How the Religious Right Brainwashes Its Followers With a False Narrative of History

Why Is Christian America Supporting Donald Trump?

by John Fea

John Fea teaches American history at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. He is the author of the new book, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump (Eerdmans Publishing, June 2018).

 

 

A week ago Sunday, June 24, 2018, First Baptist Church of Dallas held its annual “Freedom Sunday.” The church website described the special service this way: “Celebrate our freedom as Americans and our freedom in Christ with patriotic worship and a special message from Dr. Robert Jeffress, “America is a Christian Nation.”

Not everyone in Dallas was happy about it. Robert Wilonsky, an opinion writer at the Dallas Morning News, wrote that Jeffress and the First Baptist Church were “divisive” for claiming that America was a Christian nation. Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings agreed. Atheists protested. Eventually, the billboard company contracting with the church removed signs advertising Freedom Sunday.

This, of course, did not stop the service from going forward. The people of First Baptist Church spent the morning of the 24th waving American flags, wearing red, white, and blue shirts, singing the Star-Spangled Banner, and celebrating the United States military. Vice-president Mike Pence sent a letter of encouragement.

Was this a religious service or a celebration of nationalism? What was the object of the congregation’s worship?

Jeffress has been preaching his “America is a Christian Nation” sermon for a long time. On Sunday he stuck with his usual script. He indicted the “secularists, atheists, and infidels” for “perverting” the Constitution. He chided the federal government’s failure to acknowledge God in the public square. He told his congregation that academics, historians, and teachers have been lying to them about the religious roots of the United States.

Jeffress made one problematic historical reference after another. He made the wildly exaggerated claim that fifty-two of the original fifty-five signers of the Constitution were “orthodox conservative Christians.” He peddled the false notion that the disestablishment clause in the First Amendment was meant to apply solely to Protestant denominations.

Near the end of the sermon, Jeffress suggested that spikes in violence, illegitimate births, divorce, and low SAT scores in America are the direct product of the Supreme Court’s decision to remove prayer and Bible-reading from public schools.

Jeffress concluded the service with an altar call. He asked people to come to the front of the church and profess their faith in Jesus Christ. I am sure Jeffress was sincere in his desire to lead people to Jesus, but after his message it was unclear whether he was inviting them to accept Jesus Christ as Savior or embrace the idea that the United States was founded, and continues to be, a Christian nation. Maybe both.

***

Robert Jeffress is best known as a Fox News religion commentator and one of the first evangelical leaders to support Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy. He has called Trump “the most faith-friendly president in history.”

Within two weeks following the announcement of his candidacy, several polls had Trump leading among white evangelical GOP voters. In November 2016, 81% of these evangelicals cast their vote for Donald Trump for President of the United States. The reasons for this are complex, and we probably need to wait a generation or two before historians can begin to make sense of them, but three young sociologists have published a scholarly essay that suggests the most plausible explanation.

Andrew Whitehead of Clemson University, Sam Perry of the University of Oklahoma, and Joseph O. Baker of East Tennessee State University argue that “the more someone believed the United States is—and should be—a Christian nation, the more likely they were to vote for Trump.” They conclude that “no other religious factor influenced support for or against Trump.”

These sociologists found that the average Trump voter believes the federal government should: declare the United States a Christian nation, advocate for Christian values, oppose the “strict separation of church and state,” allow the “display of religious symbols in public spaces,” and return prayer to public schools. Likewise, Trump voters believe that whatever success the United States has had over the years is “part of God’s plan.”

This essay is revealing, and it confirms much of what I have written about since the 2011 release of my Was American Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction. But it does not address why and how Americans have come to believe these things. The answer to that question invites us to think historically.

Ever since the founding of the republic, a significant number of Americans have supposed that the United States is exceptional because it has a special place in God’s unfolding plan for the world. Since the early 17th century founding of the Massachusetts Bay colony by Puritans, evangelicals have relished in their perceived status as God’s new Israel—His chosen people. America, they argued, is in a covenant relationship with God. The defenders of this idea like to apply Chronicles 7:14 to the United States: “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

Though dissenters have always been present, the Christian culture of the United States remained intact well into the 20th century. But since World War II, the moorings of this culture have loosened, and evangelicals have responded with fear that their Christian nation is about to collapse. Robert Jeffress is correct about this.

During the 1960s, the Supreme Court removed prayer and Bible reading from public schools, the federal government cut federal funding to Christian academies and colleges that practiced segregation, the country grew more diverse through immigration, and the sexual revolution threatened evangelical patriarchy and gave women the right to choose to have an abortion.

The fear that America’s Christian civilization was falling apart translated into political action. In the late 1970s, conservative evangelicals such as Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye (the author of the popular Left Behind novels), and a group of politicians who had been closely affiliated with the 1964 Barry Goldwater presidential campaign, developed a political playbook to win back the culture from the forces of secularization. Most of the 81% of American evangelicals who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 understood, and continue to understand, the relationship between their faith and their politics through this playbook.

This playbook, which would eventual become the culture-war battle plan of the “Religious Right,” was tweaked occasionally over the years to address whatever moral issues seemed most important at the time, but it never lost its focus on “restoring,” “renewing,” and “reclaiming” America for Christ through the pursuit of political power.

When executed properly, the playbook teaches evangelicals to elect the right President and members of Congress who will pass laws privileging evangelical Christian views of the world. These elected officials will then appoint and confirm conservative Supreme Court justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade, defend life in the womb, and uphold religious liberty for those who believe in traditional views of marriage.

The playbook rests firmly on the Religious Right’s understanding of American identity as rooted in its view of the American past. If America was not founded as a Christian nation, the Religious Right’s political agenda collapses or, at the very least, is weakened severely.

To indoctrinate its followers in the dubious claim that America was founded as a Christian nation, the Religious Right has turned to political activists, many of whom claim to be historians, to propagate the idea that the founding fathers of the United States were in the business of building a Christian nation.

The most prominent of these Christian nationalist purveyors of the past is David Barton, the founder of Wallbuilders, an organization in Aledo, Texas that claims to be “dedicated to presenting America’s forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on the moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built—a foundation which, in recent years, has been seriously attacked and undermined.” Barton and Wallbuilders were the source of most of the historical information Jeffress presented in his Freedom Sunday sermon on June 24th.

For the past thirty years, Barton has provided pastors and conservative politicians with inaccurate or misinterpreted facts used to fuel the Religious Right’s nostalgic longings for an American Christian golden age. American historians, including those who teach at the most conservative Christian colleges, have debunked Barton’s use of the past, but he continues to maintain a large following in the evangelical community.

David Barton peddles fake news about the American past. Yet, if Andrew Whitehead, Sam Perry, and Joseph Baker are correct, his work is essential to the success of the Trump presidency in a way that I imagine even Donald Trump and his staff do not fully understand or appreciate.

Trump does not talk very much about America’s supposedly Christian origins. His grasp of history is not very strong. But his evangelical supporters see him as a gift of God—a divinely appointed figure who has emerged on the scene for such a time as this. He is in the White House to preserve God’s covenant with America, to make America Christian again.

The support for the President is a sign of intellectual laziness in the evangelical community. Rather than thinking creatively about how to move forward in hope, Trump evangelicals prefer to respond to cultural change by trying to reclaim a Christian world that is rapidly disappearing, has little chance of ever coming back, and may never have existed in the first place.

The American founding fathers lived in a world that was very different from our own. In the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, America was a nation of Christians—mostly Protestants—who put their stamp on the culture.

Yet, amid this Christian culture, the founders differed about the relationship between Christianity and their new nation. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison defended the separation of church and state. John Adams and George Washington also opposed mixing church and state, while at the same time suggesting that Christians, because Christianity taught an ethic of selflessness, could be useful in the creation of a virtuous republic in which citizens sacrificed self-interest for the common good.

The founding fathers believed in God, but most of them did not believe that God inspired the Old and New Testaments or sent His son to die and rise from the dead as the ultimate payment for human sin. The God of the Declaration of Independence is a providential deity who created the world and the people in it, but there is nothing in this important American document that defines this God in terms of the Incarnation or the Trinity.

The United States Constitution never mentions God or Christianity but does forbid religious tests for office. The First Amendment rejects a state-sponsored church and celebrates the free-exercise of religion. This is hardly the kind of stuff by which Christian nations are made. Yet Barton and Jeffress invoke these founders and these documents to defend the idea that the United States was founded as a distinctly Christian nation.

***

If the Christian Right, and by extension the 81% of evangelical voters who use its political playbook, are operating on such a weak historical foundation, why doesn’t someone correct their faulty views and dubious claims?

We do.

We have.

But countering bad history with good history is not as easy as it sounds. David Barton and his fellow Christian nationalist purveyors of the past are well-funded by Christian conservatives who know that the views of the past they are peddling serve their political agenda. Barton has demonized Christian intellectuals and historians as sheep in wolves’ clothing. They may call themselves Christians on Sunday morning, but, according to Barton, their “world view” has been shaped by the secular universities where they earned their Ph.Ds. Thanks to Barton, many conservative evangelicals do not trust academic and professional historians—even academic and professional historians with whom they share a pew on Sunday mornings.

I know this first-hand from some of the negative emails and course evaluation forms I received after teaching a Sunday School course on the history of religion and politics at the Evangelical Free Church congregation where my family worship every Sunday. Because I was a college history professor—even a college history professor at a Christian college with strong evangelical roots—I could not be trusted.

What David Barton does not understand is that there are hundreds of evangelical historians who see their work as part of their Christian identity and vocation. These historians are women and men who pursue truth about the past wherever it leads. This pursuit of truth is a deeply Christian pursuit, as is the case with all efforts to distinguish truth from error.

When people like David Barton cherry-pick from the past to promote political agendas, they do a disservice to the past, fail to treat it with integrity, and ultimately harm their Christian witness in the world. They make evangelicals look foolish. This is not what Paul described in 1 Corinthians 1:18 as the “foolishness of the cross,” it is just good old-fashioned foolishness. It is a product of what evangelical historian Mark Noll has described as the “Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.”

Many of us engaged in trying to bring good history to the evangelical church need the support of Christians who are concerned about the direction Donald Trump, the Christian Right, and the pseudo-historians who prop-up their political agenda are trying to take the country and the church. Good history is complex. It is nuanced. And it is an essential part of truly worshipping God with our minds (Luke 10:27). Unfortunately, complexity, nuance, and intellectual discipleship are not the kinds of subjects that inspire Christians to dig into their pocketbooks.

What would it take to fund evangelical historians to travel to receptive churches around the country and spend some concentrated time teaching American religious history, and American history more broadly, to lay men and women? Perhaps such visits could also include times of worship and prayer?

It is unlikely that such an effort would reach the Robert Jeffress’ of the world. but there are many evangelicals who are open and willing to listen and learn. This was another lesson I took away from my Sunday School class. In fact, the criticism I received paled in comparison with the positive comments I got from those who had never heard a fellow evangelical offer a different, more accurate, view of American history.

American evangelical political engagement is built on a very weak historical foundation. It is time that Christian philanthropists, motivated by an entrepreneurial spirit informed by the pursuit of truth and a concern for the testimony of the Gospel in the world, take the long view and invest in responsible Christian thinking about the American past. The American republic, and more importantly, the witness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, depends on it.

 

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Trump to Sign Faith-Based Initiative Order Giving Christian Fascists More Power

Trump to Sign Faith-Based Initiative Order Giving White Evangelicals More Power

Trump tried to repeal the Johnson Amendment, which would have allowed pastors to tell their congregations who to vote for and turned churches into dark money conduits for politicians. He’s tried to ban transgender troops from the military on the guidance of evangelicals. He has nominated a steady stream of judges who cater to conservative Christian interests. He acted like saying “Merry Christmas” was now permissible even though it was never a problem.

And, of course, we know why he does that. White evangelicals remain the core of Trump’s base.

So today, on the National Day of Prayer (which is, oddly enough, a Christian-only event), Trump is signing a new executive order designed to give those evangelicals even more power.

Adelle M. Banks of Religion News Service has the scoop:

President Trump plans to unveil a new initiative that aims to give faith groups a stronger voice within the federal government and serve as a watchdog for government overreach on religious liberty issues.

He is scheduled to sign an executive order on Thursday (May 3), the National Day of Prayer, “to ensure that the faith-based and community organizations that form the bedrock of our society have strong advocates in the White House and throughout the Federal Government,” a White House document reads.

No. No no no. They don’t need a stronger voice in the government. They’re doing enough damage as is. We don’t need wannabe theocrats getting federal help in choosing all the ways they’re being fake-persecuted.To be fair, President Obama wasn’t terrific on these issues either. Instead of shutting down George W. Bush‘s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, Obama expanded it with his Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships. It was well-intentioned but ultimately problematic.

Trump is now adding steroids to the mix with his White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative.

There’s a secular argument to be made in support of this office. Most Americans are religious, believers are involved in a lot of public service efforts, and this is a way to coordinate some of those projects.

But we’ve seen what happens when Trump and his Christian clique gets together. They discriminate against religious minorities. They use their connections to push legislation that has no secular purpose. They pretend to be victims just because (gasp) Christian business owners might have to sell the same product to a gay person as a straight one.

Just look at the stated purpose of this office:

The White House said those working on the initiative will provide policy recommendations from faith-based and community programs on “more effective solutions to poverty,” and inform the administration of “any failures of the executive branch to comply with religious liberty protections under law.”

How the hell will these Christians tackle “poverty” and “religious liberty” when they’re working under a president who supports a Muslim ban and a Republican Congress that passed a bill giving tax breaks to billionaires instead of using the money to help lower and middle class people?

At best, I hope this office is a symbol. Because if they actually get more power, non-evangelicals will be screwed. It’s telling that, in the RNS article, not a single non-Christian was even cited in the piece. Will there be Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, etc. working on this initiative? (Should we even bother asking?)

Or will we just get more of the same from this White House, where “religious liberty” is synonymous with “special perks for white evangelicals”?

(Image via Shutterstock)

 

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Evangelicals stunned that they’ve finally alienated everyone, including those in their own ‘party’

Evangelicals stunned that they’ve finally alienated everyone, including those in their own ‘party’

 By Kerry Eleveld

PAYPAL

After years of lecturing everyone about right and wrong and “family values” and attempting to statutorily impose their own beliefs on America, Christian fundamentalists are now shocked to find out that they’ve been abandoned by pretty much everyone, including the Republican party. Katie Zezima reports on fundie dysphoria in the wake of Donald Trump’s ascension to titular head of the Republican party.

“In a sense, we feel abandoned by our party,” [Pastor Gary] Fuller said. “There’s nobody left.”

Fuller and other conservatives whose voting decisions are guided by their Christian faith find themselves dismayed and adrift now that Trump has wrested control of the Republican Party. It is a sentiment that reaches from the small, aluminum-sided church with a large white cross on its front that Fuller and his wife built on the Nebraska plains to the highest levels of American religious life. Even progressive Christians — evangelicals and Catholics, among others — who don’t necessarily vote Republican are alarmed that Trump is attracting many voters who call themselves religious. […]

“This year the Republican Party has not just surrendered on the culture wars, they’ve joined the other side. And that’s a unique situation,” said Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.

“This year” may turn out to be a gross underestimation of the cultural change that’s taking place within the GOP and America, frankly. Trump and his followers have mostly rejected the notion that they need to embrace the fundamentalist agenda in order to win and—perhaps more to the point—that winning on fundie terms is even worth it.

Ted Cruz’s failure to convert his demonization of transgender individuals into votes in Indiana wasn’t simply a local miscalculation, it was fundamental misunderstanding of where the nationwide electorate stands on LGBTQ issues. While the public is still learning about gay and transgender people, voters seem less vulnerable to “the sky is falling” messages that social conservatives employed with same-sex marriage, for instance. As a poll found this week, 57 percent of Americans oppose mandating which bathrooms transgender individuals should use and 75 percent support equal protection laws for transgender Americans in jobs, housing, and public accommodations.

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2016: The Year Republicans Admitted They Want the U.S. to be a Fascist, Christian Theocracy

2016: The Year Republicans Admitted They Want the U.S. to be a Fascist, Christian Theocracy

 

By Allen Clifton

What gets lost in the media’s obsession with all things Donald Trump is the fact that the alternative to him is Sen. Ted Cruz, someone who I think is far more dangerous than “The Donald.” As I’ve said plenty of times before, Cruz is basically everything bad about Trump – but even more radical.

At least with Trump you get a slight glimmer of common sense when it comes to health care and Social Security. Plus Trump isn’t exactly “Mr. Religious,” even if he’s pretending to be to pander for votes. However, Ted Cruz is a religious radical who has a history of putting himself and his own ambitions before anyone else, including his own political party and the country.

This is someone who’s so unpopular that he’s done what almost nobody in Washington has been able to do for years: he’s brought Democrats and Republicans together because both groups can’t stand him. But having these two men as the top two candidates for the GOP openly tells us what kind of country conservative voters want to turn this nation into: A fascist Christian theocracy.

Both of these men are essentially different types of fascists. While Trump is more the prototypical “dictator-type,” Cruz is what I call a religious fascist. He’s even said in the past that the only way to “save” the United States is to turn it into a theocracy. These are two men who are almost never honest, who’ve built the foundations of their campaigns on doing nothing more than pandering to hate, anger, bigotry and racism.

Even when they’re called out directly to their face on something they said that was unquestionably not true, they simply accuse the person calling them out of being dishonest, then continue to lie some more. Both individuals are completely impervious to being fact checked because neither one operates within a realm of reality where “truth” matters at all. Which works well for them because most of their supporters couldn’t care less about things like facts or reality.

These are people who simply want to be told what they want to hear. The 2016 election has shown us all that Republicans want this nation to be run as a fascist, Christian theocracy. They want a propagandist who tells them mythical stories created to do nothing more than play to their fantasies.

They want to be indoctrinated, told what to think and have the Bible rule over the Constitution. They want Muslims and immigrants (at least brown ones) out of the country. They want a “leader” who stands behind a podium preaching nationalism, hate and fear. Aside from President Obama’s race, a big reason why so many hate him is because he’s not an idiot. This president is someone who sees the bigger picture and seems to understand that we’re living in a world where your capacity to outthink your opposition is just as important as the size of your military.

Meanwhile, Republicans are sheep who respond to trigger words, simplified talking points and seem to believe that extremely complex problems are solved by solutions that sound like they came from the mind of a deranged 7-year-old Charlie Manson. Right now the country is at a precipice in time that history will look back upon as either the moment we all stood up against this wave of fascist Christianity that’s threatening to take over the country, or the moment we stayed home on election day and allowed it to happen.

I certainly hope that when future generations of Americans look back on the 2016 elections, this year will be defined by tens of millions of Americans rising up against the biggest fascist threat this country has faced since Adolf Hitler ruled over Nazi Germany.

How the Vatican Manipulates the American Democratic Process

How the Vatican Manipulates the American Democratic Process

By Stephen D. Mumford, DrPH

Editor’s note: The following has been adapted from Chapter 4 of our chairman Dr. Stephen D. Mumford’s book, American Democracy and the Vatican: Population Growth and National Security (1984). This book is available on Kindle here.

The Abortion Movement

In 1980, Federal Judge John Dooling, United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, declared that the Hyde Amendment, which prevented Medicaid payment for abortion, was unconstitutional. (Copies of Judge Dooling’s 328-page decision in McRae vs. HEW are rare. During a recent conversation with the Brooklyn United States District Court, I was told that their copy had disappeared and, for this reason, they were not in a position to reproduce it.) Judge Dooling had spent a year gathering evidence and studying the anti-abortion movement, and his findings showed that the anti-abortion movement was essentially a Roman Catholic movement with a little non-Catholic window dressing.[8] The amendment, says Dooling bluntly, was a ploy by anti-abortion congressmen frustrated in their attempt to pass a constitutional amendment that would override the Supreme Court’s 1973 pro-abortion decision; its purpose was quite simply to circumvent the Court’s ruling and prevent as many abortions as possible. Dooling, a practicing Catholic, makes short shrift of the anti-abortionists’ pretensions to be a spontaneous grass-roots movement that owes its political victories to sheer moral appeal. He confirms that the right-to-life’s main source of energy, organization, and direction has been the Catholic Church, and he describes in detail how the movement uses one-issue voting to put pressure on legislators, candidates, and the party organizations that nominate them—a tactic that gains influence far out of proportion to its numbers. Please see appendix one for excerpts from Judge Dooling’s decision in McRae vs. HEW.

What is most significant in this extract is Judge Dooling’s finding that the anti-abortion movement’s main source of energy, organization, and direction has been the Catholic Church. The bishops’ Pastoral Plan prompted the creation of the Moral Majority. Richard A. Viguerie, a Catholic, is the man most responsible for the development and success of the New Right, and he will be the first to claim that honor. He was also involved in the original discussions that led to the creation of the Moral Majority and, as its fundraiser, can be credited with its financial success. Paul Weyrich, a Catholic, claims credit for originating the idea for the group and the name itself. In their search for an attractive front man for the organization, they chose Jerry Falwell, who, according to intimates, has an insatiable lust for power—and, thus, Moral Majority, Inc., was born.[9]

It is inconceivable that these Catholic laymen were not responding to the bishops’ Pastoral Plan. Much went into avoiding public disclosure of the role of the Catholic Church in the creation of the Moral Majority. Maxine Negri, in “A Well-Planned Conspiracy,” exposed involvement of the Catholic hierarchy in the Moral Majority.[10] Then, the June 21, 1982, issue of U.S. News and World Report noted:

At the heart of Moral Majority is a direct-mail operation…. Membership claims … put the number of Moral Majority’s active supporters at roughly 4 million Roman Catholics, Protestant fundamentalists, and orthodox Jews. The organization says its “hardcore contributors,” numbered at more than 400,000, include a cadre of 80,000 priests, ministers, and rabbis organized into fifty autonomous chapters.

This claim of autonomy should not be taken seriously. What is described here is exactly the organization described in the Pastoral Plan of Action down to the details.

None of us who has ever worked extensively with fundamentalist churches or lived among fundamentalists ever took the claim that the Moral Majority was a fundamentalist organization seriously. One characteristic common among fundamentalists is a keen sense of individualism, and individualists are often fundamentalists because of this trait. There is self-selection. They strongly resist the “herding” that characterizes other major denominations such as the Catholic Church. It is very difficult to organize two or three local fundamentalist churches to carry out even a local short-term civic activity. Organizing much beyond this is inconceivable. In contrast, the Catholic Church, with its keen sense of organization acquired over a two-thousand-year history, found the “organization” of the fundamentalists a relatively simple task by providing with few exceptions the entire organization infrastructure, including the organization of the fifty autonomous state chapters and the organizations in the 435 congressional districts.

The far more experienced and autocratic Catholic Church found the fundamentalists easy prey. They created “leader” Jerry Falwell and they sought out for other visible positions others who also had an insatiable lust for power. These fundamentalists toe the line of the Catholic Church to maintain their newly acquired visibility and their sense of power. And, of course, the purse strings of the Moral Majority are controlled by those who collect the money—represented by Richard Viguerie. As the old adage goes, “he who controls the purse strings, controls the organization.”

The Family-Planning Movement

There is little doubt that virtually all opposition to the family-planning movement is Roman Catholic. The anti-family-planning movement’s main source of energy, organization, and direction clearly has been the Roman Catholic Church. Most people outside the family-planning field are not aware that this anti-family-planning movement continues to score major victories, such as preventing the U.S. sale of Depo-Provera, the birth-control injectable given every three months, a method which all available data indicate is safer than birth control pills. Depo-Provera is used by tens of millions of women around the world and is now approved by over one hundred countries, including most European countries, WHO, and other prestigious groups. Other victories include successfully laying roadblocks that prevent tens of thousands of women from receiving sterilization operations when they want them, roadblocks which result in thousands of unwanted births yearly. Far more important are the successes of the Church in minimizing U.S. assistance to family-planning efforts in developing countries.

Many of these victories for the Church come under the heading “Administrative Areas” in the bishops’ Pastoral Plan of Action. Two recent examples of Catholic Church activity are the mandatory notification of parents of teens who seek contraceptives at federally funded clinics and the banning of federal funds for family-planning clinics which provide abortion.

The ERA Movement

The Equal Rights Amendment died June 30, 1982. I am certain that its failure was the result of the success of the Catholic hierarchy’s bold efforts to defeat it. As with the anti-abortion movement, the main source of energy, organization, and direction of the anti-ERA movement is the Roman Catholic Church.

In June 1978, I received a Planned Parenthood Washington Memo which contained an article entitled “U.S. Bishops Block Pro-ERA Statement.” In part, it read:

The Roman Catholic hierarchy, in early May, refused to permit issuance of a subcommittee’s statement supporting the Equal Rights Amendment, indicating that the fight against legal abortion takes precedence as its preeminent concern.

The pro-ERA statement was supported by the bishops’ six-member Ad Hoc Committee on Women in the Church and Society, which took pains to separate support for ERA from any connotation of accepting abortion. Furthermore, they sought only to issue the statement in their own behalf and had reportedly consulted with the Family Life section of the bishops’ Department of Education, which apparently approved their conclusions “that the ERA will not threaten the stability of marriage in family life.”

According to a report of the National Catholic News Service, acceptance of the statement had been urged by ninety-four employees of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and the U.S. Catholic Conference, but advance disclosures about the issue also generated heavy mail from the “right to life” groups opposing the ERA. The NCCB’s forty-eight-member administrative board, which sets policy for the 345 U.S. Roman Catholic bishops, rejected the pro-ERA document during an early May meeting in Chicago, contending that it could hurt anti-abortion efforts.

It is now apparent that this move by the bishops was a brilliant ploy. The Church not only evaded taking a positive stand on an important social justice issue which threatens its power but it has worked diligently to defeat the ERA by using the very same political action organization used to combat abortion!

In my home state of North Carolina, one of the last hopes of the ERA movement, we saw statewide polls in May 1982 show that two-thirds of our citizens favored the amendment, and, in June 1982, we saw two-thirds of our lawmakers vote to defeat it. Clearly, a vast superior organization killed the ERA in North Carolina, a finely honed and skillful operation, one two thousand years in the making—the same one continuing to fight legalized abortions in our fair state.

Actions Taken by the Church

What actions has the hierarchy taken to counter the abortion, family-planning, and ERA movements?

In 1980, Jean-Guy Vaillancourt, a Canadian Roman Catholic professor of sociology at the University of Montreal, published a book entitled Papal Power: A Study of Vatican Control Over Lay Catholic Elites.[11] This is a study of the techniques intensively used by the Vatican in many countries to control Catholic laypersons in Italy over the past one hundred years. In 1875, the Vatican created a system of local parish committees of at least five members each, called Catholic Actions. These committees were created to organize laypersons to assist the Vatican in seizing control of local, state, and national political machinery. Over the years, the Church gained considerable experience in organizing these committees and in ensuring obedience and a very high degree of responsiveness to the chain of command by the committees. These committees and their more recent counterpart, civic committees, are highly effective in mobilizing Vatican efforts. Vaillancourt places the role of the committees in proper perspective by discussing

a famous open letter presented to the Pope in 1968 by dissatisfied Catholics from France and elsewhere. The letter severely criticized the Vatican’s excessive attachment to wealth and power, stressing the idea that Church authorities are too repressive and manipulative:

“The whole Church apparatus is organized for control: the Roman Curia controls the bishops, the bishops the clergy, the clergy controls the laity … and the lay Christians control (what an illusion!) mankind. Hence a multiplication of secretaries, commissions, structures, etc., with their programs and rules…. Underhand influences have suffocated the openness which had manifested itself at the lay conference in Rome, a congress which had very little communication with the bishops who were then meeting in a synod.”

After this attack on the abuses of social and legal power by church authorities, the letter goes on to describe three of the favorite techniques of control used by the Vatican: secrecy (there are secret files even against bishops), spying and informing, and repression (used even against some of the most respected theologians).

Secrecy can be classified as either a legal or a social method of control, depending on whether it is used as an administrative-legal procedure or as a simple social defense mechanism. Spying and informing would clearly be instances of social power, since they entail the use of social processes. Finally, repression, as discussed in the open letter, refers to a mixture of legal, coercive, and even remunerative power. Concretely, it includes the habitual recourse by Church officials to excommunications, censures, condemnations, demotions, and the removal or firing of offenders from their ecclesiastical jobs.

In researching Papal Power, Vaillancourt studied Vatican control over lay Catholic elites for years, spending a large part of his time at the Vatican. To effect this control, Vaillancourt has found that the Vatican exercises eight kinds of power—all of which have been used and have proved effective in opposing social issues in the United States.

ECOLOGICAL POWER, based on the physical control of material environmental conditions. An example of this is the use of territory, buildings, or real estate to control people through the domination of their environment.

REMUNERATIVE POWER, based on material or nonmaterial rewards or compensations. An example of this is the way the Pius XII Foundation uses its funds to support some lay activities and not others.

COERCIVE POWER, based on physical or psychic violence. Examples of this are burning at the stake, torture, imprisonment, banishment, blackmail, removal from office, denouncement.

SOCIAL POWER, based on the use of structural-organizational or psycho-sociological mechanisms such as Catholic Action congresses, peer-group pressures, rumors, co-optation, social ostracism, socialization, use of mass media, nepotism, and selective recruitment. An example of social power is “conditioning.” …

LEGAL POWER, juridically founded, or simply based on bureaucratic and administrative norms, procedures, and maneuvers. An example of this is the rule of secrecy which affects, under the pain of “grievous sin,” the affairs of the Secretariate of the Pope and the Council for the Public Affairs of the Church in their relations with Vatican diplomats and other high-ranking prelates. Another example is censorship, through the nihil obstat and imprimatur.

TRADITIONAL POWER, based on the use of traditional symbols, rituals, ideas, and sentiments. The cementing of loyalty through a mass of torch-lit procession during a congress would be an example of this kind of power. Appeals to practices (for example, speaking Latin) and documents popular or prevalent in previous times are also instances of the use of traditional power.

EXPERT POWER, based on professional, technical, or scientific or purely rational arguments. An example of this is the recourse to commissions of experts in theology or the social sciences to bolster one’s position. Pius XII’s speeches to numerous groups on a multitude of topics was also an effort to control through expert power.

CHARISMATIC POWER, based on exemplary or ethical prophecy. Examples of this are calls for social justice and equality (used extensively in recent years) or the giving away of some of the Church’s possessions for certain causes (for example, a ring in a Brazilian slum). In a less prophetic vein, the replacement of personal charisma of office and the routinization of charisma are other examples of the use of this kind of power.

The Vatican with one hundred years of experience in controlling nations through these lay Catholic organizations, has chosen to export this highly developed mechanism for control of lay Catholics and democratic processes to the United States. In 1975, the Church launched its Pastoral Plan of Action. The “committees” discussed in this plan are the same “committees” discussed by Vaillancourt that are used to control lay Catholics and to serve as political machinery. These “committees” which make up anti-abortion organizations are openly being used by the Vatican to manipulate the American democratic process. This includes the Moral Majority organization, as unsuspecting Protestants lend their support. For those who have figured out that they are being used, the lust for power or attention given them is enough to keep them in the fold.

The Pastoral Plan of Action was supposedly initiated by the Vatican because “the will of God and the law of reason” demanded an unrelenting fight against abortion. However, by 1978, it became apparent that the Vatican had simply seized upon a golden opportunity to mobilize Catholic America into a political party using its “right-to-life committees”—including the Moral Majority. Some observers began to recognize that these very same “committees” were being used to fight the other “enemies” of the Catholic Church: the ERA, family planning, the environmental movement, illegal immigration control, and support for the Global 2000 Report. I am now convinced that abortion was simply an excuse to politically mobilize the American Catholic Church and create, de facto, an American Catholic Political Party. The same techniques and tactics developed and used by the Church one hundred years ago to manipulate local, state, and national governments on other continents are exactly the same techniques and tactics seen in America today!

In 1977, victory for the ERA movement seemed almost certain. Few Americans realize the fantastic amount of organization and mobilization of human resources, funds, and commitment it took on the part of the Vatican to turn apparent victory for the ERA into defeat. Phyllis Schlafly, a Catholic, and the “organization” she headed, got more help from the Vatican and the American bishops than most Americans can possibly imagine. Judge Dooling found the anti-abortionists’ claim that they were a grass-roots movement to be spurious; the belief that the anti-ERA forces are also a grass-roots movement is ridiculous.

As serious observers study the opposition to the family-planning movement, the environmental movement, illegal immigration control, and the Global 2000 Report, they recognize just how sophisticated the opposition is—the amount of energy, organization, and direction each has—and that the opposition is all the same people, the same committees.

Conclusion

This is not an abstract theory. Such organization has been effective in Italy and other countries and was described by Vaillancourt before it got underway in earnest in the United States. Until those of us who are concerned about these social justice issues are willing to confront the Catholic hierarchy, there will be no significant advances in these areas of social justice. So long as the Church can act “undercover,” it will continue to be effective in thwarting significant advances. Our willingness to permit the Church to act in secrecy in America vastly enhances its power. It is absolutely essential that our silence be shattered. If not, then no matter which of these causes is “our cause” it’s a lost cause. Just as important, the strength of a threatening Vatican-controlled political party in America will continue to grow. American Catholics who are seriously concerned about social justice must take the pope and the Vatican at their word when they say that they do not intend to change their course. Catholics must be aware that the pope and the Vatican are choosing their social justice issues very selectively. In the 1970s, Cardinal Leo Suenens proposed that the position of pope and the Vatican, as we know it, be eliminated and that four “mini-pope” positions be created; this is consistent with Catholic teachings. He insisted that this is feasible. Perhaps it is time for socially responsible American Catholics to break the American Church away from the control of the Vatican. Otherwise, they as individuals stand to be accused of the same hypocrisy practiced by their Church hierarchy.

---

[8] D. J. Dooling, decision in McRae vs. HEW, New York: U.S. District Court. See, Appendix 1 for a more complete extract from Judge Dooling’s decision.

[9] P. D. Young, “Richard A. Viguerie: The New Right’s Secret Power Broker,” Penthouse (December 1982), p. 146.

[10] Maxine Negri, “A Well-Planned Conspiracy,” The Humanist (May/June 1982), 42:3:40.

[11] Jean-Guy Vaillancourt, Papal Power: A Study of Vatican Control Over Lay Catholic Elites (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

Dr. Stephen Mumford is the founder and President of the North Carolina-based Center for Research on Population and Security. He has his doctorate in Public Health. His principal research interest has been the relationship between world population growth and national and global security. He has been called to provide expert testimony before the U.S. Congress on the implications of world population growth.

Dr. Mumford has decades of international experience in fertility research where he is widely published, and has addressed conferences worldwide on new contraceptive technologies and the stresses to the security of families, societies and nations that are created by continued uncontrolled population growth. Using church policy documents and writings of the Vatican elite, he has introduced research showing the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church as the principal power behind efforts to block the availability of contraceptive services worldwide.

In addition to his books on biomedical and social aspects of family planning, as well as scientific articles in more than a score of journals, Dr. Mumford’s major works include: The Life and Death of NSSM 200: How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U.S. Population Policy (Research Triangle Park, North Carolina: Center for Research on Population and Security, 1996); The Pope and the New Apocalypse: The Holy War Against Family Planning (Research Triangle Park, North Carolina: Center for Research on Population and Security, 1986); and American Democracy and the Vatican: Population Growth and National Security (Amherst, New York: Humanist Press, 1984).

Professor Milton Siegel, who for 24 years was the Assistant Director-General of the World Health Organization, speaks to Dr. Mumford in 1992 to reveal that although there was a consensus that overpopulation was a grave public health threat and would be a major cause of preventable death not too far in the future, the Vatican successfully fought off the incorporation of family planning and birth control into official WHO policy. This video is available for public viewing for the first time. Read the full transcript of the interview here.

The Fascist Vatican

Empire – The Vatican: A Wholly Roman Empire?

 

 

 

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ANZAC Day Not for Faggots and Towelheads

ANZAC Day Not for Faggots and Towelheads

by Geoff Lemon

[This piece is a few years old, but age has not wearied its sentiment.]

At least, not according to the Australian Christian Lobby. Sure, their main man Jim Wallace used slightly more careful language, but that was the sentiment of what he said. “Just hope that as we remember Servicemen and women today we remember the Australia they fought for – wasn’t gay marriage and Islamic!” was the thoughtful missive he left via Twitter on the 25^th.

I generally couldn’t give two shits in a waffle cone what people have to say on Twitter, the place where relevance goes to pick out its funeral clothes in pale blue. But once in a while you get something juicy, someone reposts it, and suddenly giant kerfuffles are exploding over everyone. (They’re kind of like soufflés.)

Generally, also like soufflés, these are massive beat-ups: think Nir Rosen, Catherine Deveny, that poor bloody lady with the horse. But Wallace has more reason for contrition than most. Aside from the fact that most of the towelheads and faggots could demolish him in a grammar challenge, his opinions (which he may have extensively pondered) only reinforce the ill-thought-out prejudices of thousands of other people. At least, they do once they make it onto the evening news.

Wallace said he would stand by his comment “if people read it in the right context and realise I’m not slurring gays. I have a lot of friends and associates who are gays, in fact one even tweeted me last night…” That must’ve been an illicit thrill, Jim. So, not slurring gays, you just don’t think they should have the same rights as proper normal people. Ok, check.

He went on to explain that this revelation of his came about after sitting with his father, a veteran of Tobruk and Milne Bay, who said that he didn’t recognise this Australia as being the one he fought for. Thought Jim, it was a good time to make a statement about our Judeo-Christian heritage, despite the fact that most of Australia these days is about as Christian as a bag of wet socks.

The extra-bad taste in the mouth from all this, though, is his invocation of the ANZACs to back up his point. We shouldn’t have gay marriage because ‘the ANZACs’ didn’t fight for that. We should keep an eye on dodgy Muslims because ‘the ANZACs’ sure as hell didn’t fight for them either. It was in the same vein as a particularly lunk-headed individual named Mick (natch), commenting on my pokies article, that restrictions on people’s gambling meant “the anzacs would be turning in their graves.”

To quote another commenter’s rejoinder, “Everyone loves making the ANZACs say what they want them to. They’re kind of like Jesus like that.”

And spot on. As recent years have ticked by, I’ve increasingly come to loathe ANZAC Day. Not the soldiers it honours, but the modern way of supposedly honouring them. Before you get all down on me for my disrespect, check my credentials. Through high school, my uni major, and my honours year, I specialised in Australian First and Second World War history. I’ve read dozens of biographies and memoirs by servicemen, interviewed WWII vets, and spent countless hours in archives here, in Canberra, and in Singapore. I spent a year in Thailand and Borneo researching prisoner-of-war camps, walked across northern Borneo to retrace a forced march of Aussie soldiers, then drove back and forth several more times to follow up on leads. I wrote a book of poems based on the stories I found, and I’ve done readings from it in all kinds of places to try and make sure those stories are heard. My best mate since primary school is an infantry corporal. I probably have a more direct emotional connection to that history than just about anyone who now chooses to invoke its name when April rolls around.

The fact that I do care so much is why ANZAC Days have increasingly become a time to cringe. It’s the resurgent nationalism and mythologising championed by Keating and Howard. Sentimental crud like ‘the ANZAC spirit’, gets thrown around by every chump with a lectern. People get tagged with it for playing football. The modern understanding of the phrase makes it more and more synonymous with a kind of Aussie boganeering. Thousands of young Australians go to Gallipoli to pay their respects by getting shitfaced, watching rock concerts, unrolling their sleeping bags on the graves of the dead, and fucking off the next day leaving the place completely trashed for the Turks to clean up. Much like 1915, but with a bit more piss. It’s a short step from this ‘spirit’ to the Aussie pride that saw flags tied on as capes down at Cronulla a few years ago. It seems to appeal to the same demographic that have made “Fuck off, we’re full” such a big seller down at Bumper Sticker Bonanza.

The most recent dawn service I went to sounded more like a school assembly, with the officially-voted Most Boring Prick on Earth conducting the service, then the tokenism of some Year 12 from an all-girl private school reading us her revelations after a trip to Gallipoli. The same myth-heavy sacred-worship shite. The ANZACs were this, the ANZACs were that. No, Hannah Montana. The ANZACs were a bunch of different people. The ANZACs weren’t one thing. ‘They’ didn’t believe in this or that, ‘they’ didn’t have these characteristics. They were a group of individuals.

The sanctity shtick is also popular with politicians who want to push a particular view. But the use and misuse of that history is the topic of my next post, which is an actual essay (as opposed to rant) on that subject. Yes, an essay. The internet will fall over when someone posts more than 500 words in one hit. Mind you, the 5000-worder I wrote on Balibo is one of the most popular entries on this site, so, give this a shake. I promise it’s interesting.

All of which brings us, bereft of a segue, back to Mr Wallace. His Twitter post, he said, “was a comment on the nature of the Australia [his father] had fought for, and the need to honour that in the way we preserve it into the future.”

So let me just make sure I’ve got this, Jim. Because soldiers fought and died in 1943, we need to maintain the values they had in 1943. Or do we maintain the values of the ones who fought in 1945? But hang on, they fought and died in 1915 as well… and 1914. So do we wind our values back to then? Do we bring back the Australia Party and the Northern Territory Chief Protector of Aborigines?

Let’s settle on the 1940s in general – Milne Bay and all that. And look at the values of the 1940s. This was an era when it was ok to smack your wife around a bit if she gave you lip. If you went too hard on her too often, then people might tut disapprovingly, like they did with a bloke who kicked his dog. But the odd puffy cheek was nothing to be remarked upon.

This was an era when women were supposed to show respect to men as the heads of the households and their natural superiors.

This was an era when you could pretty casually rape a girl who ended up somewhere alone with you, because if she’d got herself into that situation she was probably asking for it. Girls who said no or changed their minds were just playing hard to get. You know women, right? So fickle, so flighty. It was an era when the Australian occupation troops sent to Japan post-war were involved in the consistent rapes of Japanese women. Not traumatised vengeful former combatants, mind you, but fresh recruits, straight out of training.

This was an era when capital punishment was legal, and conscription was encouraged. This was an era when dodgy foreigners were kept out of the country by being made to sit a test in a language of the examiner’s choosing. Oh, you don’t speak Aramaic? Sorry, you failed. This was an era when Aboriginals weren’t recognised as people. Despite having been here when everyone else rocked up, they weren’t even given citizenship till 1967. Twenty-two years after the war had ended.

Were these the values that our Aussie heroes fought and died for too? Or were these not-so-good values, ones that we can discard? Where’s the distinction, Jim? Where do your values end and your values begin?

Well, guess what. I don’t want to live in the 1940s. I don’t want to live in 1918. I don’t want to brush off Vietnam, Korea, Malaya, because they were morally ambiguous. I don’t want to be part of a culture that makes people saints. I want to respect them for being people. I don’t want to live in a society where people are encouraged to hate each other, either. That kind of hatred is one of the most corrosive things in existence.

When I was in Year 9, I went to a boarding school for a year with this kid named Chris Millet. Word on the street was that he was gay. It was never clear why – I don’t think he even was. The story was along the lines of him being dared to touch another kid’s dick in the change room, and doing it to impress the tougher kids daring him. Presumably it was a set-up, and from that moment on he was branded “faggot”. I don’t mean that kids called him a faggot. I mean that they flat out swore that he was a faggot. And to 14-year-old boys there was nothing more terrifying in the world, nor so potentially destructive to one’s social standing. Millet was a fag, the lowest of the low, and in all my years I have yet to witness anyone treated in such a consistently awful fashion.

Chris Millet was bastardised and ostracised for that entire year. He was mocked, reviled, heckled, and spat at as a matter of course, the mere sight of him passing by enough to prompt a volley of abuse. Some of it was the comic genius of teenage boys (“Bums to the wall, Millet’s on the crawl!”), but usually it was just plain old invective. A big country kid, quiet and thoughtful, he just bowed his broad shoulders and kept on walking. We lived in small dorms of sixteen kids apiece; he was socially frozen out of his. His size meant not many would risk straight-out assaults, but he was routinely pushed and whacked and scuffled with; his belongings stolen, broken, or sabotaged; clothes and bed dirtied or thrown around the dorm; fair game for anyone, anytime. He ate alone, sat in class alone, walked the paths of the school alone. Even the nerdiest of the nerds only associated with him by default. He had no recourse, beyond reach and beyond help.

Even then, I was sickened by it. Even then, I could see that the fear was irrational, like being scared of catching AIDS from a handshake. Even then, I wanted to reject it. But I rarely had contact with Chris. He was in a different dorm, different activities, different classes. It was impossible not to know who he was, but our paths seldom crossed. Whenever they did, walking around school, I would smile and say hello. It was nothing, but more than he got from most people. It still felt so useless, though, that all I could offer was “Hey, Chris.” An actual smile and the sound of his real name. I don’t know if he ever noticed, but I did.

And while I wanted to do more, it was dangerous. I was a new kid that year, only just managing to fit in. Awkward, strange, providing the kind of comic relief that was mostly jester or dancing chimp. Even though I was sickened, I couldn’t seek him out to talk to, or it would have been obvious. There was the risk his personal opprobrium could have deflected onto me. I felt like a coward, but couldn’t see a way out. Even talking was dicey. One day I said hello to Chris while a kid from my dorm was walking with me. “What’s going on there?” said Will as we continued up the road. “Are you and Millet special friends?” And while he was mostly taking the piss there was still an edge to it; I could still sense that moment balancing, the risk that if he decided to push the topic with others around, it could easily tip the wrong way.

That school was tough. We spent three days a week hiking – proper stuff, 30-kilo packs, heavy old gear, 30-kilometre days through the Vic Alps. More than one stretch of mountains I crossed crying, or trying not to, or bent double, crawling up slopes with hands as well as feet. Other times I was painfully homesick, weeks spent with just the indifference of other kids and the professional distance of teachers. No phones, no internet, no way home. Physical exhaustion and isolation.

It was one of the hardest years of my life. The small group of friends I made were the one blessing that meant it could be borne. And that was exactly the thing that Chris Millet didn’t have. I cannot imagine how he made it through that year alone. Not just alone, but in the face of constant and targeted aggression. I would have buckled and gone home broken.

The last night of that year, there was a big get-together in the dining hall. When it was over I left the building looking for one person. I wandered around till I spotted him, that round-shouldered trudge, a fair way off up the hill towards his dorm. I don’t know if he was a great guy underneath it all. We never even had a proper conversation. He was just a big, quiet kid, brutalised into shyness. But I did know he didn’t deserve what he’d got. I ran up the hill after him and called out, and when he stopped, looking back a little hesitantly, I jogged up and shook his hand. “Congratulations on surviving the year,” I said. And I hope he understood how much I meant it.

That wasn’t the 1940s. That was the 1990s. And I don’t doubt you could find similar instances today. It’s attitudes like Jim Wallace’s that give legitimacy to the kind of reflex hatred that was thrown at that kid all those years ago. It’s attitudes like Wallace’s that legitimise dudes throwing molotovs at mosques in Sydney because something blew up in Bali.

And that shit doesn’t just go away. Dealing with homophobia isn’t a matter of surviving your awkward adolescence to find the inner-urban Greens-voting world has become yours to enjoy. Not every gay man gets to flower into Benjamin Law’s dashing-young-homosexual-about-town persona. Some are awkward and nervous and clumsy and just plain uncharismatic. And the kind of damage done by that early hatred will stay with them for good.

Memo: Jim Wallace. Relax. Gay marriage does not entitle hordes of faggots to come round to your house and fuck you in the mouth. At least, not without your express consent. I kinda wish they would, because at least that might shut you up, but it’s not going to happen. So what exactly is your problem? None of this legislation has any effect on your life whatsoever. Your only connection is that it makes you uncomfortable from a distance. And guess what, champ? That doesn’t give you the right to have a say. Take a pew, Jim.

As for citing ‘Anzac values’, or however you want to phrase it, it’s a rolled-gold furphy. There was no charter of mutual ideology at the recruitment office, in any of our wars. Reasons for joining up were as varied and individual as the men themselves. You have no right to start designating what those men believed.

But if you want to boil things down to the basic principle on which the war was fought – the national political principle – it was that smaller and weaker powers should not be dominated by larger ones. It was that men (and yes, it was men) should have the right to determine their own form of government, and reap the rewards of their own lands. It was (putting aside the attendant hypocrisy of the Allies’ colonial pasts) that Germany had no right to push around Poland or Czechoslovakia, and Japan no right to stand over China or Korea. It was that those people should live free, and free from fear.

Australians deserve to live free from fear too. There were nearly a million Aussie servicemen and women in WWII. Stands to reason more than a few of them were gay, even if they didn’t admit it. How could they have, when most of the population would have regarded them as either criminal, deviant, disgusting, or mentally ill? How about the 70s or 80s, when gays starting to live more openly were bashed and killed in parks and streets? Or the Sudanese kid bashed to death in Melbourne a couple of years ago? How do you feel being a Lakemba Muslim when racial tensions start heating up? Living your life in fear doesn’t only apply to warzones.

Australian soldiers fought and died in 1943. Australian soldiers fought and died in 2011, too. And in 2010, and in 2009. So what about protecting the values they represented? Like the freedom to be yourself and love you who want. The freedom to practice your religion in peace. Values like a tolerance of difference. What about protecting a society where warmth and kindness and generosity of spirit are promoted ahead of distrust, segregation and disapproval? I’d like to live in a society like that. I might even be prepared to fight for it.

Because guess what, Jim? Faggots and towelheads are people too. And in a society that still calls them faggots and towelheads, they’re some of the most vulnerable people we’ve got.

If you want to talk to me about values worth dying for, protecting the vulnerable would be a good place to start.

RELIGIO-FASCIST ALERT! The Truth about “Reclaim Australia Rallies”

Anonymous – Truth about “Reclaim Australia Rallies”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_NJv09Hj54

Anonymous would like to highlight the truth about the so called “Reclaim Australia Rallies” and their Neo Nazi ties.

FOR INFORMATION ON THE NAZI FASCIST ELEMENTS ORGANISING THIS RALLY AND DEBUNKING THE ISLAMOPHOBIC MYTHS PLEASE VISIT – http://www.reclaimwhat.net/

BRISBANE COUNTER RALLY – https://www.facebook.com/events/494287630709966/

MELBOURNE COUNTER RALLY – https://www.facebook.com/events/494287630709966/

SYDNEY COUNTER RALLY – https://www.facebook.com/events/1559805754258488/

GOLD COAST COUNTER RALLY – https://www.facebook.com/events/1533221720290510/

ADELAIDE – https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=823458121023854&ref=ts&fref=ts

ACT COUNTER RALLY – https://www.facebook.com/events/823458121023854/

ANONYMOUS IS AGAINST RACISM, BIGOTRY & FASCISM. Video of The Great Aussie Patriot making up lies to incite hatred. – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8spPxoE7ncA&feature=youtu.be

Christian Lawfare | Activist Christian Lawyer Proposes Law to “Kill the Gays”

OC lawyer wants to “kill the gays” in California, according to initiative goal

$1 million fine for “sodomistic propaganda,” prison terms and banishment also proposed

Ken Williams  

HUNTINGTON BEACH, California – An Orange County lawyer has filed a notice with the State of California that he intends to circulate an initiative measure that would call for the death of anyone who engages in sodomy in the Golden State.

Matt McLaughlin, 45, who listed his business address as 19744 Beach Blvd., No. 219 in the Newland Shopping Center in Huntington Beach, CA 92648, filed his notice in late February and it was marked as received on Feb. 26 by the Initiative Coordinator in the California Attorney General’s Office.

McLaughlin proposes to kill “sodomites” to prevent God’s “utter destruction” a la Sodom and Gomorrah.

Furthermore, McLaughlin taps into Russian and Ugandan lingo in seeking to ban “sodomistic propaganda” and would fine offenders $1 million per occurrence and/or up to 10 years in prison and/or banishment for life from California.

McLaughlin titled his initiative as the “Sodomite Suppression Act.” He proposes to change Penal Code Section 39:

a) The abominable crime against nature known as buggery, called also sodomy, is a monstrous evil that Almighty God, giver of freedom and liberty, commands us to suppress on pain of our utter destruction even as he overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.

b) Seeing that it is better that offenders should die rather than that all of us should be killed by God’s just wrath against us for the folly of tolerating wickedness in our midst, the People of California wisely command, in the fear of God, that any person who willingly touches another person of the same gender for purposes of sexual gratification be put to death by bullets to the head or by any other convenient method.

c) No person shall distribute, perform, or transmit sodomistic propaganda directly or indirectly by any means to any person under the age of majority. Sodomistic propaganda is defined as anything aimed at creating an interest in or an acceptance of human sexual relations other than between a man and a woman. Every offender shall be fined $1 million per occurrence, and/or imprisoned up to 10 years, and/or expelled from the boundaries of the state of California for up to life.

d) No person shall serve in any public office, nor serve in public employment, nor enjoy any public benefit, who is a sodomite or who espouses sodomistic propaganda or who belongs to any group that does.

e) This law is effective immediately and shall not be rendered ineffective nor invalidated by any court, state or federal, until heard by a quorum of the Supreme Court of California consisting only of judges who are neither sodomites nor subject to disqualification hereunder.

f) The state has an affirmative duty to defend and enforce this law as written, and every member of the public has standing to seek its enforcement and obtain reimbursement for all costs and attorney’s fees in so doing, and further, should the state persist in inaction over 1 year after due notice, the general public is empowered and deputized to execute all the provisions hereunder extra-judicially, immune from any charge and indemnified by the state against any and all liability.

g) This law shall be known as “The Sodomite Suppression Act” and be numbered as section 39 in Title 3 of the Penal Code, pertaining to offences [sic] against the sovereignty of the state. The text shall be prominently posted in every public school classroom. All laws in conflict with this law are to that extent invalid.

Who is Matthew Gregory McLaughlin?

Matthew Gregory McLaughlin is an attorney who lives in Huntington Beach, California. He lists his phone number at 949-285-7902.

He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of California Irvine and his law degree from George Mason University School of Law in Virginia. He was admitted to the State Bar of California in 1998, according to martindale.com

The State Bar of California shows that McLaughlin is on active status with the bar. It also noted that he was listed as “inactive” in 2012. The bar did not list any disciplinary or administrative actions taken against him.

 

The Rise of Christian Fascism | Poll: 57% Of GOPers Support Making Christianity The National Religion

Poll: 57% Of GOPers Support Making Christianity The National Religion

AP Photo / Frank Franklin II

ByDaniel Strauss

A majority of Republicans nationally support establishing Christianity as the national religion, according to a new Public Policy Polling survey released Tuesday.

The poll by the Democratic-leaning firm found that 57 percent of Republicans “support establishing Christianity as the national religion” while 30 percent are opposed. Another 13 percent said they were not sure.

It almost goes without saying that the Establishment Clause of the Constitution prohibits establishing of a national religion.

The poll was conducted among 316 Republicans from Feb. 20-22. The margin of error was plus or minus 5.5 percentage points.

About The Author

Daniel Strauss

Daniel Strauss is a reporter for Talking Points Memo. He was previously a breaking news reporter for The Hill newspaper and has written for Politico, Roll Call, The American Prospect, and Gaper’s Block. He has also interned at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas and The New Yorker. Daniel grew up in Chicago and graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.A. in History. At Michigan he helped edit Consider, a weekly opinion magazine. He can be reached at daniel@talkingpointsmemo.com.

American Pastor: Christian Children Should Be Taught To Be ‘Extremists’ Like Hitler Youth, ISIS

American Pastor: Christian Children Should Be Taught To Be ‘Extremists’ Like Hitler Youth, ISIS

via Jameson Parker

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Bert Farias is a Christian minister, a columnist, and perhaps the only person in the world who took one look at the Nazis and ISIS and thought “Now, that’s who we should be emulating!”

In an article he wrote for Charisma News, Farias argues that Christianity needs more “soldiers” for Christ and the only way to achieve that is radicalizing the youth. Hey, it worked for Hitler.

Years ago I was part of an apostolic team of fathers who mentored, equipped and empowered radical youth. We believed then and still do now that we are to help define and lead a countercultural movement. It is our passion to upset the sinful status quo of society and the church. Youth are key!

In 1933 Hitler said, “If I can separate the youth of Germany from their parents I will conquer this nation.” He started a movement called “The Brown Shirts” in which 100,000 youth stood in Berlin with their right hand raised and screaming. “Hitler, we are yours!” Imagine our youth pledging that kind of allegiance to King Jesus!

Extending the logic further, Farias looks at “revolutionary countries” where the “youth are trained in combat and weapons” and seethes with jealousy.

 

They are taught principles of Communism and the tenets of militant Islam. They give themselves wholeheartedly to the goal of world domination. Someone once said that Satan is preparing his army, but the church is entertaining her children. We need a radical departure from the standard method of training young men and women for ministry. We need a touch of wholesome extremism to launch a counterculture JESUS revolution!

Farias doesn’t seem to worry that along with all those guns in the hands of children comes some of the worst human rights atrocities being committed in the modern world. Nor did Hitler’s Youth represent a shinning example of humanity. In fact, one might argue that it was the very fanatical extremism being taught and assimilated into these groups that directly led to violence, intolerance and, in the case of both the Nazis and ISIS, genocide.

Equally disturbing is the fact that Farias seems singularly focused on the disturbing maxim “Get them while they’re young.” His entire goal appears to be to start training kids at a young age to be closed-minded. The more radical, the better. As Little Green Footballs points out, Farias’ ministry’s website is full of allusions to warfare, soldiers and fighters. One section reads:

The Training of a New Breed

For a new breed of troops to arise, there must be given a new breed of training. For many of my past trainees have only been trained for the easy and the soft and not for the rigorous and the hard. Many have been trained of the letter but not of the Spirit and so they stand unequipped for the battle and an easy target for the enemy. Sow to the spirit and so shall their swords be sharpened for the flesh has made them dull. For in the flesh is weariness and hands that hang down with the shield of faith. Prepare them to march to a different spirit. Root out the flesh, selfish ambition, and pride and train them to walk by the Lord’s side for the Lord resists the proud but gives grace to the humble.

He insists that his little “extremists” will fight not with “earthly weapons” but with the “love of God,” but seems to forget that extremism – whether it be in the name of Allah, Jesus, or German ethnic supremacy – inevitably leads to dehumanization and intolerance of those whom disagree with the “true believers.” It marks the very first step towards oppression and violence.

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Religion’s Dirty Dozen—12 Really Bad Religious Ideas That Have Made the World Worse

Religion’s Dirty Dozen—12 Really Bad Religious Ideas That Have Made the World Worse

by Valerie Tarico

 

 

 

 

 

Some of humanity’s technological innovations are things we would have been better off without: the medieval rack, the atomic bomb and powdered lead potions come to mind. Religions tend to invent ideas or concepts rather than technologies, but like every other creative human enterprise, they produce some really bad ones along with the good.

My website, Wisdom Commons, highlights some of humanity’s best moral and spiritual concepts, ideas like the Golden Rule, and values like compassion, generosity and courage that make up our shared moral core. Here, by way of contrast, are some of the worst. These twelve dubious concepts promote conflict, cruelty, suffering and death rather than love and peace. To paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, they belong in the dustbin of history just as soon as we can get them there.

Chosen People –The term “Chosen People” typically refers to the Hebrew Bible and the ugly idea that God has given certain tribes a Promised Land (even though it is already occupied by other people). But in reality many sects endorse some version of this concept. The New Testament identifies Christians as the chosen ones. Calvinists talk about “God’s elect,” believing that they themselves are the special few who were chosen before the beginning of time. Jehovah’s witnesses believe that 144,000 souls will get a special place in the afterlife. In many cultures certain privileged and powerful bloodlines were thought to be descended directly from gods (in contrast to everyone else).

Religious sects are inherently tribal and divisive because they compete by making mutually exclusive truth claims and by promising blessings or afterlife rewards that no competing sect can offer. “Gang symbols” like special haircuts, attire, hand signals and jargon differentiate insiders from outsiders and subtly (or not so subtly) convey to both that insiders are inherently superior.

Heretics – Heretics, kafir, or infidels (to use the medieval Catholic term) are not just outsiders, they are morally suspect and often seen as less than fully human. In the Torah, slaves taken from among outsiders don’t merit the same protections as Hebrew slaves. Those who don’t believe in a god are corrupt, doers of abominable deeds. “There is none [among them] who does good,” says the Psalmist.

Islam teaches the concept of “dhimmitude” and provides special rules for the subjugation of religious minorities, with monotheists getting better treatment than polytheists. Christianity blurs together the concepts of unbeliever and evildoer. Ultimately, heretics are a threat that needs to be neutralized by conversion, conquest, isolation, domination, or—in worst cases—mass murder.

Holy War – If war can be holy, anything goes. The medieval Roman Catholic Church conducted a twenty year campaign of extermination against heretical Cathar Christians in the south of France, promising their land and possessions to real Christians who signed on as crusaders. Sunni and Shia Muslims have slaughtered each other for centuries. The Hebrew scriptures recount battle after battle in which their war God, Yahweh, helps them to not only defeat but also exterminate the shepherding cultures that occupy their “Promised Land.” As in later holy wars, like the modern rise of ISIS, divine sanction let them kill the elderly and children, burn orchards, and take virgin females as sexual slaves—all while retaining a sense of moral superiority.

Blasphemy – Blasphemy is the notion that some ideas are inviolable, off limits to criticism, satire, debate, or even question. By definition, criticism of these ideas is an outrage, and it is precisely this emotion–outrage–that the crime of blasphemy evokes in believers. The Bible prescribes death for blasphemers; the Quran does not, but death-to-blasphemers became part of Shariah during medieval times.

The idea that blasphemy must be prevented or avenged has caused millions of murders over the centuries and countless other horrors. As I write, blogger Raif Badawi awaits round after round of flogging in Saudi Arabia—1000 lashes in batches of 50—while his wife and children plead from Canada for the international community to do something.

Glorified suffering – Picture secret societies of monks flogging their own backs. The image that comes to mind is probably from Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code, but the idea isn’t one he made up. A core premise of Christianity is that righteous torture—if it’s just intense and prolonged enough–can somehow fix the damage done by evil, sinful behavior. Millions of crucifixes litter the world as testaments to this belief. Shia Muslims beat themselves with lashes and chains during Aashura, a form of sanctified suffering called Matam that commemorates the death of the martyr Hussein. Self-denial in the form of asceticism and fasting is a part of both Eastern and Western religions, not only because deprivation induces altered states but also because people believe suffering somehow brings us closer to divinity.

Our ancestors lived in a world in which pain came unbidden, and people had very little power to control it. An aspirin or heating pad would have been a miracle to the writers of the Bible, Quran, or Gita. Faced with uncontrollable suffering, the best advice religion could offer was to lean in or make meaning of it. The problem, of course is that glorifying suffering—turning it into a spiritual good—has made people more willing to inflict it on not only themselves and their enemies but also those who are helpless, including the ill or dying (as in the case of Mother Teresa and the American Bishops) and children (as in the child beating Patriarchy movement).

Genital mutilation – Primitive people have used scarification and other body modifications to define tribal membership for as long as history records. But genital mutilation allowed our ancestors several additional perks—if you want to call them that. In Judaism, infant circumcision serves as a sign of tribal membership, but circumcision also serves to test the commitment of adult converts. In one Bible story, a chieftain agrees to convert and submit his clan to the procedure as a show of commitment to a peace treaty. (While the men lie incapacitated, the whole town is then slain by the Israelites.)

In Islam, painful male circumcision serves as a rite of passage into manhood, initiation into a powerful club. By contrast, in some Muslim cultures cutting away or burning the female clitoris and labia ritually establishes the submission of women by reducing sexual arousal and agency. An estimated 2 million girls annually are subjected to the procedure, with consequences including hemorrhage, infection, painful urination and death.

Blood sacrifice – In the list of religion’s worst ideas, this is the only one that appears to be in its final stages. Only Hindus continue to ritually hack and slaughter sacrificial animals on a mass scale.

When our ancient ancestors slit the throats on humans and animals or cut out their hearts or sent the smoke of sacrifices heavenward, many believed that they were literally feeding supernatural beings. In time, in most religions, the rationale changed—the gods didn’t need feeding so much as they needed signs of devotion and penance. The residual child sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible (yes it is there) typically has this function. Christianity’s persistent focus on blood atonement—the notion of Jesus as the be-all-end-all lamb without blemish, the final “propitiation” for human sin—is hopefully the last iteration of humanity’s long fascination with blood sacrifice.

Hell – Whether we are talking about Christianity, Islam or Buddhism, an afterlife filled with demons, monsters, and eternal torture was the worst suffering that Iron Age minds could conceive and medieval minds could elaborate. Invented, perhaps, as a means to satisfy the human desire for justice, the concept of Hell quickly devolved into a tool for coercing behavior and belief.

Most Buddhists see hell as a metaphor, a journey into the evil inside the self, but the descriptions of torturing monsters  and levels of hell can be quite explicit. Likewise, many Muslims and Christians hasten to assure that it is a real place, full of fire and the anguish of non-believers. Some Christians have gone so far as to insist that the screams of the damned can be heard from the center of the Earth or that observing their anguish from afar will be one of the pleasures of paradise.

Karma – Like hell, the concept of karma offers a selfish incentive for good behavior—it’ll come back at you later—but it has enormous costs. Chief among these is a tremendous weight of cultural passivity in the face of harm and suffering. Secondarily, the idea of karma sanctifies the broad human practice of blaming the victim. If what goes around comes around, then the disabled child or cancer patient or untouchable poor (or the hungry rabbit or mangy dog) must have done something in this or a previous life to bring their position on themselves.

Eternal Life – To our weary and unwashed ancestors, the idea of gem encrusted walls, streets of gold, the fountain of youth, or an eternity of angelic chorus (or sex with virgins) may have seemed like sheer bliss. But it doesn’t take much analysis to realize how quickly eternal paradise would become hellish—an endless repetition of never changing groundhog days (because how could they change if they were perfect).

The real reason that the notion of eternal life is such a bad invention, though, is the degree to which it diminishes and degrades existence on this earthly plane. With eyes lifted heavenward, we can’t see the intricate beauty beneath our feet. Devout believers put their spiritual energy into preparing for a world to come rather than cherishing and stewarding the one wild and precious world we have been given.

Male Ownership of Female Fertility – The notion of women as brood mares or children as assets likely didn’t originate with religion, but the idea that women were created for this purpose, that if a woman should die of childbearing “she was made to do it,” most certainly did. Traditional religions variously assert that men have a god-ordained right to give women in marriage, take them in war, exclude them from heaven, and kill them if the origins of their offspring can’t be assured. Hence Catholicism’s maniacal obsession with the virginity of Mary and female martyrs. Hence Islam’s maniacal obsession with covering the female body. Hence Evangelical promise rings, and gender segregated sidewalks in Jerusalem and orthodox Jewish women wearing wigs over shaved heads in New York.

As we approach the limits of our planetary life support system and stare dystopia in the face, defining women as breeders and children as assets becomes ever more costly. We now know that resource scarcity is a conflict trigger and that demand for water and arable land is growing even as both resources decline. And yet, a pope who claims to care about the desperate poor lectures them against contraception while Muslim leaders ban vasectomies in a drive to outbreed their enemies.

Bibliolatry (aka Book Worship) – Preliterate people handed down their best guesses about gods and goodness by way of oral tradition, and they made objects of stone and wood, idols, to channel their devotion. Their notions of what was good and what was Real and how to live in moral community with each other were free to evolve as culture and technology changed. But the advent of the written word changed that. As our Iron Age ancestors recorded and compiled their ideas into sacred texts, these texts allowed their understanding of gods and goodness to become static. The sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam forbid idol worship, but over time the texts themselves became idols, and many modern believers practice—essentially—book worship, also known as bibliolatry.

“Because the faith of Islam is perfect, it does not allow for any innovations to the religion,” says one young Muslim explaining his faith online. His statement betrays a naïve lack of information about the origins of his own dogmas. But more broadly, it sums up the challenge all religions face moving forward. Imagine if a physicist said, “Because our understanding of physics is perfect, it does not allow for any innovations to the field.”

 Adherents who think their faith is perfect, are not just naïve or ill informed. They are developmentally arrested, and in the case of the world’s major religions, they are anchored to the Iron Age, a time of violence, slavery, desperation and early death.

Ironically, the mindset that our sacred texts are perfect betrays the very quest that drove our ancestors to write those texts. Each of the men who wrote part of the Bible, Quran, or Gita took his received tradition, revised it, and offered his own best articulation of what is good and real. We can honor the quest of our spiritual ancestors, or we can honor their answers, but we cannot do both.

Religious apologists often try to deny, minimize, or explain away the sins of scripture and the evils of religious history. “It wasn’t really slavery.” “That’s just the Old Testament.” “He didn’t mean it that way.” “You have to understand how bad their enemies were.” “Those people who did harm in the name of God weren’t real [Christians/Jews/Muslims].” Such platitudes may offer comfort, but denying problems doesn’t solve them. Quite the opposite, in fact. Change comes with introspection and insight, a willingness to acknowledge our faults and flaws while still embracing our strengths and potential for growth.

In a world that is teeming with humanity, armed with pipe bombs and machine guns and nuclear weapons and drones, we don’t need defenders of religion’s status quo—we need real reformation, as radical as that of the 16^th Century and much, much broader. It is only by acknowledging religion’s worst ideas that we have any hope of embracing the best. 

————

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light and Deas and Other Imaginings, and the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org.  Her articles about religion, reproductive health, and the role of women in society have been featured at sites including AlterNet, Salon, the Huffington Post, Grist, and Jezebel.  Subscribe at ValerieTarico.com.

For God So Loved the 1 Percent …

For God So Loved the 1 Percent …

By KEVIN M. KRUSE

Princeton, N.J.

IN recent weeks Mitt Romney has become the poster child for unchecked capitalism, a role he seems to embrace with relish. Concerns about economic equality, he told Matt Lauer of NBC, were really about class warfare.

“When you have a president encouraging the idea of dividing America based on the 99 percent versus 1 percent,” he said, “you have opened up a whole new wave of approach in this country which is entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God.”

Mr. Romney was on to something, though perhaps not what he intended.

Holly Gressley

The concept of “one nation under God” has a noble lineage, originating in Abraham Lincoln’s hope at Gettysburg that “this nation, under God, shall not perish from the earth.” After Lincoln, however, the phrase disappeared from political discourse for decades. But it re-emerged in the mid-20th century, under a much different guise: corporate leaders and conservative clergymen deployed it to discredit Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

During the Great Depression, the prestige of big business sank along with stock prices. Corporate leaders worked frantically to restore their public image and simultaneously roll back the “creeping socialism” of the welfare state. Notably, the American Liberty League, financed by corporations like DuPont and General Motors, made an aggressive case for capitalism. Most, however, dismissed its efforts as self-interested propaganda. (A Democratic Party official joked that the organization should have been called “the American Cellophane League” because “first, it’s a DuPont product and, second, you can see right through it.”)

Realizing that they needed to rely on others, these businessmen took a new tack: using generous financing to enlist sympathetic clergymen as their champions. After all, according to one tycoon, polls showed that, “of all the groups in America, ministers had more to do with molding public opinion” than any other.

The Rev. James W. Fifield, pastor of the elite First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, led the way in championing a new union of faith and free enterprise. “The blessings of capitalism come from God,” he wrote. “A system that provides so much for the common good and happiness must flourish under the favor of the Almighty.”

Christianity, in Mr. Fifield’s interpretation, closely resembled capitalism, as both were systems in which individuals rose or fell on their own. The welfare state, meanwhile, violated most of the Ten Commandments. It made a “false idol” of the federal government, encouraged Americans to covet their neighbors’ possessions, stole from the wealthy and, ultimately, bore false witness by promising what it could never deliver.

Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, Mr. Fifield and his allies advanced a new blend of conservative religion, economics and politics that one observer aptly anointed “Christian libertarianism.” Mr. Fifield distilled his ideology into a simple but powerful phrase — “freedom under God.” With ample support from corporate patrons and business lobbies like the United States Chamber of Commerce, his gospel of godly capitalism soon spread across the country through personal lectures, weekly radio broadcasts and a monthly magazine.

In 1951, the campaign culminated in a huge Fourth of July celebration of the theme. Former President Herbert C. Hoover and Gen. Douglas MacArthur headlined an organizing committee of conservative all-stars, including celebrities like Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan, but largely comprising business titans like Conrad Hilton, J. C. Penney, Harvey Firestone Jr. and J. Howard Pew.

In an extensive public relations campaign, they encouraged communities to commemorate Independence Day with “freedom under God” ceremonies, using full-page newspaper ads trumpeting the connection between faith and free enterprise. They also held a nationwide sermon contest on the theme, with clergymen competing for cash. Countless local events were promoted by a national “Freedom Under God” radio program, produced with the help of the filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille, hosted by Jimmy Stewart and broadcast on CBS.

Ultimately, these organizers believed that they had made a lasting impression. “The very words ‘freedom under God’ have added to the vocabulary of freedom a new term,” they boasted. Soon the entire nation would think of itself as “under God.” Indeed, in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower presided over the first presidential prayer breakfast on a “government under God” theme and worked to promote public religiosity in a variety of ways. In 1954, as this “under-God consciousness” swept the nation, Congress formally added the phrase to the Pledge of Allegiance.

In the end, Mr. Romney is correct to claim that complaints about economic inequality are inconsistent with the concept of “one nation under God.” But that’s only because the “1 percent” of an earlier era intended it that way.

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Kevin M. Kruse, an associate professor of history at Princeton, is the author of the forthcoming “One Nation Under God: Corporations, Christianity, and the Rise of the Religious Right.”

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• For God So Loved the 1 Percent … – NYTimes.com (mbcalyn.com)
• For God So Loved the 1 Percent … (campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Romney: Obama Would “Poison The Very Spirit Of America And Keep Us From Being One Nation Under God” (alan.com)
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Catholic Fascist Robert Spencer Defends Genocidal Bigots

Anti-Muslim Bigot Robert Spencer Comes to the Defense of Genocidal Site “BareNakedIslam”

Anders Breivik’s choice for the “Noble Peace Prize,” Robert Spencer

Via:- Anti-Muslim Bigot Robert Spencer Comes to the Defense of Genocidal Site “BareNakedIslam”

Extremist far right anti-Muslim, MEK-Terror linked, Terrorist Inspirer, and conservative Catholic apologist Robert Spencer‘s bigotry and hatred for Islam and Muslims is evident to most rational individuals. Just take a brief glance at our copious documentation of his words, statements and activities if you are unsure of what we mean. You can also see what others have said about Spencer.

Spencer is so stuck in his goofy 11th century Crusader mentality that he is once again defending open calls to genocide. I guess he didn’t learn anything from the Anders Breivik fiasco, you know, the “insane” terrorist who thought Robert Spencer deserved the “Noble Peace Prize.”

This time Spencer is going to bat for the loony-even-by-Geller-standards, BareNakedIslam website, which was briefly shut down by WordPress for violating its terms and conditions.

A few days ago Sheila Musaji of The American Muslim reported on the unanimous cacophony of sadistic joy displayed by the owners and commenters on BareNakedIslam regarding the repeated arson attacks on mosques in France.

An anti-Muslim site called Bare Naked Islam has posted an article celebrating this. The article is titled “WOO HOO! Yet ANOTHER anti-Muslim attack on a French mosque”.  Just in case they take it down, CAIR has saved the page here.  The headline of the article states Apparently, Hell hath no fury like a Frenchman scorned. It’s the third attack on a mosque just this month. Will the Muslims ever get a clue that they are not welcome in France?

Most of the comments below the Bare Naked Islam article are hateful.  Some examples:

1

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4

5

6

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Musaji notes:

This last comment by Keith Mahone is the most extreme, and a particular concern since he says in his long rambling rant that he regularly drives past a mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, and that the sight of that mosque causes him distress.

I waded through a few articles on the site and the comments, and found that this sort of rabid hatred of Muslims and encouragement of not only limiting the civil rights of American Muslims, and encouragement of not only limiting the civil rights of American Muslims, but also actually murdering them is common.

Read Sheila Musaji’s complete piece, it details even more examples of the rabid and visceral genocide calling on BareNakedIslam.

Spencer has linked to BareNakedIslam for years now and they seem to have a mutual admiration for one another. Spencer does not take issue with BNI’s anti-Muslim genocidal rants nor does he condemn them, rather he resorts to conspiracy theory and forwards the argument that BNI is a victim of “Islamic supremacist” warfare.

Instead of apologizing for associating with BNI he rushes full hog into their corner, lauding them as an “anti-Jihad website.” He gives the meager caveat that “he doesn’t agree with everything they write,” and that “he doesn’t condone threats” but then he goes onto deflect, saying they were just a few “unhinged comments.”

No, Spencer, they aren’t a few comments they are just an example of the consistent violent anti-Muslim rhetoric pervasive in the Islamophobesphere, including your own blog (one example out of many):

Spencer also oddly attempts to deflect by posting screen shots of comments by commenters “Mosizzle” and “RefutingActs” on Spencerwatch which he interpreted as a threat, but which even some of his own followers considered a ludicrous stretch. It is really a pathetic attempt at “deflection” when anyone with half a brain knows that what is written on a daily basis on JihadWatch and BareNakedIslam cannot compare to our meticulous care in deleting hateful or bigoted remarks and even allowing some Islamophobes such as “halal pork” to post.

At the end of the day, Spencer is so far down the rabbit hole he probably doesn’t understand what he is doing. At this point he’s hoping for a Hail Mary that may somehow redeem his hateful and bloody fantasies of a world without Muslims.

Crazy Catholic Fascist Rick Santorum Yearns for Dark Ages

Santorum Calls For Public Schools To Teach Creationism

The Republican Party’s endless war on reality

By Charles Johnson

Here we go again with the right wing’s bizarre obsession with evolution. For more than a century religious conservatives have been waging a war of denial against reality itself, and there’s no sign of a cease fire yet.

Rick Santorum has long been known as one of the GOP’s most overt and unabashed creationists, and here he is speaking to the editorial board of the Nashua Telegraph, urging that Christian creationism be taught in public school science classes as an “alternative” to the scientific facts of evolution.

Argh. This is the anti-science face of the Republican Party, and Santorum is not the only presidential candidate with these Dark Ages views. In fact, the majority of the current candidates are creationists — and according to recent Gallup polls, the majority of Republican voters. They keep trying to force their ignorant beliefs into American schools despite the numerous Supreme Court rulings against them, and this election season they’re more determined than ever.

 

  Santorum: There are many on the left and in the scientific community, so to speak, who are afraid of that discussion because oh my goodness you might mention the word, God-forbid, “God” in the classroom, or “Creator,” or that there may be some things that are inexplainable by nature where there may be, where it’s better explained by a Creator, of course we can’t have that discussion. It’s very interesting that you have a situation that science will only allow things in the classroom that are consistent with a non-Creator idea of how we got here, as if somehow or another that’s scientific. Well maybe the science points to the fact that maybe science doesn’t explain all these things. And if it does point to that, why don’t you pursue that? But you can’t because it’s not science, but if science is pointing you there how can you say it’s not science? It’s worth the debate.

Hitler Was God’s Chosen Hunter: Hunting Jews! Claims Crazy For God John Hagee!

The Religious Right habitually camouflages it’s nefarious Christian Nationalist Worldview behind a phoney “pro-Israel” facade.

Religious fanatic John Hagee believes god sent Hitler to exterminate Jews and thus, as act and prophetic directive of his god, obviously a righteous and just genocide.

Like Catholic Hitler, John Hagee believes that unless Jews are converted to his Christ, they will be eradicated in the fires of hell that is, their final annihilation.

One has to wonder how even certain Right Wing Jews can be so utterly blind and continue support a religious buffoon who considers the destruction of Jews an inexorable, righteous and prophetic dictate — of his
psychopathic god?!

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Peter King Catholic Fascist & Terrorist Apologist is Chair of House Homeland Security Committee?!

Tuesday, Sep 13, 2011 11:59 ET

At U.K. terror inquiry, Rep. King defends I.R.A. terror

At a parliamentary hearing on Muslim radicalization, the New York Republican condones Irish radicalization

[Is Catholic commissar Peter King the new Joseph (Catholic fascist) McCarthy and fueling a new Inquisition?]

By Justin Elliott

AP

Rep. Peter King (R-NY)

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) stood by his past support for Irish terrorism during an appearance today before a British parliamentary inquiry into the roots of Muslim terrorism.

King, the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, came under fire as a hypocrite earlier this year when he launched his own hearings into “domestic radicalization” in the American Muslim community. Critics, including a civilian survivor of a 1990 Irish Republican Army bombing in London, called out King for being an unrepentant supporter of the I.R.A. King built his career in the Irish Catholic community of Nassau County as a pro-I.R.A. firebrand in the 1980s, and was even involved with a fundraising organization suspected of providing the militant group with money and weapons.

So it was a bit of surprise when the Home Affairs Committee of the British House of Commons invited King to testify in its “Roots of violent radicalisation” inquiry. Inevitably, King’s I.R.A.-supporting past came up.

It was the longtime Labour MP David Winnick, who was first elected to the House of Commons in 1966, who confronted King.

“There’s been some surprise in the United States but also in Britain that you have a job looking into and investigating into terrorism,” said Winnick. King, the MP added, “seems to be an apologist for terrorism.”

Winnick cited a King quote from 1982:

We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry.

And another from 1985:

If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the I.R.A. for it.

“Do you stand by that?” Winnick asked King.

“I stand by it in the context of when it was said,” King responded, without hesitation.

He later added that those quotes were designed to “put [the conflict] in a perspective” for an American audience that was too often exposed to anti-I.R.A. points of view.

He then offered this lengthy defense of the role he played during the conflict in Ireland. Conspicuously missing from it is any denunciation of, or expression of regret for, I.R.A. terrorism.

I stand by it in the context of when it was said. … I can cite you Tony Blair, as recently as March of this year, put out a long statement defending my record both in the 1980s and throughout the Irish peace process. I was just out in the hallway and Baroness Kennedy came up to me to thank me for the work I did in the Irish peace process. Paul Murphy came by last evening.

What I was saying — and I stand by it — is that the situation in northern Ireland — there were loyalist paramilitaries and obviously Republican paramilitaries — and I believe that, I had gotten to know Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. And I was very confident that if the Republican movement could get to the table, you would see a peace process. And I believe the United States had a very significant role to play as an honest mediator, as an honest broker. And I worked very closely with Bill Clinton, I was very much involved in the Good Friday agreements, I was very involved in getting Gerry Adams’ visa, but also involved in getting loyalists into the United States. I felt that when it was on the table, that Adams and McGuinness would be able to, if you will, control the republican movement. And it’s worked. Tony Blair said I made invaluable contribution to peace, Bill Clinton has cited me in his memoirs as a person who was very much involved.

It was never my position as an Irish-American, whether or not Ireland was united, to me there were injustices in the north. There were good people on both sides. I spent a lot of time meeting with the loyalist community, the unionist community, at the same time, and I came away from that convinced that there was a role for the U.S. to play. What I was saying with those quotes, I was also trying to put in perspective. All of the quotes were anti-I.R.A. in the United States, no mention [ever] made of the UVF or the UDA or the Red Hand Commandos or whatever. I was trying to put it in a perspective to show that there were people — that this is not just the terrorist mayhem it was made out to be — that there were significant leaders on the Republican side.

It’s also worth noting here that this year King defended his support for the I.R.A. to the New York Times by claiming that the group had “never attacked the United States. And my loyalty is to the United States.” He did not repeat that explanation to the parliamentary committee.

Winnick followed up on the exchange by asking about British use of torture against the I.R.A. being used as a recruiting tool, and whether there is a parallel to post-9/11 U.S. torture policies. King said he did not believe there was.

Watch the exchange, beginning at the 10:18:50 mark.

http://salon.com/a/svEMfAA

• Justin Elliott is a Salon reporter. Reach him by email at jelliott@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @ElliottJustin More: Justin Elliott

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Right Wing Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America

Fear, Inc.

The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America

Anti-Muslim graffiti defaces a Shi’ite mosque at the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, Michigan.

SOURCE: Getty Images/Bill Pugliano

By Wajahat Ali, Eli Clifton, Matthew Duss, Lee Fang , Scott Keyes, Faiz Shakir |August 26, 2011

Download this report (pdf)

Read the report in your web browser (Scribd)

Download individual chapters of the report (pdf):

• Introduction and summary
• Chapter 1: Donors to the Islamophobia network
• Chapter 2: The Islamophobia misinformation experts
• Chapter 3: The grassroots organizations and the religious right
• Chapter 4: The right-wing media enablers of anti-Islam propaganda
• Chapter 5: The political players
• Conclusion

Video: Ask the Expert: Faiz Shakir on the Group Behind Islamophobia

On July 22, a man planted a bomb in an Oslo government building that killed eight people. A few hours after the explosion, he shot and killed 68 people, mostly teenagers, at a Labor Party youth camp on Norway’s Utoya Island.

By midday, pundits were speculating as to who had perpetrated the greatest massacre in Norwegian history since World War II. Numerous mainstream media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic, speculated about an Al Qaeda connection and a “jihadist” motivation behind the attacks. But by the next morning it was clear that the attacker was a 32-year-old, white, blond-haired and blue-eyed Norwegian named Anders Breivik. He was not a Muslim, but rather a self-described Christian conservative.

According to his attorney, Breivik claimed responsibility for his self-described “gruesome but necessary” actions. On July 26, Breivik told the court that violence was “necessary” to save Europe from Marxism and “Muslimization.” In his 1,500-page manifesto, which meticulously details his attack methods and aims to inspire others to extremist violence, Breivik vows “brutal and breathtaking operations which will result in casualties” to fight the alleged “ongoing Islamic Colonization of Europe.”

Breivik’s manifesto contains numerous footnotes and in-text citations to American bloggers and pundits, quoting them as experts on Islam’s “war against the West.” This small group of anti-Muslim organizations and individuals in our nation is obscure to most Americans but wields great influence in shaping the national and international political debate. Their names are heralded within communities that are actively organizing against Islam and targeting Muslims in the United States.

Breivik, for example, cited Robert Spencer, one of the anti-Muslim misinformation scholars we profile in this report, and his blog, Jihad Watch, 162 times in his manifesto. Spencer’s website, which “tracks the attempts of radical Islam to subvert Western culture,” boasts another member of this Islamophobia network in America, David Horowitz, on his Freedom Center website. Pamela Geller, Spencer’s frequent collaborator, and her blog, Atlas Shrugs, was mentioned 12 times.

Geller and Spencer co-founded the organization Stop Islamization of America, a group whose actions and rhetoric the Anti-Defamation League concluded “promotes a conspiratorial anti-Muslim agenda under the guise of fighting radical Islam. The group seeks to rouse public fears by consistently vilifying the Islamic faith and asserting the existence of an Islamic conspiracy to destroy “American values.” Based on Breivik’s sheer number of citations and references to the writings of these individuals, it is clear that he read and relied on the hateful, anti-Muslim ideology of a number of men and women detailed in this report&a select handful of scholars and activists who work together to create and promote misinformation about Muslims.

While these bloggers and pundits were not responsible for Breivik’s deadly attacks, their writings on Islam and multiculturalism appear to have helped create a world view, held by this lone Norwegian gunman, that sees Islam as at war with the West and the West needing to be defended. According to former CIA officer and terrorism consultant Marc Sageman, just as religious extremism “is the infrastructure from which Al Qaeda emerged,” the writings of these anti-Muslim misinformation experts are “the infrastructure from which Breivik emerged.” Sageman adds that their rhetoric “is not cost-free.”

These pundits and bloggers, however, are not the only members of the Islamophobia infrastructure. Breivik’s manifesto also cites think tanks, such as the Center for Security Policy, the Middle East Forum, and the Investigative Project on Terrorism—three other organizations we profile in this report. Together, this core group of deeply intertwined individuals and organizations manufacture and exaggerate threats of “creeping Sharia,” Islamic domination of the West, and purported obligatory calls to violence against all non-Muslims by the Quran.

This network of hate is not a new presence in the United States. Indeed, its ability to organize, coordinate, and disseminate its ideology through grassroots organizations increased dramatically over the past 10 years. Furthermore, its ability to influence politicians’ talking points and wedge issues for the upcoming 2012 elections has mainstreamed what was once considered fringe, extremist rhetoric.

And it all starts with the money flowing from a select group of foundations. A small group of foundations and wealthy donors are the lifeblood of the Islamophobia network in America, providing critical funding to a clutch of right-wing think tanks that peddle hate and fear of Muslims and Islam—in the form of books, reports, websites, blogs, and carefully crafted talking points that anti-Islam grassroots organizations and some right-wing religious groups use as propaganda for their constituency.

Some of these foundations and wealthy donors also provide direct funding to anti-Islam grassroots groups. According to our extensive analysis, here are the top seven contributors to promoting Islamophobia in our country:

• Donors Capital Fund
• Richard Mellon Scaife foundations
• Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
• Newton D. & Rochelle F. Becker foundations and charitable trust
• Russell Berrie Foundation
• Anchorage Charitable Fund and William Rosenwald Family Fund
• Fairbrook Foundation

Altogether, these seven charitable groups provided $42.6 million to Islamophobia think tanks between 2001 and 2009—funding that supports the scholars and experts that are the subject of our next chapter as well as some of the grassroots groups that are the subject of Chapter 3 of our report.

And what does this money fund? Well, here’s one of many cases in point: Last July, former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich warned a conservative audience at the American Enterprise Institute that the Islamic practice of Sharia was “a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it.” Gingrich went on to claim that “Sharia in its natural form has principles and punishments totally abhorrent to the Western world.”

Sharia, or Muslim religious code, includes practices such as charitable giving, prayer, and honoring one’s parents—precepts virtually identical to those of Christianity and Judaism. But Gingrich and other conservatives promote alarmist notions about a nearly 1,500-year-old religion for a variety of sinister political, financial, and ideological motives. In his remarks that day, Gingrich mimicked the language of conservative analyst Andrew McCarthy, who co-wrote a report calling Sharia “the preeminent totalitarian threat of our time.” Such similarities in language are no accident. Look no further than the organization that released McCarthy’s anti-Sharia report: the aforementioned Center for Security Policy, which is a central hub of the anti-Muslim network and an active promoter of anti- Sharia messaging and anti-Muslim rhetoric.

In fact, CSP is a key source for right-wing politicians, pundits, and grassroots organizations, providing them with a steady stream of reports mischaracterizing Islam and warnings about the dangers of Islam and American Muslims. Operating under the leadership of Frank Gaffney, the organization is funded by a small number of foundations and donors with a deep understanding of how to influence U.S. politics by promoting highly alarming threats to our national security. CSP is joined by other anti-Muslim organizations in this lucrative business, such as Stop Islamization of America and the Society of Americans for National Existence. Many of the leaders of these organizations are well-schooled in the art of getting attention in the press, particularly Fox News, The Wall Street Journal editorial pages, The Washington Times, and a variety of right-wing websites and radio outlets.

Misinformation experts such as Gaffney consult and work with such right-wing grassroots organizations as ACT! for America and the Eagle Forum, as well as religious right groups such as the Faith and Freedom Coalition and American Family Association, to spread their message. Speaking at their conferences, writing on their websites, and appearing on their radio shows, these experts rail against Islam and cast suspicion on American Muslims. Much of their propaganda gets churned into fundraising appeals by grassroots and religious right groups. The money they raise then enters the political process and helps fund ads supporting politicians who echo alarmist warnings and sponsor anti-Muslim attacks.

These efforts recall some of the darkest episodes in American history, in which religious, ethnic, and racial minorities were discriminated against and persecuted. From Catholics, Mormons, Japanese Americans, European immigrants, Jews, and African Americans, the story of America is one of struggle to achieve in practice our founding ideals. Unfortunately, American Muslims and Islam are the latest chapter in a long American struggle against scapegoating based on religion, race, or creed.

Due in part to the relentless efforts of this small group of individuals and organizations, Islam is now the most negatively viewed religion in America. Only 37 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of Islam: the lowest favorability rating since 2001, according to a 2010 ABC News/Washington Post poll. According to a 2010 Time magazine poll, 28 percent of voters do not believe Muslims should be eligible to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, and nearly one-third of the country thinks followers of Islam should be barred from running for president.

The terrorist attacks on 9/11 alone did not drive Americans’ perceptions of Muslims and Islam. President George W. Bush reflected the general opinion of the American public at the time when he went to great lengths to make clear that Islam and Muslims are not the enemy. Speaking to a roundtable of Arab and Muslim American leaders at the Afghanistan embassy in 2002, for example, President Bush said, “All Americans must recognize that the face of terror is not the true faith—face of Islam. Islam is a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. It’s a faith that has made brothers and sisters of every race. It’s a faith based upon love, not hate.”

Unfortunately, President Bush’s words were soon eclipsed by an organized escalation of hateful statements about Muslims and Islam from the members of the Islamophobia network profiled in this report. This is as sad as it is dangerous. It is enormously important to understand that alienating the Muslim American community not only threatens our fundamental promise of religious freedom, it also hurts our efforts to combat terrorism. Since 9/11, the Muslim American community has helped security and law enforcement officials prevent more than 40 percent of Al Qaeda terrorist plots threatening America. The largest single source of initial information to authorities about the few Muslim American plots has come from the Muslim American community.

Around the world, there are people killing people in the name of Islam, with which most Muslims disagree. Indeed, in most cases of radicalized neighbors, family members, or friends, the Muslim American community is as baffled, disturbed, and surprised by their appearance as the general public. Treating Muslim American citizens and neighbors as part of the problem, rather than part of the solution, is not only offensive to America’s core values, it is utterly ineffective in combating terrorism and violent extremism.

The White House recently released the national strategy for combating violent extremism, “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States.” One of the top focal points of the effort is to “counter al-Qa’ida’s propaganda that the United States is somehow at war with Islam.” Yet orchestrated efforts by the individuals and organizations detailed in this report make it easy for al-Qa’ida to assert that America hates Muslims and that Muslims around the world are persecuted for the simple crime of being Muslims and practicing their religion.

Sadly, the current isolation of American Muslims echoes past witch hunts in our history—from the divisive McCarthyite purges of the 1950s to the sometimes violent anti-immigrant campaigns in the 19th and 20th centuries. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has compared the fear-mongering of Muslims with anti-Catholic sentiment of the past. In response to the fabricated “Ground Zero mosque” controversy in New York last summer, Mayor Bloomberg said:

In the 1700s, even as religious freedom took hold in America, Catholics in New York were effectively prohibited from practicing their religion, and priests could be arrested. Largely as a result, the first Catholic parish in New York City was not established until the 1780s, St. Peter’s on Barclay Street, which still stands just one block north of the World Trade Center site, and one block south of the proposed mosque and community center. … We would betray our values and play into our enemies’ hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else.

This report shines a light on the Islamophobia network of so-called experts, academics, institutions, grassroots organizations, media outlets, and donors who manufacture, produce, distribute, and mainstream an irrational fear of Islam and Muslims. Let us learn the proper lesson from the past, and rise above fear-mongering to public awareness, acceptance, and respect for our fellow Americans. In doing so, let us prevent hatred from infecting and endangering our country again.

In the pages that follow, we profile the small number of funders, organizations, and individuals who have contributed to the discourse on Islamophobia in this country. We begin with the money trail in Chapter 1—our analysis of the funding streams that support anti-Muslim activities. Chapter 2 identifies the intellectual nexus of the Islamophobia network. Chapter 3 highlights the key grassroots players and organizations that help spread the messages of hate. Chapter 4 aggregates the key media amplifiers of Islamophobia. And Chapter 5 brings attention to the elected officials who frequently support the causes of anti- Muslim organizing.

Before we begin, a word about the term “Islamophobia.” We don’t use this term lightly. We define it as an exaggerated fear, hatred, and hostility toward Islam and Muslims that is perpetuated by negative stereotypes resulting in bias, discrimination, and the marginalization and exclusion of Muslims from America’s social, political, and civic life.

It is our view that in order to safeguard our national security and uphold America’s core values, we must return to a fact-based civil discourse regarding the challenges we face as a nation and world. This discourse must be frank and honest, but also consistent with American values of religious liberty, equal justice under the law, and respect for pluralism. A first step toward the goal of honest, civil discourse is to expose—and marginalize—the influence of the individuals and groups who make up the Islamophobia network in America by actively working to divide Americans against one another through misinformation.

Wajahat Ali is a researcher at the Center for American Progress and a researcher for the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Eli Clifton is a researcher at the Center for American Progress and a national security reporter for the Center for American Progress Action Fund and ThinkProgress.org. Matthew Duss is a Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress and Director of the Center’s Middle East Progress. Lee Fang is a researcher at the Center for American Progress and an investigative researcher/blogger for the Center for American Progress Action Fund and ThinkProgress.org. Scott Keyes is a researcher at the Center for American Progress and an investigative researcher for ThinkProgress.org at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Faiz Shakir is a Vice President at the Center for American Progress and serves as Editor-in-Chief of ThinkProgress.org.

Download this report (pdf)

Read the report in your web browser (Scribd)

Download individual chapters of the report (pdf):

• Introduction and summary
• Chapter 1: Donors to the Islamophobia network
• Chapter 2: The Islamophobia misinformation experts
• Chapter 3: The grassroots organizations and the religious right
• Chapter 4: The right-wing media enablers of anti-Islam propaganda
• Chapter 5: The political players
• Conclusion

Video: Ask the Expert: Faiz Shakir on the Group Behind Islamophobia

Related articles

• CFAP Report: $42 Million From Seven Foundations Helped Fuel The Rise Of Islamophobia In America (crooksandliars.com)
• Godly Terrorist Anders Breivik Inspired by American Catholic Fascist Robert Spencer, Jewish Hatemonger Pamela Geller & Fascist Religious Right (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)
• New report maps the roots of Islamophobia (salon.com)

Godly Terrorist Anders Breivik Inspired by American Catholic Fascist Robert Spencer, Jewish Hatemonger Pamela Geller & Fascist Religious Right

Anders Breivik’s spider web of hate

Anders Breivik’s manifesto reveals a subculture of nationalistic and Islamophobic websites that link the European and American far right in a paranoid alliance against Islam and is also rooted in some democratically elected parties.

The Guardian has analysed the webpages he links to, and the pages that these in turn link to, in order to expose a spider web of hatred based around three “counter-jihad” sites, two run by American rightwingers, and one by an eccentric Norwegian. All of these draw some of their inspiration from the Egyptian Jewish exile Gisele Littman, who writes under the name of Bat Ye’or, and who believes that the European elites have conspired against their people to hand the continent over to Muslims.

As well as his very long manifesto, Breivik also laid out some of his thoughts on the Norwegian nationalist site Document.no. In his postings there, Breivik referred to something he called “the Vienna school of thought”, which consists of the people who had worked out the ideology that inspired him to commit mass murder. He named three people in particular: Littman; the Norwegian Peder Jensen who wrote under the pseudonym of Fjordman; and the American Robert Spencer, who maintains a site called Jihad Watch, and agitates against “the Islamisation of America”.

But the name also alludes to a blog called Gates of Vienna, run by an American named Edward “Ned” May, on which Fjordman posted regularly and which claims that Europe is now as much under threat from a Muslim invasion as it was in 1683, when a Turkish army besieged Vienna.

All of these paranoid fantasists share a vision articulated by the Danish far-right activist Anders Gravers, who has links with the EDL in Britain and with Spencer and his co-conspiracist Pamela Geller in the US. Gravers told a conference in Washington last year:

“The European Union acts secretly, with the European people being deceived about its development. Democracy is being deliberately removed, and the latest example being the Lisbon Treaty. However the plan goes much further with an ultimate goal of being a Eurabian superstate, incorporating Muslim countries of north Africa and the Middle East in the European Union. This was already initiated with the signing of the Barcelona treaty in 1995 by the EU and nine north African states and Israel, which became effective on the 1st of January, 2010. It is also known as the Euro-Mediterranean co-operation. In return for some European control of oil resources, Muslim countries will have unfettered access to technology and movement of people into Europe. The price Europeans will have to pay is the introduction of sharia law and removal of democracy.”

Spencer’s jihadwatch.org is linked to 116 times from Breivik’s manifesto; May’s Gates of Vienna 86 times; and Fjordman 114 times.

Spencer and Geller were the organisers of the protest against the so-called 9/11 mosque in New York City. They also took over Stop Islamisation of America, a movement with links to the EDL and to a variety of far-right movements across Europe. Of the two, Spencer is less of a fringe figure. He has been fulsomely interviewed by the Catholic Herald in this country and praised by Douglas Murray of the Centre for Social Cohesion, who called him “a profound and subtle thinker”. Damian Thompson, a leader writer on the Telegraph, once urged his readers to buy Spencer’s works, especially if they believed that Islam was “a religion of peace”. Last week, Spencer’s blog re-ran a piece from Geller’s Atlas Shrugged website claiming that Governor Rick Perry, the creationist rightwinger from Texas, is actually linked to Islamists via Grover Norquist, the far-right tax cutter whom Geller claims is “a front for the Muslim Brotherhood”. Geller also once republished a blogpost speculating that President Obama is the love child of Malcolm X.

As well as the “counter-jihad” websites such as Spencer’s and May’s, analysis of Breivik’s web reveals a dense network of 104 European nationalist sites and political parties. Some of these are represented in parliaments: Geert Wilders’s Dutch Freedom party; the French National Front; the Danish People’s party, the Norwegian Progress party (of which Breivik was briefly a member before he left, disgusted with its moderation); the Sweden Democrats. Others, like the EDL, are fringe groupings. Then there are those in between, such as the Hungarian far-right party Jobbik. But they range all across Europe. They are united by hostility to Muslims and to the EU.

One place where these strands intertwine is the Brussels Journal, a website run by the Belgian Catholic MEP Paul Belien, a member of the far-right Vlaams Belang party. The British Europhobic Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan appeared for three years on the Brussels Journal’s masthead. Hannan has since denounced the European neo-fascist parties as not really rightwing at all.

To appear on this list is not to be complicit in Breivik’s crime. Peder “Fjordman” Jensen was so shocked by it that he gave himself up to the police and gave an interview to a Norwegian paper in which he appeared genuinely bewildered that his predictions of a European civil war should have led anyone to such violence.

It is still more unfair to blame Melanie Phillips. Although she was cited by Breivik at length for an article claiming that the British elite had deliberately encouraged immigration in order to break down traditional society and she has written that “Bat Ye’or’s scholarship is awesome and her analysis is as persuasive as it is terrifying“, she has also argued, with nearly equal ferocity, against the “counter-jihad” belief that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim.

The world view of the counter-jihadis echoes that of the jihadis they feel threatened by. The psychological world of the jihadis has been described by the British psychiatrist Russell Razzaque, who rejected recruitment by Hizb ut-Tahrir when he was a medical student. It is not just a matter of a black-and-white world view, he says, though that is part of it. “It’s a very warm embrace. You felt a sense of self-esteem, a sense of real embrace. Then it gives you a sense of purpose, which is also something you’ve never had so much. The purpose is a huge one. Part of a cosmic struggle when you’re on the right side: you’re another generation in the huge fight that goes back to the crusades.”

This clearly mirrors Breivik’s self-image. What makes him particularly frightening is that he seems to have radicalised himself, just as jihadis do, before he went looking for advice and guidance on the internet. But he was able to take the last few steps into mass murder all alone, so far as we know. Jihadi groups also withdraw from the world into a cramped and paranoid universe of their own. Suicide bombers such as the 9/11 and 7/7 groups spent months psyching each other up before the crime, talking obsessively for hours every day. But Breivik, though he withdrew from society to his farm, seems to have spent his time alone with the internet. It allowed him to hear his own choir of imaginary friends, and hear inside his head their voices cheering him on to murder and martyrdom. Here they are, mapped.

Original post: Anders Breivik’s spider web of hate

Related articles

• The Oslo Terrorist’s ‘Counter-Jihad’ Ideology (littlegreenfootballs.com)
• Opinion: The Rise of the Macro-Nationalists (nytimes.com)
• A Certain Sameness: (brothersjuddblog.com)
• Anders Breivik’s spider web of hate | Andrew Brown (guardian.co.uk)

The GOP’s Lame Presidential Candidates: Are They Crazy Enough for the Right-Wing Screamers?

The GOP’s Lame Presidential Candidates: Are They Crazy Enough for the
Right-Wing Screamers?

Most of the GOP favorites have certain critical flaws that
could cripple their chances of winning over the Limbaugh-Fox News-Malkin axis of
the GOP base.

May 20, 2011  |

//Photo Credit: Wikimedia  Commons

There was a time when Rush Limbaugh fans would happily trot to the ballot box
and vote for soulless corporate lackeys like Bob Dole simply because they
represented that last bulwark defending Real America from Hitlerly KKKlinton’s
mandatory castration program.

But times have changed and nowadays Rush and his fellow right-wing media
shriekers are far more demanding. As the nominations of Sharon Angle, Joe
Miller, Carl Paladino and Christine O’Donnell demonstrate, Limbaugh and his
like-minded allies have inspired their audience to thumb their nose at the
Republican establishment by supporting candidates who not only protect them from
Democrats but who also speak to their deeply held cultural values.

Oftentimes, these values take the form of a checklist of key issues: Does the
candidate want to privatize Medicare? Do they want to start wars with multiple
Middle Eastern countries? Do they properly relish punishing teachers, policemen
and firefighters for daring to seek higher wages? And most importantly, do they
oppose any efforts to encourage children to exercise and eat vegetables?

Unfortunately, most of the 2012 Republican favorites all have certain
critical flaws that could cripple their chances of winning over the Limbaugh-Fox
News-Malkin axis of the GOP base. In this piece we’ll break down the major 2012
contenders and see how they stack up to the conservative media howlers’ ideals
of misanthropy, bloodlust and authoritarianism.

-Candidate #1: Mitt Romney

Romney is the classic type of plastic corporatist puppet that the Republican
Party has proudly nominated for decades. He has perfect hair, chiseled looks and
a business background that would typically make him an ideal candidate in any
Republican primary.

But there’s a major problem with Mitt: He started his political career in
Massachusetts, which ranks somewhere between North Korea and Mordor in the eyes
of talk radio personalities. While running for and serving in public office in
Massachusetts, Mitt made a number of statements that are standard fare for Bay
State politicians but that sound like chants from the Satanic Bible to the
Limbaugh-Beck axis. For instance, in 2003, then-Governor Romney said he’d
support a nationwide gas tax hike. He also worked very hard to establish his
pro-choice credentials by filling out a (gulp!) Planned Parenthood questionnaire
on reproductive rights. Oh, and he also once said during a debate with Ted
Kennedy that “we must make equality for gays and lesbians a mainstream concern.”
Uh-oh!

But the very worst thing Romney did while governor or Mordorchusetts was to
help people get access to health care. It didn’t matter that Romney did so in a
corporatist manner that enlarged the take-home pay for insurance company boards
– his efforts to get people in Massachusetts health insurance may well doom him
in the coming election. You see, helping people get health care is the one of
the most horrific crimes against humanity according to Fox News and friends
largely because… well we’re not sure, but helping people get health care seems
to be the worst thing any Republican governor can do.

The point is, many conservatives have called on Romney to apologize for
helping people get health care, even though he touted it as one of his signature
strengths while running for president in 2008. And for a candidate whose
persistent flip-flops have led Dittohead guru Erick Erickson to brand him as
“Multiple Choice Mitt,” another reversal on health care could be deadly.

Romneycare should be a lesson to all Republicans everywhere: Do not touch
health care at all unless it involves privatizing Medicare or slashing health
benefits for veterans. The GOP’s Limbaugh faction will stand for nothing
less.

-Candidate 2: Mitch Daniels

Daniels is a favorite of Beltway Republicans, who are enamored with the fact
that he seemingly knows how to count. Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson
best summed up his love for the dweeby Indiana bean-counter when he wrote that
“Daniels’s appeal is not ideological; it is mathematical.”

Since memories of calculus classes are not appealing to very many people,
Gerson elaborated: “The passions aroused by ideology, in his view, hamper the
ability of political adults to deal rationally with disturbing budget
numbers.”

OK, so he’s a union-busting version of Michael Dukakis. Big whoop.

You would think that such an uninspiring figure would elicit apathy from
conservative bloggers, who typically don’t devote much energy to reading over
policy papers or parsing wonky budget speeches.

Unfortunately for Daniels, though, his blandness hasn’t inoculated him from
the ire of the Nutteratti, since he’s committed multiple sins against
conservative orthodoxy during his time as governor of Indiana. First of all, as
Jennifer Rubin has noted, Daniels has assiduously avoided kissing the collective
asses of our conservative overlords and has instead been courting (shudder!)
people in that godforsaken hellhole known as “New York City.”

“Daniels didn’t go to the Tea Partyers or to the National Rifle Association
for a testing-the-waters confab,” cries Rubin. “Instead, he went to
Manhattan.”

You see, before any Republican candidate can win over the Limbaugh axis, they
have to engage in a thoroughly humiliating round of ass-kissing where they
pretend that Sean Hannity is the most courageous and inspiring journalist since
Edward R. Murrow. It doesn’t matter if the candidate supports exciting policies
such as mandatory castration for all men who make less than $30,000 a year:
without rampant ass-kissing, the candidate stands no chance of winning over Fox
News.

Daniels’ second big problem is that, like Mitt Romney before him, he tried to
help people get health care. As Michael Cannon writes in the National Review,
“Daniels expanded Indiana’s Medicaid program to families of four earning
$44,000.” What’s more, Daniels implemented a set of policies known as the
“Healthy Indiana Plan” that Cannon says “offers high-deductible coverage
combined with a taxpayer-funded health savings account” that not only “hands out
coverage plus something a lot like cash.” The bottom line is that Republicans
who have national ambitions should never under any circumstances try to help
people get health care. It will always come back to bite them in the behind.

Daniels’ final sin could be his worst one of all, however: Apparently Muslims
actually like him. In fact, Daniels’ ties with Sharia Law are apparently so
strong that he even received an award from the American Arab Institute. For
conservative activist Pam Geller, this was the final straw.

“Notorious Jew hater James Zogby is the co-founder and President of the Arab
Institute,” Geller howled. “Mitch Daniels has been involved (sic) with this
nototrious (sic) anti-Israel Israel (sic) organization (sic) for 25 years. How
repulsive.”

Candidate #3: Newt Gingrich

Yes, we all know about Newt’s multiple marriages and past infidelities and we
know that might make him unpalatable for social conservatives. And I may be
wrong but I don’t think many evangelicals will be convinced by Newt’s assertion
that he cheated on his wife because he was “driven by how passionately I felt
about this country” and thus “worked far too hard and things happened in my life
that were not appropriate.”

But Newt’s past naughtiness is actually just a tiny part of an even larger
problem that has dogged Gingrich for decades now: That he is shockingly full of
shit on just about everything, not just marriage.

Newt’s core problem is that he’s perpetually torn between being a classic
conservative bomb-thrower and being a cultivated “Man of Ideas” who wins respect
from the mainstream press. So while Newt scores points with the Limbaugh axis by
deriding Barack Obama’s supposed “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior,” he loses many
more potential mega-dittos with his “I’m-a-serious-problem-solver” shtick.

To cite one classic example, Gingrich’s desire to be considered a Serious
Intellectual back in 2008 led him to speak a major right-wing heresy by
acknowledging the existence of global warming. In fact, Gingrich’s desire to be
taken seriously on climate change even led to him cutting an advertisement with
(shudder!) then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi:

From a right-wing media shrieker perspective, Newt might as well have cut an
ad with Osama bin Laden and said, “We may not agree on much, but we do agree on
the need to provide America’s children with mandatory prayer rugs. Allahu
akbar!”

And like Mitt Romney, Gingrich has a long history of supporting an individual
mandate to purchase health insurance. You see, the conservative position on
health care used to be that we needed to mandate that people buy private health
insurance to avoid a socialistic single-payer system like the ones in communist
hellholes like Canada. But with the rise of the Tea Party in 2009, Republican
candidates had to shift their views away from individual mandates and toward a
system where people are left to die in the streets, just as they did in the days
of the Founders. So statements such as “you have a responsibility to buy
insurance” and “we need some significant changes to ensure that every American
is insured” from Gingrich’s 2005 book “Winning the Future” just aren’t going to
cut it anymore.

Newt’s full-of-shit-about-everything problem is particularly magnified in the
age of YouTube, where videos showing past contradictions can be plastered all
over Facebook walls and Twitter feeds. You saw this crop up during the Gingrich
campaign’s comically awful first week, which saw Newt denounce Paul Ryan’s
insane neo-Social Darwinist budget before hastily retreating in the face of
conservative backlash. Newt predictably went full-bore in an attack against the
Lamestream Media and even said that it was now out of bounds to accurately quote
his past statements.

“Any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood, because I have
said publicly those words were inaccurate and unfortunate,” Gingrich howled.

After just one week, the Gingrich campaign became so bloodied that it had
been reduced to releasing epic poems that portrayed Newt as a conquering hero
who would dispel all doubters and outsiders in good time.

“A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the
onslaught,” wrote Gingrich flack Rick Tyler. “But out of the billowing smoke and
dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who
won’t be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the
challenges America faces.”

This inspired me to try penning my own Newt epic, based on Tennyson’s classic
“Ulysses”:

“Newtlysses”

It little profits that an idle former House Speaker,
By this still
hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged third wife, I mete
and dole
Bombs and predator drones unto a savage race,
That hoard, and
sleep, and have a Kenyan anti-colonial mindset, and know not me.

You get the idea.

The good thing about being perpetually full of shit about everything is that
it’s easier to make people forget all about your past positions. People who
actually feel slightly guilty about bullshitting people don’t have that same
luxury. So if Newt can manage to get some – any! – message discipline over the
next few months he could turn out OK.

Candidate #4: Tim Pawlenty

I tried to do some research about Tim Pawlenty. Then I got bored. Like,
really, really, really bored.

Chances of winning over Dittohead Nation: Meh. Pawlenty is a straight-laced
Midwestern conservative who gets check-marks on all the major issues but who
doesn’t generate all that much excitement among the Limbaugh crowd. For even
though Pawlenty is staunchly anti-abortion and has received an “A” on fiscal
management from the Cato Institute, his dry demeanor fails to provide Fox News
fans with the emotional gratification that comes from angrily screeching at your
adversaries as loud as you possibly can. Oh, and he apparently doesn’t hate
Muslims, or something. The bottom line is that conservative media shriekers will
support him but not enthusiastically so.

Candidate #5: Sarah Palin

Palin is seemingly the perfect candidate for the conservative screamer
movement largely because she’s one of them herself. Let’s review the facts: She
kisses Sean Hannity’s ass, she doesn’t care about governing, she works for Fox
News, she’s never helped people get health care, she’s never filmed a video with
Nancy Pelosi and she cries like a baby grizzly whenever anyone says anything the
least bit uncomplimentary toward her. Indeed, Palin’s extreme sensitivity to
criticism of any sort has led to her start more pointless feuds than anyone this
side of 50 Cent.

And yet… well, here’s the problem with Sarah Palin: She would lose to Obama,
big-time. And no, it doesn’t matter if Barack Obama replaced the
stars-and-stripes with his Muslim prayer rug on the White House flagpole. Every
single poll has shown that Palin is widely disliked by the American public and
that nominating her would result in a 20-point defeat for the Republican
Party.

And to paraphrase George Patton, “Conservative screamers love a winner and
will not tolerate a loser.” The same will eventually prove true of current
Dittohead favorite Herman Cain, the pizza magnate and Tea Party activist whose
lone attempt to run for public office ended in a humiliating defeat to current
Georgia Senator Johnny Isakson in a 2004 GOP primary. And if you can’t campaign
well on wingnuttery in Georgia, there’s no way you’ll be able to campaign on
wingnuttery nationwide.

That means the Fox News axis will likely have to bring a fresh face onto the
scene that will shake up the primary race. A fresh face such as…

Candidate #6: Somali Warlord Musa Sudi Yalahow

As you can see, none of the big-name Republican candidates really lives up to
the high standards set by Fox News screamers. This is why I predict the Right’s
leading lights will embark on a campaign to draft a dark-horse candidate to
shake up the race. And there’s no better candidate to rally support on the Right
than Somali warlord Musa Sudi Yalahow.

First of all, just think about how well Somalia fits in with modern
conservative ideals of how society should be run. There ain’t no gubmint
bureaucrats tellin’ you that you can’t own a gun in Somalia! The right to bear
arms in that country is so sacrosanct that they don’t even need a Constitutional
amendment to make it a reality!

Similarly, there ain’t no gubmint bureaucrats in Somalia tellin’ you that you
gotta buy health insurance. In fact, according to Doctors Without Borders,
people in Somalia don’t have to suffer under the tyranny of having health
insurance at all! Check out an excerpt from this report:

“For many years Somalis have endured violence, displacement, malnutrition,
and lack of access to adequate health care. […] Over the course of the year, the
gap between critical needs in Somalia, particularly in and around Mogadishu, and
the level of humanitarian response grew even larger, mainly due to aid agencies’
extremely limited capacity to deliver assistance in this highly insecure and
volatile environment.”

You can just smell the freedom and liberty all the way across the ocean,
can’t you?

Next, consider the kind of man Mr. Yalahow is. According to his Wikipedia
page, Yalahow was part of an America-backed warlord coalition to fight Islamist
extremists in the country back in early 2006. In other words, he has a lot more
real-world experience fighting terrorists than the Kenyan Kommie currently
occupying the White House ever will. And when many of his fellow warlords agreed
to stop fighting and voluntarily disarm their militias, Yalahow instead issued
veiled threats to revolt if the new government didn’t live up to its
promises.

Now that’s the kind of fightin’ spirit that Fox News could get behind – maybe
Yalahow could pick Sharon Angle as his running mate to form a Second Amendment
Remedies Dream Ticket?

Brad Reed is a writer living in Boston. His work
has previously appeared in the American Prospect Online, and he blogs frequently
at Sadly, No!.

Related articles

• GOP Cattle Call 2012 – Week of 05/22/11 (dailykos.com)

Rightwing Rutherford Institute, Co-Founded By A Racist Holocaust Denier And A “Bloodthirsty Theologian” Homophobe, Attacks The Exiled!

Rightwing Rutherford Institute, Co-Founded By A Racist Holocaust Denier And A “Bloodthirsty Theologian” Homophobe, Attacks The Exiled!

By Mark Ames and
Yasha Levine

Separated at Stone Age: Holocaust-denier R J
Rushdoony…
…and Holocaust-dreamer
al-Zawahiri?

On Tuesday May 3, a lawyer for the rightwing Rutherford
Institute sent a threatening letter to The
eXiled to punish and intimidate us because we reminded our readers about
the dark, extremist homophobic ideology behind the early years of the Rutherford
Institute and its co-founder, John Whitehead. The Rutherford Institute has waged
a 15-year public relations campaign to recast itself as a “civil liberties”
outfit similar to the ACLU, yet this same “defender of civil liberties” wants to
crush The eXiled’s First Amendment rights to free speech over the crime of
reminding readers that the outfit was co-founded by one of the most extreme
anti-Semitic, homophobic monsters of our time, a Holocaust denier and eugenicist
named R. J. Rushdoony.

Rutherford’s attorney sent us a letter objecting to
two fully-sourced and documented statements in our April 28 article, Did You Fall for It? America’s Outrage Over TSA “Porn
Scanners” Was Right-Wing PR to Prevent Workers from Unionizing:

1) Characterizing Rutherford Institute president
John Whitehead as “a one-time Christian Reconstructionist,” which is true;

2) That his “outfit once advocated the death
penalty for homosexuals,” which is true.

Rutherford’s lawyer, Tom Neuberger, wrote, “Neither
The Rutherford Institute nor Mr. Whitehead, its president, have ever subscribed
to Christian ‘reconstructionist’ ideologies. … And the outrageous assertion that
the Institute ‘once advocated the death penalty for homosexuals” is clearly a
complete fabrication.”

This is an outrageous, baseless and disgusting
attack on independent journalism. An outfit that claims to be for civil
liberties yet threatens journalists who print the truth, simply because the
Rutherford Institute is trying to whitewash its past, is the height of hypocrisy
and reveals that the Rutherford Institute has not changed one bit from its
beginnings as an attack dog for far-right Holocaust deniers, anti-Semites and
neo-Confederate fascists whose one goal was to intimidate and crush any
opposition to their plan to turn America into a fundamentalist Christian nation
along the lines of the Taliban.

We will report more about the Rutherford
Institute’s threats to The eXiled and to others–one reader pointed us to a story
in Delaware which resulted in a kind of pogrom against two Jewish families
fighting a lawsuit against rabid Christian fundamentalists represented by the
Rutherford Institute– and we’ll get into the dark, sordid history of the
Institute’s founders and their beliefs, which make our factual statements that
they object to seem as though, if anything, we were going far too light on
Rutherford.

And to survive this assault, we will be asking for
our readers’ support. Gary Brecher has agreed to return to the field of action,
but only on condition that you support our effort to resist a 30-year-old
rightwing outfit’s efforts to crush independent journalism.

God Hates Fags…So did Rutherford Institute
co-founders

But first, there are so many credible sources
backing our statement in our article characterizing John Whitehead as “a onetime
Christian ‘reconstructionist’… whose outfit once advocated the death penalty for
homosexuals” that they are too numerous to list. Here we provide a small sample
of sources which repeat, expand on, and/or support this:

* From American University Professor Alan
Lichtman’s book White Protestant Nation, a
finalist for the 2008 National Book Critic’s Award for Non-Fiction:

“A movement known as Christian Reconstruction or
Dominion Theology, led by Rousas John Rushdoony of the Chalcedon Foundation,
Gary North of the Institute for Christian Economics, and John Whitehead of the
Rutherford Institute, extended Schaffer’s absolutist thinking. Dominion leaders
aimed to make America a Christian nation. They desired to ‘take back government
from the state and put it in the hands of Christians.’ This meant replacing
secular ‘self-law’ with ‘God’s law,’ which meted out harsh punishments,
including death penalty for adulterers and homosexuals.” [pp 349, Atlantic
Monthly Press, hardcover edition]

* David Brock’s bestselling book from 2002, Blinded By The Right:

“When various settlement offers were rejected by
[Paula] Jones [the woman who sued President Bill Clinton for sexual harassment],
Davis and Cammarata quit the case and were replaced by lawyers working with the
right-wing Rutherford Institute, which had been founded with the support of
Christian Right reconstructionist R. J. Rushdoony, who was an early board
member.* …The Reverend R. J. Rushdoony believed that civil law should be
replaced by Biblical law ‘to suppress, control, and/or eliminate the ungodly.’
He advocated the death penalty for abortion, adultery, sodomy, and incest as
well as for blasphemers and ‘propagators of false doctrines.’ Rushdoony was also
a Holocaust denier.” [pp 201. Three Rivers Press. 2002 paperback
edition.]

* Jeff Sharlet’s book The Family, a 2008 New York Times bestseller:

“John W. Whitehead, a constitutional lawyer who
counts Rushdoony as one of his greatest influences [pp. 349]…Rushdoony is best
known as the founder of Christian Reconstructionism, a politically defunct but
subtly influential school of thought that drifted so far to the right that it
dropped off the edge of the world, disavowed as ‘scary’ even by Jerry Falwell.
Most notably, Rushdoony proposed the death penalty for an ever-expanding subset
of sinners, starting with gay men and growing to include blasphemers and badly
behaved children.” [pp.347. Harper Perennial. 2008 paperback.]

* Mark Crispin Miller’s 2004 book, published by
W.W. Norton, Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney’s New
World Order:

“John Whitehead, an ex-student of Rushdoony’s, and
introduced by him once at the council as a man ‘chosen by God,’ directs the
Rutherford Foundation, a legal arm of the Chalcedon Foundation (which until his
death was run by Rushdoony and funded by Howard Ahmanson). Rutherford’s
important mission is to fight the legal battles on behalf of Reconstructionism.”
[pp. 263]

* Frederick Clarkson, journalist, author and
activist, in a chapter from the 1999 book Eyes
Right: Challenging The Rightwing Backlash edited by Chip Berlet:

“The Rutherford Institute’s John Whitehead was a
student of both Schaeffer and Rushdoony, and credits them as the two major
influences on his thought. … [I]t is not surprising that Whitehead goes to great
lengths to deny that he is a Reconstructionist. Rushdoony, introducing Whitehead
at a Reconstructionist conference, called him a man ‘chosen by God.’ Rushdoony
then spoke of ‘our plans, through Rutherford,
to fight the battle against statism and the freedom of Christ’s Kingdom.’” …
“The Rutherford Institute was founded as a legal project of R. J. Rushdoony’s
Chalcedon Foundation, with Rushdoony and fellow Chalcedon director Howard
Ahmanson on its original board of directors. Whitehead credits Rushdoony with
providing the outline for his first book, which he researched in Rushdoony’s
library. ” [p.69]

* Chris Hedges, writing about Whitehead’s mentor
and partner in the Rutherford Institute in his 2006 book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On
America:

“The racist and brutal intolerance of the
intellectual godfathers of today’s Christian Reconstructionism is a chilling
reminder of the movement’s lust for repression. The Institutes of Biblical Law
by R. J. Rushdoony, written in 1973, is the most important book for the
dominionist movement. Rushdoony calls for a Christian society that is harsh,
unforgiving and violent. The death penalty is to be imposed not only for
offenses such as rape, kidnapping and murder, but also for adultery, blasphemy,
homosexuality, astrology, incest, striking a parent, incorrigible juvenile
delinquency, and, in the case of women, ‘un-chastity before marriage.’ The world
is to be subdued and ruled by a Christian United States.  Rushdoony dismissed
the widely accepted estimate of 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust as an
inflated figure, and his theories on race often echo those found in Nazi
eugenics, in which there are higher and lower forms of human beings. Those
considered by the Christian state to be immoral and incapable of reform are to
be exterminated.” [pp.12-13]

* The Southern Poverty Law Center’s magazine Intelligence
Report called Rushdoony “a racist and a holocaust denier.” The SPLC describes the Rushdoony-founded Chalcedon
Foundation, for which the Rutherford Institute was set up to act as its
legal arm: “Rushdoony supported the death penalty for homosexuals, among other
‘abominators.’ He also opposed what he called ‘unequal yoking’ — interracial
marriage — and ‘enforced integration,’ insisting that “[a]ll men are NOT created
equal before God” (the Bible, he explained, ‘recognizes that some people are by
nature slaves’). Rushdoony also denied the Holocaust, saying the murder of 6
million Jews was ‘false witness.’”

* Another co-founder of the Rutherford Institute,
Rushdoony’s son-in-law, Gary North, has been described as a “bloodthirsty
theologian” who “may actually be a psychopath” by Jeff Sharlet in his 2008 book
The Family: “North […] may actually be
a psychopath—he favors stoning as a method of
execution because it would double as a ‘community project.’” [pp.348].
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Gary North advocates hiding the
true agenda of the Christian Reconstructionist movement for obvious reasons:
“Theonomists, and especially Reconstructionists, know their views are an
anathema to most Americans. Reconstructionist ideologue Gary North, in fact, has
written that Reconstructionists need ‘the noise of contemporary events’ to hide
their goals. ‘If [non-believers] fully understood the long-term threat to their
civilization that our ideas pose, they … would be wise to take steps to crush
us.’” (“Confederates on the Pulpit” SPLC Intelligence Report.
Spring 2001).

* From a Public Research Associates article:

“Whitehead believes, according to an article by
Martin Mawyer published in the May 1983 issue of the Moral Majority Report, ‘That courts must place
themselves under the authority of God’s law.’ Mawyer’s article explains, ‘The
Institute states that ‘all of civil affairs and government, including law,
should be based upon principles found in the Bible.’ That statement is a
simplified definition of Christian Reconstruction, an important movement within
evangelical Christianity.”

* Bill Moyers, interviewing R J Rushdoony in 1988, (six years after the founding
of Rutherford Institute):

Moyers:
You’ve written that the Bible calls for the death penalty, and I’m just running
down a variety of things as you can see. You’ve written that the Bible calls for
the death penalty of some 15 crimes: rape, sodomy, adultery.
Rushdoony:
Adultery because in the Bible the basic institution is the family.
There’s no law of treason against the state. The Bible doesn’t even imagine
anything remotely like that. But the basic institution is the family. And so,
several of the death penalties are associated with the family and its life.
Moyers: So
adultery was considered a theft of the family.
Rushdoony:
It was, yes, it was treason to the family.
Moyers: Homosexuality.
Rushdoony:
Yes, it was treason to the family.
Moyers: Worthy of the death sentence?
Rushdoony:
What?
Moyers: Worthy of the death sentence?.
Rushdoony:
Yes.
Moyers: Deserving of the death sentence?
Rushdoony:
Yes, that’s what [Apostle] Paul says.

…

Moyers:
But you would re-instate the death penalty for some of these or all of
these Biblical crimes?
Rushdoony: I wouldn’t—
Moyers: But
the reconstructive society–
Rushdoony: I’m saying that this is what God
requires. I’m not saying that everything in the Bible, I like. Some of it rubs
me the wrong way. But I’m simply saying, this is what God requires. This is what
God says is justice. Therefore, I don’t feel I have a choice.
Moyers: And
the agents of God would carry out the laws.
Rushdoony: The civil government would, on
these things.
Moyers: So you would have a civil government,
based upon–
Rushdoony: Oh yes. I’m not an anarchist. I’m
close to being a libertarian. But–
Moyers: But the civil law would be based on
the biblical law. And so you’d have a civil government carrying out a religious
mandate.
Rushdoony: Oh yes.

* Rushdoony and North were not only co-founders of
the Rutherford Institute, but they were also regularly featured members of the
“Rutherford Institute Seminars” speakers bureau. In other words, they were
intimately tied to, part of, and speaking on behalf of the Rutherford Institute.
Here is from a 1994 Anti-Defamation League report:

In the fall of 1986, the Traditional Values
Coalition and Citizens for Excellence in Education advertised “Rutherford
Institute Seminars” in which Rushdoony was a featured speaker — along with
Rutherford Institute founder John Whitehead. Rushdoony was described in the
advertisement as a ”theologian…who presents scriptural framework for building
orderly structures in society [sic].”

Whitehead, one of the country’s leading
conservative evangelical attorneys, has called Rushdoony one of the two major
influences on his thought. Rushdoony wrote the introduction for Whitehead’s The
Separation Illusion, and the reconstructionist patriarch is the most frequently
cited author in the bibliography for Whitehead’s The Second American
Revolution – a favored text among evangelical activists (The Institutes for
Biblical Law is among the works cited).

Rushdoony reportedly helped Whitehead found the
Rutherford Institute, and has been a director of the Institute and a participant
in its speakers bureau.

[Source: The
Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance & Pluralism in America. A
publication of the Anti-Defamation League. (1994). pp 111]

Finally, we are not surprised that the Rutherford
Institute—which claims to defend civil liberties, but seemingly behaves more
like a right-wing attack dog outfit trying to intimidate critics of its
far-right Christian agenda— sends a letter from a lawyer to suppress journalists
from exercising their first amendment rights. From its very beginning in the
early Reagan years, as Whitehead explained in a 1983 interview, “We need to be
very aggressive, not passive. Take the initiative. Sue rather than waiting to be
sued. That’s where we’ve [the Christian far-right] been weak. We’ve always been
on the defensive. We need to frame the issue and pick the court. The
[Rutherford] institute, if necessary, will charge that government is violating
religious freedoms rather than the church waiting for the government to charge
it with violating the law.” [Institute for First Amendment Studies.]

We’ve answered the Rutherford’s outrageous,
anti-Constitutional threats and attempts to crush our civil liberties. Now we
would like the Rutherford Institute to explain to us and to readers of The
eXiled why it failed to successfully challenge the statements made by the
authors in passages cited above, and how it claims to be a “civil liberties”
outfit that has distanced itself from its extremist hateful past when it
threatens to crush anyone who dares to report the truthful past.

—Mark Ames and Yasha Levine

Hysterical American Right Foamy-Mouthed Over Obama’s Speech

Instantaneous Outrageous Outrage: ‘Obama Sides with Palestinians!’

Distorted AP article triggers yet another fake outrage

In three short paragraphs about President Obama’s speech this morning, the Associated Press warps the story beyond recognition: Obama says Palestine must be based in 1967 borders.

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama is endorsing the Palestinians’ demand for their future state to be based on the borders that existed before the 1967 Middle East war, in a move that will likely infuriate Israel. Israel says the borders of a Palestinian state have to be determined through negotiations.

In a speech outlining U.S. policy in the Middle East and North Africa, Obama on Thursday sided with the Palestinians’ opening position a day ahead of a visit to Washington by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu is vehemently opposed to referring to the 1967 borders.

Until Thursday, the U.S. position had been that the Palestinian goal of a state based on the 1967 borders, with agreed land swaps, should be reconciled with Israel’s desire for a secure Jewish state through negotiations.

Wow. Rarely have I seen such blatant distortion in a mainstream news release. Here’s the exact quote from Obama’s speech:

The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.

Note: he didn’t say “1967 borders,” he didn’t “side with the Palestinians,” and he absolutely did still insist on mutually agreed swaps and secure borders for both countries. It’s nothing but a re-wording of the same position the US has taken for many years.

Based on this distorted and very misleading AP article, Fox News instantly put together a screaming fake outrage headline, currently leading on their front page:

Drudge Report also jumped on it, running a huge headline: “OBAMA SIDES WITH PALESTINIANS!”

And of course, it’s already all over the right wing blogosphere that President Obama “told Israel to move back to the pre-1967 borders.”

No. He didn’t.

All this fake outrage spread throughout the Internet within minutes after the President’s speech, like a virtual wingnut flash mob.

I guess it’s too much to ask these people to report what the President actually said.

UPDATE at 5/19/11 4:50:18 pm

Ben Smith comments:

Count me among those who have covered spats between the U.S. and Israel in some detail, and are a bit perplexed why sources from the New York Times to Benjamin Netanyahu are acting as though a Rubicon has been crossed by Obama’s restating universal assumptions and U.S. policy, and meanwhile slapping down the key Palestinian diplomatic drive.

Jeffrey Goldberg comments:

I’m amazed at the amount of insta-commentary out there suggesting that the President has proposed something radical and new by declaring that Israel’s 1967 borders should define — with land-swaps — the borders of a Palestinian state. I’m feeling a certain Groundhog Day effect here. This has been the basic idea for at least 12 years. This is what Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat were talking about at Camp David, and later, at Taba. This is what George W. Bush was talking about with Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert. So what’s the huge deal here? Is there any non-delusional Israeli who doesn’t think that the 1967 border won’t serve as the rough outline of the new Palestinian state?

UPDATE at 5/19/11 5:00:44 pm

This section of Obama’s speech is certainly not “siding with the Palestinians” — in fact, he’s clearly saying that Palestinians will never have a state while they reject Israel’s right to exist:

For the Palestinians, efforts to delegitimize Israel will end in failure. Symbolic actions to isolate Israel at the United Nations in September won’t create an independent state. Palestinian leaders will not achieve peace or prosperity if Hamas insists on a path of terror and rejection. And Palestinians will never realize their independence by denying the right of Israel to exist.

Australia’s Rising Religious Right

Religious Right Groups

Understanding that mind makes reality, one must then understand why belief
is the enemy. Belief systems have often been created to shape the mind into
narrow reality-tunnels that exclude other modes of perception. If you can
control what people believe – as Hitler, Stalin, and other dictators realized –
you have a method of coercion better than a thousand tanks or the death penalty.
– Steve Mizrach (aka Seeker1)

Listed below are links to information we have researched about Religious Right groups in Australia. On the detailed information pages, we include links to these groups’ own websites in order to encourage thinking Australians to visit these sites and critically examine the ideas they are promoting. Many of these groups have close links with each other, and spokespersons for one group often publicly represent another.

These groups all have a common agenda – political lobbying under the banner of “biblical family values”. They oppose abortion, pre-marital sex, homosexuality, prostitution, adult shops, pornography, Islam, embryonic stem cell research and even Harry Potter. They campaign strongly for censorship of material that offends them and they generally believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, including Genesis.

Above Rubies
A virulently anti-feminist group which actively encourages women to ‘submit’ to their menfolk.

Australian Christian Lobby
Formerly the Australian Christian Coalition founded in 1995, this group is based in Canberra and headed by former SAS chief, Brigadier Jim Wallace. Its aims are “to reclaim our society and our government for God and to have the Christian voice heard”. It advocates rules of conduct prescribed by the Bible, as contained in the Ten Commandments and the first five books of the Old Testament.

Australian Family Association
An off-shoot of the Catholic-based National Civic Council founded by Bob Santamaria. Bill Muehlenberg is the main national Spokesperson, but the group also has spokespersons in various States.

Australian Federation for the Family
A relatively low-key group run by Jack and Margaret Sonnemann who came to Australia from the USA in the early 1980s. Maintains close links with US groups.

Australian Festival of Light
A moral reform organisation formed in 1973 by evangelical Protestants who drew their inspiration from Mary Whitehouse’s British FOL. Principal personnel are Fred and Elaine Nile in NSW, and David and Roslyn Phillips in SA.

Catch The Fire Ministries
A small Victorian church associated with the Assemblies of God. Its pastor Danny Nalliah has obtained great notoriety through the publicity about a religious vilification case brought against them by the Islamic Council of Victoria.

Christian Democratic Party
A political party originally formed in 1981 (then named the Call to Australia Party) by Rev. Fred Nile from the Festival of Light. The group has had two members of the NSW Legislative Council for a number of years by exploiting the upper house quota election system at alternate elections.

Creation Ministries International (Australia)
Formerly called Answers in Genesis Ministries, and prior to that the Creation Science Foundation, this group originated in Australia but spread to several other countries including the USA. Its mission is “to bring reformation by restoring the foundations of our faith which are contained in the book of Genesis.”

Democratic Labor Party
The DLP was originally founded in Victoria in 1955 as a conservative Catholic breakaway from the Australian Labor Party. A national political party with close ties to the National Civic Council (NCC).

Endeavour Forum
A small but relatively influential group run by Babette Francis. It was formerly known as “Women Who Want To be Women”. Its objectives are “to counter feminism, defend the unborn and the traditional family.”

Exclusive Brethren
An operating church with political goals which include the election of socially conservative governments and the implementation of policies such as the restriction of abortion and the curtailment of homosexual rights.

Exodus Asia Pacific
A Christian group whose proclaimed purpose is “to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ by proclaiming His desire and incredible power to release people from homosexuality.”

Family Councils
These groups exists in several states, the largest and oldest group being in Victoria. They are umbrella organisations, with membership from the usual Religious Right groups but also include some unexpected members such as the Moonies and the Mormons.

Family First Party
A political party which ‘wants to make sure every piece of legislation helps every Australian family reach their potential’. In practice, the FFP promotes a strong Religious Right agenda, including opposition to school sex education, euthanasia and prostitution, and outspoken support for censorship.

Fatherhood Foundation
A recently formed organisation (2002) whose public activities indicate strong Christian fundamentalist tendencies in all matters relating to the family.

Focus on the Family Australia
A group headed by Colin Bunnett that claims to have the objective ‘to reconnect families with the ageless wisdom of Judaeo-Christian values’. It is believed to receive financial support from the much more powerful Focus on the Family (US) headed by Dr James Dobson.

Life Ministries
A small, strongly American-influenced group which cooperates effectively with like-minded organisations, and which has flown the Religious Right’s flag in Western Australia for many years.

Light Educational Ministries
A Canberra-based group which provides materials and promotes a Christian Reconstructionist version of education throughout Australia.

Media Standards Australia
A small WA-based group, formerly called the National Viewers and Listeners Association of Australia. It focuses its attention on attempting to influence the broadcast and other public media to adopt more conservative policies, particularly in relation to sex and violence.

National Alliance of Christian Leaders
A loosely organised grouping of leaders of conservative Christian organisations which aims ‘to facilitate the coming together of Christian organisational leaders, to work together towards shared objectives’.

Right To Life Australia
A large, militant and once powerful organisation whose influence has faded somewhat. Its platform is largely concerned with opposition to abortion and euthanasia.

Salt Shakers
Founded by Peter and Jenny Stokes and located in Melbourne. Peter Stokes also represented the Festival of Light before the Senate Committee inquiring into superannuation entitlements for same sex couples in March 2000.

Hate Mongers Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck Dumped!

Glenn Beck And Sean Hannity Dropped From Philadelphia Radio Station

Yesterday, hate radio hosts Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity had their nationally syndicated radio shows dropped from WPHT in Philadelphia, which is the second radio station to drop both of the conservative commentators. The moves were scheduled back in November 2010, and Marc Rayfield, market manager for CBS Radio in Philadelphia and senior vice president, said that WPHT wants to become “more of a locally based station.”

Just weeks ago, Beck was dropped from WOR in New York, but the most recent cancellation in Philadelphia hurts Beck even more. Beck got his start in Philadelphia, and many of his radio staffers still live in Philly, including Beck’s side-kick Stu. Immediately after being dropped yesterday, Beck dropped all affection for the city where he got his start, saying, “Philly sucks”:

“You know the killing streets right there in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia?” Beck told his producer. “You know how Philadelphia is not a place you want to be?” he added. “I’ll put you on a hidden cam and put you downtown at 6, 7 o’clock at night.” He could not believe his producer would be brave enough to walk around Center City at night. “Philly sucks,” Beck then said.

Last October, Hannity was dropped from KSL Radio in Utah, which is managed by Deseret Media Companies (DMC), a for-profit arm of the Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. According to reports, Hannity’s drop in Utah may have been due to a clash between DMC’s “Mission Statement,” which calls for the declaration of “light and knowledge” along with the advancement of “integrity, civility, morality, and respect for all people,” and Hannity’s constant lack of civility.

WPHT reportedly dropped both Beck and Hannity because they wanted more local talk content, but the most recent cancellations may be part of a pattern in which advertisers and broadcasters have become wary over the rhetoric spouted by hate radio. Color of Change reports that, so far, 81 companies have quit advertising on Beck’s Fox News show and Media Matter reports 100, including a list of those who haven’t withdrawn their advertisements.

– Paul Breer

Related Articles

• Nutter: Glenn Beck suffering a case of ‘verb-arrhea’ (philly.com)
• Tiny violin time – Beck, Hannity lose their Philly area stations (4th largest market) (pinkbananaworld.com)
• Glenn Beck And Sean Hannity Dropped From Their Philadelphia Radio Station (mediaite.com)
• Jewish Group Wants Glenn Beck Dropped From Fox News (politicsdaily.com)

How the U.S. Government Promotes Islamophobia

Via Alex Kane

I often focus on organizations and individual right-wing activists outside the U.S. government that have stoked anti-Muslim sentiment here.  But the U.S. government itself is just as culpable in promoting a McCarthyist climate of fear where every Muslim-American is considered a “terror threat” and Islam is turned into the new bogeyman of the day.

The latest installment in the Washington Post‘s investigative series by Dana Priest and William Arkin, “Top Secret America,” provides a look into how the U.S. government is mired in the deep swamp that is Islamophobia in America (emphasis mine):

Seeking to learn more about Islam and terrorism, some law enforcement agencies have hired as trainers self-described experts whose extremist views on Islam and terrorism are considered inaccurate and counterproductive by the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies…

Ramon Montijo has taught classes on terrorism and Islam to law enforcement officers all over the country.

“Alabama, Colorado, Vermont,” said Montijo, a former Army Special Forces sergeant and Los Angeles Police Department investigator who is now a private security consultant. “California, Texas and Missouri,” he continued.

What he tells them is always the same, he said: Most Muslims in the United States want to impose sharia law here.

“They want to make this world Islamic. The Islamic flag will fly over the White House – not on my watch!” he said. “My job is to wake up the public, and first, the first responders.”

With so many local agencies around the country being asked to help catch terrorists, it often falls to sheriffs or state troopers to try to understand the world of terrorism. They aren’t FBI agents, who have years of on-the-job and classroom training…

Amazingly, the Center for Security Policy, a neoconservative think tank, is also being listened to by the U.S. homeland security apparatus:

A book expanding on what Shoebat and Montijo believe has just been published by the Center for Security Policy, a Washington-based neoconservative think tank. “Shariah: The Threat to America” describes what its authors call a “stealth jihad” that must be thwarted before it’s too late.

The book’s co-authors include such notables as former CIA director R. James Woolsey and former deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, along with the center’s director, a longtime activist. They write that most mosques in the United States already have been radicalized, that most Muslim social organizations are fronts for violent jihadists and that Muslims who practice sharia law seek to impose it in this country.

Frank Gaffney Jr., director of the center, said his team has spoken widely, including to many law enforcement forums.

“Members of our team have been involved in training programs for several years now, many of which have been focused on local law enforcement intelligence, homeland security, state police, National Guard units and the like,” Gaffney said. “We’re seeing a considerable ramping-up of interest in getting this kind of training.”

The fact that Gaffney speaks with law enforcement on how to combat “terrorism” is disturbing.  Matt Duss of Think Progress explains that Gaffney is a person who thinks that “Obama is a Muslim, question[s] whether Obama is an American citizen, [and] believe[s] that the U.S. Missile Defense Agency’s new logo is a sign of the president’s ‘submission to sharia.’”  Gaffney is not an expert on Islam.  In fact, Gaffney did not consult a single Islamic scholar on his “report” on shariah law, and only started studying the religion three years ago.

What’s more, as I explained here, the Center for Security Policy’s general counsel is David Yerushalmi, an advocate for criminalizing Islam and who once wrote that “blacks [are]…the most murderous of peoples.”

Another recent instance of the U.S. government promoting Islamophobia was the arrest of Mohamed Osman Mohamud in Oregon, which in reality was, as Glenn Greenwald put it, the FBI successfully thwarting its own plot.

The next day, this happened:

U.S. investigators said a fire at an Islamic center in Oregon on Sunday was arson and warned they would tolerate no retribution for an attempt by a Somali-born teenager to detonate what he thought was a car bomb.

Pledge of Allegiance Resources: Information, History, Arguments on Under God

_{Image Source: Andersen Ross/Getty Images}

The Pledge of Allegiance has been recited by tens of millions of school children over the years and is familiar to most Americans — but was the 1950s addition of the phrase “under God” an unconstitutional violation of the separation of church and state? Atheists and some theists argue that it is and, moreover, that it’s fundamentally immoral because it tells people that there is an inherent, officially supported connection between American patriotism and belief in a particular sort of god. This religious nationalism is connected to violence, hostility, and distrust towards both atheists and minority dissenters.

Click link below for resources:-

Pledge of Allegiance Resources: Information, History, Arguments on Under God

Texas Tea Baggers Push for Judenfrei Republican Leadership

About Atheism has some interesting and insightful comments on the Tea Bagger loonies:-

It would be difficult to understate just how bigoted America’s Tea Bagger movement really is. It’s unlikely that many are consciously bigots, like members of the KKK, but they do subscribe to an extreme form of tribalism in which white, Protestant Christians are the only “true” Americans.

The extremes to which this can be taken are evident in Texas where State Rep. Joe Straus should have the votes to become Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, but a coalition of Tea Baggers is fighting him — and one of their key arguments is that he’s a Jew. The anti-Semitism of their anti-Straus campaign is evident to everyone but them — they seem to believe that they are immune to anti-Semitism because they are Christians guided by God.

– “Straus is going down in Jesus’ name,” said one e-mail, whose origins were unclear.

– Straus “clearly lacks the moral compass to be speaker,” said another, written by Southeast Texas conservative activist Peter Morrison. A Morrison e-mail said that Straus’ rabbi sits on a Planned Parenthood board and then pointed out that Straus’ opponents in the Speaker’s race “are Christians and true conservatives.” Morrison is a contributor to the white supremacy website VDARE.

– The Tea Party-backed groups are now running anti-Straus robo-calls and e-mails demanding a “true Christian speaker,” reports News 8 Austin.

– The Quorum Report, an online newsletter, reported extensively late Monday on e-mails that mentioned Straus’ Judaism, his rabbi and the Christian faith of his House critics, who include Rep. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola.

– Patrick Brendel reported that David Barton, leader of the group WallBuilders, has helped organize much of the anti-Straus campaign. Barton is a frequent contributor to the Glenn Beck program.

– Kaufman County Tea Party Chairman Ray Myers sent an e-mail last week praising a Straus opponent as “a Christian Conservative who decided not to be pushed around by the Joe Straus thugs.”

Source: Think Progress

It’s important to recognize that these aren’t just some fringe Tea Baggers at work here. All of these groups have operated alongside other conservative groups without a problem for a while now. They are accepted as being as “mainstream” as a group can get in conservative circles today. What this means is that this anti-Semitism, bigotry, and extreme tribalism are also accepted as “mainstream” among conservatives and Republicans today. Indeed, they are arguably what is driving modern American conservatism.

Myers, Morrison, and others have signed letters and worked in conjunction with major right-wing and Republican groups, like Americans for Prosperity. Americans for Prosperity, funded and financed by billionaires David and Charles Koch, is one of the most prominent conservative organizations in the country. Its leader, Tim Phillips, ran a similarly anti-Semitic campaign before being asked by David Koch to manage Americans for Prosperity.

That anti-Semitic campaign was, interestingly enough, against Eric Cantor in 2000. Today Eric Cantor is one of the leaders of the Republican Party — and he hasn’t wasted a second of his precious time condemning or even mildly objecting to the anti-Semitic tribalism or Christian Nationalism of his political cronies. He doesn’t have enough self-respect to complain when it’s directed at him, much less enough respect for others to stand up for them — not even when they are conservative Republicans.

This is the true heart of the American Tea Bagger. Gaze upon it well, for sooner or later it will direct its hatred in your direction. This sort of tribalism always seeks out new targets to attack, until there is nothing left but to turn in on itself and become self-destructive.