The "Christian" Mafia

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Re: The "Christian" Mafia

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jan 14, 2015 2:46 pm

come to the RI basement....it's fun :)
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The "Christian" Mafia

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Wed Jan 14, 2015 2:50 pm

Searcher08 » Wed Jan 14, 2015 12:59 pm wrote:I think this is truly a weird and bizarre response.


As "weird and bizarre" as Vladimir Putin wearing sunglasses, yes.

AD is being AD, as he has been for years.

Your continued efforts to provide his oeuvre with detailed & nuanced commentary and explications surely gratifies him every time, while leading us no closer Towards a New RI.
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Re: The "Christian" Mafia

Postby slimmouse » Wed Jan 14, 2015 2:56 pm

Wombaticus Rex » 14 Jan 2015 18:45 wrote:
slimmouse » Tue Jan 13, 2015 11:12 am wrote:Edited to add.

AD, youre throwing your life away whilst indulging in this stupidity.


:thumbsup

Please make peace with watching that process without commentary. You have no interest in real discussion with AD, who has no interest in real discussion with you.

Known Knowns don't need to get re-hashed every seven days, knowing them is sufficient.


Says who, buddy ? :thumbsup

Edited to add.

Forgive my optimism, but Im actually stupid enough to believe that we are all a work in progress.

Me, You, Everyone :thumbsup
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Re: The "Christian" Mafia

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Wed Jan 14, 2015 3:05 pm

Says who, buddy ? :thumbsup


You, sir.

slimmouse » Mon Jan 12, 2015 1:27 pm wrote:Your own thoughts AD? I will unquestionably forgive you if you say that they are completely fucked up, when it comes to making sense of this kind of stuff.


slimmouse » Tue Jan 13, 2015 9:36 am wrote:Would you care to explain this in any fashion that makes any reasonable sense, other than the blurting out of elite designed memes?
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Re: The "Christian" Mafia

Postby American Dream » Wed Jan 14, 2015 3:22 pm

Yeah- I must admit I have mixed feelings around this but mostly I don't have the time and energy for extended conversations that don't seem to be going much of anywhere. I've learned a lot over the years at R.I. and when I post articles without commentary it is with the assumption that those who can put it all to good use will, and that those who can't... will do whatever it is that they do...
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Re: The "Christian" Mafia

Postby American Dream » Sun Jan 18, 2015 11:52 am

The Family Part II

Image

Welcome to the second installment in my ongoing examination of an organization variously known as "the Family" or "the Fellowship." Founded in 1935 by a minister known as Abraham Vereide with the support of a group of wealthy Seattle business men, the fundamentalist Christian sect's influence would grow to the point that by the 1950s it held an annual National Prayer Breakfast attended by the President of the United States and other key political and business figures. This tradition continues to this very day.

Image


http://visupview.blogspot.com/2015/01/t ... rt-ii.html
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Re: The "Christian" Mafia

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Jan 18, 2015 12:00 pm

Seymour Hersh “quite simply, the best Western journalist at work in Iraq today.”



The IS Caliphate and the West's Wars in Syria and Iraq: A Challenge to Religious Pluralism in the Middle East

October 8, 2014 Zurich, Switzerland

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUABhmIbyg4





from COUNTERPUNCH

NOVEMBER 24, 2014

After 2,000 years, a Community Will Try Anything – including Pretending to Convert to Islam – to Avoid Losing Everything
Has the End Finally Come for Iraq’s Christians?
by PATRICK COCKBURN
Two years ago Jalal Yako, a Syriac Catholic priest, returned to his home town of Qaraqosh to persuade members of his community to stay in Iraq and not to emigrate because of the violence directed against them.
“I was in Italy for 18 years, and when I came back here my mission was to get Christians to stay here,” he says. “The Pope in Lebanon two years ago had established a mission to get Christians in the East to stay here.”

Father Yako laboured among the Syriac Catholics, one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, who had seen the number of Christians in Iraq decline from over one million at the time of the American invasion in 2003 to about 250,000 today. He sought to convince people in Qaraqosh, an overwhelmingly Syriac Catholic town, that they had a future in Iraq and should not emigrate to the US, Australia or anywhere else that would accept them. His task was not easy, because Iraqi Christians have been frequent victims of murder, kidnapping and robbery.

But in the past six months Father Yako has changed his mind, and he now believes that, after 2,000 years of history, Christians must leave Iraq. Speaking at the entrance of a half-built mall in the Kurdish capital Irbil where 1,650 people from Qaraqosh have taken refuge, he said that “everything has changed since the coming of Daesh (the Arabic acronym for Islamic State). We should flee. There is nothing for us here.” When Islamic State (Isis) fighters captured Qaraqosh on 7 August, all the town’s 50,000 or so Syriac Catholics had to run for their lives and lost all their possessions.

Many now huddle in dark little prefabricated rooms provided by the UN High Commission for Refugees amid the raw concrete of the mall, crammed together without heat or electricity. They sound as if what happened to them is a nightmare from which they might awaken at any moment and speak about how, only three-and-a-half months ago, they owned houses, farms and shops, had well-paying jobs, and drove their own cars and tractors. They hope against hope to go back, but they have heard reports that everything in Qaraqosh has been destroyed or stolen by Isis.

Some have suffered worse losses. On the third floor of the shopping mall in Irbil down a dark corridor sits Aida Hanna Noeh, 43, and her blind husband Khader Azou Abada, who was too ill to be taken out of Qaraqosh by Aida, with their three children, in the final hours before it was captured by Isis fighters. The family stayed in their house for many days, and then Isis told them to assemble with others who had failed to escape to be taken by mini-buses to Irbil. As they entered the buses, the jihadis stripped them of any remaining money, jewellery or documents. Aida was holding her three-and-a-half month old baby daughter, Christina, when the little girl was seized by a burly IS fighter who took her away. When Aida ran after him he told the mother to get back on the bus or he would kill her. She has not seen her daughter since.

It is not the savage violence of Isis only that has led Father Yako to believe that Christians have no future in Iraq. He points also to the failure of both the Iraqi government and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to defend them against the jihadis. Christians in Iraq have traditionally been heavily concentrated in Baghdad, Mosul and the Nineveh Plain surrounding Mosul. But on 10 June some 1,300 Isis fighters defeated at least 20,000 Iraqi army soldiers and federal police and captured Mosul. The army generals fled in a helicopter. In mid-July Christians in the city were given a choice by Isis of either converting to Islam, paying a special tax, leaving or being executed. Almost all Christians fled the city.

Kurdish peshmerga moved into Qaraqosh and other towns and villages in the Nineveh Plain. They swore to defend their inhabitants, many of whom stayed because they were reassured by these pledges. Father Yako recalls that “before Qaraqosh was taken by Daesh there were many slogans by the KRG saying they would fight as hard for Qaraqosh as they would for Irbil. But when the town was attacked, there was nobody to support us.” He says that Christian society in Iraq is still shocked by the way in which the Iraqi and Kurdish governments failed to defend them.

Johanna Towaya, formerly a large farmer and community leader in Qaraqosh, makes a similar point. He says that up to midnight on 6 August the peshmerga commanders were assuring the Syriac Catholic bishop in charge of the town that they would defend it, but hours later they fled. Previously, they had refused to let the Christians arm themselves on the grounds that it was unnecessary. Ibrahim Shaaba, another resident of the town, said that he saw the Isis force that entered Qaraqosh early in the morning of 7 August and it was modest in size, consisting of only 10 vehicles filled with fighters.

At first, IS behaved with some moderation towards the 150 Christian families who, for one reason or another, could not escape. But this restraint did not last; looting and destruction became pervasive. Mr Towaya says that the Isis authorities in Mosul started “giving documents to anybody getting married in Mosul to enable them to go to Qaraqosh to take furniture [from abandoned Christian homes].”

As so many had fled, there are few who can give an account of how IS behaved in their newly captured Christian town. But one woman, Fida Boutros Matti, got to know all too well what Isis was like when she and her husband had to pretend to convert to Islam in order to save their lives and those of their children, before finally escaping. Speaking to The Independent on Sunday in a house in Irbil, where they are now living, she explained how she and her husband Adel and their young daughter Nevin and two younger sons, Ninos and Iwan, twice tried to flee but were stopped by Isis fighters.

“They took our money, documents and mobile phones and sent us home,” she says. “After 13 days they knocked on our door and the men were separated from the women. Thirty women were taken with their children to one house and told they must convert to Islam, pay a tax or be killed. We told them that since they had taken all our money, we could not pay them.” Four days later, some fighters burst into the house saying they would kill the women and the children if they did not convert.

Soon afterwards, Mrs Matti was taken to Mosul in a car with three other women and a guard who, she recalls, threw a grenade into a house on the way to frighten them. In Mosul they were taken first to al-Kindi prison, formerly an army camp, but did not enter it and then their guard got a phone call to bring them to a house in the Habba district of the city.

In the house, she and the three other Christian women were put in one room, next to another in which there were 30 Yazidi girls between 10 and 18 who were being repeatedly raped by the guards. Mrs Matti says that “the Yazidi girls were so young that I worried about Nevin and told the guards that she was eight years old though she is really 10″.

They told her that her husband, Adel, had converted to Islam. She asked to speak to him on the phone, saying she would do whatever he did. They spoke, and agreed that they had no choice but to convert if they wanted to survive.

When they appeared before an Islamic court in Mosul to register their conversion, their three children were given new, Islamic names: Aisha, Abdel-Rahman and Mohammed. They went to live in a house in a Sunni Muslim district and from there – here the husband and wife are circumspect about what exactly happened – they secured a phone and contacted relatives in Irbil. They said that they needed to take one of their children for medical treatment in Mosul city centre, and, once there, they had a pre-arranged meeting with a driver who took them by a roundabout route through Kirkuk to the protection of the KRG.

The trauma of the last six months has been overwhelming for the remaining Christians in Iraq. The Chaldean Archbishop of Irbil, Bashar Warda, heads an episcopal commission to help displaced Christians whom he says number 125,000, or half the total remaining Christian population. Unlike other displaced people in Iraq, the Christians are mostly cared for by the churches. He says that there will always be a few Christians remaining in Iraq, but overall “they have lost their trust in the land. Some 80 or 90 are leaving every day for Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.” Others would go if they had money and visas.

Mounting persecution since 2003 and now the final calamity of Isis taking Mosul and the Nineveh Plain has convinced many that they can no longer stay. The archbishop suspects that, even if IS is driven back and Christians can return to their homes, half of them will only stay long enough to sell their property. Almost exactly a hundred years after the Armenian Christians in Turkey were slaughtered or driven into exile, the end has come for the Christian community of Iraq. “Have no doubt,” concludes Archbishop Warda, “that here is massacre, here is a tragedy.”






CHRIS FLOYD
ALTERNET
ZNET
COUNTERPUNCH
DISSIDENT VOICE
THE INDEPENDENT
ANTIWAR
INFORMED COMMENT
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The "Christian" Mafia

Postby American Dream » Sun Jan 25, 2015 9:39 am

http://matthewnlyons.net/works-hosted-o ... -politics/

Where Does the Christian Right Get Its Politics From?

by Matthew Lyons

Speech to the Annual Brunch of the Broome County Coalition for Free Choice, Binghamton, New York, 12 February 1995


I’m going to offer you a few brief thoughts about the Christian Right. The primary focus of my work over the past two or three years has been on the history of ultraconservative, fascist, and right-wing populist movements in the U.S. When I think about what’s dangerous about the Christian Right today, a lot of what I think about is how this movement has built on the work of past right-wing movements, but has moved beyond them in important ways.

There is a long tradition of right-wing Christian political activism in the United States. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux-Klan, which at that time included millions of members, was very closely tied to various Protestant churches. In the 1930s, Father Coughlin’s “Social Justice” movement, which was led by a Catholic priest and had special appeal for many Catholics, was the largest pro-fascist movement in this country at the time. In the 1950s and 60s, there were a number of Christian anti-Communist organizations.

And yet the Christian Right of today has built a social base which is broader and more cohesive than any of these earlier movements. It has done a lot to set aside sectarian theological disputes between different factions. It has brought millions of Christians into political activism for the first time, including major groups such as Pentecostals and charismatics, who traditionally have avoided political activism. And the Christian Right has been working hard to build political unity between evangelical Protestants and right-wing Catholics — especially using issues such as abortion and homophobia to recruit Catholic support. These are major political changes.

The Christian Right has also pulled itself out of the trap that many of its predecessors faced, of simply reacting against secularism and liberalism in society. Since the 1970s and 80s, the movement has presented itself as working for an active, positive program. A major unifying principle of the Christian Right today is “Dominion Theology” — the belief that Christians should exercise “dominion” over all spheres of society. The most frightening form of Dominion Theology is a doctrine called Christian Reconstructionism, which has been very influential within the movement. Reconstructionists advocate a totalitarian, explicitly patriarchal theocracy based on their interpretation of Biblical law. In their vision, for example, only men from Biblically correct churches could vote or hold office. And the death penalty could be applicable as punishment for: homosexuality, adultery, heresy, striking a parent, incorrigible juvenile delinquency, and in the case of women, having an abortion or “unchastity before marriage.”

Reconstructionism has not been universally accepted within the Christian Right, but it has become a defining ideological pole which everyone else responds to in one way or another. Paul Hill, the anti-abortion terrorist who murdered two people in Pensacola, Florida in 1994, was a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, which is run by Reconstructionists. Reconstructionists also head the group Missionaries to the Preborn, one of the most militaristic of the anti-abortion groups, whose leaders have endorsed the killing of abortion providers.

The Christian Right has borrowed a lot of ideas from secular ultra-conservatism, but has given these themes greater force by presenting them in religious terms. The Reconstructionist conception of Biblical law, for example, includes abolishing the welfare state and all public social services (including public schools), abolishing labor unions, abolishing laws protecting civil rights, the environment, and workplace health and safety. Their vision of a Christian republic would be based on an extreme form of laissez faire capitalism.

Traditional right-wing conspiracy theories have also been woven into Christian Right doctrine. Many leading Reconstructionists have had close ties with the John Birch Society, and have echoed the Birchers’ warnings about sinister plots linking Freemasons, Communists, the Eastern establishment, the Council on Foreign Relations, the UN, and so on. A lot of these conspiracy theories include veiled or indirect references to antisemitic themes — for example they often scapegoat bankers such as the Rothschilds who just “happen” to be Jewish. What the Reconstructionists do is say that all of these human conspiracies are reflections of Satan’s master conspiracy. And you see exactly the same kind of conspiracy thinking in Pat Robertson’s bestselling book, The New World Order.

One place that Christian Rightists and secular ultra-conservatives have come together recently is in the U.S. Taxpayers Party, which brings together Howard Phillips’s Conservative Caucus, the remnants of George Wallace’s American Independent Party, and anti-abortion activists such as Randall Terry, and Matthew Trewhella of Missionaries to the Preborn. At a USTP meeting last summer, Trewhella urged formation of armed citizens militias, while another leader called for abortion providers to be put to death.

In a strange way, the Christian Right has also borrowed — in parasitic fashion — from progressive political traditions. This is one of its most insidious characteristics, which doesn’t get confronted very much. When we see the Christian Right’s attacks on multiculturalism, we need to recognize that the movement has also developed its own form of multiculturalism. This is not the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, which was restricted to Protestant, native-US-born, White men. Certainly, the Christian Right’s multiculturalism is shallow and tokenistic — but then that is also sometimes true of liberal multiculturalism as well.

The Christian Right is a movement which constantly invokes the anti-slavery abolitionist struggle and Martin Luther King as inspiration for its campaign against abortion rights. It’s a movement which has actively sought to forge alliances with conservative Black, Latino, and Asian churches and community groups, and has had some successes in that — notably in the New York City school curriculum fight a couple of years ago. The flip side of this is the movement’s celebration of “Western Civilization” against “barbarism.” What I think has happened here and in some other right-wing movements is a shift away from old-style segregationism and biological racism toward a more sophisticated cultural racism, which is happy to include a few people of color, as long as they are loyal to the values of “Western civilization.” At the same time, some Christian Right leaders have voiced explicitly racist views, and sections of the movement, including some anti-abortion activists, have made common cause with Klan and neonazi organizations.

You see a similar kind of stance toward Jews. Some Christian Right organizations have expressed open anti-Jewish bigotry — such as Human Life International. On a more basic level, the whole concept of “Christianizing” America is antisemitic by definition — just as it also anti-Muslim, anti-Buddhist, anti-Hindu, anti-agnostic and anti-atheist. And yet the Christian Right has been fairly successful in publicly dissociating itself from the long history of Christian antisemitism. It has welcomed a handful of Jews as members and supporters, and it has presented itself as the champion of “Judeo-Christian” values — a phrase which reduces Jewish culture to a prefix on somebody else’s noun. A big help to the movement’s image has been the fact that many evangelical Christian leaders have expressed strong support for the state of Israel, for both political and theological reasons. This has made many pro-Zionist Jews think twice about sharply criticizing the Christian Right.

Maybe the strangest part of the Christian Right’s pseudo-progressivism is the way it has taken on some of the trappings of feminism in the service of a program of misogyny and male dominance. Thus we find propaganda campaigns about how abortion “exploits women.” Thus right-wing opponents of pornography often say that pornography is sinful — and it objectifies women. Thus the Christian Right has encouraged women to become politically active, to develop leadership skills and professional qualifications — at the same time that it’s told them to embrace their supposedly “traditional” family role of subservience and passivity.

The movement’s views on homosexuality, however, have none of this ambiguity. As far as I know, Christian Rightists have not sought to include any lesbian or gay members. Nor have they tried to mask their belief that homosexuality should be utterly suppressed. I suppose their version of inclusiveness in this case is that gay and lesbian people can be “saved” and that one should “hate the sin but love the sinner.”

The last point I want to make is about the relationship between the Christian Right and U.S. society as a whole. A lot of people have tried to portray the Christian Right as some kind of “radical extremist” movement which is outside the so-called “democratic mainstream.” I think that way of thinking fosters a dangerous complacency about the mainstream. The kinds of oppression and bigotry that the Christian Right stands for are rooted in U.S. society’s long and continuing history of male dominance, racism, class hierarchy, and so on. To a large extent, we also see these oppressions perpetuated today in moderate and liberal politics — whether it’s the bipartisan consensus on dismantling welfare rights, the bipartisan attacks on so-called “illegal aliens,” or the fact that in the United States today, millions of low-income women do not have genuine full access to reproductive freedom. One of the great dangers of movements such as the Christian Right is that they help make “mainstream” forms of brutality and injustice look respectable by comparison.
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Re: The "Christian" Mafia

Postby American Dream » Sun Jan 25, 2015 10:11 am

The Family Part III

Image

Welcome to the third installment in my ongoing examination of the highly controversial Christian organization variously known as "The Family" or "The Fellowship." In the first installment I broadly outlined the organization, which dispenses millions (and likely billions) of dollars yearly to various causes and which holds an annual National Prayer Breakfast that has been attended by every sitting US President since Dwight Eisenhower. The background of Family founder Abraham (Abram) Vereide and the alleged religious experience than inspired the organization were all discussed in that installment.

With part two I began to examine the origins of the group admist the labor struggle in the Pacific Northwest (but especially Seattle) that erupted in the mid-1930s. Originally the Family was begun as a labor busting organization, at the urging of several former military officers. This is rather curious as the military and FBI employed a host of anti-labor groups as a part of industrial security during the First World War. The practice had quietly begun again the late 1920s when labor unrest once gain began to emerge. The murky netherworld of industrial security was examined in greater depth before here.

Also considered was the potential ties between Vereide and his group and William Dudley Pelley and the Silver Shirts. Seattle and Washington state on the whole were a stronghold for the Silver Shirts and Vereide shared certain similarities with the arch fascist Pelley.

Image
Pelley with the Silver Shirt

This would hardly be the only time Vereide's path would cross with those of individuals with a certain fondness for fascism. One such individual was a man of some means whom Vereide had courted prior to his founding of the Family in 1935.

"... In 1932, Abram took as a Bible student Henry Ford. By then, the automaker was a wizened old leather strop of a man, wary of controversy. He had been the American publisher of the notoriously fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic fantasia concocted in czarist Russia to justify pogroms against Jews, and the other The International Jew, a book many Nazis would later credit with awakening their Aryan anti-Semitism. During the previous decade, historians suspect, he illegally financed Adolf Hitler. But it was not just national socialism's bigotry that Ford supported, nor even mainly that. What Ford, inventor of the assembly line, loved above all was efficiency. Even his war of words against the Jews had been in the interests of standardization, purging of 'others' from the American scene. And yet, in 1932, Ford wanted certain details of his campaign for American purity to disappear. He wanted to sell cars to Jews. He was need of a makeover, a quick bath in the Blood of the Lamb.

"Ford's wife heard Abram speak in Detroit and insisted that he meet with her husband, no doubt guessing that Abram's theology of biblical capitalism would sit well with the tycoon, an eccentric religious thinker who had been raised on populist American fundamentalism. Abram and Ford traded Bible verses through a series of meetings in Ford's offices, and then Ford invited Abram to his home in Sudbury, Massachusetts. 'They were together two days,' records Abram's biographer Grubb, '[Ford] unloading about spiritual, intellectual, and business problems, and Abram seeking to give the answer for himself and the nation.' Abram thought Ford 'befuddled,' full of half-baked religious notions gathered from partial readings of Hindu texts and theosophy. 'The question was,' Abram thought, 'How could he be untangled?'

"Their meetings continued in Michigan. Abram was drawn like a moth to the great man's wealth – to the possibility that Ford might put his tremendous worldly resources behind the campaign for government by God. But he was frustrated by Ford's failure to settle on one simple fundamentalist explanation of life and the universe, until, at their final meeting, Ford finally shouted, 'Vereide, I've got it! I've got it! I found the release that you spoke of. I've made my surrender. The only thing that matters is God's will.'

"But Ford continued to see divine will best expressed in German fascism. As Hitler's power grew, Ford became more comfortable expressing his admiration. It was mutual; the Fuhrer hung a portrait of Ford behind his desk and told the industrialist, on a visit Ford paid to Nazi Germany, that national socialism's accomplishments were simply an implementation of Ford's vision.

"That was a perspective that, unlike theosophy, gave Abram no pause...
"

(The Family, Jeff Sharlet, pgs. 122-123)

Image
Ford


Continues at: http://visupview.blogspot.com/2015/01/t ... t-iii.html
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Re: The "Christian" Mafia

Postby slimmouse » Sun Jan 25, 2015 12:43 pm

American Dream wrote:
But Ford continued to see divine will best expressed in German fascism. As Hitler's power grew, Ford became more comfortable expressing his admiration. It was mutual; the Fuhrer hung a portrait of Ford behind his desk and told the industrialist, on a visit Ford paid to Nazi Germany, that national socialism's accomplishments were simply an implementation of Ford's vision.


bumping this "piece of shit" :oops: thread, for the above quote.

Less than a fortnight ago I really did think it was a piece of shit,

Anyways, enough of me -- where does Henry Ford turn up elsewhere? Sir Anthony Sutton ( anointed as such no doubt, by many truth-seekers) offers more revelations in a video thats been rolling around here lately, entitled - The best enemies that money can buy-

Try and get a link to any of the versions that are not even remotely raciist, since their isnt actually a Rothschild in sight, in any of this.
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Re: The "Christian" Mafia

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sun Jan 25, 2015 12:51 pm

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Re: The "Christian" Mafia

Postby American Dream » Sun Jan 25, 2015 1:29 pm

Here is more:

John Miller

Politics of Hate in the USA, Part II: Right-wing Mysticism and Beliefs


Continued from “Politics of Hate in the USA, Part I: Repressive Tolerance”

***

Conspiracy Theory

Modern conspiracy theory traces its roots to the French cleric Abbé Barruel. In 1797 Barruel wrote an account of the French Revolution focused on the Jacobins. Behind the Jacobins he saw a conspiracy of three secret societies: the Order of Templars, the Order of Freemasons and the Illuminatti.2 In 1806 the retired army officer J.B. Simonini praised Barruel’s analysis in a letter to him, but pointed out “the omission” that Jews had founded both the Freemasons and the Illuminatti for world domination.3 In his book Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, the Scotsman John Robison further argued, “Nothing is more clear than that the design of the Illuminatti was to abolish Christianity.”4 Many in the United States, clergymen especially, greeted the French Revolution with suspicion. In May1798 the Reverend Jedidiah Morse warned of a Jacobin-derived plot against American political and religious institutions. Soon after, journalists exposed the Robison book as fraudulent. By the end of 1799 the Illuminatti affair was, for the time being, over.5

Around 1891 the novel Biarritz, written by Prussian postal worker Hermann Goedsche under the pen name Sir John Retcliffe, gained notoriety throughout Europe. What captivated many of its readers was a sensationalistic chapter entitled “In the Jewish Cemetery in Prague.” In it, elders from the twelve tribes of Israel gather at the grave of the most venerable rabbi and discuss the progress of their plot to take over the world. This text was reprinted as a pamphlet called “The Rabbi’s Speech” and distributed throughout Russia and France. In time, readers came to accept this story as fact and it became the basis for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols purport to be a transcript of lectures given by leading Jews at a 1840 world congress in Cracow, Poland.6 They were pieced together between 1872 and 1895 from various sources: the writings of Barruel, Simonini, Goedsche plus books by Maurice Joly and Gougenot des Mousseax. 7 James Ridgeway has summarized them as follows:

The Protocols argue that people are incapable of governing themselves, and only a despot using armed force can govern effectively….[The Jews have plotted their] rise to power by pitting the Gentiles against one another until, eventually…[they] will be able to enlist the masses in overthrowing their indolent gentile leaders. Thereafter the masses will be kept under firm control through an efficient government that will banish unemployment, apply taxation in proportion to wealth, and promote education. During this messianic age the Jewish masters will shrewdly promise, but never deliver, liberty.8


Although London Times correspondent Philip Graves showed parts of the Joly’s book had been plagiarized in the Protocols, they too became accepted as fact. Shortly before the October Revolution, the czar’s secret police published another version in an attempt to smear its opponents.9

Image
The Jew Bolshevic Emblem surrounded by the
Symbolic Serpent in the Protocol book.


In the 1920s Henry Ford widely distributed the Protocols in the United States. His weekly newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, included them as part of a series on “the Jewish international conspiracy.” According to the Independent, Jewish influence was everywhere. Jews forced William Howard Taft to break a commercial treaty with Russia (thereby weakening the czar). They controlled Woodrow Wilson’s administration, particularly through Bernard Baruch, chair of the War Industries Board. (Wilson initiated the League of Nations, forerunner to the far right’s much hated United Nations.) Communism itself was a Jewish plot. The Independent also charged that Paul Warburg intended to control the US financial system with the Federal Reserve. Ford later anthologized the entire series as The International Jew and distributed the book worldwide. Half a million copies circulated in the US alone. In Germany, it became a cornerstone of fascist propaganda. In 1927 Aaron Sapiro sued the Independent for libel in its series “Jewish Exploitation of Farmer Organizations.” Although the lawsuit ended in a mistrial, Ford closed the newspaper.10 During this highly publicized case, the Independent’s editor, William J. Cameron, took full blame for the newspaper’s policies. Wilson and the Warburg family also challenged Ford’s accusations. Ford retracted them, claiming his employees had published the material without his consent. Yet, in 1938, Ford accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, becoming the first American to be decorated with that medal.11 Christian Identity expert Michael Barkun has noted the irony of Ford’s anti-Semitism:

The so-called “pseudo-agrarian” movements…beginning in the 1890s…sought to blame rural and small-town social dislocations on an urban, plutocratic conspiracy. More often than not, this cabal was identified as explicitly Jewish, and it became a convenient scapegoat for those troubled by departures from traditional social values. It was ironical that Henry Ford, himself an agent of some of these changes…became…one of the principal voices for an anti-Semitic politics of resentment.12


In the 1930s a new religious revival swept across the US, reviving, among other things, the anti-Semitism Ford had espoused earlier on. Just as a convulsive modernization left Germany open to Nazism, so economic turmoil and rapid urbanization drove many Americans to fundamentalist religion. With fire and brimstone preachers grimly warning of the coming apocalypse, paranoia and racism were overlaid on these beliefs. Three figures dominated the fundamentalist movement: Gerald B. Winrod, William Pelley and Gerald K. Smith.13

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The Dearborn Independent newspaper printed by Henry Ford, 1925.

Gerald B. Winrod preached that Christ would soon return for the Battle of Armageddon. He believed that while anti-Semitism is founded in Biblical prophecies, only a “certain element” of world Jewry advocates subversion. The widow of Christian Identity minister Wesley Swift believes that it was Winrod who introduced her husband to British-Israelism, the paradoxical forerunner to the Identity movement that first identified with Jews, then turned anti-Semitic.14 What distinguished Winrod from other preachers was his 1938 bid for US Senate in Kansas. He finished third in the Republican primary elections with considerable support from Mennonite communities and the Ku Klux Klan.15

At the outset of his career, William Pelley had been a supporter of Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations. In 1927, he underwent a sudden mystical transformation, withdrawing from society and experiencing a “rebirth” during which he claimed to have heard voices from other worlds. He came back to public life believing in reincarnation—particularly in the reappearance of “demon souls” as Jews. Later, Pelley embraced the work of “pyramidologist” David Davidson, who was a follower of British Israelism. By integrating Davidson’s work with anti-Semitism, Pelley helped lay the groundwork for Christian Identity. 16 After Hitler came to power in Germany, Pelley founded the Silver Legion—or Silver Shirts as Pelley sometimes called them, after the Brown Shirts. Pelley even claimed that Christ himself had accepted his offer to become an honorary Silver Shirt. In 1942, trying to quash nativist reactionaries, the Roosevelt administration charged both Pelley and Winrod with sedition. Pelley spent fifteen years in prison.17

Like Winrod, Gerald K. Smith was a fundamentalist who entered politics. In 1933 he joined Pelley’s Silver Shirts, then went on to help manage Huey Long’s presidential campaign. After Long’s assassination in 1935, Smith unsuccessfully ran for office himself. He then formed the Union Party with Father Charles Coughlin and Francis Townsend. The Union Party ran William Lemke against Roosevelt in the 1936 election, but received less than a million votes. Smith next moved to Detroit and met Henry Ford who sponsored his radio broadcasts and furnished him with investigators for compiling the “Ford Company Red File,” a list of known or suspected communists. This work inspired feverish visions of Jewish conspiracy in Smith’s mind. He proclaimed, “Communism is Jewish” and speculated that Roosevelt never died, but that Jews had hidden him to later bring him back as “President of the World.” Even after the Second World War, Smith maintained that people had misunderstood Hitler and that the holocaust was a hoax. Despite his bizarre speculations, Smith was a commanding speaker who could rally large audiences. During the Second World War he met with Christian Identity theologian Wesley Swift and converted to the obscure sect that now provides a religious and ideological foundation for many recent hate groups.18 As an agitator, Smith helped politicize the Identity movement; using key Identity figures to forward his own political agenda, he lent coherence to an otherwise fragmented movement.19

Kenneth Goff, a Christian Identity minister and protegé of Minuteman founder Robert DePugh, claims the conspirators have continued to control international politics even today. According to him, Benito Mussolini, Nikolai Lenin and Colonel E. Mandel House (a chief aide to Wilson) laid the plans for the First World War at a conference in Belgium during the early 1900s. After House convinced Czar Nicholas II to abdicate his throne, Jacob Schiff, through the financial firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., engineered Lenin’s rise to power. To cover their tracks, Zionists launched a “disinformation campaign” portraying their allies, the Russian Communists, as anti-Semitic. Goff claims that the international Jewish banking cabal further consolidated its hold on the world economy through marriages between the Loeb, Rothschild and Warburg families. To win sympathy, they fabricated accounts of the holocaust in Nazi Germany and continue to use the charge “anti-Semitic” to disable their critics. The “Jewish” agent Alger Hiss, served on the US delegation to the Yalta Conference and helped arrange to grant the Soviet Union veto power in the United Nations.20 From Goff’s perspective, a secret cabal controls mainstream television, radio and newspapers as well: the so-called “Jews’ media.” Those who subscribe to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have come to call the Federal government the Zionist Occupation Government—or ZOG, for short.

In 1991, Pat Robertson’s book The New World Order became a New York Times bestseller with almost a half million copies in print. The book has effectively legitimated the bizarre ideas of the patriot movement within a broader evangelical Christian community. Although his book simply updates well-established conspiracy themes, Robertson, then unofficially heading the Christian Coalition, disavowed that approach.21 Nonetheless, he claimed to have traced “an invisible cord” of influence connecting “[Woodrow] Wilson…to the JP Morgan bank, to the Rockefellers and the Council on Foreign Relations…to the powerful Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, to the United Nations, to Henry Kissinger…,to the Trilateral Commission, to Jimmy Carter, to George Bush.” Critic Michael Lind attacked Robertson’s implicit racism in the February 1995 New York Review of Books:

Not since Father Coughlin or Henry Ford has a prominent white American so boldly and unapologetically blamed the disasters of modern world history on the machinations of international high finance in general and on a few international Jews in particular.22


Robertson responded, “I deeply regret that anyone in the Jewish community believes that my description of international bankers and use of the phrase “European bankers” in my book refers to Jews.”23 Even so, Robertson quoted the work of well-known anti-Semites Nesta Weber and Eustace Mullins in support of his theories.24 Defenders of the book dismissed its anti-Semitism by pointing out Robertson’s support for Israel. For a dispensational premillennialist such as Robertson, backing Israel does not necessarily preclude anti-Semitism. According to this belief, the Jews must return to Israel before the Second Coming.

Michael Barkun has described how conspiracy theory relies on an inverse logic of credibility: one that stigmatizes ideas bearing the approval of prestigious institutions and that legitimizes, by default, those not associated with such institutions. He links this inversion to British sociologist Colin Campbell’s notion of the “cultic milieu”:

[which] refers to a society’s “rejected knowledge,” beliefs considered unacceptable by such authoritative institutions as conventional religion, universities, the state, and the mass media. Second, the cultic milieu refers not simply to this body of rejected knowledge but to its expression in the form of a “cultural underground,” a “network of individuals, groups, practices, institutions, [and] means of communication.” 25


Clearly, this inverse logic is a compensatory rationalization of otherwise unacceptable social changes. It pertains not so much to active cultural dissent itself as it does to withdrawal from status quo adversity. A disaffected person is always the most susceptible to this form of belief. One can always more easily scapegoat another than confront one’s own failings. Consensus within a cult, moreover, can intensify and seemingly objectify almost any belief. Laird Wilcox, a critic of the radical right, points out that once people enter conspiracy discourse, they become “insulated from outside forces, they listen to themselves and no one criticizes them….You have an internal myth built up by this incestuous feedback.” 26 Political analyst Chip Berlet further observes that once a group establishes this insularity, “instead of engaging in a political struggle based on debate, compromise, and informed consent, . . . [conspiracy theorists only] want to expose and neutralize the bad actors.” 27 Recently, the emergence of the Internet has reinforced this kind of thinking. There, when verification for these ideas is lacking, predisposition—i.e., a fervent need to believe—sanctions them anyway.

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http://www.e-flux.com/journal/politics- ... d-beliefs/
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Re: The "Christian" Mafia

Postby slimmouse » Sun Jan 25, 2015 1:56 pm

Yet another ending that made sense.
I was talking a while back with Dr Evil, where I mentioned that our mainstream perception of spirituality is something of a big Parody ( Strictly observationally-innit )

If I might attempt to engage your personal thoughts on that.?

In a gesture of faith, I will go first by suggesting that this is unquestionably the case, regardless of the actual outcome of taking our last mortal breath?
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Re: The "Christian" Mafia

Postby American Dream » Sun Feb 01, 2015 1:12 pm

The Family Part IV

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Welcome to the fourth installment in my ongoing examination of an organization variously known as "The Family" or "The Fellowship." Established in 1935 by a Lutheran minister named Abraham "Abram" Vereide, the Family became involved in political intrigues since its very inception. It quickly grew into an elite network of hardline Christians and wealthy doners that now spend hundreds of millions (and likely billions) on a host of causes in a given year. Every United States President since Dwight Eisenhower has attended the group's annual National Prayer Breakfast.

With the first installment of this series I considered the religious experience Vereide claimed lay behind the ideology of the Family as well as the group's origins after a "chance" encounter with a "former" military officers of some means the morning after Vereide's alleged experience. Part two addressed the group's early efforts in putting Arthur Langlie in office, first as the mayor of Seattle and later as Washington state's governor. Also addressed there are the possible ties the Family had with the FBI/military industrial security apparatus since the early days and the curious similarities between Vereide and Silver Shirt founder William Dudley Pelley.

The third and most recent installment began to address Vereide's pre-WWII fascist connections. Vereide flirted with Henry Ford for a time and developed ties with Dr. Frank Buchman, the founder of the Moral Re-Armament movement and vocal supporter of Nazi Germany. Buchman was the recipient of ample funding from Ford, who at the time was still employing William J. Cameron, a man some believe was the actual author of The International Jew and a key influence on the transformation of British Israelism into Christian Identity "theology." Also considered was the presence of arch fascist promoter Merwin K. Hart in the Family's inner circle. Hart would go on to be involved with a host of far right groups such as the American Security Council, the Congress for Freedom and the Liberty Lobby in the post-WWII years.

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Hart

With this present installment I would like to consider Vereide's post-WWII efforts to save various Nazi and fascist collaborators as well as his efforts to guide the development of post-WWII Germany. Vereide seems to have been utterly convinced of the importance of this work as profound disillusionment set in during the waning years of World War II. As a proponent of a "New World Order" (as noted in part one), Vereide was initially supportive of the United Nations. This stance did not last long, however.

"A magnificent garden in the back grew upon the green ridge of Rock Creek Park, the narrow gorge that separated the property from the sculpted grounds of Dumbarton Oaks. It was there, in 1944 – the same year that Abram and his wife, Mattie, at last risen from her sickbed in Seattle, moved to the Christian Embassy – that Roosevelt and his advisers began planning the United Nations. Abram at first interpreted the United Nations as the result of divine intervention leading the secular world towards international acknowledgment that the truths of the world's religions were best summarized in the personality of Jesus. He turned his weekly congressional prayer meetings into lobbying sessions on the organization-to-be's behalf, and his most conservative prayer disciples – especially the old arch-isolationist Senator Arthur Vandenberg, converted to Cold War internationalism before World War II had even ended – helped quiet American resistance to the endeavor.

"History, not his Christ, would disappoint Abram. After the war ended, after it dawned on him that the UN would not become an international Christian congress, after the atom bombs fell, after the Red Army boiled up to the edge of Western Europe and did not stop so much a simmer, waiting, Abram was certain, for Stalin's command, for Satan's whisper – after he had taken stock of the war's victories and defeats, his anxieties and his enthusiasms grew more warlike than the UN could accommodate. Communism no longer meant the creed of insufficiently submissive worker; now it was as great and grand as Lucifer's kingdom, an evil empire that had launched 'World War III,' Abram decided. 'Most of these communists are in fact rebels and should be treated as rebels,' he said, waving the black flag of no mercy for those who disobey God – a sentiment his followers in developing nations would later make real by murdering hundreds of thousands of leftists. Abrams fundamentalism was polite only within the confines of Washington; projected onto the world, it brought on violence and raised up those most capable of it."

(The Family, Jeff Sharlet, pgs. 156-157)


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Continues at: http://visupview.blogspot.com/2015/01/t ... rt-iv.html
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Re: The "Christian" Mafia

Postby American Dream » Fri Feb 06, 2015 12:11 am

http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2015/ ... kfast.html

Thursday, February 05, 2015
The National Prayer Breakfast: validating theocracy


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Barack Obama speaks at National Prayer Breakfast 2-5-09

This morning, as he has done every February since 2009, Barack Obama addressed the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. The National Prayer Breakfast is sponsored by a secretive theocratic Christian organization known as The Family or The Fellowship, a group I first learned about from Jeff Sharlet’s scathing 2008 exposé, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. Here’s a quote from my review of Sharlet’s book:

“The Family is all about power. It believes that the wealthy and powerful are chosen by God, and its mission as an organization centers on bringing them to Jesus, bringing them into a spiritual ‘covenant’ of total unity with each other. ‘Hitler made a covenant,’ [Family head] Doug Coe is apparently fond of saying. ‘The Mafia makes a covenant. It is a very powerful thing’ -- all the more so when it is based on submission to Jesus (54). The Family teaches that those who hold worldly power, as long as they pledge obedience to Jesus, can kill, torture, rape, steal, and lie on a mass scale with no moral constraints whatsoever. This, too, sets the Family apart. Christian rightists generally present themselves as defenders of civic morality. However twisted or hypocritical that claim may be in practice, it's a far cry from the Family's absolute repudiation of ethical principles.”


Every president of the United States since Eisenhower has been a featured speaker at the National Prayer Breakfast, validating and bolstering the influence of the theocratic organization that sponsors it. With rare exceptions, mainstream media treats this as completely uncontroversial.

But as former Christian rightist Frank Schaeffer asked in a 2010 New York Times column, “Would President Obama speak at a prayer breakfast organized by the KKK? Would Jim Wallis and other ‘progressive’ Christians attend?”

Because The Family doesn’t just work with hardline conservatives. It’s also happy to work with moderates and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, anyone who will help further its work of Christianizing the ruling class. Hillary Clinton, for example, has had a close relationship with The Family for a decade or more.

(For more on this group, see also Sharlet’s follow-up book, C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy, which among other things details the Family’s involvement in Uganda, including heavy support for the 2009 bill that would have made homosexuality punishable by death.)
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