Faith Under Fire

The following article was written by Amanda Metzger, a MichaelSavage.com contributor.

Whether it’s an 856-year-old cathedral burning in Paris, bombs at Easter Services in Sri Lanka, or shots from a gun in a suburban San Diego Synagogue, it feels like faith in general is under fire in this world.

The latest tragedy at the 33-year-old Chabad of Poway Synagogue is a bloody story dripping with irony.

In a manic manifesto allegedly penned by suspected lone shooter John Earnest, he takes great pride in claiming to be a descendant from European ancestors who journeyed to the New World.

The irony here is that many of the Europeans who fled across the Atlantic sought to escape religious persecution from another sect of Christianity.

They were desperately seeking religious freedom, so much so that these Christians risked everything they had to sail to an unknown land.

Yet the alleged shooter claims to have murdered in honor of his ancestry.

Want more irony? He was studying to become a nurse — a profession that seeks to heal.

He claims to be a follower of Christ. Apparently no one told him that Jesus was Jewish. He also missed Jesus’s greatest commandment: to love.

In the manifesto, the author also takes credit for arson at a mosque in Escondido, located near San Diego and makes racists comments against Muslims.

News reports mentioned the manifesto and its racist views, but many of them conveniently omitted the text where the alleged shooter attacked President Donald Trump, calling him a “Zionist, Jew-loving, anti-white, traitorous c***sucker.”

If he had praised the president, would that have been the headline?

Perhaps it doesn’t fit their narrative that Trump is the catalyst for the fury of hate.

It was about a half hour into a Passover celebration on the final day of the holiday when this 19-year-old was reported to have fired an AR-15 type assault weapon.

The bullets struck four people, killing one woman and injuring two men and a little girl.

Amid the mire of hate in which this story dwells, there are flashes of bravery.

Even though Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, a founder of the Synagogue and originally from Brooklyn, took a bullet to his hand, he defied hatred and continued his sermon as they finished the final day of the holiday commemorating the liberation of Israelites from slavery in Egypt thousands of years ago.

Another victim, Almog Peretz, was shot in the leg while rushing children to safety.

The woman who was killed, Lori Gilbert-Kaye, leapt in front of her Rabbi amid gunfire. She gave her life to save another.

Anti-Semitism in America is not new. Looking over attacks on Synagogues, there were spates of them during certain years. But the deadliest in U.S. history came recently in October 2018 when 11 people were so needlessly murdered in a Pittsburgh synagogue simply for their lineage and practicing their faith.

How did we get to a point where churches of all faiths are having difficult conversations over whether they should have security in their buildings and whether congregants should tote guns. What a world to live in where you no longer feel safe in a place of worship.

Thanks to a brave, off-duty Border Patrol agent with a gun, the death toll wasn’t higher on Saturday.

I couldn’t stop thinking about why these attacks on places of worship are happening now. The irony is that faith is being attacked in a time when more and more Americans are turning away from it and congregations are dwindling.

More and more people believe in nothing, numbed by television and social media and worshiping at the altar of momentary pleasures.

Where does that leave our society?

With radicalized psychopaths who believe so much in evil that they are willing to forfeit their futures to attack the last of us who still dare to believe in something beautiful.

In 2016, after 22 years on the air, Michael Savage was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame, an honor he calls “the capstone of my life.” The Savage Nation, the country’s number one streaming radio show, is one of the top programs in America, with millions of listeners and broadcast on more than 230 stations, including WABC and KSFO. A prolific New York Times best-selling author, Dr. Savage has been profiled in Playboy and The New Yorker, and he has been awarded the Freedom of Speech Award by Talkers magazine. He received his PhD in epidemiology and nutrition sciences from the University of California at Berkeley. To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.