America needs experts who can reverse the damage Biden is doing to our national security and will stand up to future unsound and dangerous decisions.
The Taliban’s seizure of Afghanistan — emboldened by President Joe Biden’s senseless decision to rush U.S troops out of the country without a plan — blindsided the Afghan government, the Afghan military, and America’s allies. This reckless decision has led to bipartisan criticism in the United States and from our global allies, and ridicule by America’s adversaries.
Biden’s attempts to blame everyone but himself for this fiasco, his refusal to take press questions for nearly a week (except from sycophantic George Stephanopoulos), and his decision to hide at Camp David while these events unfolded have only intensified criticism.
As commander-in-chief, Biden is at fault for this disaster. But his senior national security advisers also bear responsibility for implementing his irresponsible Afghanistan policies instead of resigning and reporting them to Congress.
It’s important to stress that Biden had bad instincts on national security when he was a younger man. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote that Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
Now that Biden appears to be suffering from mental decline, he is making national security decisions that are irrational and dangerous. This extends beyond Afghanistan, to nuclear talks with Iran and failing to secure our southern border.
If Biden Can’t Be Replaced Now, Replace His Yes-Men
In a perfect world, Biden would immediately resign, be impeached, or be removed from office under the 25th Amendment for this unprecedented incompetence and dereliction of duty.
To remove the president under the 25th Amendment, the vice president and the majority of the cabinet would need to determine that Biden is unfit for office. Congress would then need to approve that process by a two-thirds vote in both chambers. It is hard to see how a majority of Biden’s cabinet or two-thirds of the Democrat-controlled Congress would agree to such action.
Impeachment would require passage of articles of impeachment by a majority of the House and conviction and removal by a two-thirds vote in the Senate. Democrats will not permit this now, but it might be possible in early 2023 if Republicans take control of Congress in the 2022 midterm elections.
Since removing Biden from office is not possible right now, other action must be taken: replacing his top national security advisers with experts who have the experience, principles, and gravitas to reverse the damage Biden is doing to our national security and will stand up to future unsound and dangerous decisions by this president.
It is pointless now for National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley to claim or leak to the press that they opposed Biden’s decision to rapidly withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan. They knew this decision was wrong and dangerous. They were duty-bound to resign and report Biden’s reckless decision to Congress.
Making this worse, most of Biden’s senior national security advisers are unqualified yes-men. Putting aside buffoonish Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan are third-stringers out of their league. And Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin apparently has so little influence with Biden that the president forgot his name at a press conference.
Bring In More Competent People
Blinken, Sullivan, and Austin (as well as Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas) must go and be replaced with more experienced and competent experts. Democrats Sen. Chris Coons, former Rep. Jane Harman, former Rep. Eliot Engel, former Secretary of the Navy Sen. Jim Webb, or defense expert Michèle Flournoy would do a far better job. Deputy secretaries and other lower-level national security officials also should be replaced with more competent experts.
Biden should make CIA Director William Burns – his only competent cabinet-level national security official – national security advisor or secretary of state.
Is there a chance Biden would ever make such moves? There might be, because replacing his national security team would be seen as taking bold and decisive action in response to outrage over his Afghanistan policy and questions about his leadership.
Biden and congressional Democrats also might support this course of action because it would allow Biden to shift the blame for his Afghanistan policy onto others. Although this would be highly unfair and dishonorable, it may be necessary to convince Biden to name some highly qualified and principled people as his top national security advisers.
Biden’s senseless Afghanistan policy and unmistakable signs of his mental decline strongly suggest he is not capable of serving as commander-in-chief. Democrats almost certainly will not agree to remove him, so their Republican colleagues must pressure them to pursue the next best option: surrounding Biden with highly qualified and principled national security experts who will not tolerate more irrational national security decisions.
To safeguard America’s national security and global leadership, we need bipartisan action now to compel President Biden to take this action.
A developing economic crisis in Afghanistan is adding a fresh layer of turmoil in the country.
Why it matters: “[T]he value of the Afghan currency could collapse, inflation could accelerate and the mix of violence and chaos could be prolonged,” the AP writes.
What’s new: Wire-transfer services Western Union and MoneyGram stopped facilitating payments into Afghanistan, a flow of money that’s “a key source of support for many Afghan families,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
The backdrop: ATMs are running out of cash. Prices for a range of essentials like flour and oil are rising sharply.
The big picture: The country’s economy has relied on foreign aid that’s at risk of shriveling up with the Taliban takeover.
What to watch: The Taliban appointed Mohammad Idris — “an obscure official” — as acting head of Afghanistan’s central bank, charged with steering monetary policy, Bloomberg reports.
The afghani, the country’s currency, is in freefall. For a place that facilitates trade in U.S. dollars, any imports will get more expensive.
What they’re saying: “If the Taliban don’t get cash infusions soon to defend the afghani, I think there’s a real risk of a currency devaluation that makes it hard to buy bread on the streets of Kabul for ordinary people,” the Overseas Development Institute’s Graeme Smith tells the AP.
The bottom line: “Afghanistan, unfortunately, was already facing multiple crises. … What you have on top of that is going to be economic hardships,” Ajmal Ahmady, who served as Afghanistan’s central bank chief until the government fell and he fled the country, told CNN.
President Joe Biden again walked away from White House reporters asking him questions about thousands of Americans still stranded in Afghanistan on Monday.
The president delivered a speech at the White House about the coronavirus vaccine getting full approval from the Food and Drug Administration, urging everyone to get vaccinated.
He did not mention the crisis in Afghanistan once in his speech and left without taking questions.
“Do you know how many Americans are left in Afghanistan sir?” one reporter asked as Biden walked away.
He did not stop to respond to the question.
The Biden administration still can not put a number on the Americans stuck in the country.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said he was unwilling to go into detail, even as the administration promises they are getting more Americans out of the country.
When asked by reporters if he was being intentionally vague, Kirby replied, “I’m just going to leave it at several thousand.”
It is unclear whether or not Biden can get all Americans out of Afghanistan before the August 31 deadline for withdrawal.
“The president believes we are making substantial progress,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said, adding they were consulting the Taliban on “every aspect” of the evacuation process.
A female street preacher in the United Kingdom, who was arrested last year for allegedly threatening members of the public, was exonerated by a district judge.
Police detained Hazel Lewis, 49, on Feb. 12, 2020, outside Finsbury Park tube station in North London for reportedly making homophobic and racist comments. Several community members defended her during the arrest, asking police “What law has she broken?”
Allegations against Lewis included making a child cry and using hostile language toward a citizen. Police also charged her with harassment, causing alarm, and provoking distress.
BREAKING: The first Christian woman to face trial for street preaching since a landmark free speech case in 1997 has been told there was ‘no case to answer’ by a district judge. 🙌https://t.co/MFzD0wuMwD
Supported by the Christian Legal Centre, the preacher faced a full trial at Highbury Corner Magistrates Court.
In a ruling last week, District Judge Julia Newton noted, “The defendant is alleged to have said, ‘you are an advocate of Satan and I rebuke you in Jesus’ name’. I don’t find those words threatening. These words were certainly disagreed with. I do not find that they were abusive either.”
“Further, in relation to distress. It is clear that (a witness) was disturbed and found them to be unpleasant. She said that other people were distressed. She said that she was distressed and found these words were unpleasant. However, that does not amount to harassment, alarm or distress,” she remarked.
“In addition, there is no evidence as to why the children were crying. Whilst there was a lot of noise, there were a lot of things that could have led the children to cry. I find that there is no case to answer.”
After 18 months of ongoing legal proceedings, Lewis is now planning to sue the police.
“All I was doing was preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, and I was arrested for it,” she said. “There are dangers out on the streets – I have had urine thrown at me and have been threatened, but Christians are called to preach the gospel of salvation and hope in any situation, no matter how tough, so I am not afraid.
“Despite this experience, I am determined to keep preaching. Since the pandemic began, I have seen more and more Christians taking to the streets of London to preach.”
Andrea Williams chief executive of the Christian Legal Centre called Lewis a “courageous Christian woman” for her determination to disprove the baseless accusations of hate speech brought against her.
“It is chilling that one false accusation to the police can see a woman preaching on her own handcuffed, arrested, and prosecuted,” Williams stated. “The police were determined to charge her no matter what the evidence, and we are relieved that the courts have seen through it.”
Critics said it was concerning that full approval was based on only six months’ worth of data — despite clinical trials designed for two years — and that there was no public discussion of the data.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today granted full approval to the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID vaccine for people 16 years and older — without allowing public discussion or holding a formal advisory committee meeting to discuss data.
This is the first COVID vaccine approved by the FDA, and is expected to open the door to more vaccine mandates by employers and universities.
“For businesses and universities that have been thinking about putting vaccine requirements in place in order to create safer spaces for people to work and learn, I think this move from the FDA, when it comes, will actually help them to move forward with those kinds of plans,” U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy on Sunday told CNN’s Brianna Keilar.
“The FDA’s approval of this vaccine is a milestone as we continue to battle the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Dr. Janet Woodcock, acting FDA commissioner in a press release issued Monday.
“While this and other vaccines have met the FDA’s rigorous, scientific standards for emergency use authorization, as the first FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccine, the public can be very confident this vaccine meets the high standards for safety, effectiveness and manufacturing quality the FDA requires of an approved product.”
Woodcock said she believes FDA approval will instill additional confidence in people to get vaccinated.
According to The Washington Post, Pfizer’s vaccine approval was the fastest in the agency’s history, coming less than four months after Pfizer/BioNTech filed for licensing on May 7.
“It’s been remarkably fast,” said Holly Fernandez Lynch, a bioethics expert and lawyer at the University of Pennsylvania, who said careful handling of the approval was crucial to potentially persuading the “vaccine hesitant” to receive the licensed product.
The approval of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine was based on its clinical trial of 44,000 people — half of whom got the shots, the company said. The median six-month follow-up period for safety and efficacy began after participants received their second dose, Pfizer said.
“Based on the longer-term follow-up data we submitted, today’s approval for those aged 16 and over affirms the efficacy and safety profile of our vaccine at a time when it is urgently needed,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in a statement. “I am hopeful this approval will help increase confidence in our vaccine.”
The company plans to follow the 44,000 enrollees for a total of 24 months, from the start of the trial. In order to qualify for FDA Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) last December, Pfizer followed trial participants for a median of only two months after participants received their second dose.
Pfizer’s COVID vaccine received EUA on Dec. 11, 2020, for use in individuals 16 years and older. On May 10, the authorization was expanded to include 12- through 15-year-olds.
According to the FDA, EUAs can be used by the agency during public health emergencies to provide access to medical products that may be effective in preventing, diagnosing or treating a disease, provided the FDA determines that the known and potential benefits of a product, when used to prevent, diagnose or treat the disease, outweigh the known and potential risks of the product.
Pfizer’s vaccine will remain under EUA for 12- through 15-year-olds, and for a third dose in certain immunocompromised individuals.
However, full approval gives doctors flexibility in using vaccinations for “off-label use,” which is not permitted for EUA products. This would allow doctors to give patients booster shots before the FDA clears them.
Critics accuse FDA of ‘unprecedented, naked power grab’
According to an article published Aug. 20 in the BMJ, transparency advocates have criticized the FDA decision not to hold a formal advisory committee meeting to discuss Pfizer’s application for full approval — an important mechanism used to scrutinize data.
Last year the FDA said it was “committed to use an advisory committee composed of independent experts to ensure deliberations about authorisation or licensure are transparent for the public.”
But in a statement to The BMJ, the FDA said it did not believe a meeting was necessary ahead of the expected full FDA approval.
An FDA spokesperson said the agency held numerous meetings of its Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) related to COVID vaccines in 2020, and did not believe a meeting was needed related to this biologics license application for Pfizer.
According to the BMJ, companies typically apply for full approval after a longer period has elapsed so that more data are available for review.
Kim Witczak, a drug safety advocate who serves as a consumer representative on the FDA’s Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee, said the decision removed an important mechanism for scrutinizing the data.
“These public meetings are imperative in building trust and confidence especially when the vaccines came to market at lightning speed under emergency use authorization,” said Witczak. Wticzak was one of 27 experts who launched a citizen’s petition demanding the FDA “slow down and get the science right” before approving COVID vaccines.
“The public deserves a transparent process, especially as the call for boosters and mandates are rapidly increasing,” Wticzak said. “These meetings offer a platform where questions can be raised, problems tackled and data scrutinised in advance of an approval.”
Witczak said it’s concerning that full approval is based on only six months’ worth of data — despite clinical trials designed for two years — and there’s no control group after Pfizer offered the product to placebo participants before the trials were completed.
“They know they can’t win this argument on the science and that’s why they had to abolish the public process and independent oversight,” said Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “They believe themselves so powerful now that they are stripping off all pretenses that this is about public health, and are baldly revealing the corruption.”
“This is a sinister scheme for mandating a badly flawed vaccine that has already made history with record deaths and injuries, that neither prevents disease nor transmission, and does not improve mortality. Pfizer’s most recent six-month data show that while the jab prevents some COVID deaths, it causes more heart attacks yielding a net loss of life.”
Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Center for Health Research, told The BMJ it’s obvious the FDA has no intention of hearing anyone else’s opinion, and says making decisions behind closed doors can feed vaccine hesitancy.
“It’s important to have a public discussion about what kind of data are there, and what the limitations are,” Zuckerman said. “As we think about risk versus benefit, we need to know.”Joshua Sharfstein, vice dean for public health practice and community engagement at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and former FDA deputy commissioner during the Obama administration, said advisory committee meetings are more than just a way of receiving scientific input from outside experts.
“It’s also an opportunity to educate the public about the important work that the FDA has done reviewing an enormous amount of data about a product,” Sharfstein told The BMJ. “It’s a chance for questions to be asked and answered, building public confidence.”
The Polish-Canadian pastor who faces a potential four-year jail sentence for holding church services in Calgary, Alberta, is warning Americans that the tyranny he saw growing up in communist Poland has spread to Western countries.
Pastor Artur Pawlowski, 48, recently spoke to The Daily Wire as he lingered in the Portland, Oregon, area following an attack on a prayer rally he arranged on the banks of the Willamette River. The event, which he organized with local churches, made headlines when black-clad members of Antifa rushed in to deploy tear gas, destroy sound equipment, assault worshipers, and scoff that God had abandoned them.
Pawlowski, who was maced in the face, claimed that Portland police watched the incident from their cars and did nothing.
The clash with Antifa marked a poignant episode in Pawlowski’s speaking tour throughout the United States, during which he has been urging Americans to vigilantly guard the religious liberty he claims is quickly vanishing in Canada.
“Gestapo Psychopaths”
Earlier this year, when a public health inspector arrived at his church with armed police during Holy Week to inspect the sanctuary during a service, Pawlowski drew international attention when he forcefully ejected them.
Authorities returned weeks later with a court order and Pawlowski threw them out a second time, rebuking them for disrupting worship again and urging them to contact his lawyer. Court of Queen’s Bench Justice David Gates authorized police and health officials “to use such reasonable force as they deem appropriate to gain access” to Pawlowski’s church and “to do anything necessary” to arrest him if he fails to comply.
WATCH:
Within days, a motorcade of Calgary Police pulled over Pawlowski and his brother on their way home from church. As they cuffed them in the middle of a busy highway and dragged them into police vans, Pawlowski called the officers “Gestapo psychopaths,” a reference to the Nazi secret police.
Pawlowski, whose grandmother once hid under a mattress while a Nazi soldier raped another girl above her, does not use the term lightly.
WATCH (arrest begins at 1:45 mark):
“I grew up in Poland behind the Iron Curtain,” Pawlowski said. “I grew up under communism, socialism, under the boots of the Soviets in a country where you had absolutely no freedoms. No freedom of speech, no freedom of religion, no freedom of association, no freedom of the press.”
“For disagreeing with government, for just simply sharing your heart about something that you have seen or heard, you could be tortured, arrested, beaten, sentenced to years in jail time — just because you had a different opinion than the State government.”
“In Poland, if you listened to another source of information that was coming outside of the communist-approved mainstream media, you could go to prison for five years. If you were caught possessing a pamphlet that was not approved by the government, you could go to jail for a year or two,” Pawlowski continued.
He remembered that “before they would sentence you, you would be tortured, beaten by the police.” Lawlessness reigned and the Constitution of the Polish People’s Republic became a mere piece of paper. “There was nothing that resembled justice and rule of law at all. It was 50,000 communists ruling, enslaving 36 million Polish people at that time. So what I see right now is a similar approach. One law at a time, one infringement on our rights at a time.”
During a recent speech in Tennessee, Pawlowski explained that he loves and respects the police who uphold the law, but warned that officers who enforce unjust decrees are acting like those who enabled the Nazi regime. “When you choose to break the law, you’re no longer an officer of the law,” he said. “You’re becoming a Gestapo.”
Pawlowski and his brother were released on bail after spending three days in jail, during which time some prison authorities allegedly mistreated them, mocked their faith, and unnecessarily prolonged their incarceration.
The orders under which he was charged have since been rescinded, but a judge found Pawlowski guilty of contempt in June and he still potentially faces four years in jail for allegedly organizing an illegal in-person gathering, inciting or inviting others to attend an illegal gathering, as well as promoting and attending the gathering.
“A Boiling Frog”
Pawlowski claims he has been warning of diminishing religious liberty in Canada for decades. He noted with painful irony how he was convinced to immigrate to the country from Greece in 1995 because the embassy promised him it was the freest country in the world. In his early 20s at the time, he had a thriving business in Athens but had grown weary of the corruption in Greek society.
By 2005, a year after he became a Canadian citizen, Pawlowski said authorities had already begun to harass him. His fines, court cases, and arrests piled up as he preached in the open air outside Calgary City Hall and fed the homeless through the charity he founded. Offenses included reading the Bible aloud, using a megaphone, and stretching an extension cord across a city sidewalk.
In December 2009, a concerned provincial court judge struck down several of the city’s infractions against Pawlowski and his ministry, ruling that “the City’s attempts … to limit the scope of the efforts by the accused to minister to his congregants, fall precariously close to being excessive and, to any reasonable observer, an abuse of power.”
In 2010, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) stripped Pawlowski’s church of its tax-exempt status, alleging it spent more than 10% of its time engaged in vocal opposition to divorce, homosexuality, and abortion, which a CRA agent deemed excessively political, according to the National Post.
The move from CRA earned a rebuke from Frederick Henry, the Roman Catholic bishop of Calgary at the time, who defended Pawlowski and accused government authorities of displaying what he described as the “height of hypocrisy.” Henry himself was subjected to an audit in 2004 after he refused to recant public criticism of then-Prime Minister Paul Martin for supporting abortion and same-sex marriage despite claiming to be Catholic. The audit found the government owed him $70.
After tussling with them for a decade, Pawlowski said he finally achieved victory in court against the authorities in 2015 and had all of his permits restored. When COVID-19 hit, however, they fixed their attention on him again. Less than a month into the pandemic, he was hit with a fine when police alleged that more than 15 people showed up to his outdoor service where he was preaching the Gospel and feeding the homeless.
According to police, the gathering was against the public health mandates of Alberta, which as of August 20 has seen 242,997 COVID-19 cases and 2,343 deaths out of a population of more than 4 million.
By the time state action against Pawlowski culminated in his arrest in the middle of the road, several other churches and pastors had been swept up into Canada’s COVID-19 crackdown. The first to draw international attention was Pastor James Coates of Edmonton, whose church was forced underground after Coates was arrested and police barricaded their building behind three layers of fencing.
Speaking to Fox News host Tucker Carlson while her husband was spending more than a month in the maximum-security Edmonton Remand Centre, Erin Coates said she no longer recognized her native Canada. “We’re like a boiling frog,” she observed. “For a while, I think our freedoms have just been slowly stripped from us and so slowly over time that we didn’t even realize it. And so when a health order is put in place that takes away your freedoms, it’s not shocking to people.”
“You Are Losing Your Liberties”
Pawlowski said his speaking tour is intended “to let Americans know that what’s happening in Canada has already started to happen here, and is going to happen in the United States if Americans will not rise up.” Because of their country’s unique role in history, he warned that how Americans respond will bear consequences for the entire world.
“We need your help,” he said. “The free world is looking at this great American eagle, is waiting for that eagle to start flapping its wings. We need your help. And you have rescued us before. You came to the rescue during the Second World War, and I believe it’s time for America to come to our rescue once more.”
By sharing his story of what has happened to him through the years, Pawlowski hopes “to awaken as many people as possible that you are losing your liberties left and right. Canada used to be a free nation. It is no longer a free nation. It is under a totalitarian medical regime. And we need to rise up, stand up, and push this great evil away or else.”
“So as a father, as a patriot, as a lover of my country, Canada, I want to stand up and say, ‘Hey, I have seen this movie before. It does not end well. Wake up.’ Government should never have this enormous power to do whatever they want without accountability. That’s communism, that’s fascism,” he added. “Right now, what we’re seeing is a repetition of history. And I hope that every man that values his family and his country would rise up and stand up and bring attention to what is happening.”
“The Enemy Is In Your Face”
Days after the assault on his rally in Portland, Pawlowski joined a group of Christians who gather weekly outside of a Planned Parenthood clinic in nearby Salem to sing worship songs and pray against abortion. Members of Antifa, most of whom were masked and clothed in their signature black, assembled across the road to scream curses at them through megaphones.
“The enemy is not hiding anymore,” he said during a Facebook live stream of the event. “The enemy is in your face. The enemy is challenging you, just like the Philistines challenged the army of God. And, at that time, what they needed was David to come to understand that their God is bigger than the enemy’s god. His God was a lot bigger. And if God is for us, who can be against us?”
Pawlowski, though sober, remains hopeful that as evil becomes more brazen, more people will wake up to stand against it. Contrasting them with his fellow Canadians, he said he has been “greatly encouraged” by the Americans he has met throughout his tour who “are fired up for the country.”
“They’re patriots, they’re vocal Christians, willing to stand up and do what’s right,” he said. “I’m on fire right now. I’m meeting unbelievably beautiful, amazing lovers of this country everywhere I go.” He noted he has even met some politicians who are committed to resisting tyranny.
“So that greatly encourages me and actually puts more faith in me, because now I feel I’m not alone, I’m not the only one. There are many who think like me. Actually, there are millions like me.”
Regarding the potential jail sentence that awaits him in his home country, Pawlowski remains unafraid. “Historically speaking, everyone that wanted to change something from tyranny to something that is free and beautiful had to face difficulties. … And I decided that if no one else wants to pay the price, I’m willing to pay that price. I’m willing to be the voice for the voiceless, for the millions of people that are terrified, afraid of the tyranny. They’re afraid to lose their jobs. They’re afraid to lose their lives.”
“So if I am to be the one that will become that voice for those millions of people, so be it, and I’m willing to pay the price for it,” he added.
Christian Street Preacher Wins Lawsuit After False Allegations of Hate Speech
A female street preacher in the United Kingdom, who was arrested last year for allegedly threatening members of the public, was exonerated by a district judge.
Police detained Hazel Lewis, 49, on Feb. 12, 2020, outside Finsbury Park tube station in North London for reportedly making homophobic and racist comments. Several community members defended her during the arrest, asking police “What law has she broken?”
Allegations against Lewis included making a child cry and using hostile language toward a citizen. Police also charged her with harassment, causing alarm, and provoking distress.
Supported by the Christian Legal Centre, the preacher faced a full trial at Highbury Corner Magistrates Court.
In a ruling last week, District Judge Julia Newton noted, “The defendant is alleged to have said, ‘you are an advocate of Satan and I rebuke you in Jesus’ name’. I don’t find those words threatening. These words were certainly disagreed with. I do not find that they were abusive either.”
“Further, in relation to distress. It is clear that (a witness) was disturbed and found them to be unpleasant. She said that other people were distressed. She said that she was distressed and found these words were unpleasant. However, that does not amount to harassment, alarm or distress,” she remarked.
“In addition, there is no evidence as to why the children were crying. Whilst there was a lot of noise, there were a lot of things that could have led the children to cry. I find that there is no case to answer.”
After 18 months of ongoing legal proceedings, Lewis is now planning to sue the police.
“All I was doing was preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, and I was arrested for it,” she said. “There are dangers out on the streets – I have had urine thrown at me and have been threatened, but Christians are called to preach the gospel of salvation and hope in any situation, no matter how tough, so I am not afraid.
“Despite this experience, I am determined to keep preaching. Since the pandemic began, I have seen more and more Christians taking to the streets of London to preach.”
Andrea Williams chief executive of the Christian Legal Centre called Lewis a “courageous Christian woman” for her determination to disprove the baseless accusations of hate speech brought against her.
“It is chilling that one false accusation to the police can see a woman preaching on her own handcuffed, arrested, and prosecuted,” Williams stated. “The police were determined to charge her no matter what the evidence, and we are relieved that the courts have seen through it.”