Sound The Trumpet : Rick Warren does it, again

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“Rick Warren does it, again”
by WND - Joseph Farah
July 4th, 2009

While millions of other Americans will be celebrating Independence Day weekend, Rick Warren, often called "America's Pastor," will be serving as the keynote speaker for a Saudi-backed Muslim group that promotes a radical strain of Wahhabi Islam in about 80 percent of U.S. mosques.

I don't know about you, but I'm getting tired of Rick Warren's bad judgments.

This time Warren will be schmoozing with the Islamic Society of North America, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood – just as are al-Qaida, Hamas and most other Muslim terrorist organizations.

ISNA puts on a façade of moderation, yet, according to terrorism expert Steven Emerson, it "convenes annual conferences where Islamist militants have been given a platform to incite violence and promote hatred."

After Hamas leader Mousa Marzook was arrested in 1997, ISNA raised money for his defense. He was eventually deported.

ISNA condemned the U.S. government's seizure of the financial assets of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad after Sept. 11.

Brigitte Gabriel combats politically correct notions about the "religion of peace" in "They Must be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How we Can Do It"

"I think ISNA has been an umbrella, also a promoter of groups that have been involved in terrorism," explains Emerson. "I am not going to accuse the ISNA of being directly involved in terrorism. I will say ISNA has sponsored extremists, racists, people who call for jihadagainst the United States."

I could go on with many more details about ISNA. Suffice it to say it is no friend of Christianity and no friend of America.

So what is Rick Warren doing speaking at the group's national conference?

I don't know what Warren's agenda is. He would probably say he doesn't have one. But I can tell you the effect of his appearance – it is designed to disinfect and rehabilitate a group that is dangerous and subversive to U.S. national security.

But it should surprise no one, at this point, that Rick Warren will be there. One of the first times I ever wrote about Rick Warren was in 2006 when he took an equally misguided trip to Syria to meet with dictator Bashar Assad and praise him for his pleasant treatment of Christians. Syria was then and remains today one of the world's leading state sponsors of Islamic terrorism. Almost every terrorist group in the world maintains offices there. Nevertheless, Rick Warren said, while in Syria, that the country "does not allow extremism of any kind."

Less than a week after Warren's absurd proclamations in Syria, a Christian leader in Lebanon, former President Pierre Gemayel, was assassinated in the streets of Beirut. Everyone in Lebanon knows who killed him – the Syrian government.

As I wrote at the time, "it is imperative that Christians – and especially Christian leaders – have discernment about evil in our world. And true, unadulterated evil is what you have running Syria today. The government led by Bashar Assad, who met with Rick Warren last week, is anti-American, anti-freedom, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish and pro-terrorist.

"Rick Warren should know this. Yet, he has placed himself in a position of apologizing and excusing the government in Damascus, one of the most evil on the face of the earth.

"It is not an exaggeration to say that government got cover last week as a result of Warren's shameful public relations on its behalf. I won't go so far to say there was a direct cause-and-effect relationship between Warren's embrace of Assad and the assassination of Gemayel yesterday, but it is both a coincidence of striking proportions as well as an illustration of the true character of Damascus' totalitarian police-state regime."

In 2007, Rick Warren was one of 100 or so "evangelical leaders" who signed a document begging forgiveness from Muslims for all the evil deeds perpetrated against them by Christians.

Rick Warren loves to apologize for things he didn't do, for things other people did that weren't wrong, even for things that occurred hundreds of years before he was born – such as apologizing to Muslims worldwide for atrocities committed against their ancestors during the Crusades.

In 2007, he also apologized for American "excesses in the war on terrorism."

And he has apologized for the church because it hasn't done enough about the spread of AIDS and problems like global warming.

Yet, I must observe that despite his predilection for apologies, he has a great deal of trouble owning up to his own personal mistakes.

Once again, just like his trip to Syria, serving as the keynote speaker to the Islamic Society of North America is a very, very bad personal mistake – one that demonstrates a complete lack of spiritual discernment.

Looking for His glorious appearing! Titus 2:13