Tim Wildmon: Hey, welcome back, everybody, to Today's Issues on the American Family Radio Network. Thanks for joining us on AFR. Tim, Fred, and Ray here, and we welcome our brother, Steve. Good morning, Steve.

Steve: Hey, everybody.

Tim Wildmon: Hello, Ray. Hey, Steve. How are you doing?

Steve: I'm well. Thank you.

Tim Wildmon: What's on your mind, Steve?

Steve: What is on my mind? Oh, man, I've been getting ready for this particular half hour, and boy, do I have a story. You loaded the bear?

Tim Wildmon: Oh, okay.

Steve: It's all I can do not to just shake sometimes with rage at what's going on in the world.

Tim Wildmon: Well, I don't know how to respond to that exactly. Where do we go from here? Shake with rage. Think about it. "Rage" would be a good heavy metal band, though.

Steve: That would be.

Tim Wildmon: Hey, Mom, Saturday night I want to go see Shake for Rage.

Steve: That's right.

Tim Wildmon: I'm going to have a great time. All right, before we jump into that, we were talking about the situation in the world, with seemingly the whole world against Israel, Steve. Even now, we were talking about this, and Ray mentioned some Scriptures in Bible prophecy. We're seeing this play out. I mean, the whole world is against Israel right now, with the exception, of course, of the United States.

Ray: The whole world has basically been against Israel since 1948, when Israel became a nation again.

Tim Wildmon: But it's really amped up here because of the weaponry people have in the world. We see the drones that the militaries are using. Now the Turkish prime minister is speaking out against Israel. The world is angry at Israel.

Steve: Well, they hate the Jews. They won't say that necessarily out loud, but they think Israel is an illegitimate country, and they're going to cite what's going on with Gaza. By that, I mean the Israelis have bombed and sent their troops into Gaza, which is where the Palestinian and Arab people live, where Hamas, the terrorist organization, rules. People don't like it when innocent people die in Gaza.

Tim Wildmon: Now, they don't say a lot about the innocent people who were butchered on October 7, when 1,100 or 1,200 people were killed, which started all this. It was almost like two or three days after October 7, when all those Jews were massacred by Hamas, that the world was calling for a ceasefire.

Steve: Yeah, and I thought to myself, since when do the people who butcher 1,100 people in cold blood, who go out and kill people at a music festival, immediately get to say to Israel, "You can't keep firing at us"? Since when do the perpetrators get to set the terms for the response of the people who were butchered to start this whole thing? Does that make sense to you, Fred?

Fred: Absolutely. Why is that? Let's just deal with Gaza as an example of that hatred. Remember that territory we call Gaza? Not too long ago, that was part of Israel.

Tim Wildmon: It's still Israel.

Fred: It's not an independent country, but it's part of Israel. Israel has done so many things in a bid to show, "We want to be at peace with the Palestinians." Israel gave up that land. They said, "You've got the strip. Move in there and we'll work together." It was a beautiful area. Israel gave it up, and they moved their own citizens. Israelis were forced to move out of Gaza. I remember that.

What did the Hamas rulers do after that? They took international money, including money from the United States, and started firing rockets at Israel. They took the cement, and instead of building nice buildings and hotels along the Mediterranean, they used it to build tunnels into Israel so Hamas terrorists could go in there. The truth is never being told about what's going on.

Tim Wildmon: Listen, do you know who the first Palestinians were? That name Palestinian is derived from a name, Philistina, which was given by the Roman leader at the time of Caesar because he hated Jews. He gave them the nickname Philistines, and that got translated down to Palestinians. People don't know that.

In the schools in the West Bank and in Gaza, they're taught to hate. That phrase, "from the river to the sea," means, "We believe in annihilating Israel."

Fred: Yeah. The focus and intensity of the hatred for the Jews in Israel is inexplicable to me. The world cares so much about it. Why don't they say, "Free Ukraine"? That's just not a cause to latch onto like "Free Palestine."

Tim Wildmon: All right, we'll revisit this. This will be in the news from now until the Lord comes back, right?

Steve: Yes, this story. I would argue that perhaps the hatred of the Jews started in Egypt when they were slaves, with the plagues, and when they went and took the Promised Land. Ever since then, they've been assailed.

One of the modern arguments the world has against Israel right now is that what they're doing in Gaza is disproportionate. "Only 1,300 of your people were slaughtered on October 7. You go in and kill thousands." Well, first of all, the terrorists are hiding behind civilians. You don't hear that from the left.

Ben Shapiro had an interesting response to this during an Oxford debate. Someone said, "Well, it's disproportionate. So many more Palestinians or Arabs are being killed than Jews were killed." This was his response: "If, based on the numbers, more Germans died than Brits in World War II, did that mean the British were wrong in World War II? Based on the numbers, did that mean Britain was wrong in World War II?"

Hamas keeps hiding civilians on top of active combatants. If Hamas thought Israel was simply going to target civilians and they wanted to save their own civilians, theoretically, they would not put their rockets in apartment buildings.

Tim Wildmon: One of the things that drives me absolutely up a wall is this notion that Hamas itself knows Israel is attempting to stop civilian casualties. There are tapes of Israel literally calling people standing outside buildings who work for Hamas and telling them, "Get the civilians out of the building. We're about to hit the building." The Hamas guy says, "I don't want to get the people out of the building." The IDF soldier says, "Get them out or they're going to die." The Hamas representative says, "I want them to die."

Well, anyway, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is going to be speaking to the United Nations Thursday.

Fred: And his plane is going to be landing in New Jersey.

Tim Wildmon: Standing in New Jersey.

Fred: Yes, that's interesting. There are more Jews in New York City than any place in the world, with the exception of the nation of Israel. There are a lot of Jewish people in and around New York who care about what's happening because the Jewish people are really under attack here in the United States, too.

The people on the far left are blaming American Jews for what Israel has done inside Gaza. If you support Israel in any way, you support what they call genocide. I think that's a misuse of that word because there are a lot of Arabs who live in Israel, in Bethlehem, Jericho, and Nazareth, who aren't in the Gaza Strip, and they're not being taken out. They're members of the Knesset. They're citizens of Israel.

If this were genocide, the Israelis would be taking out all the Arabs. They're not. They're only fighting Hamas in Gaza. So it's not genocide. But they'd like to use that word because it generates a lot of emotion. "Who's committing genocide?" "Well, the Israelis are." You see what I'm saying?

Tim Wildmon: Yeah. Listen, we need to acknowledge that war is hell. Just as innocent Israelis and innocent Jews have died, innocent Arabs have died in Gaza. No question about it. Women and children have died. Why? Primarily because Hamas makes this a mess.

Hamas, which is a terrorist organization recognized universally, is the one firing into Israel, trying to kill the Jews. They're the ones who slaughtered and butchered the 1,100 people on October 7. They're the ones who hide their weapons under mosques, hospitals, and schools. When the Israelis go out to take those things out, sometimes innocent people are killed while the Israelis are trying to defend themselves.

Steve: You know, one of the things that bothers me the most, Tim, is the mainstream media journalists. They know the truth of what we've been talking about here. They know the truth. The Associated Press was housed in the same building as Hamas in Gaza, the Associated Press.

We know that the Associated Press and other media have been using AI-generated pictures to show dying children in the arms of mothers in Gaza. They've been falsifying those pictures. It's scandalous how the mainstream media covers this. Can you imagine during World War II the mainstream media basically sympathizing with the Nazis? This is what's happening now with Hamas.

Tim Wildmon: Hamas being the same?

Steve: Yes, they're sympathizing with Hamas.

Tim Wildmon: All right, Steve, go ahead.

Steve: One of the things that has got me a little bit riled up this morning is that we're hearing Lindsey Clancy is in the news again. You remember Lindsey Clancy? She is the woman who confessed to killing her three children by strangling them. She was put on trial, where a lone holdout juror stopped her from being declared not guilty by reason of insanity.

A local television station doxxed this man. They found him, and now they are persecuting him. Kevin Reddington, who is the defense attorney for Lindsey Clancy, is now demanding that this juror, whose name I can say now because it's out there, Michael de Rondeville, appear before the judge. They want to look at his phone records and find out if he lied on his jury form. They are destroying this man's life.

Kevin Reddington is asking the judge to dismiss all charges and declare that she is acquitted. Our friend Jonathan Turley thinks this is highly unusual. He wrote that the demand from Reddington is highly unusual. Occasionally, defense counsel will raise later-discovered information on possible juror misconduct. Reddington has attacked the juror in the courtroom, even suggesting he was prejudiced against disabled individuals. Jonathan Turley says that Kevin Reddington has moved from zealous advocacy to virtually stalking this holdout juror. It is unconscionable what's going on there.

Tim Wildmon: I think we all agree with you, brother. Is that pretty well it?

Fred: Yeah, we're speechless.

Tim Wildmon: I can't remember a case like this, Steve, where a juror was treated this way. Maybe this wasn't possible before the age of the Internet, because now it's possible to use search engines and records, to break into systems, and to do all kinds of things. What's been done to this guy is unconscionable. It's evil, what they're doing here. Evil.

At the end of it all, they want to get all the charges dismissed against this woman who murdered her own children. I forget the phrase you used, but it makes me angry, too. Whatever you said, Steve, I back you up on that.

Steve: Every time I think about this and the disjointed, unhinged fan club that Lindsey Clancy has collected around herself, something is desperately wrong with our society when this is allowed to happen.

Fred: Something's desperately wrong in Canada, too. I'm going to hold you responsible for this if I'm not careful. There is an 83-year-old grandmother up there by the name of Brigitte Stegman who was put to death through their medical assistance in dying program, assisted suicide, against her will. It was said that she died with a whole lot of blood around her because they couldn't get the needle in the first time, with her hands clasped in prayer. She never consented to this.

Steve: She did. She signed up for it.

Fred: She did, and then she changed her mind.

Steve: We need to put it in full context. They didn't just go in and kill her.

Fred: No.

Steve: No. Tell them what happened.

Fred: All right. Stegman was 83 years old, and she had stage-four stomach cancer. Canada is known to push this at every conceivable point, if they can. They will ask, and if they can assist you to die, she agreed. She said, "Okay." Then her family went to double-check and said, "Are you sure?" She said she had changed her mind. She said, "No," and she started to cry and say, "I don't want to die. I don't want to die."

She held to this position. Her family went on a 10-day vacation somewhere, and in the middle of this 10-day vacation, the medical community taking care of her resumed discussions about medical assistance in dying. The family was told that an assessment had been conducted and Stegman was determined capable of consenting when they came back.

Tim Wildmon: Even though she got every question wrong on the mental competency test, right?

Fred: They said that her living siblings were dead. She didn't know that they were still living.

Tim Wildmon: So what's the point you're trying to make?

Fred: Whenever you have assisted dying, it starts out with people saying, "Only people who are in the last weeks of life, in order to give them peace and dying, so that they don't suffer needlessly, we're going to help them go a couple of days early." That's where it always starts, but it always ends up with someone who is either not terminally ill, or maybe has a long-term disease or disability that's going to make life a little more difficult.

We talked the other day about a two-year-old they put to death because this child had some physical disabilities. The parents consented to it. Every time you have medical assistance in dying, whether it's in Canada, the Netherlands, Europe, Washington, or Oregon, the line always creeps more and more and more because it is a disavowal of life. You are disrespecting life when you take it out of God's hands.

Tim Wildmon: Maybe the key words there are "the line creeps." That's an interesting way to put it. When the law is passed, the line is over here, but it always moves in the wrong direction.

Fred: Always.

Tim Wildmon: Let me ask you guys a question. This will sound like I'm playing devil's advocate, and I'm not, because I don't believe in assisted suicide. I don't believe in it for moral reasons and biblical reasons. I don't think, as you said, Steve, that you should play God there.

However, we put pets down. Now hear me out. Don't laugh, although you can laugh if you want to. I understand we're talking about pets, not people. But we put pets down in the name of not making them suffer and doing the humane thing, and we don't bat an eye about it.

Again, I'm just asking the question, so don't misunderstand that Tim believes this. I'm asking the question that a lot of people would ask, and it deserves an answer, Ray. What's the difference between somebody who is terminally ill, maybe in the last months of life, and you don't want to see them suffer, so you give them something to put them to permanent sleep or cause them to die? What's the difference?

Ray: The essential difference is this: We human beings are made in the image of God. We have worth, value, and dignity because we are made in the image of God. This is from Genesis 1 and Genesis 2.

I have, three feet away from me, our Aussiedoodle, Sadie, who is life and light to us, but she's not the same as Marlene and me. We fiercely love that dog, but if you take what the Bible says seriously, Sadie is a creation of God, but she's not made in the image of God the way Marlene and I are, the way our kids are, and the way our grandkids are.

That image of God deserves to be respected from the moment of conception to the moment of actual physical death. It's different. We all deeply understand that we love our animals, but there is a difference between animals and human beings made in God's image.

Tim Wildmon: Any thoughts on this?

Fred: Yeah. I think the issue of money has entered into the question about what they call doctor-assisted suicide. When you have socialized medicine, as they do in Canada, and Canada is now one of the leaders in the world per capita in doctor-assisted suicide, money becomes a factor.

They start to use arguments like, "If you go ahead and do this now, Mrs. Whatever, it'll save your family a lot of money. Why put your family through the financial constraints of keeping you alive? Go ahead and get this done. It's going to happen anyway."

This is what's going on right now, and I only see it increasing because the median age of the population is getting older and older. To deal with the financial constraints of the medical care of individuals, I think you're going to see an increase in this.

Tim Wildmon: All right. Well, thank you, Steve.

Steve: My pleasure.

Tim Wildmon: Thank you, Fred, Ray, and Chris and Kendra. Brent Creely, our producer, and Cole Green, our video man. Who else? Somebody put a birthday cake back there for somebody here, and it's very tasty. I couldn't tell whose birthday it was because the writing on the cake had been eaten into, so I don't know who to say happy birthday to.