Leadership, like most things, comes to some people more easily than others. But here’s the good news: whatever your natural abilities, you can learn to be a leader if you take the time to practice a few fundamental skills. As you apply these skills over time, you grow in effectiveness as a leader.
Start today to master these six easy habits that will help you become the leader you want to be:
Exercise authenticity with self. Identify your ethical code, and never compromise on what you believe to be right and wrong. It isn’t always easy to live authentically. At times, being true to what you know is right means going against the crowd. As an authentic leader, you have to be willing to look at yourself honestly and take criticism well, using it to improve your performance.
Practice effective communication. A great leader is a great communicator. Learn to effectively use a number of different communication strategies to pass along your vision and values, share inspiration, and give clear commands—all while being transparent with information and open to feedback.
Apply emotional intelligence. A skilled leader is able to master and manage emotions. They don’t get angry in stressful situations. Instead, they have the ability to look at a problem and calmly find a solution. Work to develop a high degree of emotional intelligence by knowing yourself well, understanding and overcoming your emotional triggers, and staying attentive to the emotional needs of those around you.
Generate a positive outlook. It’s easy to be positive when things are going well, but a skilled leader is able to remain confident when things go wrong. Learn to embrace failures and inspire your team and those around you to consider every circumstance, good and bad, as an opportunity to learn. A positive outlook will encourage others and create an environment where people want to remain. Positive thinking and positive action go hand in hand.
Admit mistakes even if you’re afraid of looking weak. A skilled leader readily admits mistakes. When you do, you show your human side and gain respect. When you’re candid and honest about your own mistakes, your employees feel safe admitting theirs, helping to create a humanized, accepting, open culture.
Be a role model others want to emulate. As a leader, your actions set the tone and the standard for appropriate behavior in the workplace. Exhibit actions that you want your team to emulate. You can establish rules of conduct to help people understand expectations, but the best way to encourage the behavior you want to see is to correctly and precisely demonstrate it yourself.
Police said that the jihadis were known to have committed at least 369 robberies and thefts in and around Barcelona. In addition to theft, the cell members sustained themselves through drug trafficking and document fraud. ‘There is little doubt that the
The police in Abuja are yet to release Dino Melaye, despite a court order that the senator should be released on bail once he meets his bail conditions.
The Maitama Division of the High Court of the Federal Capital Territory on Friday accorded Mr Melaye bail with stringent conditions to allow him access to his doctors after the senator said he has been ill since he was arrested on January 4.
Mr Melaye was arrested at his residence in Abuja as a suspect in a homicide investigation.
The Kogi West senator with the opposition Peoples Democratic Party has denied involvement in the murder, which occurred in his state in 2018.
He accused the police under former Inspector-General Ibrahim Idris of being on a witch-hunt to weaken him politically. Mr Idris, who retired on January 15, denied trying to settle political scores with Mr Melaye.
On January 4, the senator surrendered and was subsequently arrested following an eight-day siege that began on December 28 at his residence in Maitama, a highbrow suburb of the nation’s capital.
Despite claiming that his health has deteriorated, the police declined to release him. Rather, they moved him to a medical facility run by the State Security Service in Abuja.
It was on the basis of his health that the court granted him bail, whose conditions include presenting three sureties who live and own properties in Abuja. The Clerk of the National Assembly was also required to sign the senator’s bail bond.
He satisfied the court’s demand on Monday, according to court filings seen by PREMIUM TIMES.
The police also said Mr Melaye is involved in the killing of Danjuma Saliu, a police officer, in Kogi State who was shot in a fracas in July 2018.
These allegations and fresh ones being filed against the senator were cited by police sources as the grounds for disregarding the court order for the senator’s freedom on health grounds.
The police in new charges for which they planned to dock Mr Melaye said the senator lied when he claimed a plot to plant weapons and other incriminating items in his residence during the week-long siege.
An alarm which Mr Melaye raised on Twitter that the police officers who stormed his residence to arrest him were being captured on security cameras as they made alleged sinister plots was cited as one of the evidence to be used when the trial opens this morning.
The police said the senator knew the claim was false but pushed it out nonetheless.
Mr Melaye in an interview with PREMIUM TIMES denied allegations of lying against the police. He suggested that the police were making a mockery of the judiciary by filing fresh charges before a court whose bail order they refused to obey.
The fresh charges were filed on January 14 while Mr Idris was still in office.
The new Inspector-General, Mohammed Adamu, has promised to discard the impunity and disregard for civil institutions that characterised his predecessor’s tenure, but it was unclear whether or not he had been briefed about the scheduled arraignment of Mr Melaye today.
Efforts to speak to the police spokesperson, Frank Mbah, were unsuccessful as he neither picked the phone calls nor responded to text messages put across to him. Also, the Abuja police spokesperson, Anjuguri Manzah, said he cannot speak on the matter when asked about police’s disregard of the court order on Tuesday morning.
The Government of President Muhammadu Buhari has asked the Chief Justice of Nigeria, CJN, Walter Onnoghen to resign from office.
This was disclosed on Tuesday by Aliu Umar, the government prosecutor on resumption of the controversial trial of the CJN for allegedly failing to declare some of his assets when he was sworn-in.
In his open address at the Code of Conduct Tribunal, Umar also said a letter to that effect has been sent to Onnoghen, wondering whether he had received it or not.
Meanwhile, Mr. Onnoghen shunned again the tribunal as he was not present when the CCT resumed at 10:20 a.m.
Wole Olanipekun, a senior lawyer leading a team of over 50 defence counsels for Mr Onnoghen, told the court that his client was absent because of the cases that were instituted against the tribunal’s proceeding.
Recall that a federal high court ruled last week that Mr Onnoghen’s trial be suspended, but a school of thought sympathetic with the government argues that the order is of no effect since federal high courts are not superior to the CCT. According to them the tribunal is only bound to obey orders from the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court.
Meanwhile dozens of protesters stormed the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT) in Abuja, demanding discontinuance of the infamous trial of the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Walter Onnoghen.
Recall that the CCT had on January 14 fixed January 22 for hearing in the six counts of false assets declaration brought against Mr. Onnoghen by the Code of Conduct Bureau.
President Muhammadu Buhari-led federal government unilaterally — without required consultation with states and the national assembly– tampered with the NLNG funds.
A young Nigerian farmer, Abdulkadir Muhammad, is seeking compensation for a job he did for the Senior Special Assistant to the President Muhammadu Buhari on Economic Management Team, Dolapo Bright.
Between January and June, Mr Muhammad was asked by the top aide to carry out three agriculture-related feasibility studies.
The first, on rice milling plant in Jigawa State, and the second, on packaging and storage strategies of perishable farm produce in northern Nigeria and the third, a compilation of regions where perishable produce are cultivated in 19 northern states.
Mr Muhammad had carried out the assignments with the hope of remuneration and continued relationship with the top aide but things changed as soon as he delivered.
HOW IT STARTED
Concerned about the flight of local rice from producing communities to neighbouring countries, 35-year-old Muhammad created an agri-tech website early 2017.
The website, Magna Wealth, was intended to bridge the gap between local rice farmers and Nigerians who are willing to purchase the produce.
“There is a lot of activities of the government in helping farmers to grow the rice but there is actually no much effort to see these rice penetrating inwards Nigerian market. You see, most of the communities producing rice in Nigeria exist in border states so they (farmers) sell it easily to foreigners.
“I developed a website that I wanted to identify with some key distribution agents so that we can be collecting pre-season orders. So, we needed to identify with the farmers because we can’t sell what we don’t have. I’m more concerned that these rice should be sold to Nigerians as an extension of the benefit the CBN is giving to farmers through the Anchors Borrowers Scheme so that foreigners will not come and benefit what our government spent on. So, I developed this website,” he said.
In the course of interaction with the farmers, one of them (farmers) introduced him to Mr Bright who asked for a proposal on his plans. After the first interaction, Mr Bright invited the youth to his office in Abuja in March 2017.
THE CONTROVERSIAL DEAL
At the meeting, Mr Muhammad said the aide told him that his proposal was not good enough and asked for a redrafting.
Also at the meeting, Mr Muhammad asked for the aide’s assistance in setting up a warehouse and working capital.
While the meeting was getting to the tail, Mr Bright informed him that the federal government was in a partnership with the Chinese government and would want to interact with organised farmers to get them to benefit. To facilitate this interaction, he was asked to generate data and design a rice mill.
“Mr Dolapo told me that I needed something that will attract farmers to me. He said you needed rice mill. He asked me to go back to Jigawa, talk to organised farmers on how to facilitate government’s interventions and get data for them. He was clapping his hands and told me to do it in two weeks. He said we’ll have a meeting after submission and another meeting with DG of BOA (Bank of Agriculture) on the rice mill he wants help me with.”
For this assignment, there was no agreed remuneration nor was there a written agreement.
Within the deadline, however, Mr Muhammad submitted a report on a proposed seven tonnes per hour rice milling plant in Auyo Local Government Area of Jigawa State.
The 24-page report, a copy of which he gave to PREMIUM TIMES, includes market survey, technical specification, production plan, marketing plans, and evaluation of critical problems among others.
However, instead of making a physical submission of the report, Mr Muhammad sent it to Mr Bright’s e-mail, therefore robbing himself of an acknowledgment copy.
A copy of the mail seen by this reporter indicates that the report was sent to Mr Dolapo on March 2, 2017 at 9:21 a.m.
“I eventually went to Abuja and I called him that I need to submit the hard copy so I can get my acknowledgment, he said he was in a meeting that I should call him back.
“Three days later, he called me that the work was very wonderful. That why not me extend it to the 19 states of the north and present it to their governors as template so that they will have data generated and prepare ground for government intervention?”
To this request, Mr Muhammad demanded to be provided cash, a Hilux van to move around and a means of identification. He said Mr Bright did not provide any of these but made another request.
In May 2017, an unsuspecting Mr Muhammad was asked to gather data on perishable goods and list regions where they are cultivated in all 19 states of northern Nigerian.
The report was concluded and submitted, again, via e-mail on Thursday, June 8, 2017.
The 732-kilobyte file details local technology in packaging and storage of perishable farm produce and list of regions where perishable produce are cultivated in 19 northern states.
Again, Mr Muhammad went to Abuja and asked to see Mr Bright to follow up on their initial discussions and submit a hard copy of his latest report. But, according to him, the aide kept giving him excuses and later stopped answering calls.
At this point, the farmer then realised he might have been used.
LEGAL AID
After multiple unsuccessful efforts to get Mr Bright’s attention, the youth in August 2017 approached a law firm, Idi Danabubakar and Co., to front for him.
The firm on August 9, on behalf of Mr Muhammad, wrote Mr Bright to demand N150, 000, 000 to be paid within seven days.
Mr Bright did not respond, necessitating a legal action but the farmer could not afford what was demanded by his lawyer.
Next, he contacted the Legal Aid Council, a body which offers free civil litigation service to Nigerians. In a letter dated October 24, 2017 the council demanded N275 million to be paid to the farmer on or before November 30.
“This demand stems from the fact that our client’s work is an intellectual property which you know is valuable and can be exploited for economic advantage by you, or your office, or anybody,” the letter notes.
Again, Mr Bright ignored the letter.
INTELLECTUAL THEFT?
While Mr Muhammad was making efforts to get compensated for his work, the Federal Government on July 9, 2018 signed a N10 billion contract for the construction of integrated large scale rice processing plants in 10 states of the federation.
The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and MV Agro PVT of India and its partners, MV Agro Engineers Nigeria limited.
The 10 states where the rice mills will be sited are Anambra, Kaduna, Kebbi, Ogun, Zamfara, Kogi, Benue, Bauchi, Niger and Bayelsa.
The MoU will now enable the conclusion of the plant procurement procedures, installation and commissioning to be delivered within 18 months or latest by December 2019.
Even though Jigawa was not one of the states where the mills will be set up, Mr Muhammad believes the approved mills were awarded to specifications in his feasibility report.
“Along the line, as I was pursuing this issue, the Federal Government approved 10 rice mills in Nigeria. These mills, 100 percent are my idea. I spoke with an insider who said all these your work has been approved, all the correspondences have passed through tables. He said I should be careful that these people can even harm me. He said I should trace my work at the Ministry of Agric.
“Before I submitted my report, they already had a plan that some implements were coming from China. They just wanted me to prepare the modalities and prepare ground for them as against their plans. The only difference is the capacity, all other things are the same. My proposal was 140 tonnes, theirs is 100. I did everything to perfect specification; from boiler to de-stoner, energy efficiency, how the rice brand can be used to power sections of the rice mill. “They needed only one of mine to develop their own. It was because of this plan that he insisted that I must work on the rice mill. Maybe that was an assignment they were on before I came, he just decided to use me and dump me later,” he said.
ABDULKADIR SEEKS COMPENSATION
Meanwhile, a few days to the signing of the MoU by the federal government, Mr Muhammad had approached the court to seek justice.
In the court papers seen by PREMIUM TIMES, the Vice President of Nigeria (Chairman of the Economic Management Team), The Attorney General of the Federation, Mr Bright and three others were listed as defendants in the case filed on July 2, 2018.
The claimant sought N275 million ‘representing consultancy fees for services rendered,’ and N500 million ‘representing damages for breach of contract.’
In another relief, Mr Muhammad wants 14 percent pre-judgement interest, another 14 percent post-judgment interest and N5 million as cost of legal action.
But Mr Muhammad had other obstacles to contend with.
“He (The lawyer) filed the case in July. In August, the court went on vacation but because it’s a human rights case, they assigned it to a judge. They served them court papers, yet no response.
“As I talk to you now, every time I call my lawyer he’ll say they have not re-assigned it. Later, he stopped attending to my calls.”
Later, I went to the Federal High Court to trace my file and I realised that it has not been re-assigned. There, an insider told me that the case has some element of interest from people from above.”
As at the time of filing this report, the case has not been assigned to a judge over six months after initiating legal process.
When contacted, Mr Bright snapped at this reporter, insisting not to comment.
“Listen, he has already gone to court. Don’t come and tell me anything about…shebi he has gone to court. Don’t come and ask me anything,” Mr Bright said furiously.
“He has gone to court, why should I be making comment,” he added and ended the call.
In Proverbs 15:25-28 Solomon reminds us of the cost of pride is very large. Those who choose pride set themselves against God and God will set Himself against them. They and their house will be targets of God’s destruction. “The Lord tears down the house of the proud but maintains the widow’s boundaries”. On the other hand, the widow is the picture and representative of a humble, needy person who looks to and depends on God. She represents the opposite of the proud, and God takes special care of those who humbly depend on Him. As Solomon has said previously, God opposes the proud.
How we think matters to God. Wickedness doesn’t begin in the actions; it begins in the heart and thoughts. There is certainly a sense in which our actions are more important than our thoughts, but our actions begin in our thoughts, so what we…
Silence will heal the wounds inflicted by the endless words that swarm around us, exhaust us, tire us beyond all tiredness. We need silence in our noisy, work–filled life, as a child needs its mother’s milk. We need to be alone with God.
We need to have a desert, be it only a corner of some apartment, some house, where we can go and rest with God. We need to follow him to some hill, to some garden where he himself was also wont to pray when he was tired and weary and distressed.
We need silence in order to be able to listen to our brothers, to listen with the heart. We need silence to open our souls to our brothers, making an inn for the thousands who may be living in palatial homes but have no place to lay their burdens of loneliness. We need…
David Kupelian’s revealing conversation with NARAL co-founder Bernard Nathanson
(Image courtesy Pixabay)
During the tumultuous 1960s, after centuries of legal prohibition and moral condemnation of abortion, a handful of dedicated activists launched an unprecedented campaign, whose purpose was two-fold: first, capture the news media and thus public opinion, and then, change the nation’s abortion laws.
Their success was rapid and total – resulting in abortion being legalized in all 50 states, for virtually any reason and throughout all nine months of pregnancy. Since the Supreme Court’s controversial Roe v. Wade decision made 46 years ago today, Jan. 22, 1973, American doctors have performed well over 60 million abortions.
Although polls consistently show a vast majority of Americans oppose of unfettered abortion-on-demand, the movement’s well-crafted, almost magical slogans – appealing to Americans’ deeply rooted inclination toward tolerance, privacy and individual rights – enabled the early abortion marketers to divert attention away from the core issues of exactly what abortion does to both mother and unborn child, focusing instead on a newly created issue: “choice.” No longer was the morality of killing the unborn at issue, but rather, “who decides.”
The original abortion-rights slogans from the early ’70s – they remain virtual articles of faith and rallying cries of the “pro-choice” movement to this day – were “Freedom of choice” and “Women must have control over their own bodies.”
“I remember laughing when we made those slogans up,” recalled Bernard Nathanson, M.D., co-founder of pro-abortion vanguard group NARAL, during a lengthy interview I did with him in 1990. Reminiscing about the early days of the abortion-rights movement in the late ’60s and early ’70s, he confided, “We were looking for some sexy, catchy slogans to capture public opinion. They were very cynical slogans then, just as all of these slogans today are very, very cynical.”
Besides having served as chairman of the executive committee of NARAL – originally, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, and later renamed the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League – Nathanson was one of the principal architects and strategists of the abortion movement in the United States. He told me an astonishing story.
Changing the law on abortion
“In 1968 I met Lawrence Lader,” Nathanson explained. “Lader had just finished a book called ‘Abortion,’ and in it had made the audacious demand that abortion should be legalized throughout the country. I had just finished a residency in obstetrics and gynecology and was impressed with the number of women who were coming into our clinics, wards and hospitals suffering from illegal, infected, botched abortions.
“Lader and I were perfect for each other. We sat down and plotted out the organization now known as NARAL. With Betty Friedan, we set up this organization and began working on the strategy.”
“We persuaded the media that the cause of permissive abortion was a liberal, enlightened, sophisticated one,” recalled the movement’s co-founder. “Knowing that if a true poll were taken, we would be soundly defeated, we simply fabricated the results of fictional polls. We announced to the media that we had taken polls and that 60 percent of Americans were in favor of permissive abortion. This is the tactic of the self-fulfilling lie. Few people care to be in the minority. We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. The actual figure was approaching 100,000, but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1 million.
“Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public. The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200-250 annually. The figure we constantly fed to the media was 10,000. These false figures took root in the consciousness of Americans, convincing many that we needed to crack the abortion law.
“Another myth we fed to the public through the media was that legalizing abortion would only mean that the abortions taking place illegally would then be done legally. In fact, of course, abortion is now being used as a primary method of birth control in the U.S. and the annual number of abortions has increased by 1,500 percent since legalization.”
NARAL’s brilliantly deceitful marketing campaign, bolstered by fraudulent “research,” was uncannily successful. In New York, the law outlawing abortion had been on the books for 140 years. “In two years of work, we at NARAL struck that law down,” said Nathanson. “We lobbied the legislature, we captured the media, we spent money on public relations … Our first year’s budget was $7,500. Of that, $5,000 was allotted to a public relations firm to persuade the media of the correctness of our position. That was in 1969.”
New York immediately became the abortion capital for the eastern half of the United States.
“We were inundated with applicants for abortion,” Nathanson told me. “To that end, I set up a clinic, the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health (CRASH), which operated in the east side of Manhattan. It had 10 operating rooms, 35 doctors, 85 nurses. It operated seven days a week, from 8 a.m. to midnight. We did 120 abortions every day in that clinic. At the end of the two years that I was the director, we had done 60,000 abortions. I myself, with my own hands, have done 5,000 abortions. I have supervised another 10,000 that residents have done under my direction. So I have 75,000 abortions in my life. Those are pretty good credentials to speak on the subject of abortion.”
At the time, CRASH was the largest abortion clinic in America.
‘A window into the womb’
After two years, Nathanson resigned from CRASH and became chief of the obstetrical service at St. Luke’s Hospital in New York City, a major teaching center for Columbia University Medical School. At that time, in 1973, a raft of new technologies and apparatuses had just become available, all designed to afford physicians a “window into the womb.”
Nathanson recounted for me the dazzling array of cutting-edge technologies coming online back then:
Real-time ultrasound: an instrument which beams high-frequency sound into the mother’s abdomen. The echoes that come back are collected by a computer and assembled into a moving picture;
Electronic fetal heart monitoring: We clamp an apparatus on the mother’s abdomen, and then continuously record the fetal heart rate, instant by instant;
Fetoscopy: an optical instrument put directly into the womb. We could watch that baby, actually eyeball it.
Cordocentesis: taking a needle, sticking it into the pregnant mother’s uterus and, under ultrasound, locating the umbilical arteries and actually putting a needle into the cord, taking the baby’s blood, diagnosing its illnesses, and treating it by giving it medicine. Today, surgery is actually performed on the unborn!
“Anyway,” Nathanson told me, “as a result of all of this technology – looking at this baby, examining it, investigating it, watching its metabolic functions, watching it urinate, swallow, move and sleep, watching it dream, which you could see by its rapid eye movements via ultrasound, treating it, operating on it – I finally came to the conviction that this was my patient. This was a person! I was a physician, pledged to save my patients’ lives, not to destroy them. So I changed my mind on the subject of abortion.”
“There was nothing religious about it,” he hastened to add. “This was purely a change of mind as a result of this fantastic technology, and the new insights and perceptions I had into the nature of the unborn child.”
Nathanson expressed some doubts about abortion then, in an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine. “I was immediately summoned to a kangaroo court and was discharged from the pro-abortion movement, something I do not lose sleep over.”
In 1985, intrigued by the question of what really happens during an abortion in the first three months of pregnancy, Nathanson decided to put an ultrasound machine on the abdomen of a woman undergoing an abortion and to videotape what happens.
“We got a film that was astonishing, shocking, frightening,” he told me.
It was made into a film called “The Silent Scream.” It was shattering, and the pro-abortion people panicked. Because at this point, we had moved the abortion debate away from moralizing, sermonizing, sloganeering and pamphleteering into a high-tech argument. For the first time, the pro-life movement now had all of the technology and all of the smarts, and the pro-abortion people were on the defensive.
Nathanson’s film provoked a massive campaign of defamation on the part of the pro-abortion movement, including charges that he had doctored the film. He hadn’t. “I was accused of everything from pederasty to nepotism. But the American public saw the film.”
In 1987, Nathanson released another, even stronger film called “Eclipse of Reason,” introduced by Charlton Heston. “‘The Silent Scream’ dealt with a child who was aborted at 12 weeks,” said Nathanson. “But there are 400 abortions every day in this country that are done after the third month of pregnancy. Contrary to popular misconception, Roe v. Wade makes abortion permissible up to and including the ninth month of pregnancy. I wanted to dramatize what happens in one of these late abortions, after the third month.” He explained:
They took a fetuscope, which is a long optical instrument with a lens at one end and a strong light at the other. They inserted the fetuscope into the womb of a woman at 19-1/2 weeks, and a camera was clamped on the eyepiece and then the abortionist went to work.
This procedure was known as a D&E (dilation and evacuation). It involves dilating the cervix, rupturing the bag of waters, taking a large crushing instrument and introducing it way high up into the uterus, grabbing a piece of the baby, pulling it off the baby, and just repeating this procedure until the baby has been pulled apart piece by piece.
Then the pieces are assembled on a table, put together like a jigsaw puzzle, so the abortionist can be sure that the entire baby has been removed. We photographed all this through the fetuscope. This is a shattering film.
Thus did Bernard Nathanson, once a founder and top strategist of the pro-abortion movement, come to be staunchly committed to the cause of ending legalized abortion in America.
Nathanson is by no means the only abortionist to switch sides in the abortion war. In recent decades, hundreds of abortion providers have left their profession. On its website, NARAL has bemoaned “the dwindling number of doctors willing or trained to perform abortions.”
Putting the genie back in the bottle
Ironically, Bernard Nathanson, perhaps the closest thing to being “the man who started it all” for the “pro-choice movement” – the Edward Teller of abortion – spent the rest of his life trying to put the abortion genie back in the bottle. Like Norma McCorvey – who as the barefoot-and-pregnant “Jane Roe” was the pro-abortion plaintiff in the Supreme Court’s momentous and fateful Roe v. Wade decision – Nathanson also became utterly dedicated to putting an end to what both later came to see as a national tragedy on a par with the Nazi Holocaust.
“Let me share with you my own personal perception of the abortion tragedy,” Nathanson told one California audience:
I’m going to set it against my Jewish heritage and the Holocaust in Europe. The abortion holocaust is beyond the ordinary discourse of morality and rational condemnation. It is not enough to pronounce it absolutely evil. Absolute evil used to characterize this abortion tragedy is an inept formulation.
The abortion tragedy is a new event, severed from connections with traditional presuppositions of history, psychology, politics and morality. It extends beyond the deliberations of reason, beyond the discernments of moral judgment, beyond meaning itself. It trivializes itself to call itself merely a holocaust or a tragedy.
It is, in the words of Arthur Cohen, perhaps the world’s leading scholar on the European Holocaust, a mysterium tremendum, an utter mystery to the rational mind – a mystery that carries with it not only the aspect of vastness, but the resonance of terror, something so unutterably diabolic as to be literally unknowable to us.
“This is an evil torn free of its moorings in reason and causality, an ordinary secular corruption raised to unimaginable powers of magnification and limitless extremity. Nelly Sachs, a poetess who wrote poems on the Holocaust in Europe and who won the Nobel Prize in 1966, wrote a poem called ‘Chorus of the Unborn.’ Permit me to give you a few lines. She said:
We, the unborn, the yearning has begun to plague us as shores of blood broaden to receive us. Like dew, we sink into love but still the shadows of time lie like questions over our secret.
‘The Hand of God’
Six years after his interview with me, Dr. Bernard Nathanson – who had long described himself as a “Jewish atheist,” including during the years when he first turned away from abortion – converted to Roman Catholicism and was baptized by John Cardinal O’Connor in New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1996. That same year, he published his autobiography, “The Hand of God: A Journey from Death to Life by The Abortion Doctor Who Changed His Mind.” Toward the end of this insightful and shatteringly honest narrative, Nathanson describes one particular experience – his presence during a 1989 Operation Rescue demonstration against Planned Parenthood in New York City – that directly precipitated his spiritual conversion to Christianity:
Now, I had not been immune to the religious fervor of the pro-life movement. I had been aware in the early and mid-eighties that a great many of the Catholics and Protestants in the ranks had prayed for me, were praying for me, and I was not unmoved as time wore on. But it was not until I saw the spirit put to the test on those bitterly cold demonstration mornings, with pro-choicers hurling the most fulsome epithets at them, the police surrounding them, the media openly unsympathetic to their cause, the federal judiciary fining and jailing them, and municipal officials threatening them – all through it they sat smiling, quietly praying, singing, confident and righteous of their cause and ineradicably persuaded of their ultimate triumph – that I began seriously to question what indescribable Force generated them to this activity. Why, too, was I there? What had led me to this time and place? Was it the same Force that allowed them to sit serene and unafraid at the epicenter of legal, physical, ethical, and moral chaos?
And for the first time in my entire adult life, I began to entertain seriously the notion of God – a god who problematically had led me through the proverbial circles of hell, only to show me the way to redemption and mercy through His grace. The thought violated every eighteenth-century certainty I had cherished; it instantly converted my past into a vile bog of sin and evil; it indicted me and convicted me of high crimes against those who had loved me, and against those whom I did not even know; and simultaneously – miraculously – it held out a shimmering sliver of Hope to me, in the growing belief that Someone had died for my sins and my evil two millennia ago.
Most players would feel intimidated facing a rampaging Serena Williams for an Australian Open semi-final berth but not Czech seventh seed Katerina Pliskova, who instead harbours a desire for revenge against the American great.
The pair will meet in the last eight at the season-opening Grand Slam on Wednesday, with the day’s other quarter-final pitting Japan’s US Open champion Naomi Osaka against Ukrainian sixth seed Elina Svitolina.
Williams has blazed her way through the first four rounds at Melbourne Park, dropping only nine games in her opening three matches before finally encountering some resistance from top seed Simona Halep.
But even the world number one was eventually overwhelmed in three sets as an intensely focused Williams continued her quest for a record-equalling 24th major, with Halep saying facing the 37-year-old was like being hit by a freight train.
Pliskova is confident she can derail the Serena express. She’s done it before at a Grand Slam when she defeated Williams in straight sets in the 2016 US Open semi-finals.
The American responded with a commanding quarter-final victory over Pliskova at Flushing Meadows in 2018, but now the Czech 26-year-old is convinced it’s her turn, saying she has improved since then.
“I didn’t play well that match, so for sure it would be good revenge to play her again,” Pliskova said. “Different conditions here. I think I’m playing a little bit better than last year, so I’m looking forward to it.”
Williams, who is chasing a record eighth Australian title to take her to 24 majors and match Margaret Court’s record, said she always had good matches against the big-serving Pliskova.
“I’ve got to return a little bit better (against her) but I’ll be ready. She’s ready. Let’s do it,” said Williams, who is the bookies’ favourite for the title despite being seeded 16.
If fourth seed Osaka defeats the in-form Svitolina, she will set up a blockbuster semi-final with Williams, who infamously melted down and ranted at the umpire as the 21-year-old outgunned her in last year’s US Open final.
But Svitolina will be no pushover for the young Japanese star, who has lost to the 24-year-old Ukrainian in three of their previous five meetings.
While Osaka has been hailed as the leader of a new player generation after her US Open breakthrough, Svitolina is hungry for Grand Slam success after scoring her biggest career win at the WTA Finals in Singapore last October.
Both have endured tough three-setters in their past two matches, with Svitolina crediting her victories on mental toughness instilled by the confidence-boosting win in Singapore.
“I know that I can challenge good players and I can win,” she said. “You know, the Singapore week showed that I can be out there and winning tough matches.”
The humble Osaka said she still felt overwhelmed at times on the Grand Slam stage and was still working out how to get past top opponents such as Svitolina.
“She’s a very consistent player and when she has the chance she does like to attack. I think playing her is going to be very difficult for me,” Osaka said.
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