendered me you know, impotent now because of all the chemotherapy and radiation I had. So that was a blessing that I didn't know about until later, which we'll get to. But a roll the story forward a little more quickly as that I was getting all bad news. I was relapsing, I went through about three or four different cycles of different chemotherapy recipes, nothing was working. I was getting sicker, and they tight. My sister, I am the twin CJ, for bone marrow transplant and she was a 25% chance of being a match. She happened to be 100% match. And I had to then gear up for back in 1990 was a bone marrow transplant where they would remove her bone marrow from her hip bones, they would scrub it and cleanse it, and they would put it in me. And they would hope that my body wouldn't immediately rejected and die and shut down or over time, which is called graft versus host these that it wouldn't kill me or potentially that it would work and it would actually reset my immune system. And it would take over the malignant cells and set my set me back straight, which it ended up doing. And so having a twin was another blessing miracle. You know that, you know, that happened to me. And I did some immunotherapy called interleukin two that was like, like the grandfather of immunotherapy that strengthened my system. And then I moved to Florida to get out of the cold weather and then I moved out to California to rebuild my life. I call that Humpty Dumpty building Humpty Dumpty version one. And that's that's how I got to California in Southern California.   Michael Hingson  32:15 So once again, your big sister savedthe day,   Howard Brown  32:19 as usual.   Michael Hingson  32:21 That's a big so we go,   Howard Brown  32:23 as we call ourselves the Wonder Twins. He's more. She's terrific. And thank God she gave part of herself and saved my life. And I am eternally grateful to her for that,   Michael Hingson  32:34 but but she never had any of the same issues or, or diseases. I gather. She's been   Howard Brown  32:41 very healthy, except for like a knee. A partial knee replacement. She's been very healthy her whole life.   Michael Hingson  32:48 Well, did she have to have a knee replacement because she kept kicking you around or what?   Howard Brown  32:52 No, she's little. She's five feet. 510 So she never kicked me. We are best friends. My wife's best friend. I know. She is just just a saint. She's She's such a giving person and you know, we take that from our parents, but she she gave of herself of what she could do. She said she do it again in a heartbeat. I don't think I'm allowed to give anybody my bone marrow but if I could, would give it to her do anything for her. She's She's amazing. So she gave me the gift, the gift of life.   Michael Hingson  33:21 So you went to Florida, then you moved to California and what did you do when you got out here?   Howard Brown  33:24 So I ended up moving up to northern California. So I met this girl from Michigan in Southern California, Lisa, my wife have now 28 years in July. We married Lisa Yeah, we got married under the Jewish wedding company's wedding canopies called the hotpot and we're looking at the Pacific Ocean, we made people come out that we had that Northridge earthquake in 94. But this is in July, so things are more settled. So we had all friends and family come out. And it was beautiful. We got it on a pool deck overlooking the Pacific. It was gorgeous. It was a beautiful Hollywood type wedding. And it was amazing. So we got married in July of 94. And then moved up to Silicon Valley in 97. And then I was working at the startups. My life was really out of balance because I'm working 20 hours, you know, a day and I'm traveling like crazy. And my wife says, You know what, you got to be home for dinner if we're going to think about having a family. And we're a little bit older now. 35 and 40. And so we've got to think about these things. And so I called back to Newton Wellesley hospital, and I got the specimen of sperm shipped out to San Jose, and we went through an in vitro fertilization process. And she grew eight eight eggs and they defrosted the swimmers and they took the best ones and put them back in the four best eggs and our miracle baby our frozen kids sickle. Emily was born in August of 2001. Another blessing another miracle. I was able to have a child and healthy baby girl.   Michael Hingson  34:58 So what's Emily doing today?   Howard Brown  35:00 Well, thank you for asking that. So, she is now in Missoula, Montana at a television station called K Pax eight Mountain News. And she's an intern for the summer. And she's living her great life out there hiking, Glacier National Park. And she ran I think she ran down to the Grand Tetons and, and she's learning about the broadcast business and reporting. She's a writer by trade, by trade and in journalism. And she likes philosophy. So she'll be coming back home to finish her senior year, this at the end of the summer at the University of Michigan. And so she's about to graduate in December. And she's, she's doing just great.   Michael Hingson  35:35 So she writes and doesn't do video editing us yet using Abbott or any of the evolutions from it.   Howard Brown  35:41 No, she does. She actually, when you're in a small market station, that's you. You write the script, she does the recording, she has a tripod, sometimes she's she films with the other reporters, but when she they sent her out as an intern, and she just covered the, this, you know, the pro pro life and pro choice rallies, she she records herself, she edits on Pro Tools, which is super powerful now, and a lot less expensive. And then, when she submits, she submits it refer review to the news director and to her superiors. And she's already got, I think, three video stories and about six different by lines on written stories. So she's learning by doing, it's experiential, it's amazing.   Michael Hingson  36:23 So she must have had some experience in dealing with all the fires and stuff out at Yellowstone and all that.   Howard Brown  36:31 So the flooding at Yellowstone, so I drove her out there in May. And I didn't see any fires. But the flooding we got there before that, she took me on a hike on the North Gate of Yellowstone. And she's she's, you know, environmentally wilderness trained first aid trained. And I'm the dad, and I'm in decent shape. But she took me out an hour out and an hour back in and, you know, saw a moose saw a deer didn't see any mountain lion didn't see any Grizzlies, thank God, but we did see moose carcass where the grizzly had got a hold on one of those and, and everybody else to get it. So I got to go out to nature weather and we took a road trip out there this summer, it was a blast. It's the those are the memories, when you've been through a cancer diagnosis that you just you hold on to very dearly and very tight. It was a blast. So that's what he's doing this summer. She'll be back. She'll be back in August, end of August.   Michael Hingson  37:22 That's really exciting to hear that she's working at it and being successful. And hopefully she'll continue to do that. And do good reporting. And I know that this last week, with all the Supreme Court cases, it's it's, I guess, in one sense, a field day for reporters. But it's also a real challenge, because there's so many polarized views on all of that.   Howard Brown  37:44 Well, everybody's a broadcaster now whether it's Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and all the other ones out there, tick tock. So everybody's sort of a reporter now. And you know, what do you believe, and unfortunately, I just can't believe in something in 140 characters or something in two sentences. Yeah, there's no depth there. So sometimes you miss the point, and all this stuff. And then everything's on 24 hours on CNN, on Fox on MSNBC, so it never stops. So I call that a very noisy world. And it's hard to process. You know, all this. It's coming at you so fast in the blink of an eye. So we're in a different time than when we grew up, Michael, it was a slower pace. Today in this digital world. It's, it's, it's a lot and especially COVID. Now, are we just consuming and consuming and binging and all this stuff, I don't think it's that healthy.   Michael Hingson  38:36 It's not only a noisy world, but it's also a world, it's very disconnected, you can say all you want about how people can send tweets back and forth, text messages back and forth and so on. But you're not connecting, you're not really getting deep into anything, you're not really establishing relationships in the way that as you point out, we used to, and we don't connect anymore, even emails don't give you that much connection, realism, as opposed to having meaningful dialogue and meaningful conversations. So we just don't Converse anymore. And now, with all that's going on, in the very divided opinions, there's there's no room for discussion, because everybody has their own opinion. And that's it, there's no room to dialogue on any of it at all, which is really too bad.   Howard Brown  39:21 Yeah, I agree. It's been divisive. And, you know, it's, it's hard because, you know, an email doesn't have the body language, the intent, the emotion, like we're talking right now. And, you know, we're expressing, you know, you know, I'm telling stories of my story personally, but you can tell when I get excited, I smile, I can get animated. Sometimes with an email, you know, you don't know the intent and it can be misread. And a lot of that communication is that way. So, you know, I totally get where you're coming from.   Michael Hingson  39:55 And that's why I like doing the podcasts that we're doing. We get to really have conversation isn't just asking some questions and getting an answer and then going on to the next thing. That's, frankly, no fun. And I think it's important to be able to have the opportunity to really delve into things and have really good conversations about them. I learned a lot, and I keep seeing as I do these podcasts, and for the past 20 plus years, I've traveled around the world speaking, of course, about September 11, and talking about teamwork, and trust, and so on. And as I always say, if I don't learn more than I'm able to teach or impart, then I'm not doing my job very well.   Howard Brown  40:35 So that's exactly and that's, that's where I'm going after the second health concern. You know, I'm now going to teach, I'm gonna inspire, I'm going to educate. And that's, that's, that's what I do, I want to do with the rest of my time is to be able to, you know, listen, I'm not putting my head in the sand, about school shootings, about an insurrection about floods about all that. You gotta live in the real world. But I choose, as I say, I like to live on positive Street as much as possible, but positive street with action. That's, that's what makes the world a better place at the end of the day. So you sharing that story means that one we'll never forget. And you can educate the generations to come that need to understand, you know, that point in time and how it affected you and how you've dealt with it, and how you've been able to get back out of bed every day. And I want to do the same.   Michael Hingson  41:26 Well, there's nothing wrong with being positive. I think that there is a need to be aware. But we can we can continue to be positive, and try to promote positivity, try to promote connectionism and conversations and so on, and promote the fact that it's okay to have different opinions. But the key is to respect the other opinion, and recognize that it isn't just what you say that's the only thing that ever matters. That's the problem that we face so much today.   Howard Brown  41:58 Right? Respect. I think Aretha Franklin saying that great. She   Michael Hingson  42:01 did. She did. She's from Motown here. There you go. See? When you moved out to California, and you ended up in Silicon Valley, and so on, who are you working for them?   Howard Brown  42:14 So I moved up, and I worked for this company called Liquid audio that doesn't exist anymore. And it was just iTunes 10 years too early on, there was real audio, there was Mark Cuban's company was called Audio net and then broadcast.com used for a lot of money. And so the company went public and made a lot of money. But it didn't work. The world wasn't ready for it yet to be able to live in this cassette world. It was not ready. I Napster hadn't been invented, mp3 and four hadn't been invented. So it just the adoption rate of being too early. But it still went public a lot. The investors made a ton of money, but they call that failing, failing forward. So I stayed there for a year, I made some money. And I went to another startup. And that startup was in the web hosting space, it was called Naevus. site, it's now won by Time Warner. But at that time, building data centers and hosting racks of computers was very good business. And so I got to be, you know, participate in an IPO. You know, I built built up revenue. And you know, the outsourcing craze now called cloud computing, it's dominated by the folks that like Amazon, and the folks at IBM, and a few others, but mostly, you know, dominated there, where you're basically having lots of blinking lights in a data center, and just making sure that those computers stay up to serve up the pages of the web, the videos, even television, programming, and now any form of communication. So I was, I was early on in that and again, got to go through an IPO and get compensated properly unduly, and, but also my life was out of balance. And so before we were called out for the sperm and had a baby, I transitioned out when Silicon Valley just the pendulum swung the other way, I ended up starting to work at my own nonprofit, I founded it with a couple of Silicon Valley guys called Planet Jewish, and it was still very technologically driven. It was the world's first Community Calendar. This is before Google Calendar, this is in 2000. And we built it as a nonprofit to serve the Jewish community to get more people to come to Jewish events. And I architected the code, and we ran that nonprofit for 17 years. And before calendaring really became free, and very proud of that. And after that, I started a very similar startup with different code called circle builder, and it was serving faith and religions. It was more like private facebook or private online communities. And we had the Vatican as a client and about 25,000 Ministries, churches, and nonprofits using the system. And this is all sort of when Facebook was coming out to you know, from being just an edu or just for college students. And so I built that up as a quite a big business. But unfortunately, I was in Michigan when I started circle builder. I ended up having to close both of those businesses down. One that the revenue was telling off of the nonprofit and also circuit builder wasn't monetizing as quickly or as we needed as well. But I ended up going into my 50 year old colonoscopy, Michael. And I woke up thinking everything was going to be fine. My wife Lisa's holding my hand. And the gastroenterologist said, No, I found something. And when I find something, it's bad news. Well, it was bad news. Stage three colon cancer. Within about 10 days or two weeks, I had 13 and a half inches of my colon removed, plus margins plus lymph nodes. One of the lymph nodes was positive, install a chemo port and then I waited because my daughter had soccer tournaments to travel to but on first week of August in 2016, I started 12 rounds of Rockem sockem chemotherapy called folfox and five Fu and it was tough stuff. So I was back on the juice again, doing chemotherapy and but this time, I wasn't a deer in the headlights, I was a dad, I was a husband. I had been through the trenches. So this time, I was much more of a marine on a mission. And I had these digital tools to reach out for research and for advocacy and for support. Very different at that time. And so I unfortunately failed my chemotherapy, I failed my neck surgery, another colon resection, I failed a clinical trial. And things got worse I became metastatic stage four that means that colon cancer had spread to my liver, my stomach linings called the omentum and peritoneum and my bladder. And I had that same conversation with a doctor in downtown Detroit, at a Cancer Institute and he said, We don't know if we can help you. And if you Dr. Google, it said I had 4% of chances of living about 12 to 18 months and things were dark I was I was back at it again looking looking at the Grim Reaper. But what I ended up doing is research and I did respond to the second line chemotherapy with a little regression or shrinkage. And for that you get more chemotherapy. And then I started to dig in deep research on peritoneal carcinoma which is cancer of the of the of the stomach lining, and it's very tricky. And there's a group called colon town.org that I joined and very informative. I there then met at that time was probably over 100 other people that had had the peritoneal carcinoma, toma and are living and they went through a radical surgery called cytoreduction high pack, where they basically debulk you like a de boning a fish, and they take out all this cancer, they can see the dead and live cells, and then they pour hot chemo in you. And then hot chemo is supposed to penetrate the scanning the organs, and it's supposed to, in theory kill micro cell organism and cancer, although it's still not proven just yet. But that surgery was about a 12 and a half hour surgery in March of 2018. And they call that the mother of all surgeries. And I came out looking like a ghost. I had lost about 60 pounds, and I had a long recovery. It's that one would put Humpty Dumpty back together. It's been now six years. But I got a lot of support. And I am now what's called no evidence of disease at this time, I'm still under surveillance. I was quarterly I just in June, I had my scans and my exams. And I'm now going to buy annual surveillance, which means CAT scans and blood tests. That's the step in the right direction. And so again, I mean, if I think about it, my twin sister saved my life, I had a frozen sperm become a daughter. And again, I'm alive from a stage four diagnosis. I am grateful. I am lucky, and I am blessed. So that's that a long story that the book will basically tell you, but that's where I am today.   Michael Hingson  48:50 And we'll definitely get to the book. But another question. So you had two startups that ran collectively for quite a period of time, what got you involved or motivated to do things in the in the faith arena?   Howard Brown  49:06 So I have to give credit to my wife, Lisa. So we met at the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles at this young leadership group. And then they have like a college fair of organizations that are Jewish support organizations. And one of them happened to be Jewish Big Brothers, now Jewish Brothers and Big Sisters of Los Angeles. Suppose you'd be a great big brother. I was like, well, it takes up a lot of time. I don't know. She's like, you should check it out. So I did. And I became I fill out the application. I went through the background checks, and I actually got to be a Jewish big brother to this young man II and at age 10. And so I have to tell you, one of the best experiences in my life was to become a mentor. And I today roll the clock forward. 29 years in is now close to 40 years old or 39 years old. He's married with a son who's one noble and two wife, Sarah, and we are family. We stayed together past age 18 Seen, and we've continued on. And I know not a lot of people do that. But it was probably one of the best experiences I've ever done. I've gotten so much out of it. Everyone's like, Oh, you did so much for in? Well, he did so much for me and my daughter, Emily calls him uncle and my wife and I are we are his family, his dad was in prison and then passed away and his mom passed away where his family now. And so one of the best experiences. So that's how I kind of got into the Jewish community. And also being in sales I was I ended up being a good fundraiser. And so these nonprofits that live their lifeblood is fundraising dollars. I didn't mind calling people asking them for donations or sitting down over coffee, asking them for donations. So I learned how to do that out in Southern California in Northern California. And I've continued to do that. So that gave me a real good taste of faith. I'm not hugely religious, but I do believe in the community values of the Jewish community. And you get to meet people beyond boards and you get to raise money for really good causes. And so that sort of gave me another foundation to build off of and I've enjoyed doing that as a community sermon for a long time.   Michael Hingson  51:10 I'll bite Where does Ian live today?   Howard Brown  51:13 Okay, well, Ian was in LA when we got matched. I had to move to San Francisco, but I I petitioned the board to keep our match alive because it was scholarship dollars in state right. And went to UC Santa Cruz, Florida State for his master's and got his last degree at Hastings and the Jewish community supported him with scholarships. And in was in very recently was in San Francisco, Oakland area, and now he's lives in South Portland, Oregon.   Michael Hingson  51:39 Ah, so you haven't gotten back to Michigan yet? Although he's getting into colder weather. So there's a chance?   Howard Brown  51:45 Well, let me tell you, he did live with us in Michigan. So using my connections through the Jewish community, I asked if he could interview with a judge from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals a friend of mine, we sat on a on a board of directors for the American Jewish Committee, Detroit. And I said, she's like, well, Howard, I really have to take Michigan kids. I said, You know what? No problem. You decide if he's if he's worthy or not go through your process, but would you take the phone call? So she took the phone call, and I never heard anything. And then Ian called me and he said, I got it. I as a second year loss. Going to be a second year law student. I'm going to be clerking for summer interning and clerking for this judge Leanne white. And again, it just it karma, the payback, it was beautiful. So he lived with us for about four and a half months. And when he came back, and it was beautiful, because Emily was only about four or five years old. And, and he lived with us for that time. And it was beautiful.   Michael Hingson  52:43 But that's really great. That, that you have that relationship that you did the big brother program. And I'm assuming you've been big brother to other people as well.   Howard Brown  52:53 No, no. I have not actually. Because what it did is it trained me to be a dad. So when I had Emily, it was more it was more difficult actually to do that. And so no, Ian has been my one and only match. I mentor a lot of Babson students, and I mentor and get mentored by some cancer patients and, and some big entrepreneurs. Mentorship is a core value of mine. I like to be mentored. And I also like to mentor others. And I think that's, that's what makes the world go round. So when Steve Gates when Bill Gates, his wife, Melinda, just donated 123 million to the overall arching Big Brothers, Big Sisters of America. And that money will filter to all those, I think that that's such a core value. If a young person can have someone that takes interest in them, they can really shape their future and also get a lot out of it. So mentorship is one of my key values. And I hope it's hope it's many of your viewers and yours as well. Michael,   Michael Hingson  53:52 absolutely is I think that we can't do anything if we can't pass on what we've learned and try to help other people grow. I've been a firm believer my entire life of you don't give somebody a fish, you teach them how to fish and however, and wherever that is, it's still the same thing. And we need to teach and impart. And I think that in our own way, every one of us is a teacher and the more we take it seriously, the better it is.   Howard Brown  54:18 Well, I'm now a student not learning podcasting. I learned how to be a book author and I'm learning how to reinvent myself virgin Humpty Dumpty, version two coming out.   Michael Hingson  54:29 So you had been a national cancer survivor advocate and so on. Tell me a little bit about that if you would.   Howard Brown  54:35 So I respect people that want to keep their diagnosis private and their survivorship private. That's not me. I want to be able to help people because if I would have been screened at age 40 or 42, I probably wouldn't have had colon cancer and I was not, but this is a preventable disease and really minorities and indigenous people as they need to get screened more, because that's the highest case of diagnosis for colorectal cancer. But what I think that that's what his needs now it's the second leading killer of cancer right now. And it's an important to get this advocacy out and use your voice. And so I want to use my voice to be able to sound the alarm on getting screening, and also to help people survive. There's I think, 16 million growing to 23 or 4 million by 2030. Cancer survivors out there, cancer diagnosis, it sucks sex all the way around, but it affects more than the patient, it affects your caregiver, it affects your family affects relationships, it affects emotions, physical, and also financial, there is many aspects of survivorship here and more people are learning to live with it and going, but also, quite frankly, I live with in the stage for cancer world, you also live with eminence of death, or desperation to live a little bit longer. You hear people I wish I had one more day. Well, I wish I had time to be able to see my daughter graduate high school, and I did and I cherished it. I'm going to see her graduate college this December and then walk at the Big House here in Michigan, in Ann Arbor in May. And then God willing, I will walk her down the aisle at the appropriate time. And it's good to have those big goals that are important that drive you forward. And so those are the few things that drive me forward.   Michael Hingson  56:28 I know that I can't remember when I had my first colonoscopy. It's been a while. It was just part of what I did. My mother didn't die of colon cancer, but she was diagnosed with colon cancer. She, she went to the doctor's office when she felt something was wrong. And they did diagnose it as colon cancer. She came home my brother was with her. She fell and broke her hip and went into the hospital and passed away a few days later, they did do an operation to deal with repairing her hip. And but I think because of all of that, just the amount that her body went through, she just wasn't able to deal with it. She was 6970. And so it was no I take Yeah, so I was just one of those things that that did happen. She was 71, not 70. But, you know, we've, for a while I got a colonoscopy every five years. And then they say no, you don't need to do it every five years do it every 10 years. The couple of times they found little polyps but they were just little things. There was nothing serious about them. They obviously took them out and autopsy or biopsy them and all that. And no problems. And I don't remember any of it. I slept through it. So it's okay.   Howard Brown  57:46 Great. So the prep is the worst part. Isn't it though? The preps no fun. But the 20 minutes they have you under light anesthesia, they snipped the polyps and away you go and you keep living your life. So that's what I hope for everyone, because I will tell you, Michael, showing through the amount of chemotherapy, the amount of surgeries and the amount of side effects that I have is, is I don't wish that on anyone. I don't wish on anyone. It's not a good existence. It's hard. And quite frankly, it's, I want to prevent about it. And I'm just not talking about colon cancer, get your mammogram for breast cancer, get your check for prostate cancer, you know, self care is vital, because you can't have fun, do your job, work Grow family, if your hell if you're not healthy, and the emotional stuff they call the chemo brain or brain fog and or military personnel refer to it as PTSD. It's real. And you've got to be able to understand that, you know, coming from a cancer diagnosis is a transition. And I'll never forget that my two experiences and I I've got to build and move forward though. Because otherwise it gets dark, it gets lonely, it gets depressing, and then other things start to break down the parts don't work well. So I've chosen to find my happy place on the basketball court be very active in sounding the alarm for as an advocate. And as I never planned on being a book author and now I'm going to be a published author this summer. So there's good things that have come in my life. I've had a very interesting, interesting life. And we're here talking about it now so I appreciate it.   Michael Hingson  59:20 Well tell me about you in basketball seems to be your happy place.   Howard Brown  59:24 So everyone needs to find a happy place. I'll tell you why. The basketball court I've been playing since I was six years old and I was pretty good you know, I'm not gonna go professional. But I happen to like the team sport and I'm a point guard so I'm basically telling people what to do and trash talk and and all that. But I love it a

Max Wood former United States Attorney for the Middle District of Georgia joins the program to discuss his charities work in 2014 helping Iraqi Christians  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's Monday, August 8th, A.D. 2022. This is The Worldview in 5 Minutes heard at www.TheWorldview.com. I'm Adam McManus. By Adam McManus (Adam@TheWorldview.com) Iraqi Christians mark tragic anniversary August 6, 2014 is a day Iraqi Christians will never forget. They call it the “Black Day.” Max Wood, Chairman of the American Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East, told The Worldview what happened, WOOD: “On August 6, 2014, the ISIS military forces came to a town called Qaraqosh, Iraq, which has traditionally been one of the largest Christian towns in Iraq. They gave the residents of that town just a few hours to either leave or convert to Islam or be killed. As a result, 50,000 Iraqi Christians left that day.” Those Iraqi Christians fled to Turkey, Syria, and Jordan. However, the majority of them, 40,000, went to Jordan which is very welcoming to refugees. The American Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East provides food for 8,000 of these Iraqi Christian refugees. WOOD: “Iraqi Christians are allowed to have refuge in Jordan, but they're not allowed to work in Jordan. That's the policy of the King of Jordan. Some refugee groups are allowed to work, but the Christian refugees are not.” Matthew 14:14 says, “When Jesus saw the great crowd, He had compassion on them.” Consider giving a donation to help pay for the food of the Iraqi Christian refugees in Jordan through a special link in our transcript today at www.TheWorldview.com. Plus, they've established the Olive Tree Center outside the Jordanian capital of Amman. WOOD: “And then we sustain their mental and emotional needs through our Olive Tree Center which offers music classes, guitar classes, piano classes, art classes, English classes are extremely popular, cooking classes give these ladies a chance to gather together as Iraqis in a foreign land.” On Saturday, they held a day of commemoration for the Iraqi Christian refugees in Jordan. WOOD: “On August 6, they had a commemoration ceremony there at the Olive Tree Center commemorating this day. They call this day the Black Day. It's similar to America's experience with September 11. It's a date they will never forget. It's a date that was horrific for them. It's a date that changed their lives forever.” China to U.S.A.: You can't 'treat countries like George Floyd' Enraged by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's August 2nd visit to the island nation of Taiwan, off the coast of China, a Chinese diplomat named Hua Chunying,  said, 'We cannot allow the U.S. to take itself as ‘world policeman' and treat other countries [like] George Floyd whom it can bully and strangle at will,” reports The Daily Mail. China's military fired 11 ballistic missiles into the Taiwan Strait - with five landing in Japan's exclusion zone. Alex Jones ordered to pay $45.2M more over Sandy Hook lies On Friday, an Austin, Texas jury ordered conspiracy theorist talk show host Alex Jones to pay $45.2 million in punitive damages to the parents of a child who was killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, adding to the $4.1 million he must pay for the suffering he put them through by claiming for years that the nation's deadliest school shooting was a hoax, reports the Associated Press. The total — $49.3 million — is less than the $150 million sought by Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, whose 6-year-old son, Jesse Lewis, was among the 20 children and six educators killed by Adam Lanza, in the 2012 attack in Newtown, Connecticut. But the trial marks the first time Jones has been held financially liable for peddling lies about the massacre, claiming it was faked by the government to tighten gun laws. Mass. GOP governor makes state abortion sanctuary On July 29th, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, a pro-abortion Republican, signed a bill codifying both abortion and puberty blockers for children into law, reports LifeNews.com. According to the Massachusetts Family Institute, this egregious law does 6 things, First, it turns Massachusetts into an “abortion sanctuary” by prohibiting the governor, courts, or law enforcement from cooperating with other states in enforcing their pro-life laws against abortionists who flee to Massachusetts. Second, it forces state universities to provide the abortion pill to students. Third, it forces insurance companies to cover abortion, even if they have religious objections. Fourth, it allows late-term abortions when a doctor deems a baby “incompatible with sustained life” outside of the womb, a decision which is not subject to review by any medical board. Fifth, it extends legal protections to Planned Parenthood which distributes puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, even in states where they have been criminalized for use on children.  Sixth, it establishes Massachusetts as an abortion exporter by: Protecting abortionists who perform abortions out-of-state, even if they violate other states' laws. Lowering or eliminating safety requirements for pharmacies to dispense abortion pills. Giving immunity to abortionists who provide abortifacient drugs through the mail or through telehealth appointments to women in states where abortion is illegal. Despite the fact that this Republican governor is clearly out of step with his own party's pro-life, anti-transgender platform, Baker celebrated the bill's signing with not just one tweet, but a second tweet. He praised the “dedication” of the legislature for passing this evil law. But Proverbs 17:15 says, “He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous are both alike an abomination to the Lord.” After 66 days in hospital, 10-year-old Uvalde victim goes home And finally, a little girl who sustained critical injuries during the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas on May 24th finally walked out of the hospital last Friday, more than two months after Salvador Ramos  killed 19 students and two teachers, reports FaithWire.com. Mayah Zamora, age 10, who was shot in three limbs, walked out on her own to cheers and joy from hospital staff. STAFF: “Mayah. Mayah. Mayah.” (cheers) Administrators at University Health, a hospital in San Antonio, Texas, tweeted, “She is our hero, and we can't wait to see all she accomplishes in the future!” A GoFundMe page with a goal of $150,000 to help with Zamora's medical bills has brought in nearly $115,000. Close And that's The Worldview in 5 Minutes on this Monday, August 8th, in the year of our Lord 2022. Subscribe by iTunes or email to our unique Christian newscast at www.TheWorldview.com. Or get the Generations app through Google Play or The App Store. I'm Adam McManus (Adam@TheWorldview.com). Seize the day for Jesus Christ.

A new MP3 sermon from The World View in 5 Minutes is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: Iraqi Christians mark tragic anniversary Subtitle: The World View in Five Minutes Speaker: Adam McManus Broadcaster: The World View in 5 Minutes Event: Current Events Date: 8/8/2022 Length: 7 min.

A daily news briefing from Catholic News Agency, powered by artificial intelligence. Ask your smart speaker to play “Catholic News,” or listen every morning wherever you get podcasts. www.catholicnewsagency.com - Pope Francis has asked people around the world to fast and pray for peace in Ukraine on March 2, Ash Wednesday. After meeting Pope Francis on Monday, the rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris invited Muslims in France to pray for peace in Ukraine. In a statement after his private audience at the Vatican on Feb. 28, Chems-Eddine Hafiz said that the pope expressed deep concern about the fate of migrants arriving in Europe and the conflict in Ukraine. https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/250518/after-meeting-pope-francis-leader-invites-france-s-muslims-to-pray-for-peace-in-ukraine March 5 will mark the first anniversary of Pope Francis' historic trip to Iraq, as the first pope to do so. In a meeting with Iraqi Christian leaders at the Vatican on Monday, Pope Francis called it an “unforgettable visit” and emphasized the importance of the Christian presence in the Middle Eastern country. The Christian population in Iraq, a country of around 40 million people, has been steadily dwindling for decades, from around 1.4 million in 2003 to about 250,000 today. https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/250515/pope-francis-remembers-historic-iraq-visit-1-year-later The Women's Health Protection Act failed in the U.S. Senate on Monday. Pro-life groups had called it the most radical abortion bill in U.S. history. The Feb. 28 vote needed 60 votes to proceed, with all but one Senate Democrats voting for the Act, and no Republicans. The vote marked the first time that the Senate voted on a standalone bill to proactively codify Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court case that legalized abortion nationwide. https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/250523/pro-abortion-womens-health-protection-act-fails-in-us-senate Today, the Church honors Saint David of Wales, the patron of the Welsh people, who is remembered as a missionary bishop and the founder of many monasteries during the sixth century. https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/saint/st-david-of-wales-163 - Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. Today, there are several saints honored. Saint Angela of the Cross, a 19th-century Spaniard, is the Foundress of the Institute of the Sisters of the Company of the Cross, a group dedicated to prayer and silence, as well as to serving the poor and dying. https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/saint/st-angela-of-the-cross-165 St. Agnes of Prague, a European who lived in the 13th century, entered the monastery after turning down the Holy Roman emperor's overtures of marriage. Emperor Frederick is said to have remarked: "If she had left me for a mortal man, I would have taken vengeance with the sword, but I cannot take offense because in preference to me she has chosen the King of Heaven." https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/saint/st-agnes-of-prague-170 And finally, Blessed Charles the Good was a Flemish warrior and ruler known for his just, compassionate, and wise actions. https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/saint/blessed-charles-the-good-412

I had a great discussion with Rayyan Al Shawaf, author of the novel "When all Else Fails".We discussed the following:➡️ The Arab-Christian identity and how the majority of Christians in MENA consider themselves Arabs while a number of Iraqi Christian groups like the Assyrians and Chaldeans don't see themselves as Arabs.➡️ How virtue by association can sometimes be the only way to get our tormentors off our backs➡️ When representation in literature is seen as cultural appropriation. ➡️ Controversy over sexually explicit scenes and the objectification of women in these scenes ➡️ Writing habits and the publishing journey.**************************************************************************Connect with Natasha TynesYou can connect with me via the following channels:TwitterFacebookInstagramYouTubeSubscribe to my newsletterWebsite

Come with us to the Middle East as VOM Radio host, Todd Nettleton, and his wife, Char, share stories from a recent visit to persecuted Christians in the region. Listen as they share updates on Iraqi refugees who fled from ISIS more than five years ago and what the Lord is currently doing in the lives of persecuted Christians – even one who has only been a believer one week! You'll hear about an Iranian woman who, in just two years as a believer, has planted almost 40 churches! She uses every opportunity to pray for others in Jesus' name. When those prayers are answered, they instantly want to know more about the Lord she serves. Learn about Christians in the Middle East sacrificially staying with Muslim family members—in spite of persecution—in the hope of seeing their relatives know Christ. Listen also to hear about a service where former Muslims were baptized into new life in Christ—and the joy radiating from the new believers' faces. As ISIS drove across the Nineveh plains, many Iraqi Christians fled to surrounding countries as refugees. More than five years later, many are still waiting for a new beginning in another country. They are unable to work, and their children can't attend school. But the church is welcoming them—both Muslim and Christian refugees. VOM continues to partner with churches to help meet Christian refugees' needs and encourage them in this discouraging season. Learn how you can pray for them and for the church in the Middle East.

Come with us to the Middle East as VOM Radio host, Todd Nettleton, and his wife, Char, share stories from a recent visit to persecuted Christians in the region. Listen as they share updates on Iraqi refugees who fled from ISIS more than five years ago and what the Lord is currently doing in the lives of persecuted Christians – even one who has only been a believer one week! You'll hear about an Iranian woman who, in just two years as a believer, has planted almost 40 churches! She uses every opportunity to pray for others in Jesus' name. When those prayers are answered, they instantly want to know more about the Lord she serves. Learn about Christians in the Middle East sacrificially staying with Muslim family members—in spite of persecution—in the hope of seeing their relatives know Christ. Listen also to hear about a service where former Muslims were baptized into new life in Christ—and the joy radiating from the new believers' faces. As ISIS drove across the Nineveh plains, many Iraqi Christians fled to surrounding countries as refugees. More than five years later, many are still waiting for a new beginning in another country. They are unable to work and their children can't attend school. But the church is welcoming them—both Muslim and Christian refugees. VOM continues to partner with churches to help meet Christian refugees' needs and encourage them in this discouraging season. Learn how you can pray for them and for the church in the Middle East.  Never miss an episode of VOM Radio! Subscribe to the podcast!

The life, death and resurrection of Christ, who's birth we're about to celebrate, changed everything. However, what shouldn't be forgotten is that Christ was born in the Middle East. Also, the shepherds, who received the good news of great joy concerning the birth of Christ, were Middle East shepherds.--Why is that important- It's because even today, news of Christ is being spread throughout the Middle East by people who are willing to risk their freedom and even their lives to do so.--Todd Nettleton is Chief of Media Relations and Message Integration for Voice of the Martyrs. He's just returned from the Middle East and joined Jim once again to bring Crosstalk listeners an update on the persecuted church, particularly in the Middle East. He's host of The Voice of the Martyrs Radio and author of, When Faith is Forbidden- 40 Days on the Frontlines with Persecuted Christians.--Todd began by describing one of the sobering parts of his trip. It involved meeting with Iraqi Christian refugee families who have fled to nations around Iraq. These individuals fled during the rise of ISIS 5 to 7 years ago. They've registered with the U.N. as refugees, have applied for acceptance in a free nation, but are in limbo as they wait for that process to proceed.--One man has been in this situation of waiting for 8 years which is difficult because where they are now, they have no legal recognition so they can't get employment and their children aren't able to attend public schools. Such individuals wonder how they're going to do things that we take for granted like feeding the family.

The life, death and resurrection of Christ, who's birth we're about to celebrate, changed everything. However, what shouldn't be forgotten is that Christ was born in the Middle East. Also, the shepherds, who received the good news of great joy concerning the birth of Christ, were Middle East shepherds.--Why is that important- It's because even today, news of Christ is being spread throughout the Middle East by people who are willing to risk their freedom and even their lives to do so.--Todd Nettleton is Chief of Media Relations and Message Integration for Voice of the Martyrs. He's just returned from the Middle East and joined Jim once again to bring Crosstalk listeners an update on the persecuted church, particularly in the Middle East. He's host of The Voice of the Martyrs Radio and author of, When Faith is Forbidden- 40 Days on the Frontlines with Persecuted Christians.--Todd began by describing one of the sobering parts of his trip. It involved meeting with Iraqi Christian refugee families who have fled to nations around Iraq. These individuals fled during the rise of ISIS 5 to 7 years ago. They've registered with the U.N. as refugees, have applied for acceptance in a free nation, but are in limbo as they wait for that process to proceed.--One man has been in this situation of waiting for 8 years which is difficult because where they are now, they have no legal recognition so they can't get employment and their children aren't able to attend public schools. Such individuals wonder how they're going to do things that we take for granted like feeding the family.

Having just returned from the Middle East, Todd Nettleton shared about meeting with Iraqi Christian refugees who've been in limbo more than five years since ISIS forced them from their homes. Todd also told us about a Muslim convert whose own family tried to kill him when he chose to leave Islam to follow Christ. Yet he says he won't EVER deny Christ. Pray for these brothers in Christ that they would be able to stand firm while they wait for answers and direction, and to shine brightly in the face of persecution. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Everyone's Wilson's Daryl Crouch talks about the strain on pastors and leaders that lead to discouragement and how we can help them. Iraqi Christian Relief Council's Juliana Taimoorazy talks about the plight of Iraqi Christians and her nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Everyone's Wilson's Daryl Crouch talks about the strain on pastors and leaders that lead to discouragement and how we can help them. Iraqi Christian Relief Council's Juliana Taimoorazy talks about the plight of Iraqi Christians and her nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

In this month's episode, Michele Rigby Assad shares with Courtney Moore and Missie Branch about her journey as a CIA operative. Her full story can be found in her book: Breaking Cover: My Secret Life in the CIA and What It Taught Me about What's Worth Fighting For. In this episode, Michele discusses: – How God used her childhood interests to help lead her to work abroad with the CIA – Overcoming her own self-doubt and fear to be able to do the job God had called her to do – What her day-to-day work looked like as a CIA agent – Being a woman working in a male-dominated field – How she overcame being underestimated by her superiors and fought to rise above and excel in her field – How God brought together all of her unique skillsets to help rescue persecuted Iraqi Christians from ISIS Don't forget to download the Women & Work Going Deeper Bible Study and Discussion Questions that correspond to this episode. For more conversation with Michele, check out our Summer Series event at womenwork.net.   *As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.

When the Communist party took over mainland China in 1949, there were an estimated 5 million Christians. Three-plus decades of severe persecution under Mao nearly succeeded in eradicating Chinese Christianity. Nearly. By 1976, less than four decades after Mao's death, Christians in China numbered between 60-80 million. That's a low estimate. The actual number could be even higher. As Evan Osnos of The New Yorker wrote a few years ago, “as I traveled around China, I stopped being surprised by my encounters with Christians.” Today, as we've discussed many times on BreakPoint, the Communist Party is cracking down on religious minorities, including Christians. Among the reasons is that Chinese leader Xi Jinping has embraced a Mao-like cult of personality. The current crackdown includes raids and even bulldozing churches, arresting pastors, and discrimination in employment against people holding religious beliefs. Given this increasingly hostile environment, it shouldn't surprise anyone that, as Fox News recently reported, many Chinese Christians are fleeing the country. Included in the report was the story of Liao Qiang, a member of the Early Rain Covenant Church, which was raided in December 2018. More than 100 of its members were taken into custody. After the raid, as she told the Associated Press, Liao's daughter had to “report her whereabouts to police using social media whenever she left her home.” And she was informed that “her safety would not be guaranteed.” This caused Liao to conclude China was no longer a safe place for him or his family. So he fled with them to Taiwan, with hope they will be allowed to enter the U.S. as refugees. Given recent realities in China, including the mass detention of Muslim Uighurs, even more drastic forms of persecution could be in in the future for Chinese Christians. All of this means we will likely see more Christians fleeing from China as refugees. The question is: Where will they go? Back in April, World Magazine reported that “Under [the Trump] administration, refugee admissions have plunged to historic lows, with persecuted Christians in the Middle East suffering from the fallout.” To be clear, these “historic lows” are really low. “The number of Middle East Christians admitted into the United States in 2018 fell by a staggering 98 percent from 2016. Christians from countries that Open Doors ranked highest for religious persecution saw a 76 percent decline from 2016 to 2018.” The numbers in 2019 will be even lower: In the first few months of this year, “30 Iranian Christians, 25 Iraqi Christians, and zero Syrian Christian refugees” had been admitted to the United States. Absent a major change of heart and policy, there's no reason for Chinese Christians to expect refuge in the United States. Other countries could pick up the slack, of course, but why would we expect them to when the world's leader in protecting religious freedom around the world has stopped leading by example? And, we have stopped. I will repeat what I said back in April, “Christians have enjoyed nearly-unprecedented access to the White House, to administration officials and many of the promises made to us have been kept. Unfortunately, the promise to aid persecuted Christians around the world has not been kept.” I understand we are in the midst of a nation-wide and deeply divisive struggle over how to handle illegal immigration, especially on the southern border. The issue of Christian refugees should not be conflated with that conversation. The Trump administration specifically promised to help persecuted Christians around the world and is, this week, holding its second annual ministerial on the issue of religious persecution. We need to make it clear that, knowing what may await our Chinese brethren, we must back up any talk about religious freedom with real, tangible actions. That must include giving Christian refugees a place of refuge. If that sounds harsh, ask Liao Qiang about what harsh really looks like.

(00:00-10:15): James Holzhaur’s Jeopardy! run is over! The Chicago native was just shy of the all-time show record. Also, Pastor David Platt explains the President’s unexpected appearance at McLean Bible Church over the weekend. Was it a ploy to score political points? Brian and Ian touch on these topics. (10:15-20:16): Simon Sinek is the king of short, concise, and convicting sound bites. Ian picks from his Facebook feed and reflects on Sinek’s take on leadership and humility. He also points out the important distinction between leadership and authority. (20:16-30:15): Iraqi Christian burned alive three times survives and ‘sees Jesus’ in a vision. Brian and Ian discuss this amazing article and example of a miracle. They read it verbatim and react to it with raw amazement, but also admit to being skeptical about unbelievable examples such as this. Do you think miracles still happen as they did in the Bible? (30:15-40:13): What is the difference between performance music and worship music? Brian and Ian read a Christianity Today article that highlights 6 important differences. They focus on differentiating the two and avoiding putting the attention on the musician, rather than God, in church worship sessions. (40:13-50:30): Brian and Ian dive into this amazing feature from the Washington Post. It is written by morning local news anchor, Peggy Wehmeyer. Ian reads the story in its entirety and reflects on this modern parable about loving your neighbor and expressing kindness to those who persecute you. (50:30-1:01:33): Pennsylvania institutes a state-wide ‘Day of Kindness’ in honor of Fred Rogers. The Pennsylvania native was one of the most beloved television personalities as he expressed his kindness through child-like wonder and humility. Brian and Ian reflect on Mr. Rogers’ legacy and how that his personality and values should be implemented in Christianity everywhere. (1:01:33-1:12:07): Three marks of humility in leadership. Brian and Ian mull over an article in Christian Leaders and apply it to leading a church. They emphasize the importance of being a steward to a congregation for the better of next generations. (1:12:07-1:18:39): Brian and Ian’s “Weird Stuff We Found on the Internet”: A heartwarming story of a 101-year-old vet who flew to see his grandson’s commission into the Air Force Academy. On another note, Australia has new didgeridoo weapon restrictions, and metal melts...surprise. Don’t get cocky about traffic stops, you might end up looking like an idiot, and CERTAINLY don’t serve horses at McDonald’sSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Trump Administration has been a stalwart defender of Americans' religious liberty. From repealing the HHS mandate, to protecting religious rights in the workplace, and especially the appointment of justices and judges who respect the first amendment, the “more” that was promised by the President after that initial executive order has been delivered. However, the Administration's actions concerning religious freedom outside the United States is not as impressive as its talk. Last summer's Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom featured spellbinding rhetoric delivered by a “Who's Who” of people who've devoted their lives to the cause of religious freedom. The ministerial culminated in a statement called the “Potomac Declaration,” which stated, among other things, that “Religious freedom is universal and inalienable, and states must respect and protect this human right.” Remember the scene in the movie “Braveheart,” in which Mel Gibson's William Wallace delivers a barn burner of a speech to Scottish forces, whereupon Stephen, his Irish lieutenant, asks, “Fine speech. Now what?” While Wallace had an answer for Stephen, unfortunately the same cannot be said of the current administration, as WORLD magazine recently reported. “Under [the Trump] administration,” WORLD told its readers, “refugee admissions have plunged to historic lows, with persecuted Christians in the Middle East suffering from the fallout.” Just how low? “The number of Middle East Christians admitted into the United States in 2018 fell by a staggering 98 percent from 2016. Christians from countries that Open Doors ranked highest for religious persecution saw a 76 percent decline from 2016 to 2018.” So far, the downward trend is continuing in 2019. In the first months of this year, “30 Iranian Christians, 25 Iraqi Christians, and zero Syrian Christian refugees” had been admitted to the United States. As the saying goes, these low numbers aren't a bug of the system, they're a feature. According to one former administration official, the architect of White House immigration policy, Stephen Miller, once said that he “would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched American soil.” Whatever you make of the truthfulness of that story, the truth of the refugee story remains: Unless the U.S. is willing to admit persecuted religious minorities as refugees, the Potomac Declaration, as well as all those great speeches by those amazing leaders at the Ministerial are nothing but empty noise. Think about it: The countries represented at the Ministerial didn't need to be admonished not to persecute religious minorities. The Potomac Declaration wasn't directed at them. It was directed at Iraq, where the dire situation facing Christians is at least partly due to our invading and destabilizing the country. It was directed at Iran, Pakistan, and Syria and other countries on Open Door's list. Unfortunately, these are the least likely places to take the Potomac Declaration to heart, which leaves us with the question, “Now what?” At least part of the answer has to be for the United States to admit people fleeing religious persecution as refugees. Otherwise we're sending a clear message to their persecutors hat we don't mean what we say about religious freedom. As WORLD says, this administration “runs the risk of growing disillusionment among Christians for whom their persecuted brethren is a key concern.” Christians have enjoyed nearly-unprecedented access to the White House, to administration officials and many of the promises made to us have been kept. Unfortunately, the promise to aid persecuted Christians around the world has not been kept. We see our persecuted brothers and sisters caught up in the middle of what is a very necessary larger debate over immigration. The administration could both secure the border and help refugees under religious persecution. And if it did, it would be a huge political win. But even more important, with each year setting new records for religious persecution and martyrs around the world, it's the right thing to do.   http://www.breakpoint.org/2019/04/breakpoint-christian-refugees-need-a-new-home/   Resources Left behind Harvest Prude | WORLD | March 28, 2019 Religious liberty report card: The Trump administration's first year Travis Weber | Family Research Council | January 12, 2018 Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom Potomac Declaration Share Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor | U. S. Department of State | July 26, 2018

About the Panel: Iraq and Syria have become major sources of instability in the Middle East, drawing in Islamic extremists from around the world, sending floods of refugees outside of their borders, and seeing genocide at the hands of the Islamic State. The societies of both Iraq and Syria have suffered much from Baathist politics and ideology, which has in many ways set the stage for much of the dysfunction and problems that we are seeing in those countries today – a factor not usually recognized in analyses of events there. Events within Iraq and Syria have also been influenced by external actors jockeying for influence and in pursuit of their own geopolitical goals. In each country, however, there are hopeful signs, despite all of the tragedy. The dynamics in Syria and Iraq are related, yet distinct and different. This panel will explore the distinct dynamics in each country as well as some common dynamics, the changing role of the United States in the region, the role of other external factors such as Russia, Iran, Turkey, and the Gulf States, and will examine what the economic and political future may look like for ethnic and religious minorities in both countries. In Iraq, where the Christian population has dropped by approximately 90% since 2003 and where Yazidis have suffered genocide along with their Christian neighbors, the future role and status of ethnic and religious minorities is critical to that country's stability and future. The Iraqi panelist, Loay Mikhael, is an Iraqi Christian, now living in the Washington, D.C. area. In Syria, approximately 30% of Syrian territory, located in the northeast of the country, is governed by the Self-Administration of North and East Syria, which was announced on 6 September 2018, is heavily populated by Syrian Kurds, along with Arab, Christian and other minorities. The legislature for this body is the Syrian Democratic Council. Two of our panelists, Bassam Ishak, a Syrian Christian, and Sinam Sherkany, a Kurdish Muslim, are part of the SDC, and represent the SDC here in Washington, D.C. They will discuss how they are attempting to build a pluralistic society with protections for freedom of religion, speech, and dissent, in the midst of the chaos of the Syrian civil war. This panel was moderated by IWP Research Professor Paul Coyer, who specializes in the role of religion in foreign affairs and who spent time this past summer with the Yazidi and Christian communities of northern Iraq.

No people group on earth has lived in their homeland quite as long as the Assyrians of northern Iraq. This small tribe has suffered millennia of persecution, but for the entire church age have embraced Jesus Christ as their Lord. But today, through the actions of Islamic purists running amok, the Assyrians are barely hanging onto their lives and land. Many have fled to other countries, and many have died. In this rich interview with Juliana Taimoorazy, herself an Assyrian Christian from Iran, we learn about the outlook for this forgotten people. Indeed, Juliana's life work is to make the Assyrian people unforgettable. Will you please take some time to learn who they are, and what they face? Begin with this episode of the Citizen of New Jerusalem, but also go to the website of the Iraqi Christian Relief Council, of which Juliana is founder and president. From there also see the Philos Project, (to which Juliana is a Senior Fellow)--an outreach to Westerners to educate and encourage us in positive engagement with the Middle East. This interview was a great privilege to conduct, and I hope you take its lessons with you as you think, pray, and act to show love to Christians under the heavy burden of persecution and displacement. Be sure to offer feedback here, or to donate here to keep this show going strong. Thank you all.

What is a Christian's responsibility to the “Persecuted Church”? On today's program, I'll be interviewing an Iraqi Christian who was forced to leave Iraq and relocate into Europe due to persecution. In First Corinthians 12:26, The Bible tells us that “whenever one member of the Body of Christ suffers the all of the members suffer along with them”. On a recent trip to Europe, I was able to meet and interview an Iraqi Christian refugee. I believe hearing her story will serve as a source of inspiration in your Christian Walk. I invite you to join me now.

Would you like to take a quick trip over to Europe and visit with an Iraqi Christian refugee and hear their story of faith? If so, just stay tuned. On today's program, I will be sharing an interview that I recently had with an Iraqi Christian refugee. Her story will bless your life. Today she will be sharing about a vision that she recently had of Jesus Christ and the profound impact it had upon her life. Jesus Christ is alive and He is manifesting Himself to those who are hungry for truth. I invite you to join me now as we travel to Central Europe and hear a story of Faith, Forgiveness and Freedom.

Do you remember the time that an Angel warned Joseph and Mary to take the “Christ Child” into Egypt due to the persecution of Herod? Matthew Chapter 2 tells us, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Arise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” Joseph arose with the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod.” The “Sword of Herod” forced Joseph, Mary and Jesus to relocate into another country. On today's program, you will hear a modern story of a Christian who was made to relocate into another country as a refugee for their personal safety. Her story will inspire you to pray for your fellow brothers and sisters worldwide who are enduring persecution. I invite you to join me for this story of faith, forgiveness and freedom.

Do you remember the time that an Angel warned Joseph and Mary to take the “Christ Child” into Egypt due to the persecution of Herod? Matthew Chapter 2 tells us, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Arise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” Joseph arose with the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod.” The “Sword of Herod” forced Joseph, Mary and Jesus to relocate into another country. On today's program, you will hear a modern story of a Christian who was made to relocate into another country as a refugee for their personal safety. Her story will inspire you to pray for your fellow brothers and sisters worldwide who are enduring persecution. I invite you to join me for this story of faith, forgiveness and freedom.

What is a Christian's responsibility to the “Persecuted Church”? On today's program, I'll be interviewing an Iraqi Christian who was forced to leave Iraq and relocate into Europe due to oppression. In First Corinthians 12, The Apostle Paul told us, that “whenever one member of the Body of Christ suffers all of the members suffer along with them”. On a recent trip to Europe, I was able to meet and interview an Iraqi Christian refugee. I believe hearing her story will serve as a source of inspiration in your Christian Walk. I invite you to join me now.

Many Christians who call Iraq home plan to stay in their native country despite persecution. Listen as Air1's Adam Russell shares their story.

What is a Christian's responsibility to the “Persecuted Church”? On today's program, I'll be interviewing an Iraqi Christian who was forced to leave Iraq and relocate into Europe due to persecution. In First Corinthians 12:26, The Bible tells us that “whenever one member of the Body of Christ suffers the all of the members suffer along with them”. On a recent trip to Europe, I was able to meet and interview an Iraqi Christian refugee. I believe hearing her story will serve as a source of inspiration in your Christian Walk. I invite you to join me now.

Would you like to take a quick trip over to Europe and visit with an Iraqi Christian refugee and hear their story of faith? If so, just stay tuned. On today's program, I will be sharing an interview that I recently had with an Iraqi Christian refugee. Her story will bless your life. Today she will be sharing about a vision that she recently had of Jesus Christ and the profound impact it had upon her life. Jesus Christ is alive and He is manifesting Himself to those who are hungry for truth. I invite you to join me now as we travel to Central Europe and hear a story of Faith, Forgiveness and Freedom.

Do you remember the time that an Angel warned Joseph and Mary to take the “Christ Child” into Egypt due to the persecution of Herod? Matthew Chapter 2 tells us, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Arise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” Joseph arose with the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod.” The “Sword of Herod” forced Joseph, Mary and Jesus to relocate into another country. On today's program, you will hear a modern story of a Christian who was made to relocate into another country as a refugee for their personal safety. Her story will inspire you to pray for your fellow brothers and sisters worldwide who are enduring persecution. I invite you to join me for this story of faith, forgiveness and freedom.

Do you remember the time that an Angel warned Joseph and Mary to take the “Christ Child” into Egypt due to the persecution of Herod? Matthew Chapter 2 tells us, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Arise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” Joseph arose with the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod.” The “Sword of Herod” forced Joseph, Mary and Jesus to relocate into another country. On today's program, you will hear a modern story of a Christian who was made to relocate into another country as a refugee for their personal safety. Her story will inspire you to pray for your fellow brothers and sisters worldwide who are enduring persecution. I invite you to join me for this story of faith, forgiveness and freedom.