The Religious Origins of the Sanctuary Movement

Cliff Kincaid — July 24, 2015 

Thanks to Donald Trump, the major media are being forced to cover the illegal immigration movement, such as the proliferation of “sanctuary cities” across the U.S. that attract criminal aliens, give them legal protection, and let them back out on the streets to commit more crimes. But the really taboo topic is how these sanctuary cities grew out of a movement started by the Catholic Church and other churches.

Over 200 cities, counties and states provide safe-haven to illegal aliens as sanctuary cities, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) reports. What has not yet been reported is that the Catholic Church, which gave President Obama his start in “community organizing” in Chicago, has been promoting the sanctuary movement for more than two decades.

What’s more, in April, a delegation of U.S. Catholic bishops staged a church service along the U.S.-Mexico border and distributed Communion through the border fence. At the same time, Pope Francis said a “racist and xenophobic” attitude was keeping immigrants out of the United States.

No wonder the pope’s approval ratings have been falling in the United States. Overall, Gallup reports that it’s now at 59 percent, down from 76 percent in early 2014. Among conservatives, it’s fallen from 72 percent approval to 45 percent (a drop of 27 points).

“Few people are aware that this extreme left branch of the Catholic Church played a large part in birthing the sanctuary movement,” says James Simpson, author of the new book, The Red-Green Axis: Refugees, Immigration and the Agenda to Erase America.

Simpson says Catholic Charities, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and its grant-making arm, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, are prominent elements of the open borders movement.

The sanctuary movement has its roots in the attempted communist takeover of Latin America.

With the support of elements of the Roman Catholic Church, the Communist Sandinistas had taken power in Nicaragua in 1979. At the time, communist terrorists known as the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) were threatening a violent takeover of neighboring El Salvador. President Ronald Reagan’s policies of overt and covert aid for the Nicaraguan freedom fighters, known as the Contras, forced the defeat of the Sandinistas, leaving the FMLN in disarray. In 1983, Reagan ordered the liberation of Grenada, an island in the Caribbean, from communist thugs.

Groups like the Marxist-oriented Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) were promoting the sanctuary movement for the purpose of facilitating the entry into the U.S. of illegal aliens who were supposedly being repressed by pro-American governments and movements in the region. The U.S. Catholic Bishops openly supported the sanctuary movement, even issuing a statement in 1985 denouncing the criminal indictments of those caught smuggling illegal aliens and violating the law. Section 274 of the Immigration and Nationality Act prohibits the transportation or harboring of illegal aliens.

Two Roman Catholic priests and three nuns were among those under indictment

in one case on 71 counts of conspiracy to smuggle illegal aliens into the United States. One of the Catholic priests indicted in the scheme was Father Ramon Dagoberto Quinones, a Mexican citizen. He was among those convicted of conspiracy in the case.



Through the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, an arm of the Bishops, the church has funded Casa de Maryland, an illegal alien support group which was behind the May 1, 2010, “May Day” rally in Washington, D.C. in favor of “immigrant rights.” Photographs taken by this writer showed Mexican immigrants wearing Che Guevara T-shirts, and Spanish-language communist books and literature being provided to rally participants.



An academic paper, “The Acme of the Catholic Left: Catholic Activists in the US Sanctuary Movement, 1982-1992,” states that lay Catholics and Catholic religious figures were “active participants” in the network protecting illegals. The paper said, “Near the peak of national participation in August 1988, of an estimated 464 sanctuaries around the country, 78 were Catholic communities—the largest number provided by any single denomination.”

A “New Sanctuary Movement” emerged in 2007, with goals similar to the old group. In May, the far-left Nation magazine ran a glowing profile of this new movement, saying it was “revived” by many of the same “communities of faith” and churches behind it in the 1980s.

One group that worked to find churches that would provide sanctuary to immigrants in fear of deportation is called Interfaith Worker Justice, led by Kim Bobo, who was quoted by PBS in 2007 as saying, “We believe what we are doing is really calling forth a higher law, which is really God’s law, of caring for the immigrant.”

But conservative Catholic Michael Hichborn of the Lepanto Institute saysInterfaith Worker Justice is run by “committed Marxist socialists,” and that Bobo is “highly active and involved with the Democratic Socialists of America,” a group which backed Obama’s political career.

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Retired NASA Scientists Take on Pope

Cliff Kincaid — June 8, 2015




With the papal encyclical on climate change scheduled for a June 18 release, the liberal media can be expected to portray the Vatican document as a major step forward for the United Nations agenda of controlling and taxing the use of natural resources by governments and people. But a group of retired NASA scientists is taking on the pope directly, armed with the expertise that has come through decades of planning U.S. space missions and dealing with the most complex and difficult issues of climate science.

Their verdict: the pope is risking his moral status and his credibility.

In fact, this group is directly warning Pope Francis that if he embraces the climate agenda of the United Nations, he will be violating both scientific principles and the religious values he embodies that are supposed to be reflected in direct aid for the poor people of the earth.

But the pope is apparently counting on his status as “the most popular person on the Earth,” in the words of Dan Misleh, executive director of the Catholic Climate Covenant organization, to make the “moral” case that we live on “an abundant yet finite planet,” and that global limits to industrial growth have to be imposed on a worldwide basis.

The battle, now taking shape, will likely help determine whether U.S. sovereignty will be sacrificed in order to make possible a system of “global governance” or world government.

In a controversial decision that could backfire, Republican House Speaker John Boehner (OH) has invited Pope Francis to deliver an address to Congress in September, an opportunity he could use to push the similar climate change agendas of both the Vatican and the Obama administration.

That a research team composed primarily of retired NASA scientists and engineers has entered the debate is relatively new and particularly noteworthy. These individuals have a lot of experience in the climate change area, as a result of sending astronauts into the atmosphere and outer space and returning them to earth.

The members of the group, the Right Climate Stuff Research Team, are veterans of the NASA Apollo program that landed astronauts on the moon and returned them safely during the decade of the 1960s, according to the introduction to their letter to the pope. They maintain a website setting forth their view that there is no convincing evidence that the planet is in a “climate crisis.”

These retired scientists suggest that the pope is making a big mistake by using unreliable or untested computer models that predict a “climate disaster.” They assert, “Our strict NASA policies, based on common sense concepts of the Scientific Method, trained us to ignore projections of un-validated models for critical design or operational decisions involving human safety, and instead, base such decisions on available physical data.”

Their spokesman is Harold H. Doiron, who serves as chairman of the Right Climate Stuff Research Team. He tells the pontiff in a letter that “There is no compelling scientific or humanitarian reason for immediate enactment of world-wide CO2 emission controls, as the UN is urging you to recommend…”

What’s more, Doiron and his colleagues argue, the poor in the developing world “need unfettered access to relatively inexpensive fossil fuel energy sources to improve their quality of life,” and if higher atmospheric CO2 levels do in fact occur, they will not hinder the development of poor nations but rather result in “increased food production” that will benefit them.

Rejecting the idea of CO2 as a pollutant that should be regulated, they said, “we know that CO2 is a very special colorless, odorless and non-polluting gas designed by our Creator to be an essential chemical compound for sustaining all plant, animal and human life.”

Doiron made a presentation in Rome on April 28 as part of a Heartland Institute event designed to warn the Vatican against rushing to embrace the U.N. climate change agenda. He included a PowerPoint presentation titled “An Independent, Objective Assessment of the Human-Caused Global Warming Issue,” which refers to the U.N. agenda as “climate alarmism” based on faulty models, not actual data.

He is scheduled to speak this week in Washington, D.C. at the Tenth International Conference on Climate Change.

At his presentation in Rome, Doiron said he was a member of a Catholic parish in Texas where fellow parishioners were “praying that Pope Francis will have discernment as he looks into this global warming controversy.” On Fox News Sunday, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum, a practicing Catholic, said “there are more pressing problems on Earth” for the pontiff to be addressing than climate change.

Ignoring the concerns of conservative Catholics that the church should focus on moral issues, The New York Times ran a story, “Pope Francis Steps Up Campaign on Climate Change, to Conservatives’ Alarm,” reporting that the papal encyclical “will be accompanied by a 12-week campaign, now being prepared with the participation of some Catholic bishops, to raise the issue of climate change and environmental stewardship in sermons, homilies, news media interviews and letters to newspaper editors…”

The source of this statement was Dan Misleh, who has been invited inside the Vatican to help coordinate the campaign. He previously directed the educational and outreach efforts of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development.

His group has now become part of the Global Catholic Climate Movement, whose website shows poor people walking through flood waters, hurricanes, and smokestacks, as visitors to the site are urged to “change our course,” and to pray and then act.

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Infiltration of the U.S. Government, Part Two

By Cliff Kincaid — May 5, 2014

Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine has apparently surprised a lot of people who thought the Cold War was over, and that Russia had been integrated into the “community of nations.” In 2012, President Obama pushed through Permanent Normal Trade Relations for Russia, giving Putin access to billions of dollars of Western capital. Continue reading here... 

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More Dishonest Coverage From Pro-Homosexual Media

Cliff Kincaid — March 29, 2013





A big news story came out of Tuesday’s March for Marriage demonstration in Washington, D.C. But it didn’t make “news” in the major media. As one who covered the event, it was significant that there were so many members of minority groups. This was not a mostly white crowd. In addition to the presence of black, Hispanic and Asian supporters of traditional marriage, there were some notable Democrats, such as New York State Senator Ruben Díaz, and he let people know he was several minorities in one.

“I’m Puerto Rican,” he said. “I’m black, with kinky hair. I am a Democrat and I am a senator. I’m against abortion. I’m against same-sex marriage, and I won the last election with 89 percent of the vote.”

J.C. Derrick of World magazine has a good analysis of how the major media, led by The Washington Post, virtually ignored the March for Marriage. But unless you actually see what happened on the ground, as the thousands of traditional marriage supporters held their demonstration, you would miss the true significance of how dishonest the media’s coverage of this issue has become.

The March for Marriage went by the Supreme Court before returning to the National Mall location where the rally was held. The group has posted a video of excerpts of the major speeches.

Ken McIntyre of the Heritage Foundation wrote a dispatch, with pictures: Marching for Marriage—and Children. John Burger of the Catholic World Report estimated the crowd at 10,000. Based on attendance at several rallies in the nation’s capital, I put the crowd size at about 5,000.

Díaz, the New York state senator, led an all-night vigil for the rally of 32 buses filled with Pentecostal ministers and members of the New York Hispanic Clergy Organization.

He was the only Democratic state senator in 2011 to cast a “No” vote on the homosexual marriage bill in New York State and he was the only lawmaker to rise to speak against it. “God, not Albany, has settled the definition of marriage, a long time ago,” Díaz said.

The video excerpts are interesting, in that a self-proclaimed homosexual man, Doug Mainwaring, co-founder of the National Capital Tea Party Patriots, was also shown opposing homosexual marriage.

He spoke at a Heritage Foundation event, saying, “I used to be pro-same-sex marriage but the more I thought about it, it occurred to me, this just isn’t right. Marriage is the most successful institution that civilization has produced over the last few millennia, and we shouldn’t mess with it. If we attempt to redefine marriage, we’re going to redefine children in the same way. In fact, I prefer to use the term ‘undefine.’”

His speech at the March for Marriage included the admonition that the Supreme Court should “ignore the media’s relentless, manufactured urgency to institute same-sex marriage.”

That media campaign, as we revealed in a recent column, includes the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA), funded by all of the major news organizations. Natalie Morales of NBC’s Today Show was the host of the March 21 New York fundraiser for the group.

On cue, Jenna Wolfe, NBC Today Show weekend anchor, came out as a lesbian on the air on Wednesday, as the Supreme Court prepared to take up the second of two homosexuals rights cases. She announced that she and her lesbian partner, Stephanie Gosk, an NBC News correspondent, were getting married, and that she, Wolfe, was pregnant. There was no word on the identity of the father.

However, People Magazine, which carries a story about the couple, says Wolfe “underwent artificial insemination with an anonymous donor.” Referring to acceptance of homosexual rights and homosexual marriage, Wolfe told People, “…I don’t want to bring my daughter into a world where I’m not comfortable telling everyone who I am and who her mother is.”

It seems as though the father just doesn’t matter at all. Welcome to the world of “homosexual marriage.” It is just not an issue for the major media.

But the omissions and distortions don’t end there. On the NBC Nightly News on Tuesday night, host Brian Williams claimed that a majority of Americans now support homosexual marriage. But the Reuters Corporation recently released the results of a huge poll finding only 41 percent of America supports it.

The company tried to mask the results by highlighting majority support for benefits for “same-sex couples.” But the story about the poll notes in the fourth paragraph that only 41 percent of people say same-sex couples should be permitted to marry.

This poll is significant for two reasons. One, it was a large poll of 24,455 people. Second, its parent company, Thomson Reuters, signed on to a Supreme Court brief endorsing homosexual marriage.

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council commented, “If 41% was all the support Reuters could scrounge up for same-sex ‘marriage,’ then you know they exhausted every avenue trying to push that number higher—and couldn’t.”

NBC News correspondent Kristen Dahlgren did a story on Tuesday’s Brian Williams newscast on “TV’s impact on the gay marriage debate” which totally ignored the role of NBC News, which like CBS News and Fox News, funds one side of the debate—the NLGJA.

As the Supreme Court took up the cases, the NLJGA issued a statement saying, “NLGJA would like to remind journalists, bloggers, columnists and media analysts of the important role they play in giving citizens the information needed to understand the full impact these cases will have in their communities.”

That obligation apparently doesn’t include facts about how the media are distorting and manipulating the coverage on behalf of a special interest group that includes major media figures and “news” organizations.

Is it possible that pro-homosexual coverage disguised as “news” has played a role in making homosexual marriage more acceptable? If so, perhaps there will be a backlash when the American people realize they have been conned and deceived.

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Disgraced Liberal Journalist Teaches Media Bias at Georgetown

Posted By Cliff Kincaid On October 15, 2012 @ 11:32 pm In AIM Column 

Disgraced journalist David Chalian has been hired as the new Vice President for Video Programming at Politico, despite being fired by Yahoo! News for making a vicious “joke” accusing the Romneys of hating black people. A quick look at the syllabus for the course he is teaching at Georgetown University may explain why. His course requires the “daily reading” of Mike Allen’s “Politico Playbook” column in particular and instructs students to read Politico itself on a regular basis.

Chalian had been heard on an ABC News video [1] claiming that GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his wife Ann were unconcerned about black people getting hit by Hurricane Isaac during the GOP convention. “They aren’t concerned at all,” he said. “They are happy to have a party with black people drowning.” Laughing could be heard as the “joke” was made.

Georgetown is the nation’s oldest Catholic university, while Politico is a publication with a definite left-wing bent. The Daily Caller notes [2] that Politico’s writers “have had a penchant for viewing those on the political right through a harsh prism.”

A course syllabus for “Political Reporting: Road to the White House” is not publicly available on the website for the class [3] but we found a copy [4] on the Internet. The course can be counted toward a “Master of Professional Studies in Journalism” and is taught by Chalian in conjunction with Brooke Brower [5], the senior producer for MSNBC’s “The Daily Rundown with Chuck Todd.” Brower was previously a producer for “Hardball with Chris Matthews.”

MSNBC is also considered a left-wing news operation.

An item on the “Required Viewing” part of the course is the HBO propaganda film, “By the People: The Election of Barack Obama (2009) [6].” One of the filmmakers said [7] about the project, “I think my hope for it, too, is that people will see it and be re-inspired to be part of the democratic process again. I think that it was an amazing time for this country.”

Georgetown University still lists [8] Chalian on its faculty as “Yahoo! News Washington bureau chief,” even though he was fired back on August 29—more than a month ago. The news organization said at the time that “David Chalian’s statement was inappropriate and does not represent the views of Yahoo! He has been terminated effective immediately.”

Georgetown’s failure to identity Chalian as having been fired from Yahoo!, and the unprofessional conduct that got him fired, seems to fall far short of the high standards of honesty and integrity required of students. The students at the prestigious institution “are expected to maintain the highest standards of academic and personal integrity” and sign a Georgetown University Honor Pledge that affirms “academic honesty.”

It says, “In the pursuit of the high ideals and rigorous standards of academic life, I commit myself to respect and uphold the Georgetown University Honor System: To be honest in any academic endeavor, and to conduct myself honorably, as a responsible member of the Georgetown community, as we live and work together.”

Politico Editor-in-Chief John Harris announced [9] his hiring, saying that while Chalian had “screwed up” by making the racial attack on the Romneys, it “did not reflect his personal views or professional standards.” He did not explain how he knew this was the case. Harris added that Chalian was “superbly well-qualified to help us achieve a strategic goal that is very important for Politico.”

A writer at Red State called [10] Chalian a “bigot” and added, “I’m sure he is a great fit for a reflexively biased publication like Politico. And to the extent that their ‘strategic goal’ is patently dishonest reporting on Republicans and conservatives I’m sure Chalian will be an ideal fit.”

At the time that the story broke about Chalian’s comments, Rush Limbaugh noted his affiliation with Georgetown, saying [11], “Well, I said he sounded like a kid. I assumed that because he’s at Yahoo, that he’s a kid. He’s not. This guy is an adult. He’s been around for years. In addition to that, he teaches a master’s degree class at Georgetown. He teaches a master’s degree class, Master of Professional Studies in Journalism, at Georgetown. So he’s an objective journalist. Exactly right. He’s a teacher. I erred when I said this kid is just repeating what he’s been taught. This is what he’s teaching! It’s even worse than I thought. This is what he’s teaching.”

Now we know that Chalian “teaches” the left-bias at Politico as something to be read, understood, and appreciated by his students. This may help explain why he is now working there.

But it doesn’t explain why his faculty bio [8] at Georgetown hasn’t been updated to reflect his firing from Yahoo!

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Article printed from Accuracy In Media: http://www.aim.org


URL to article: http://www.aim.org/aim-column/disgraced-liberal-journalist-teaches-media-bias-at-georgetown/


URLs in this post:


[1] an ABC News video: http://www.mrctv.org/videos/yahoos-david-chalian-romneys-happy-have-party-black-people-drowning


[2] notes: http://dailycaller.com/2012/10/12/politico-hires-yahoo-bureau-chief-who-was-fired-for-racial-statements/


[3] website for the class: http://courses.georgetown.edu/index.cfm?Action=View&CourseID=MPJO-859


[4] a copy: http://kbpublisher.gu-scs.com/kb_file/MPJO-859-01_Political%20Reporting_12c.pdf


[5] Brooke Brower: http://scs.georgetown.edu/departments/11/master-of-professional-studies-in-journalism/faculty-bio.cfm?a=a&fId=147980


[6] By the People: The Election of Barack Obama (2009): http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/by-the-people-the-election-of-barack-obama/index.html


[7] said: http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/3/by_the_people_the_election_of


[8] lists: http://scs.georgetown.edu/departments/11/master-of-professional-studies-in-journalism/faculty-bio.cfm?a=a&fId=161575


[9] announced: http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/10/david-chalian-back-in-business-138292.html


[10] called: http://www.redstate.com/2012/10/14/politico-hires-avowed-bigot-david-chalian/


[11] saying: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/08/29/until_karma_gets_them_the_lib_media_will_always_portray_republicans_as_rich_racists

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Pentagon Celebrates Gay Pride During Treason Trial

Cliff Kincaid — July 5, 2012

The Defense Department hosted a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month event on June 26, 2012, in the Pentagon Auditorium which featured a speech by Defense Department General Counsel Jeh Johnson and a panel discussion entitled, “The Value of Open Service and Diversity.” But the event failed to include any mention, pro or con, of the most celebrated homosexual soldier in American history, Bradley Manning, who is currently on trial for treason.

An examination of the transcript shows that no one at the DoD event saw fit to denounce Manning’s alleged treachery by leaking classified information to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. The Washington Post story about the Pentagon “pride” event was silent about the scandal, as if the Manning case has nothing to do with the conduct of homosexuals in the military.

It is clearly a subject that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and other administration officials do not want to bring up in the context of the push for “gay rights” in the military. The reason may be that Manning, who had a security clearance while serving as an intelligence analyst in Iraq, is not only an embarrassment to the Armed Forces but has a connection to the Obama White House that most of the media are afraid to investigate.

“i have sources in the White House re: DADT and the disaster that keeps going on with that… Shin Inouye,” Manning wrote in a series of emails that included the name of a top Obama White House official. DADT is a reference to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the policy prohibiting open homosexuality in the military.

Manning had been an out-of-the-closet homosexual before its repeal and had been working with various gay rights and Democratic Party groups. Was he a gay “mole” in the ranks? Who were his “sources” in the Obama White House?

In Manning’s treason trial, the death penalty has inexplicably been ruled out, even though Soviet atom bomb spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were both executed for their crimes.

Inouye, a former associate of the ACLU office in Washington, D.C., is openly homosexual and handles gay rights issues in the executive office of the president. Before going to the White House, where he serves as Director of Specialty Media, Inouye was a spokesperson for the Presidential Inaugural Committee and, prior to that, was the Constituency Communications Coordinator at the Obama for America campaign.

Gawker, a website that has tackled the topic because of the sex angle, has reported that Manning was close to Inouye. Manning reportedly said of Inouye, “He’s a friend of mine,” and that a Manning reference to “White House contact (he’s tried to sleep with me, uggh),” included a link to a Facebook photo of Inouye in a White House press room. “Strangely,” Gawker said about the scandal, “Manning’s connection to the D.C. gay establishment, not to mention the White House, has been glossed over.”

Conservative columnist Ann Coulter has argued that Manning’s homosexuality was critical to understanding the case, and noted that foreign intelligence services have traditionally exploited sexual perverts. She wrote, “The most damaging spies in British history were the Cambridge Five, also called the ‘Magnificent Five:’ Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, Donald Maclean and John Cairncross. They were highly placed members of British intelligence, all secretly working for the KGB. The only one who wasn’t gay was Philby. Burgess and Blunt were flamboyantly gay. Indeed, the Russians set Burgess up with a boyfriend as soon as he defected to the Soviet Union.”

She added, “The Magnificent Five’s American compatriot Michael Straight was—ironically—bisexual, as was Whittaker Chambers, at least during the period that he was a spy. And of course, there’s David Brock.” The latter is the conservative journalist who turned into a Democratic Party activist and George Soros operative.

“So many Soviet spies were gay that, according to intelligence reporter Phillip Knightley, the Comintern was referred to as ‘the Homintern,’” Coulter said.

Manning’s connection to Assange, who is now in hiding in the embassy of Ecuador in London, has gotten somewhat more attention. Assange had denied any contact with Manning, but evidence in the case contradicts that claim and it is apparent that Assange misrepresented his dealings with the Army soldier in order to protect himself from possible espionage charges in the U.S. Assange is now seeking political asylum from Ecuador in a bid to avoid extradition to Sweden over charges that he sexually assaulted two women. He had been hosting a television program on Moscow-funded Russia Today (RT), where he interviewed such Marxist figures as Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali, a British Pakistani associated with the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies.

Although the Pentagon doesn’t want to address Manning’s homosexuality in the context of his treason trial, the Bradley Manning Support Network has no qualms about it. This group marched in solidarity with Manning in “Gay Pride” parades in New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco, while holding “Free Bradley Manning” signs. These occurred just two days before the carefully orchestrated DoD gay pride event was held to convince the public that everything is fine and good with open homosexuals in the ranks.

The only story in the “mainstream” press that we saw mentioning the gay support for Manning was in the San Francisco Examiner, where Mike McKee, of a group called “Courage to Resist,” said that he regards Manning as “an influential gay soldier.”

A leading British gay rights activist, Peter Tatchell, who was a founder of Outrage!, a group of self-described “angry queers,” says Manning is a “hero” and a “peace hero.”

James Kirchick, a fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a contributing editor for The New Republic, says, “Rather than condemn him as the traitor he is, many gay activists have rushed to his defense, portraying him as a courageous whistleblower who brought American abuses to light. By arguing that Manning is not only a victim of the military but also a hero, these activists unwittingly confirm the claim that gay people are unfit to serve in the armed forces.”

It is believed that Manning, who had a security clearance, leaked classified information to Julian Assange because he was upset with the pace of military acceptance of homosexuality.

The Pentagon gay pride event shows how far the acceptance has come. It opened with President Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta giving “LGBT pride month” video messages. LGBT refers to the sexual categories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered. The panel featured Sue Fulton, a West Point graduate and a Member of the Board of Visitors at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Gordon Tanner, principal deputy general counsel for the Air Force, and Marine Corps Capt. Matthew Phelps.

Tanner said that he had a “laundry list of all the civilian benefits that we now are working on getting” for the LGBT “community.”

The open display of DoD pride in the homosexual lifestyle follows the spectacle of invited guests of President Obama at the White House gay pride event making obscene gestures at portraits of conservative President Ronald Reagan. Media were quick to quote White House spokesman Shin Inouye as saying, “Behavior like this doesn’t belong anywhere, least of all in the White House.”

This is the same Inouye who Bradley Manning claimed was his contact in the White House as he was agitating for gay rights from within the Armed Forces. Inouye is quick to defend the White House but has remained silent about his apparent link to Bradley Manning. He did not return our telephone call.

Repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was passed by Congress in a lame duck session and three weeks later signed into law by Obama on December 22, 2010. It was all done in a hurry, before the full ramifications of the WikiLeaks treason case and Manning’s role in it were known. At this point, it cannot be said with certainty that Manning did not have other gay collaborators in the ranks of the Obama Administration.

It is a fact, however, that Manning had been arrested before the repeal, at a time when homosexuality was considered a security risk. “It’s interesting to me that this individual (Manning) was able to get his security clearance even while homosexuality was a court-martial offense” said Chaplain (Col.) Ron Crews, USAR retired, the executive director for the Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty. “If he was known to have been engaged in homosexual activity, that should have been a red flag for his security clearance in those days.”

Manning was indeed out of the closet, had advertised his gay rights activism on Facebook, and had even marched in gay pride parades. But military officials apparently looked the other way.

Our questions include: “Was Manning a pawn of high-level officials in the Obama White House? Who protected him? And why?”

Crews, one of the few people examining how the new policy is being implemented, is also concerned about media coverage suggesting that homosexuality in the military is being widely accepted.

“As gays serve openly, chaplains report few problems” is the headline over an Associated Press story by David Crary appearing on Thursday in papers across the country.

Crews countered that this is the case because chaplains expressing concern about the new policy “have been ordered by their commanders not to speak to the press.” He says, “As long as you’re in favor of the repeal and the current DoD policy, you can speak to the press.”

“I don’t think we are getting the full story yet,” he added.

That also seems to be the case with the Bradley Manning-Shin Inouye connection. But like so many other Obama scandals, the media are not anxious to get to the bottom of this one.

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Catholic Church Rejects Surrender Terms from Obama

Cliff Kincaid — January 30, 2012



My Catholic priest, Father Larry Swink, delivered a homily on Sunday that I told him would make headlines. In the toughest sermon I have ever heard from a pulpit, he attacked the Obama Administration as evil, even demonic, and warned of religious persecution ahead. What was also newsworthy about the sermon was that he cited The Washington Post in agreement—not on the subject of the Obama Administration being evil, but on the matter of its abridgment of the constitutional right to freedom of religion.

What is happening is extraordinary and unprecedented. The Catholic Church is in open revolt against the Obama Administration, with Fr. Swink noting from the pulpit that priests across the archdiocese were joining the call on Sunday to rally Catholics to resistance against the U.S. Government. He said we are entering a time of religious persecution and that Catholics and others will have to make a final decision about which side they are on.

The issue is what the Catholic Bishops have called a “literally unconscionable” edict by the Obama Administration demanding that sterilization, abortifacients and contraception be included in virtually all health plans.

At a time when the media are full of reports about who is ahead and behind in the polls, and who will win the next Republican presidential primary, this incredible uprising in the Catholic Church is something that could not only overshadow the political campaign season, but also may have a major impact on the ultimate outcome—if Republicans know how to handle it. This matter goes beyond partisan politics to the growing perception of an unconstitutional Obama Administration assault on religious freedom. To hear the Catholic Bishops and Priests describe it, our constitutional republic and our freedoms hang in the balance.

The administration claims there is a religious exemption in the mandate, but the bishops say it is so narrow that it fails to cover the vast majority of faith-based organizations, including Catholic hospitals, universities and service organizations that help millions every year. “Ironically,” they say, “not even Jesus & his disciples would have qualified.”

The bishops go on, “Now that the Administration has refused to recognize the Constitutional conscience rights of organizations and individuals who oppose the mandate, the bishops are now urging Catholics and others of good will to fight this unprecedented attack on conscience rights and religious liberty.”

Interestingly, The Washington Post, as Father Swink indicated, agrees with the bishops. The paper said, “In this circumstance, requiring a religiously affiliated employer to spend its own money in a way that violates its religious principles does not make an adequate accommodation for those deeply held views. Having recognized the principle of a religious exemption, the administration should have expanded it.”

So why would the administration pick a major fight with the Catholic Church? There are two main reasons. (1) The administration wants to please its progressive and feminist, secular pro-abortion base. (2) The administration believes Catholics are divided on the issue and will ignore their leaders and follow Obama.

Support for the latter explanation comes in the form of the Obama Administration’s efforts to co-opt the Catholic Church, primarily through appointing nominal Catholics to high-level positions in government and keeping funding going to the church for “social justice” causes. Another player in this effort is the hedge-fund billionaire George Soros, an atheist who nevertheless has foundgroups that are “Catholic in name only” to accept his financial largesse. These groups, including Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, are designed to give the impression that Catholics are less concerned about issues like stopping abortion and protecting the sanctity of traditional marriage than passing government health care. The Obama/Soros gamble may be backfiring.

It’s true that the bishops went along with Obama’s health care scheme, even lobbying on its behalf. But now they seem to be realizing that the plan was a Trojan Horse designed to force population control measures on the people of the United States. It will be difficult for the bishops to continue working with the administration on other issues, like immigration. They have drawn a line in the sand. They cannot back down.

Father Larry Swink of Jesus The Divine Word Catholic Church in Huntingtown, Maryland, is not alone in his tough language. Pittsburgh Bishop David A. Zubik posted a letter on the Roman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh’s website that said, “It is really hard to believe that it happened. It comes like a slap in the face. The Obama administration has just told the Catholics of the United States, ‘To Hell with you!’ There is no other way to put it.” He added, “This whole process of mandating these guidelines undermines the democratic process itself. In this instance, the mandate declares pregnancy a disease, forces a culture of contraception and abortion on society, all while completely bypassing the legislative process.”

You know it’s serious when the bishops are talking about heaven and hell.

Indeed, Fr. Swink opened his discussion of what he described as the evil nature of the Obama Administration by reading from scripture about Jesus casting out demons. He saw the order on health care coverage as the start of religious persecution. The congregation joined him in calls of “Amen” when he challenged them to stand tall with the church.

You cannot expect the secular Washington Post to go along with such rhetoric. But even its liberal editorial writer saw the ramifications of the health care order, perhaps anticipating the confrontation that we now see developing. From the point of view of this liberal paper, the Obama Administration is not only undermining religious freedom but risking a major backlash to its overall “progressive” agenda and even a second term in office.

Some may see this battle as just another church-state dust-up that will be resolved through litigation. But when apocalyptic imagery is used, such as what I heard at my church on Sunday, one must wonder if there is an awakening on the part of the Catholic community and if there is something else going on here besides politics as usual. In short, is the Catholic Church beginning to finally recognize the real nature of the Obama Administration?

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PROGRESSIVES URGE OBAMA TO DUMP ISRAEL

By Cliff Kincaid
May 24, 2011
NewsWithViews.com

Unofficial Obama adviser Medea Benjamin, founder of Code Pink, organized a small demonstration in Washington, D.C. this week to demand that the U.S. terminate military aid to Israel. “Not one nickel. Not one dime. We won’t pay for Israel’s crimes,” Benjamin led the demonstration in the anti-Israel chants. One protester from the Washington, D.C. Green Party said the U.S. and Israel were terrorist governments.

Benjamin, a member of the International Solidarity Movement which is allied with enemies of the U.S. and Israel, is known for her pink outfits. She announced in 2009 that she was going to deliver a letter to Obama from the deputy foreign minister of Hamas. “In the letter,” reported Benjamin, “Hamas urged Obama to visit ‘our ground Zero’ in Gaza and bring about a ‘paradigm shift’ in the Israel-Palestine conflict based on enlightened world opinion and international law.”

This appears to be what Obama did in his Thursday speech urging Israel to return to its vulnerable 1967 borders with the Arab states.

The occasion of the protest was the launching of an advertising campaign on the Washington, D.C. subway system calling for an end to aid for Israel, a development that would lead to the demise of the Jewish state. The ads are being posted inside Washington Metro Area Transit Authority (WMATA) Metrorail trains for the next 4 weeks. The demonstration took place on May 16, just a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol, and attracted several television cameras.

Organizers said the protest was not designed to support the terrorist group Hamas, with Benjamin saying that she has traveled to the Middle East merely to “meet” with leaders of the organization. “Does meeting with somebody mean that you support them?” she said. However, numerous participants in the demonstration refused, under questioning, to directly condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization.

It may sound incredible that a far-left agitator like Benjamin would have clout with the President of the United States, but she is very close to such notables as Jodie Evans, an Obama fundraiser, and Bernardine Dohrn, the former Weather Underground terrorist leader and associate of the President when he was a Chicago politician on the rise. This video shows Benjamin and Dohrn in deep and friendly conversation before Dohrn exploded over allegations from this columnist that she was involved in the bombing murder of a policeman.

Turning their attention to Latin America, Jodie Evans and Medea Benjamin have been photographed whooping it up with Venezuela’s Marxist ruler Hugo Chavez, a collaborator with the Iranian and Cuban regimes against U.S. interests around the world.

Benjamin is also a co-founder of Global Exchange, a group that sponsors trips to Venezuela and Cuba and which took out an ad in a memorial service booklet in honor of the Weather Underground and Black Liberation Army (BLA) member Marilyn Buck, a convicted terrorist who died last year. “Marilyn we appreciate your love and your sacrifices” it said. The ad featured a quote from Fidel Castro sidekick Che Guevara about a “true revolutionary” being guided by “feelings of love.”

Global Exchange is also a member of the “Hands Off Assata” campaign, which is designed to discourage the FBI from seeking the return of convicted cop-killer Assata Shakur, a BLA member who fled to Cuba after escaping from prison with the help of the Weather Underground.

Benjamin has used her access to Obama officials to argue against FBI investigations of members of the International Solidarity Movement, who are being called before a grand jury in Chicago because of their work with terrorist groups such as Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). On one occasion, she pressed Obama Attorney General Eric Holder to intervene with the FBI to stop the probes.

“We have people we know that have been appointed or are advisers,” Benjamin said about the Obama Administration. “I mean, we’re excited that some people with some progressive views are going to be in this administration.”

In addition to favoring a policy of abandoning Israel, Code Pink has demanded that Obama withdraw U.S. military forces from Afghanistan, leaving that country to the mercy of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. A video shows Evans and Obama at a fundraiser engaging in friendly conversation, with Obama putting his arm around her.

© 2011 Cliff Kincaid - All Rights Reserved

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Media Ignore Gay Source for WikiLeaks

Photo (Courtesy) http://morrisonworldnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Wikileaks-founder-Julian-Assange-and-PFC-Bradley-Manning1.jpg

By Cliff Kincaid November 29, 2010


The issue is not just WikiLeaks and its strange founder Julian Assange but Bradley Manning and those in the Army who turned a blind eye to his alleged insubordination and treason.

As the Senate returns to Washington to debate such matters as the Pentagon’s homosexual exclusion policy, major media coverage of the disclosure of thousands of sensitive U.S. Government cables by WikiLeaks has curiously and conveniently ignored the homosexual orientation and anti-American motivation of the alleged leaker, Pfc. Bradley Manning, now in prison.

The New York Times reported, “The possibility that a large number of diplomatic cables might become public has been discussed in government and media circles since May. That was when, in an online chat, an Army intelligence analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, described having downloaded from a military computer system many classified documents, including ‘260,000 State Department cables from embassies and consulates all over the world.’ In an online discussion with Adrian Lamo, a computer hacker, Private Manning said he had delivered the cables and other documents to WikiLeaks.”

This is all true. But what the Times left out of its coverage was that Manning was an open homosexual who flaunted the Pentagon’s homosexual exclusion policy without being punished for his behavior and conduct.

Similarly, The Washington Post ignored the controversial issue of Manning’s sexual orientation. It reported, “Although WikiLeaks has not disclosed the source of the materials, suspicion has centered on Pfc. Bradley Manning, 23, an Army intelligence analyst now in military custody. The military arrested Manning this year, charging him with the downloading and transfer of classified material.” This was it.

Some honest coverage came from International Business Times, which reported, “Manning is openly gay and has been active in gay rights movements.”

But how was this possible if the Pentagon had a policy against gay soldiers?

Jonah Knox, the pseudonym for a noncommissioned officer and analyst in the United States Army Reserves, pointed out in an AIM column that, rather than repeal the Pentagon’s homosexual exclusion policy, the WikiLeaks scandal demonstrates that the policy and regulations need to be tightened up.

Knox wrote that the regulations implementing the policy seemed to be designed to cause confusion. Despite Manning’s flaunting of the law, Knox wrote, “it does not surprise me that the Army may never have investigated Manning for his support of the homosexual agenda, for his frequenting of homosexual events and/or establishments because Department of Defense policy does not seem to allow it. However, Department of Defense and Army regulations did allow the Army to investigate Manning based on his declarations of being a homosexual who despised the Army for not fully embracing the homosexual agenda and not acting quickly enough to repeal DADT.”

So the issue is not just WikiLeaks and its strange founder Julian Assange but Bradley Manning and those in the Army who turned a blind eye to his alleged insubordination and treason.


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Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report and can be reached at cliff.kincaid@aim.org

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The Hidden Soros Agenda: Drugs, Money, the Media, and Political Power

Excerpt of article:

The Soros media connections include:

•An investor in the Times Mirror Company, Soros funded the Project on Media Ownership, headed by Professor Mark Crispin Miller at New York University. Whose purpose was expose “media concentration.” A total of $300,000 over several years came from George Soros’ Open Society Institute (OSI). In 1999, a survey commissioned by the Project on Media Ownership and the Benton Foundation and paid for by OSI found that seventy-nine percent of adults would favor a law requiring commercial broadcasters to pay 5 percent of their revenues into a fund for public broadcasting.

•Eric Alterman of The Nation has hailed Soros for spending millions on “education campaigns with America Coming Together, voter mobilization drives with MoveOn.org and research activities with the Center for American Progress (CAP)–where I am a senior fellow?” Alterman says his own magazine, The Nation, is viewed as out of the mainstream in part because of “the continued appearance in its pages of a long-time Stalinist communist, Alexander Cockburn, whose unabashed hatred for both America and Israel … tarnish the reputation of its otherwise serious contributors.” Alterman’s mentor, I.F. Stone, was a paid agent of the KGB and a Stalinist. .

•In the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Orville Schell said that Soros had written a ”succinct and well-reasoned book,” The Bubble of American Supremacy, which ought “to provide a welcome template for how the candidates might begin to think their way through to a more coherent view of America’s place in the world.” Soros had spoken on March 3 at the Goldman Forum on the Press and Foreign Affairs, sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. The event was a conversation between Soros and Journalism Dean Orville Schell.

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•OSI gave $60,000 to the Independent Media Institute , whose executive director, Don Hazen, is a former publisher of Mother Jones. Hazen has called Soros a “progressive philanthropist.” A story carried by the Independent Media Institute on its AlterNet project says Soros “believes in democracy, positive international relations and effective strategies to reduce poverty, among other things.”

•OSI gave a $75,000 grant to the Center for Investigative Reporting. The group’s board of advisers includes prominent journalists.

•OSI gave $246,528 to the Center for Public Integrity, headed by former CBS News producer Charles Lewis, “to support the continuing expansion of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.” A total of $1 million went for “the Global Access Project.” In total, it is estimated that the group has received $1.7 from Soros.

•OSI gave $200,000 to the Fund for Investigative Journalism. This group, too, features prominent journalists on its board.

•OSI’s “Network Media Program” gave $22,157 to Investigative Reporters & Editors.

•Soros Foundations have provided $160,000 to MediaChannel.org, a so-called “media issues supersite, featuring criticism, breaking news, and investigative reporting from hundreds of organizations worldwide.” The executive editor is Danny Schecter, a former news program producer and investigative reporter at CNN and ABC. It was created by Globalvision News Network, whose board includes “Senior executives from the world’s leading media firms.”

•OSI has contributed $70,000 toward the far-left Independent Media Center, or Indymedia, known as an “independent newsgathering collective,” whose servers were seized by a federal law enforcement agency on October 7. The action was apparently related to an investigation into international terrorism, kidnapping or money laundering.

•OSI provided $600,000 to the Media Access Project, a so-called telecommunications public interest law firm critical of conservative influence in the major media.

•OSI provide $30,000 to the Media Awareness Project, a “worldwide network dedicated to drug policy reform” and promoting “balanced media coverage” of the drug issue.

•OSI provided $200,000 to the Association for Progressive Communications, “an international network” working for peace, human rights, development and protection of the environment?”

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Read MORE

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Obama Endorses Global Taxes on Eve of U.N. Summit

Obama Endorses Global Taxes on Eve of U.N. Summit

By Cliff Kincaid September 16, 2010


Obama has been a major U.N. supporter since he was in the Senate and sponsored a bill, the Global Poverty Act (S 2433), to force U.S. compliance with the MDGs.In a classic case of misdirection, while the media are preoccupied with the fate of the Bush tax cuts, President Obama is preparing to attend a United Nations summit next week to endorse “innovative finance mechanisms”—global taxes—to drain even more wealth out of the U.S. economy.

A draft “outcome document” produced in advance of the September 20-22 U.N. Summit on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) commits the nations of the world to supporting “innovative financing mechanisms” to supplement foreign aid spending.

The term “innovative financing mechanisms” is a U.N. euphemism for global taxes. But the document actually goes further, praising the “Task Force on International Financial Transactions for Development” for its work on the subject of mobilizing additional “resources” for countries to achieve the MDGs. This is a body tasked with proposing and implementing global tax schemes.

“We consider,” the document says, “that innovative financing mechanisms can make a positive contribution in assisting developing countries to mobilize additional resources for financing for development on a voluntary basis. Such financing should supplement and not be a substitute for traditional sources of financing.”

In other words, the revenue from global taxes should be in addition to foreign aid spending.

The document recognized the “considerable progress” made in this area, an acknowledgement that an international tax by some nations on airline tickets is already in effect and producing several billions of dollars of revenue for world organizations to fight AIDS and other diseases.

In an article in The Christian Science Monitor, under the headline, “Small global taxes would make a big difference for world’s ‘bottom billion,’” the foreign minister of France and other officials of foreign nations endorse various forms of “innovative development financing.” One of their proposals is a tax on international currency transactions that could generate $35 billion a year.

The proposal, popular at the United Nations for decades and long-advocated by Fidel Castro, is called the Tobin Tax and named after Yale University economist James Tobin. Steven Solomon, a former staff reporter at Forbes, said in his book, The Confidence Game, that such a proposal “might net some $13 trillion a year…” because it is based on taking a percentage of money from the trillions of dollars exchanged daily in global financial markets.

He is referring to the fact that once such a tax is in place, it could be easily raised to bring in hundreds of billions of dollars or more a year to the U.N. and other global institutions.

Such financial transactions through banks and other financial institutions are commonplace on behalf of Americans who have stock in mutual funds or companies that invest or operate overseas. Hence, such a global tax could affect the stocks, mutual funds, and pensions of ordinary Americans.

The term “small global taxes” brought a stunned reaction from Senator David Vitter, when he was told of what is being proposed in advance of the U.N. summit. Vitter introduced Senate resolution 461, “Expressing the sense of the Senate that Congress should reject any proposal for the creation of a system of global taxation and regulation,” to put the Senate on record against any such measure. He has vowed to maintain pressure on the world body to avoid implementing any of these schemes and thinks that the Congress has to use whatever financial leverage it has to frustrate U.N. demands for more power and authority in world affairs.

The Vitter resolution was sent to the liberal-controlled Senate Finance Committee, which declined to act on it.

Obama has been a major U.N. supporter since he was in the Senate and sponsored a bill, the Global Poverty Act (S 2433), to force U.S. compliance with the MDGs. Joseph Biden, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, tried to get it passed into law but ultimately failed.

As President, Obama is in a position to actively promote global taxation measures and clearly has done so. The “outcome document” his administration has already endorsed will be formally approved at next week’s summit.

The document affirms the so-called “Monterrey Consensus” that committed nations to spending 0.7 percent of Gross National Product (GNP) on official development assistance (ODA), otherwise known as foreign aid. It says that “The fulfillment of all ODA commitments is crucial, including the commitments by many developed countries to achieve the target of 0.7 percent of gross national product (GNP) for ODA to developing countries by 2015…”

Over a 13-year period, from 2002, when the U.N.’s Financing for Development conference was held, to the target year of 2015, when the U.S. is expected to meet the Millennium Development Goals, this amounts to $845 billion from the U.S. alone, according to Jeffrey Sachs of the U.N.’s Millennium Project.

“We have fully embraced the Millennium Development Goals,” Obama told the U.N. in 2009.


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Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report and can be reached at cliff.kincaid@aim.org
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Source:
http://www.aim.org/aim-column/obama-endorses-global-taxes-on-eve-of-u-n-summit/

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Muslim, Christian, or Marxist?

By Cliff Kincaid August 24, 2010

...what the Obama presidential campaign says about Obama’s religious affiliation is not something to be taken at face value.When questions came up during the campaign about Barack Obama’s religious affiliation, his aides flatly asserted that he was a “practicing Christian” and was “baptized” in the Trinity United Church of Christ. However, some of the same questions have come up again in the wake of opinion polls finding people confused about Obama’s religious identity. Our media cannot understand the confusion.

For most in the media, it is cut-and-dried: Obama is a Christian. People who don’t believe it are dumb or misled.

But calling yourself something is not the same thing as proving it is the case. This claim deserves to be scrutinized, even when it involves a sensitive and personal matter such as religious belief.

Unfortunately for Obama and his backers, the same Obama campaign apparatus which claimed that he is a baptized Christian asserted that the mysterious “Frank” in Obama’s book, Dreams from My Father, was just a black civil rights activist. It turned out that “Frank” was Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party member under surveillance by the FBI who served as a mentor for a young Obama in Hawaii. The 600-page FBI file on Davis even suggests he was an espionage agent on behalf of the Soviet Union.

Dupes, a forthcoming book by Professor Paul Kengor, promises to take another close look at Obama’s Frank Marshall Davis connection.

So what the Obama presidential campaign says about Obama’s religious affiliation is not something to be taken at face value. They have a vested interest in making Obama look more acceptable to the American people.

As President, he has gone to church only a few times, which undermines the claim that he is a practicing Christian. People see him playing golf on Sunday; they don’t see him going to church.

In fact, however, being a Christian is not just a function of attending church services. Rather, it is related to being baptized. Did this critical development occur in Obama’s life?

In this context, it is important to take a look at what Obama’s own books, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope, say about the President’s religion, or lack thereof.

He acknowledges in Dreams that his grandfather was a Muslim (page 104) and that he spent two years in a Muslim school in Indonesia studying the Koran (page 154). In The Audacity of Hope, he says (page 204) that “my father had been raised a Muslim” but that by the time he met his mother, his father was a “confirmed atheist.”

His stepfather was not particularly religious and his mother professed “secularism,” Obama wrote (pages 204-205), but as a child he went to a “predominantly Muslim school,” after being first sent to a Catholic school. His mother, he said, was concerned about him learning math, not religion.

Obama’s reference to being baptized is found in his second book, The Audacity of Hope, published in 2006, not in Dreams, published in 1995. Obama wrote on page 208, “I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and be baptized.”

Traditionally, Christianity teaches that baptism is a sacrament involving the use of water to signify acceptance of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Since Obama was not born and baptized a Christian, in order to become a Christian he had to enter into the sacrament of baptism some time later in life.

In this regard, Obama does not indicate anywhere in his books that he came into contact with what Christians regard as the “living water.” Instead, he says that, in his baptism, he made “a choice,” knelt beneath a cross, and “felt God’s spirit beckoning.” He said, “I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.”

This sounds like a powerful religious experience but it is not what Christians regard as baptism.

In Dreams from My Father, Obama discusses his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, noting that he had been “dabbling with liquor, Islam, and black nationalism in the sixties” but that “the call of faith had apparently remained” and that he went on to study religion, including “the black liberation theologians.” For his part, Obama visited Wright to discuss membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ as an extension of his community organizing activities and the hope that he could get “involvement” in this effort from churches like Wright’s.

As Obama contacted the churches and their ministers, he reveals that they thought he was a Muslim (page 279) or, he jokes, an Irishman, “O’Bama.”

Obama talks about hearing a Wright sermon, “The Audacity of Hope,” which inspired the title of his second book. However, there is no mention of any baptism in this—his first—book. The reference to being baptized came in the second book, as Obama was preparing to launch his presidential campaign. The timing is significant.

These are the facts as Obama himself reported them. So how have the media handled them? Needless to say, there has been no serious investigation into whether the claims are true and what they mean.

“Obama’s religious biography is unconventional and politically problematic,” Newsweek’s Lisa Miller reported. “Born to a Christian-turned-secular mother and a Muslim-turned-atheist African father, Obama grew up living all across the world with plenty of spiritual influences, but without any particular religion. He is now a Christian, having been baptized in the early 1990s at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.”

The phrase, “having been baptized,” is apparently based on Obama’s claim about being baptized. Our major media haven’t questioned the claim.

Miller went on to say, “His baptism presents its own problems. The senior pastor at Trinity at the time of Obama’s baptism was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., the preacher who was seen damning America on cable TV…”

Notice the formulation, “at the time of Obama’s baptism.” She carefully does not say that Wright performed the baptism. In fact, there’s no evidence it was a baptism in the traditional sense that it was performed by Wright or anybody else. It looks like Obama walked down the aisle and made a profession of faith. That is not a Christian baptism.

The Canada Free Press published a very interesting article in February by Madeline Brooks, who asked, “Where is the baptism certificate? We do not see one because there was no baptism. That central part of Christianity was not required at Obama’s former church, the Trinity United Church of Christ, during the years Obama attended…”

She cites the research of a pastor, Usama Dakdok, who had called Obama’s church to ask about membership:

“Do I have to be baptized to join the church?” asked Pastor Dakdok. “No, you don’t,” was the answer. “You can be a member without being baptized.”

“And what exactly is required to become a member?” The answer: “You attend two Sunday school classes in a row about membership, and then you walk the aisle.”

Walk down the aisle? That sounds exactly what Obama described in his book. This is how one becomes a member. But it is not a baptism into Christianity.

“I called the Trinity United Church of Christ and they confirmed that baptism is merely optional for members,” Brooks added.

Pastor Dakdok reports that he also asked a spokesperson for Trinity, the membership director:

“If I am a Muslim man, and I believe in the prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, but I also believe in the prophet Jesus, do I have to give up my Islamic faith to join your church?”

The answer was, “Absolutely not! We have so many members of our church who are Muslims.”

Dakdok asked the Trinity spokesperson, “Is that how Senator Barack Obama became a member?” The membership director of the church refused to answer.

Madeline Brooks calls this “Muslim Christianity,” which she says is theologically impossible.

In fact, the contradictions don’t end there. Obama’s pastor for 20 years, Jeremiah Wright, could be described as a “Marxist Christian,” which is also theoretically impossible, since Marxism is materialistic and atheistic. Yet, as we revealed last November, Wright gave a speech in which he praised Marxism and faulted the media for claiming that communism and Christianity were somehow opposed to one another.

So the question regarding Obama is not just whether he is a Muslim but a Marxist, based not only on his attendance at Jeremiah Wright’s unusual church but the influence exercised over him during his growing-up years by Communist Frank Marshall Davis.

Dakdok, who was brought up in Egypt, a Muslim country, is adamant that Obama is a Muslim, based on the fact that his birth father was a Muslim and that there is no evidence that Obama ever specifically rejected Islam. Christian radio host Brannon Howse interviewed Dakdok, at the urging of conservative columnist David Limbaugh, brother of the national talk show host, Rush Limbaugh. Dakdok was also interviewed recently on Stacy Harp’s Christian radio show. He speaks around the country in front of Christian audiences.

While Obama may have been a Muslim by birth, that doesn’t mean that he accepts the Muslim faith or philosophy. Instead, Islam may be seen as just another religion/ideology that can be used for his own political purposes.

The case for Obama being a Marxist is far more convincing. He was exposed to Marxist ideology in church under Wright, as well as from Frank Marshall Davis.

The American people now seem to get it, even though the truth about Obama’s relationship with Davis has never been thoroughly explored by the major media. A poll from the Democracy Corps, a Democratic Party firm, found that 55 percent said that Obama could accurately be described as a socialist.

This is far more than the number of people who see him as a Muslim.

If and when the media start examining the Frank Marshall Davis connection, the “socialist” label could take on more sinister connotations.

This is why, of course, they will avoid it.


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Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report and can be reached at cliff.kincaid@aim.org


Source: http://www.aim.org/aim-column/muslim-christian-or-marxist/
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MSNBC Works with Alex Jones to Discredit Tea Party Movement

MSNBC Works with Alex Jones to Discredit Tea Party Movement

By Cliff Kincaid June 13, 2010


The “Rise of the New Right” will be quickly forgotten because of its serious inattention to the facts.

Radio host Alex Jones, who believes that 9/11 was a U.S. government plot and “inside job” conspiracy, is featured in Chris Matthews’ Wednesday documentary (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697/#37455267) on MSNBC as a leader of the “New Right” and the Tea Party movement. But Jones has absolutely nothing to do with the conservative or Tea Party movements.

In the advance promotional advertisements for the program, Jones is shown saying that the U.S. has entered the phase of “deep tyranny.” The promos make Jones appear to be the undisputed leader of the “New Right” and the Tea Party movement.

But in fact, a video shows Jones disrupting a Tea Party rally in Texas by shouting at organizers and speakers with a bullhorn. This performance woke up many Tea Party members to the real Jones agenda and he has been anathema to them ever since.

“HARDBALL Looks at Conservative Movement,” the MSNBC website says, referring to the Chris Matthews program which airs at 7 p.m. ET Wednesday.

But Jones is not and never has been a conservative. Jones has much more in common with the left than the right. He is, for example, a member of the 9/11 Truth Movement, as was Van Jones, the Obama official fired after evidence of his communist background began to surface. The 9/11 Truth Movement was originally designed to undercut evidence that Muslims were behind the attacks that killed almost 3,000 Americans. Leftists joined the movement and used it to undermine the Bush Administration drive for a military response to Islamic terrorism and its base of operations in the Middle East.

On MSNBC, it seems clear that the “Rise of the New Right” program planned for June 16 is an outgrowth of fear that the Tea Party movement could threaten liberal control of Washington, D.C.

The key to the MSNBC assault is the use of Jones.

As Accuracy in Media has documented, Jones postures as a “patriot” with inside information about various plots but appears regularly on the Russia Today television propaganda channel, where he has defended Russian foreign policy. One of his themes is that the U.S. is the greatest instigator of terrorism in the world today. He also promotes legalization of marijuana as a solution to our economic woes.

These are hardly “conservative” or Tea Party positions.

Judging by the transcript, reportedly leaked by an MSNBC “insider” to Jones, the radio host says in the program, apparently with a straight face, that a “global guild of psychopaths” is “setting up a planetary police state” to destroy up to 99 percent of the world’s population.

Adopting its own conspiracy theory, MSNBC throws out the names of Sarah Palin, Scott Brown, Dick Armey, Rand Paul, Joe McCarthy, Glenn Beck, Father Coughlin, Pat Buchanan, and the John Birch Society, as if they are all somehow linked or share something in common.

It is classic guilt by association, with no evidence of association being presented.

But for Alex Jones, the attention serves his purposes. Having cooperated with Matthews, a former Democratic Party operative, and his producers, Jones’ associates are now claiming that the script is biased to make the Tea Party movement look bad. This was the obvious intention all along, of course, and Alex Jones played his part.

Matthews and his “sources” in the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Media Matters group should understand that, rather than being any kind of right-wing political figure, Jones works openly and closely with such “progressive” figures as Webster Tarpley, a former high-level associate of political opportunist and extremist Lyndon LaRouche, one of the first fringe political figures to question whether Muslims were behind the 9/11 attacks. Tarpley wrote 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in the USA, blaming the U.S. for the attacks.

LaRouche, who has been on the fringes of the political scene for decades, began his career as a Marxist and his National Caucus of Labor Committees was a faction of the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society at Columbia University. During the late 1970s and 1980s, LaRouche and his operatives suddenly adopted a “conservative” posture. After that, however, LaRouche ran for president as a Franklin Roosevelt Democrat. He served prison time on financial fraud charges before re-emerging and running a movement that today is attempting to co-opt the Tea Party message.

Tarpley, who, like Jones, is a prominent figure in the so-called 9/11 Truth Movement, is a regular guest on the Jones radio show and appears in Jones documentaries that purport to expose the Obama Administration and the forces behind it. One of Tarpley’s books on Obama, published by Progressive Press, whitewashes Obama’s Marxist connections. He advertises himself as “one of the most incisive critics of Anglo-American hegemony,” demonstrating how he views the world.

One of the common themes of both Jones and Tarpley is that Muslims are being unfairly blamed for terrorist attacks such as 9/11 and that the U.S. and/or Israel are really behind them.

The problem of LaRouche operatives in the Tea Party movement is a real one and has been recognized as such. Members of the LaRouche movement have been waving the signs that are sometimes seen at Tea Party gatherings that depict President Obama as Hitler. The words “LaRouche PAC,” referring to the cult leader’s political action committee, are actually visible on some of the signs and banners.

The Matthews documentary mentions the Nazi charge against Obama, in order to discredit the Tea Party movement, without noting its LaRouche origins. It is another example of the program’s basic dishonest approach.

Conservative activist Tom DeWeese of the American Policy Center, who began his conservative career in Young Americans for Freedom decades ago, has written that, “Forces led by Lyndon LaRouche and, in my opinion, Alex Jones, are working deep inside our movement to see it implode into fights, caused by distrust and hatred. I believe they are manipulating the media to show the freedom movement as simply a band of nuts not to be taken seriously.”

It’s hard to tell who is manipulating whom. In any case, the Matthews agenda is clear: to use Jones in an unfair effort to smear the ordinary Americans and conservatives associated with the Tea Party movement as kooks following dangerous and unstable personalities. By extension, this reasoning goes, any candidate receiving their support is questionable.

All of this is supposed to benefit Democrats such as Harry Reid running against Tea Party-backed candidates like Sharron Angle in Nevada.

Another theme of the Matthews program, which we have seen before, is that the Tea Party movement includes racists. Matthews is a member of an all-white line-up of hosted shows on MSNBC-TV that has been determined to ignore black speakers and black leaders of the Tea Party movement.

If Matthews had wanted to present the facts, rather than his own conspiracy theories, he could have mentioned that Kentucky Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul, a leader of the Tea Party movement, has appeared several times on the Alex Jones radio show and that Jones has even raised money for him. These are facts that any objective journalist on the right or left would agree that Paul has to account for.

In addition, Fox News host Andrew Napolitano, who now has his own television show on the Fox Business Network (FBN), appears regularly on the Jones radio program and has referred to the radio personality as a “great” figure with amazing insights into current events.

Incredibly, Rand Paul recently bypassed NBC’s “Meet the Press,” in order to avoid being questioned about his libertarian views, and instead went on the Russia Today propaganda channel, where he talked about immigration and other matters. For someone who wants to be elected to a national office with influence over national security affairs, it is shocking that Paul would go on a channel financed by the Kremlin that not only promotes Russian foreign policy but also the 9/11 “inside job” conspiracy theory.

In one segment that seems largely untainted by the political motives or conspiracies advanced by Matthews and his producers, the MSNBC program features a legitimate Tea Party member by the name of Ana Puig, a stay-at-home mother of four who got involved in the “Kitchen table patriots” because of the Marxist threat she saw developing from the Obama Administration. “I like to call it 21st Century Marxism, a camouflage statement for Communism since we are not fighting a bloody battle,” she has written. “Instead, we are fighting an ideological one.”

This is the real voice of the Tea Party movement. And this is why liberals like Matthews are so scared of it. The Tea Party movement has emerged because of recognition of what Obama and his backers truly represent.

One motive for the weak and slanted Matthews documentary is clearly disgust over the fact that Fox News, which is killing MSNBC in the ratings, has been a platform for Ana Puig and others like her. The role of Fox News in promoting the movement is mentioned several times.

By attacking the Tea Party movement, Matthews is really attacking his nemesis Fox News.

But if the transcript that is being made available by Jones is the final one, Matthews will have demonstrated that, in addition to being a hatchet man for the Democratic Party, he is also a bad journalist. He could have mentioned a real issue—how Andrew Napolitano of FBN has praised Alex Jones and has appeared repeatedly on his radio show.

The “Rise of the New Right” will be quickly forgotten because of its serious inattention to the facts. But you can bet that Jones will use it to make himself into a media martyr.


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Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report and can be reached at cliff.kincaid@aim.org

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Source: http://www.aim.org/aim-column/msnbc-works-with-alex-jones-to-discredit-tea-party-movement/
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