August/September 2009

[NOTE: This editorial essay constitutes the entire August-September edition]

 

THE OBAMA TRANSITION

THE EDITOR

– Part II –

Crisis and Opportunity

“You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste, it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid. ”

RAHM EMANUEL

We discovered in Part I that Barack Obama is a deceitful self-server, sponsored by and beholden to the labyrinthine Socialist International. An ambitious mediocrity devoid of political experience and achievement, he is not what he purports to be. Indeed the very work which established the Obama legend and propelled him to power, his 1995 autobiography Dreams From My Father, is not what it seems.Hailed by Time magazine as “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician” - and soon to be embroidered by Hollywood - it is in fact a myth-making sham.

Apart from the 1995 memoir, reveals Jack Cashill, Obama has rarely put pen to paper throughout his entire life, save for the “unexceptional and clearly ghost written” Audacity of Hope in 2006. Cashill unearthed three early essays, however, which feature dull, leaden prose with not “a single phrase that is clever, concise, or even vaguely memorable.” In some appalling sentences, “the punctuation and word selection are as random as the grammar.” An authority on literary fraud, he concluded that Barack did not have the ability to pen the autobiography which was “much too well written. I had seen enough of Obama’s interviews to know that he did not speak with anywhere near the verbal sophistication on display in Dreams.”

In typically furtive fashion, Obama chose to conceal the identity of his collaborator. “To admit that he needed a collaborator,” says Cashill, “would have undercut his campaign for president and to reveal the name of that collaborator would have ended it.” Further forensic study by Cashill revealed this person to be none other than his Marxist ally Bill Ayers. An unrepentant terrorist who bombed government buildings in the 70s, Ayers had the means, motive and ability to help Obama pen the book.

“Dreams was published in June 1995,” explains Cashill. “That same year, Ayers was busy fueling the ambitions of his young protégé, first with an appointment to the chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant and later with a fundraiser in his Chicago home. ... He thought he was launching a mayor that he could exploit, even control, not a president, who would move quickly beyond his grasp.”

Cashill demonstrates that the language, style and content of Ayers’ own very well written 2001 memoir Fugitive Days is reflected precisely in much of Dreams. Among countless examples: “Both Ayers and Obama speak of ‘rage’ the way that Eskimos do of snow - in so many varieties, so often, that they feel the need to qualify it, here as ‘impressive rage,’ elsewhere in Dreams as ‘suppressed rage’ or ‘coil of rage,’ and in Fugitive Days as ‘justifiable rage,’ ‘uncontrollable rage,’ ‘blind rage...’.”

People, places, events and entire passages replicate themselves in the books to an impossible and embarrassing degree. But as Cashill points out, “For the literary left, the fact that Ayers helped Obama would be a less troubling revelation than that Obama needed help at all. They have built a foundational myth around his genius, a genius that can be located only in Dreams. ... There is thus a logic to the left’s willful blindness. Why the literary right has accepted this charade continues to baffle me.”

More baffling still is the Constitutional charade: claims that he is not even eligible to hold the presidential office!

Although he says he was born in Hawaii, it is widely believed he was born in Kenya. Yet he still refuses to furnish his birth certificate as proof that he fulfils the Constitutional requirement of being a natural born citizen. This is pretty basic stuff and not much to ask. When John McCain was questioned about it, he showed his birth certificate without hesitation. When Barack Obama was asked by courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, he hid behind the right to privacy. A study by the United States Justice Foundation estimates that in the past year Obama has paid eleven law firms in 12 states upwards of $950,000 in campaign funds for legal resources to block disclosure of any of his personal records.

This alarming reticence has provoked at least 18 lawsuits brought by citizens demanding proof of Obama’s citizenship or qualification to serve as president. Initially dismissed as a ridiculous stunt by cranky right-wingers, this righteous campaign to defend the Constitution has gathered force and a smoking gun arrived on 26 May with the release of Obama’s college transcripts.

Provided by Occidental College in compliance with a court order in a suit brought by Americans for Freedom of Information in the Superior Court of California, the transcript indicates that Obama, under the name Barry Soetoro, applied for and was awarded a Fullbright Scholarship as a foreign student from Indonesia. To qualify for the scholarship a student must claim foreign citizenship.

Even the Obama-worshipping mainstream media were forced to recognise the significance of this revelation. “Along with the evidence that he was first born in Kenya and there is no record of him ever applying for US citizenship, this is looking pretty grim,” the Associated Press finally admitted. “The news has created a firestorm at the White House as the release casts increasing doubt about Obama’s legitimacy and qualification to serve as president.”

Regardless of the final outcome (and Hawaii State officials insist they have seen, though will not produce, original birth records verifying Obama is a “natural born citizen”) the very existence of this campaign, reflecting the concerns of millions of American citizens, is further testimony to the fears and upheaval provoked by Barack Obama, the self-styled man of peace described by Cardinal Stafford as “apocalyptic.” Yet as we also established in Part I, while he is an agent par excellence of the culture of death he is neither the Antichrist nor the False Prophet who precedes him but, rather, a bona fide “shadow” of Antichrist. His vexed relationship with the Jews confirms that assessment.

Rude awakening

The Fathers of the Church agree that the Jews will be the first people to accept the Antichrist as the Messiah, since he will offer them the earthly kingdom they crave but which Jesus denied them. Far from such hero worship, however, the seventy-eight per cent of Jewish voters who cast their ballot for Mr Obama are already confounded and worried by him.

Following Obama’s speech to a Muslim audience in Cairo in early June, his second effort to re-define America’s posture toward the Arab world, the president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Malcolm Hoenlein, confided to Newsmax that “There’s a lot of questioning going on about what he really believes and what does he really stand for.” This umbrella group comprises the usual clique purporting to represent the Jewish people (Anti-Defamation League, B’nai B’rith, American Jewish Congress, et. al.). Bully boys used to getting their way, who scream down and smear opposition, using their inexhaustible wealth to legally crush anyone who objects to their atheistic agenda, it is tempting to revel in their panic as the man they presumed to have bought and paid for like so many presidential predecessors sells them out. Yet for once their concern is instructive.

Most upset by Obama’s indirect comparison of Hitler’s genocide of the Jews to the Palestinian struggle and his avoidance of crucial historical facts about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they also took exception to his claim that America has seven million Muslims, a figure Jewish propagandist Hoenlein says “Arab propagandists have put out. In fact, they say only six million, when in fact there’s no study that shows even half of that.”

Correct. In 2007, the Pew Research Center estimated the Muslim American population at 2.35 million. Confirming his flimsy relationship with the truth, Obama casually tripled the Muslim population of his country. Thus, Jewish leaders “are expressing concern about what was said [in Cairo],” says Hoenlein. “I’ve heard it from some of his strongest supporters. ... Even people close to him have said to us that there were parts of the speech that bothered them.”

Actually, he might have said some perfectly good things. It is what he didn’t say about Iran and the Carteresque weakness that flags to the terrorist mind which might be perceived as more worrying. For starters, his dangerously naive idea that diplomatic dialogue with an incorrigible, self-declared international menace like Iran (which has been at war with America for 30 years and is still killing Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan) does no favours to its long-suffering populace, which needed presidential appeals for freedom and Western solidarity to sustain and deepen its public protests. Instead, lamented foreign policy expert and author Michael Ledeen, Obama “hasn’t done anything to help the Iranian people. He’s been dragged kicking and screaming to the point where he’s finally condemned the repression, but that’s it.”

Not such a brilliant strategy, given the looming prospect of a nuclear device in the hands of hothead Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Largely detested by his own people, the majority of whom were born after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Ahmadinejad is a puppet of the Shia Mullahs. In 2005, he vowed to fulfil the Ayatollah Khomeini’s dream that the “occupying regime (Israel) must be wiped off the map.”

Hoenlein, then, is not only speaking for the Jews when he says “People are genuinely very concerned...about President Obama.” The Sunni Muslim states surrounding Iran and European countries within potential firing range are just as anxious. After all, last May, flaunting their rapid progress, Iran test-fired a 1,200-mile, solid-fuel missile capable of reaching most of the Middle East.

Everyone, in other words, will suffer more or less for the election of such a slippery, two-faced dilettante to the most powerful post on earth. A man who, as we saw last month, was not only raised and trained by dedicated Marxists but for twenty years happily absorbed the anti-American (and anti-Israeli) rants of his spiritual advisor Jeremiah Wright (before abruptly cutting him off when news of the scandalous relationship finally broke). Neither honourable nor substantial, even were it advisable to do so he could never accept Ahmadinejad’s taunting requests for a public debate about “the origin of global problems” - let alone national ones - because he does not possess the wherewithal. Amorphous “goals” and “visions” trip off his forked tongue. But to offer anything more than embellishments of the puerile slogans he parroted from cue cards throughout his election campaign is simply beyond him.

Hence his taking an economic recession (left behind by President Bush but also fuelled by his own complicity) and rapidly morphing it into a depression: turning the $1 trillion deficit he inherited into a $2 trillion deficit overnight by passing what has been described as “the largest discretionary spending bill in the history of the world;” looking to triple the national debt over ten years to almost $10 trillion; forcing the Federal Reserve to start buying U.S. debt (an inflation of the currency) due to his massive spending programmes; all of which is undermining investor confidence in the U.S., weakening the dollar, pushing up interest rates and further crippling economic activity as unemployment skyrockets. For good measure, to fund his national healthcare takeover, costed by the Congressional Budget Office at up to $1.6 trillion but certain to blow out to unsustainable European proportions, he will be looking initially to raise around $600 billion in new taxes.

“Spends too much, taxes too much, and borrows too much,” declared Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, summing up Obamanomics and the Democratic Socialist purview (variously expressed as: “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good”- Hillary Clinton; “Our problem today is too little government” - Congressman Barney Frank; “It’s compassionate to spend money, even if there is not money there to spend and even if you’re heaping debt on the next generation” - Lisa Myers, NBC).

Moreover, serial liar Barack has pursued this ruinous path through a raft of broken pledges. “What happened to the promise that we’re going to let the American people see what’s in the [1,100 page stimulus] bill for 48 hours?” asked Republican John Boehner as he dropped the stack of papers to the floor of the House.

The lies and recklessness are fostered, in turn, by political paybacks to the shadowy forces who gave him victory. As outlined in Part I, these include the Association of Community Organization for Reform Now [ACORN] which although the target of at least 14 lawsuits and involved in crimes ranging from voter fraud to a mob-style “protection racket” is being protected from attempts to bar it from receiving massive taxpayer funds.

A former ACORN partisan who finally saw the light and bucked his party leaders by calling for hearings on accusations against the group, Democratic House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. alluded to corruption, cronyism, cover-up and a total lack of transparency - the “old politics” Obama vowed to “change” - when he suddenly dropped his plan to investigate, telling the Washington Times as he left the House chamber on 24 June: “[the] powers that be decided against it.” In fact, Democratic “powers” bristle at the prospect of hearings because it threatens to light the touch-paper leading to explosive financial ties and close cooperation between President Obama’s campaign and ACORN and its sister organizations.

Deadly makeover

Despite the murky double-dealing, the larceny passed off as a fiscal stimulus and even his ardent backers now a little queasy over the liability they have unleashed, Obama’s national approval rating remains high, albeit steadily diminishing. This is largely due to the protection afforded him by the mainstream media, whose outpourings remain one long Obama infomercial.

Emblematic of the idolisation blocking any semblance of fair and rational public debate is MSNBC talk show host Chris Matthews, who has both wept over an Obama speech (“I felt this thrill going up my leg”) and compared him to Jesus even while recognising the catastrophic potential of his presidency. “We have to question the numbers, the amount of money that’s been printed and the size of the deficits and the addition to the debt,” he admitted. “These are huge numbers. ... It’s scary.” Yet in the end the “thrill” trumps even national bankruptcy for Matthews because “When he talked about [my country], I was inspired.”

Representative of this slavering support for the new president’s big government agenda was a 24 June prime-time ABC television special beamed from the White House. Presented as a town hall-like discussion of Obama’s healthcare policy (a central plank of his presidency) it flatly denied a voice to serious critics of the plan while screening both audience participants and their questions. This outcome was anticipated just prior to the broadcast by two reports which quantified the network’s staggering bias.

The Washington Times revealed that ABC employees gave 80 times as much money to Mr. Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign than to his rival John McCain ($124,421 as against $1,550). Just as predictably, a Business & Media Institute [BMI] study found that since Inauguration Day, ABC has aired news stories with positive reviews of Obama’s health plan 55 times, compared with 18 highlighting negative reviews. Citing Census Bureau figures, the BMI analyses also accused ABC of “exaggerating the breadth of the uninsured problem,” saying the network’s claim that up to 50 million Americans are uninsured is false. (It is less than half that figure and Obama’s plan would not insure even half of those).

It is indeed a manufactured “crisis.” A recent liberal poll jointly conducted by ABC itself revealed that 89 per cent of Americans are satisfied with their healthcare (bearing in mind the legal requirement for hospitals to treat anyone who walks into an American emergency ward, including illegal immigrants, and the fact that the U.S. government already spends 17 percent of its budget - over $2.6 trillion a year - on healthcare). Figures, facts and polls unhelpful to the push for socialised medicine have been waved away or suppressed, including positive comparisons of American healthcare vis-à-vis the many dangerously dysfunctional nationalised systems now at breaking-point.

Seeking to avoid embroiling the whole country in a UK-style “bureaucratic-led, government-run, red-tape-ridden system” and the massive tax increases it will entail to fund, former Republican House Speaker (and recent Catholic convert) Newt Gingrich says that “while there are many things we should do to improve the American system, going to a government bureaucratic model is not one of them. It’s much better to give people the ability, through tax credits, through vouchers, and through tax deductions, to buy health insurance, but to have a competitive market with many different choices so you are in control of your healthcare. ... it’s possible to put together a coalition of common sense, practical people who want to get to a bipartisan solution.”

The president, however, has ignored a bipartisan Senate health care bill that would create state-based purchasing pools where Americans would enrol in a private insurance plan. This disinterest in profitable bipartisanship, which he repeatedly promised on the campaign trail, betrays once more the mendacious ideologue behind the cool exterior; a man in ruthless pursuit of power and control.

Also true to ideological form, Mr Obama has not even read his own healthcare reform legislation, admitting to left-leaning bloggers during a recent conference call that he was “not familiar” with key provisions. Obviously, since his public guarantees that people retain their choice of doctor and private health plans fly in the face of his bill which effectively abolishes such choice within 5 years, forcing everyone on to a government-run plan, to pay more for less care. As a result, nearly 100 million could be forced to change plans if his bill is passed. And the elderly, the group with the greatest access to free medical care in America, will suffer the most - apart, that is, from babes in utero. And there’s the deadly rub of this Socialist makeover being forced on a wholly reluctant American populace.

Congressman Chris Smith has called the 1,018-page healthcare monstrosity the “greatest threat to the unborn since Roe v. Wade.” Life-saving amendments to Obama’s bill have been offered by Republicans only to be rejected by the Democrats. One amendment would have explicitly excluded abortion from the minimum benefits and mandates provided for in the bill; another would have prevented taxpayers from being forced to subsidize abortions. Both failed, testifying to the truth of claims that Obama’s health care overhaul is one big abortion industry bailout.

Planned Parenthood’s Guttmacher Institute recently gloated that if abortion is taxpayer funded, abortions would rise by at least 30 percent. The Medicaid program from 1973-1976 funded as many as 300,000 abortions per year until the Hyde amendment was enacted to stop it. This is the homicidal truth behind Mr Obama’s boast of wanting to reduce “the need for abortion”: empty rhetoric which has bewitched the Vatican, as we shall see.

Reinvigorated Left

While Big Media continues to smooth his way by trashing objectivity and shutting down critical discussion, Obama is reinvigorating his extreme Left constituency. Typical of this ominous liberal awakening is the “8:45 call,” a private conference call hosted each morning by two liberal Washington organizations - Progressive Media (a project of the Center for American Progress - CAP) and the Media Matters Action Fund - in which more than 20 labour, environmental and other Democratic-leaning groups (but no White House officials) take part. In a story headlined “The new left-wing conspiracy”, Politico.com says the “call” marks “a new level in coordination by the White House’s allies.” John Podesta, CAP President and former White House Chief of Staff, views it as “a coordinated echo chamber on the outside backing up” the Democrats which was lacking during the Clinton years. “There’s a real interest on the progressive side for groups to want to coordinate with each other and leverage each other’s work in a way I haven’t ever seen before.”

At the United Nations headquarters in New York, Austin Ruse of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute [C-FAM] is watching this reinvigorated Left move with startling speed to reverse the pro-life orientation of the Bush years. “Obama’s administration is gearing up to make a frightening new global attack on the unborn child,” warned Ruse in his Fax report of 14 April. “The Friday Fax staff was there just two weeks ago when the Obama administration made its UN debut by supporting language that has been used by UN agencies, UN committees, radical lawyers and judges to impose abortion on reluctant countries. Friday Fax staff watched in horror as the previous pro-life positions of the US were overturned in an instant by radical feminists representing the new Obama administration. The US will now join the UN bureaucracy, Canada and the European Union as the most aggressive promoters of abortion all over the world. This new pro-abortion coalition will actively seek to impose abortion on all the countries of Latin America, Africa, the Far East and even on the few remaining pro-life countries in Europe.”

Ruse explained that not only has Susan Rice, Obama’s UN Ambassador, pledged that the Obama administration will ratify the truly frightening UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (the CEDAW committee having already directed 93 countries to make abortion legal), but in the space of his first few months alone, Obama: “restored US funding for the UN Population Fund, the UN’s population control agency that helped set up and run the Chinese forced abortion program; overturned the US ban on funding International Planned Parenthood Federation and the Center for Reproductive Rights, aggressive pro-abortion and anti-family groups that are deeply involved in forcing abortion on unwilling people all over the world, especially in Latin America; [and] Obama’s negotiators at the UN have already made aggressive pro-abortion and anti-family statements at the UN including signing a French declaration that seeks to make homosexuals a specially protected class at the expense of religious freedom.”

Insulting comparison

Mr Obama rationalises this wickedness, and all the criminal self-interest detailed in Part I, through a DIY ‘spirituality’ - presented as “Christianity” despite bearing no doctrinal or moral relation whatsoever to the real thing. In this way he manipulates America’s Christian heritage for his own ends, holding himself up as a God-fearing latter-day Abraham Lincoln, whose bible he used to be sworn in and whose train journey from Philadelphia to Washington for the 1861 inauguration he replicated.

Commentators have warmed to this theme of allegedly “obvious parallels” between Lincoln and Obama: “both makers of superb speeches; both calmly facing crises of the largest scale,” eulogised one. Yet dispassionate comparison reveals that even on a purely political level there could hardly be a greater difference between honest Abe and the devious Barack.

Like all politicians, Lincoln made mistakes, changed direction and brought incompetent men into his government. Nonetheless, his famous bipartisan approach and the forgiveness and reconciliation which marked his dealings with the defeated South after the War is clearly way beyond Obama, given his wildly partisan and provocative actions and appointments. Moreover, Lincoln drafted his own speeches, unlike Obama who has a 26-year-old penning his overblown and vastly overrated efforts, strewn with sentimental platitudes, advertising jargon and plagiarized soundbites. Listing the numerous speakers and writers whose words Obama has directly “borrowed,” Andrew Ferguson, senior editor of The Weekly Standard, notes in relation to his speechifying: “Obama has had the unbelievable luck to attract listeners who seem to think he’s minted it fresh.”

Florian Gussgen, a columnist for Germany’s Stern magazine, was not one of them. Commenting on the Hollywood-staged Obama event in Berlin during his pre-election ‘tour,’ Gussgen wrote: “The man is perfect, impeccable, slick. Almost too slick … Obama’s speech was often vague, sometimes banal and more reminiscent of John Lennon’s feel good song ‘Imagine’ than of a foreign policy agenda.”

Slipperiness sans substance, not gushing propaganda about “perfectly crafted sentences,” is the oratorical reality. In fact, whereas the 16th president of the Union delivered the most important address in American history in less than 200 hundred words - the Gettysburg Address which he scribbled on the back of a used envelope - the 44th president delivers lengthy orations, going on and on until eyes glaze over and minds shut down. The Blairite insincerity doesn’t help. His tortured response to Ted Kennedy’s collapse during the inaugural lunch was typical. Instead of simply voicing his regret at the news and wishing Mr Kennedy a speedy recovery, he said: “And so I would be lying to you if I did not say that right now part of me is with him.” As a more sober critic observed about this hollow grandiloquence: “Despite losing part of himself to the Senator, the President attended ten balls with his wife.”

These kinds of workaday differences expose the gulf between Lincoln the statesman and Obama the front man. But on the more crucial matter of religious conviction, the distance between the two is not so much a gap as an unbridgeable chasm.

Seeking to emulate Lincoln, Obama reaches into the Bible for his material at every opportunity, as throughout his inaugural address and again in April, during an impassioned sales pitch to boost confidence for his fiscal spendathon. He compared the U.S. economic system he inherited to the man who built his house on a foundation of sand, declaring that his new economy will instead be like the strong house built by the man who used a foundation of stone, “Proud, sturdy, and unwavering in the face of the greatest storm.”

Far from shoring up his politics, however, this very passage  from Matthew [7: 21-29] rebukes the president himself! The sturdy house built on stone represents “Everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them.” Barack Obama, on the contrary, embodies the “fool” who “listens to these words of mine but does not act on them”, thus building his house (his economy) “on sand.”

So in terms of architectural scriptural analogies, it is “whited sepulchre” which springs to mind whenever Barack reaches for the Good Book, playing to the crowd and mouthing sacred texts for effect. Abe, on the other hand, took Holy Writ seriously and lived accordingly. Unlike Mr Obama, for instance, he not only spoke of the need for humility but also practiced it, his legitimate political ambition notwithstanding. Perhaps this is because his view of God the Father was infinitely closer to a Christian understanding than Obama’s.

Admittedly, like Reagan, Lincoln was not a member of a Christian denomination, yet he did believe that faith informing a free Republic leading to American “exceptionalism” came from the will of God. He introduced “Thanksgiving” on the last Thursday in November precisely as a prayerful giving of thanks to the Creator for blessings rained upon America. He would have been horrified by the sidelining of God in private and public life (like covering up the “IHS” and cross above the dais at the Jesuit-run Georgetown University when Obama spoke there last April). His speeches continually referred to the Almighty (viewed as some kind of supreme being) and prayer, with fourteen references to God and two biblical quotes in his second inaugural address. His favourite verse was Proverbs 29:18: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” That vision is necessarily God’s vision, which is why he saw the Founding Fathers reference to “inalienable rights” endowed to all men by the Creator.

How far from Lincoln and that declaration is Obama’s pitiless “vision” which sees the innocent “perish” en masse! To paraphrase Bishop Robert Vasa of Oregon: those who back abortion and infanticide but say they love God are liars. Period.

Perverting scripture, faith and morals

The absurd and insulting comparison of a virtuous, self-educated political giant with a self-serving Ivy Leaguer on the make did not stop Obama pushing his faux-Lincoln credentials to the limit as he wooed the Evangelical vote. Many Protestants (and as it turned out even more Catholics) were fooled by the slick marketing which saw his spurious “faith” promoted via thousands of “American Values House Parties,” where participants discussed Obama and religion, and through a presence on Christian radio and blogs. In The Faith of Barack Obama, pro-life author Stephen Mansfield is suckered into describing Obama as “unapologetically Christian and unapologetically liberal” (as if the former were compatible with the latter). Even while noting Mr Obama’s pagan belief that other religions provide ‘paths’ to a ‘higher power’ and his heretical doubts about an afterlife, Mansfield gushes that “Obama’s faith infuses his public policy, so that his faith is not just limited to the personal realms of his life, it also informs his leadership.”

Fortunately, as Protestant Joel McDurmon demonstrated in our November 2008 edition, not all Evangelicals were fooled. Dr James Dobson, the highly respected and powerful Evangelical leader who recently stepped down as chairman of Focus on the Family, was another who accused Obama of distorting both the Bible and the Constitution. Taking aim at examples Obama has cited in asking which Biblical passages should guide public policy - ancient dietary codes from Leviticus or the Sermon on the Mount - Dobson said: “I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology… He is dragging biblical understanding through the gutter.”

It is hard to argue with that assessment in light of Obama’s belief, expressed before a College audience in Nelsonville, Ohio, that Our Lord Himself condones his support for legal recognition of “same-sex unions” (which, he has written elsewhere, he is open to states codifying as “a domestic partnership, a civil union, or a civil marriage”). “If people find that controversial,” he said, “then I would just refer them to the Sermon on the Mount, which I think is, in my mind, for my faith, more central than an obscure passage in Romans.”

Presumably he was alluding to the famous and famously abused line: “Do not judge, or you too will be judged.” But unfortunately for Barack the Sermon in the Gospel of Matthew includes not only the Beatitudes but also very judgemental elements: to wit, an endorsement of scriptural moral commandments (“anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven”) and condemnations of murder, divorce and adultery. It also includes a warning which forewarns the rise of Barack himself: “Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves”!

And as for the “obscure passage in Romans” he denigrates, it rather inconveniently condemns homosexual acts as unnatural and sinful, committed by people who knew God but turned against him and paid the price in disease and death: “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator - who is forever praised. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.”

All in all, not the most convincing set of Scriptural passages to set forth in support of legalising sodomitical “unions” of any type. But this is what happens when your theological adviser is the so-called “Reverend” Jeremiah Wright: you end up with a knowledge of Scripture on a par with 2004 Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, who told an interviewer that his favourite part of the New Testament was the Book of Job.

Undeterred by his all too willing ignorance of Holy Writ and oblivious to the cost of usurping divine and natural law, Obama has pressed ahead with his apocalyptic plan to obliterate Christian marriage as the foundation of civilized society. “Unfortunately, my Administration is not authorized by existing Federal law to provide same-sex couples with the full range of benefits enjoyed by heterosexual married couples,” he said in June. “That’s why I stand by my long-standing commitment to work with Congress to repeal the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). It’s discriminatory, it interferes with States’ rights, and it’s time we overturned it.” Passed by Congress in 1996, DOMA prohibits federal recognition of same-sex “marriages” and also allows a state to ignore such “marriages” performed outside its borders. Concurrently, zealous Obama has directed the Census Bureau to do whatever it takes to collect specific same-sex “marriage” data rather than categorise those involved as merely unmarried partners as had been planned for the 2010 census.

Dr Dobson reserved some of his harshest criticism for Obama’s argument that the religiously motivated must frame debates over these issues and especially abortion not just in their own religion’s terms but in arguments accessible to all people. The pro-abort Obama, he said, is trying to govern by the “lowest common denominator of morality,” labelling it “a fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution” and asking: “Am I required in a democracy to conform my efforts in the political arena to his bloody notion of what is right with regard to the lives of tiny babies? What he’s trying to say here is unless everybody agrees, we have no right to fight for what we believe.”

Divide and conquer

Dobson’s pithy assessment also cuts to the core of Obama’s attempt to divide and conquer pro-lifers and bamboozle an increasingly clueless Rome.

On 17 May, for example, taking time out from his breathless anti-life agenda, he stopped off at the University of Notre Dame to receive an honorary degree and appeal disingenuously to a common desire to reduce the number of abortions. Misreading the stubborn ideologue from afar and untroubled by nationwide protests against the scandalous visit, including objections by over 80 bishops and the refusal of former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, Mary Ann Glendon, to accept a university award due to Obama’s presence, the Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano immediately took the bait. “Obama is not a pro-choice president,” declared the editor in futile diplomatic outreach to a man who has announced his “irreducible difference [with the Pope] on the abortion issue.”

The former theologian of the papal household under John Paul II, Father George Cottier also took the practiced deception at face value. Lauding his “humble realism” and the “positive indications” in his Notre Dame address of a desire to find common ground on abortion, Fr Cottier did not see a liar but, incredibly, a president seeking after truth in a pluralistic society. The 87-year-old Swiss priest also believes that Obama’s citing of the Sermon on the Mount during his 4 June Cairo speech is a sign that he perceives “its positive reflection and its inspiration for public life” - despite his citing the same Sermon to justify sodomitical “marriage”!

Locally, too, in a divided and largely aimless U.S. Church, the Alinskyite strategy is working a treat.

Take the two Catholic pro-lifers at loggerheads during a National Press Club debate on 28 May. On one side, Professor of Law Douglas Kmiec, an Obama supporter, duly accepted the president’s worthless promise to fund abortion alternatives, and urged support of the Obama White House to address the common good as a prudent step for Catholics. On the other, Professor of Jurisprudence Robert George challenged Kmiec (and the Vatican) with the bleeding obvious: pointing out that Obama’s administration had rejected all the key policy proposals for discouraging abortion i.e. banning partial birth and sex-selection abortions, ending second and third trimester abortions and enacting waiting periods, informed consent and parental consent laws.

Enmity

As he toys with faith, scripture, pro-lifers and the Vatican in this way, Obama clearly bedazzles the shameful likes of Doug Kmiec, who genuflect blindly before him. The Antichrist, of course, will go on to actually proclaim himself to be God. But while many have deified Barack (including priests in Canton, Massachusetts, who during Mass have compared him favourably to Jesus) the man himself is content to accept the genuflections while simply mouthing platitudes about the Almighty - after the fashion of his new best friend and baby-killing comrade, Tony Blair.

During an address to the annual National Prayer Breakfast on 5 February, where predictably he became the first ‘world leader’ to shake hands with the President, Mr Blair managed to mention God no less than 31 times. Not bad for a politician whose Downing Street administration professed not to “do God”! Nowadays, as he milks the God-fearing US cash cow and lines his pockets to the tune of millions of dollars each year (to add to the £15 million he has amassed since leaving office), he suddenly can’t stop spouting the “G” word. “In surrendering to God we become instruments of his love,” he declared before going on (and on) about “the unconditional nature of God’s love,” “the guardianship of faith in God,” “religious faith… as the guide to our world and its future.”

For his part, the President hailed Mr Blair as an example for everyone “of what dedicated leadership can accomplish.” [urgent memo to self: send President “Comic” O’Blair expose!] He also spoke of the role of faith in his own life. “There is no God who condones taking the life of an innocent human being,” he declared with barely a tell-tale smirk. Falsely asserting that all religions teach people to love and care for one another, the seasoned community organizer announced that this “common ground” will underlie his White House Office on Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, which will not favour any religious group but work with communities without “blurring the line” between “church and state.”

It seems, though, that his motivation for this Social Gospel - of feeding the hungry and housing the homeless while avoiding evangelisation - came not from Saul Alinsky but his mother: “I had a father who was born a Muslim but became an atheist, grandparents who were non-practicing Methodists and Baptists, and a mother who was sceptical of organized religion, even as she was the kindest most spiritual person I’ve ever known.”

To hear this caring, sharing, ecumenical lovefest, it might have been the Lord of the World’s Master Mason Julian Felsenburgh speaking alongside the Grand Inquisitor, the son of perdition in Brothers Karamazov. Within the latter, writes Dostoevsky, “The sun of love burns in His heart,” reflected in his “gentle smile of infinite compassion” which stirs the hearts of the masses. But this apparently Christ-like love and compassion is not what it seems. Like Felsenburgh, the Grand Inquisitor is really the enemy of mankind because he destroys freedom, just as the supposedly Christian President and ex-Prime Minister do with their death-dealing and coercive legislation which criminalises Christian faith and belief.

These two shadows of Antichrist sing from the same unholy hymn sheet as their fictional counterparts; veiling their flagrant hypocrisy with coded language. While Obama is crying out against “worn out dogmas” and for the tearing down of “the walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew,” Blair is simultaneously railing against “religion under attack from within… corroded by extremists who use their faith as a means of excluding the other.” Their target, of course, is not so much the Islamic fundamentalist as the Catholic dogmatist: that ideological rejecter of moral relativism and believer in absolute truth and the one true Church; that bigoted foe of “diversity” and “equality” who refuses to allow the killing of babes or their handing over to moral degenerates; that “extremist” fly-in-the-ointment who will not kowtow to the fascist anti-life, anti-family, anti-Catholic agenda of the Man of Sin.

Even more than those who do not believe in big government, it was surely this Catholic disturber of his false peace that Mr Obama had in mind when he spoke recently of his opposition to “ideology, small-mindedness, prejudice and bigotry.”

It is a recurring Democratic refrain. Back in 1997 Bill Clinton decried “The wrong kind of faith [which] leads to division and conflict. Prejudice and contempt cloaked in the presence of religion or political conviction are no different. These forces have nearly destroyed our nation in the past. We shall overcome them. We shall replace them with a generous spirit of a people that feel at home with one another.”

Since he shares Mr Obama’s “generous spirit” apropos partial-birth infanticide, and feels “at home” with sexual assault, serial adultery, fraud and perjury, Teflon Bill naturally viewed as prejudicial and contemptible those pesky Christians who would later judge and “nearly destroy” him (i.e. try but sadly fail to put him behind bars).

Intellectuals use the same presidential language rather more bluntly. “In the name of their faith, these moral retards are running around pointing fingers and doing real harm to others,” writes Brooklyn College sociologist Timothy Shortell. “They discriminate, exclude and belittle. They make a virtue of closed-mindedness and virulent ignorance. They are an ugly, violent lot…. preaching self-righteousness, paranoia and hatred. Christians claim that theirs is a faith based on love, but they’ll just as soon kill you.”

Though not yet foaming like the crazed Shortell, Obama’s fascistic vocabulary is sending shivers up Catholic spines.

Contempt

On the ground, it translates into direct attacks on the Church. Notably at the UN. “The United Nations is a mere tool of the reproductive choice fascists,” lamented Irish Medical News columnist Dr John Fleetwood recently. Those fascists are now Catholic-baiting Obama delegates and fellow-travellers. 

When the UN Commission on the Status of Women recently gathered to promote radical ideas on homosexual rights, abortion and sex education, the Church was repeatedly denounced for its strong pro-life stance and the Holy See’s alliance with other groups to influence UN texts on women’s rights. “At the Center for Reproductive Rights event on HIV positive women,” reports C-FAM, “one of the panelists from Chile took the opportunity to denigrate the Catholic Church for wielding its ‘power and influence’ to discourage the Chilean government from supporting widespread condom distribution. When one young pro-life advocate spoke on effectiveness of abstinence for HIV prevention, she was shouted down by the panelist.”

For all his talk about bringing unity and civility to government, Obama has encouraged such Catholic contempt with aggressive nominations. Like that of extreme pro-abortion pseudo-Catholic Kathleen Sebelius, Governor of Kansas, as his Secretary of Health and Human Resources. Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City has publicly rebuked Sebelius for her “30 year history of advocating and acting in support of legalized abortion.” This included throwing parties for partial-birth abortionist George Tiller, a man who killed 60,000 babies before being shot dead by a vigilante last June (not so much murdered as “terminated in his 203rd trimester,” observed the acerbic Anne Coulter). Accordingly, the Archbishop has insisted that Sebelius refrain from receiving Communion until she makes a worthy confession and publicly repudiates her pro-abortion stand.

A more divisive appointment and crude statement of intent by Obama would be hard to fashion. Although he made a decent attempt by subsequently choosing Harry Knox to sit on the advisory committee of his Faith-Based Initiative. A sodomite seeking “faith-based transgender education in 40 diverse congressional districts across the country,” just prior to his selection Knox had decried the Pope and some bishops as “discredited leaders” and labelled the Knights of Columbus as “foot soldiers of a discredited army of oppression” because of their opposition to same-sex “marriage” and the use of condoms in fighting AIDS.

And again, in early June, despite his call for “fair minded words” in debating differences on major ethical issues, he appointed Kevin Jennings as his Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Office of Safe & Drug Free Schools, a homosexual activist renowned for using foul and abusive language against those who oppose his agenda. Founder of the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN), Jennings “should have been drummed out of public policy years ago for GLSEN’s role in the awful Fistgate scandal that corrupted Boston youth” (with hard-core pornographic talk and presentations of homosexual acts), fumed Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth. Instead, he has been elevated “to one of the most important roles in US education policy.” A true mouthpiece for Obama’s own deep-seated anger and prejudice, Jennings says that members of the “religious right” are “hard core bigots” who comprise about 20 per cent of the electorate. In a filthy tirade he told an audience, “We have to quit being afraid of the religious right… F*** ‘em! … I don’t care what they think! Drop dead.”

Cynical verbiage is employed to paper over the animus: his 10 July meeting with the Pope eliciting presidential tributes to the Church - “a profound influence worldwide” -  and the Holy Father - “a thought leader and opinion leader on so many wide-ranging issues.” But make no mistake, these vicious appointments are the real measure of Barack Obama. Provocations compounded by his determination to up the ante on “hate” crime legislation while simultaneously outlawing the Catholic conscience of doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers, leaving them to choose between their livelihoods and the acceptance of sodomy, abortion and other immoral and murderous practices.

The very idea would have been abhorrent to his hero Lincoln, who, at a time of rampant prejudice against Catholics, spoke out for their rights! But the great man would not recognize his country today, where even the mention of Jesus is now regarded as a hostile act to be avoided.

A pernicious trend all too familiar to British readers.

Persecution

In the same week that a 24 February 2009 poll of 1,045 people carried out by ComRes for the BBC, in which two-thirds overall (and three-quarters of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs) supported Christianity as the guide for law and life in the UK, libraries were ordered by ministers to move the Holy Bible to the top shelf to avoid giving offence to Muslims. Nurse Caroline Petrie was recently suspended by the NHS for merely praying for a patient. And school receptionist Jennie Cain faced disciplinary action because she sent an email merely asking friends to pray for her daughter.

In the name of “diversity,” the British police have recently set up a Pagan Police Association which will allows more than 500 pagan officers to take days off on the eight pagan holidays of the year, including Halloween. “The force strives to provide a receptive environment for all its staff,” crowed a self-satisfied Hertfordshire Superintendent. Yet “diversity” does not extend to the Christians. Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn reports that pagans and Muslims are catered for and given time off for their festivals but “mere Catholics, Anglicans and Methodists can expect no such special consideration.” A Hertfordshire Catholic police constable informed him that after he took 45 minutes off to attend Mass on Ash Wednesday this year “he was subjected to disciplinary action and given a a formal oral warning. There have been stories of devout Christians being ordered to work on Christmas Day and over Easter while other religions are excused duty on their holy days. One rule for Eid and another for Easter.”

All the while: Labour fascists are intensifying their anti-Christian crusade through their grotesquely misnamed “Equality” laws which seek to force schools and hospitals to remove religious images and crucifixes should atheists complain; NHS trusts are inventing ever more reasons to prevent staff from wearing tiny crosses and crucifixes, citing highly improbable “infection” and “safety” risks; faithful Catholic adoption agencies are being forced to close rather than hand over children to sodomites and lesbians (prompting Tory MP Anne Widdecombe to suggest that “the powers will merely look the other way when Muslims set up an adoption agency and apply the same principles”); and schools (including the Catholic system, thanks to directives signed off by Archbishop Nichols) are pandering to Islam.

In addition, numerous Christian couples have been forced to resign as foster parents by local council adoption nazis for refusing to condone homosexuality. This reflects the anti-Christian hatred of the state-funded national adoption agency which sets rules and organises training for social workers across the country. Last May, in its official publications, the British Association for Adoption and Fostering attacked the millions of Christian opponents of homosexual adoption of children, branding them “retarded homophobes.” Patricia Morgan, who has published a scholarly study of homosexual adoption, responded: “It is disgraceful that they do not wish to discuss the pros and cons of gay adoption. They just go in for abuse. They do not appear interested in evidence about the outcomes for children.”

The only “outcome” of interest to the sodomite lobby, of course, is recruitment - the younger the better - without which their sterile milieu is doomed to extinction. Their recruitment bureau is the welfare state. In Scotland, the mother of a five-year-old boy and four-year-old girl adopted out to two sodomites despite her parents wanting to care for them, wept as she described being ordered by the social worker to say her last goodbyes during a trip to the Edinburgh zoo in August 2008. “My son grabbed me tightly on the leg and would not let me go. It was just absolutely devastating. I did not under any circumstances want my children to be placed with gay men. … My mum and dad were prepared to give them so much love, but social work snatched them away.” For two years the grandparents fought relentlessly for the right to custody but were opposed every step of the way by the “bully tactics” of Edinburgh’s social work department which, they claimed, effectively blackmailed them by telling them they would never see their grandchildren again unless they agreed to the sodomite adoption.

Similarly, last June, Brighton and Hove council sought to place a Catholic child who attends a Catholic school with two homosexuals who run a hotel, despite the mother wanting him placed with a heterosexual married couple in accordance with her faith. Only legal intervention has halted the placement and forced a review of the case (under the protective provisions of the 1989 Children Act).

“One wonders just how roughshod Brighton and Hove would dare to ride over a similar stipulation from a Muslim mother,” mused Anne Widdecombe, “but Christians don’t count.” She derided the Sexual Orientation Regulations brought in under the 2006 Equality Act to ban discrimination against homosexuals in the provision of goods and services: “It is a sign of the Britain we are in. If you do not subscribe to the prevailing orthodoxy you might as well be living in the Soviet Union.”

“You can’t express views that were common currency 30 or 40 years ago,” bemoaned BBC presenter Jeremy Vine last January. “Arguably the parameters of what you might call ‘right thinking’ are probably closing. Sadly, along with that has come the fact it’s almost socially unacceptable to say you believe in God. I’m trying to work out whether any part of the BBC Jeremy Vine is the Christian Jeremy Vine.” Clearly cowed by the situation and vacillating in time-honoured Anglican fashion, Vine added: “One of the things I think, which may sound bizarre, is that Christ is who he said he was. I don’t think I’d put that out on my show; I suppose there is a bit of a firewall between thinking that and doing the job I do.”

Which job would that be, Jeremy: licking BBC boots, or kissing the Lord’s cheek?

Mercifully, President Lincoln’s ‘progeny’ are made of sterner stuff than King Henry’s. When a new policy within the Virginia State Police took effect last summer, requiring generic prayers at departmental events, Rex Carter and five other volunteer chaplains promptly gave up their chaplaincies after being told they could not pray in the name of Jesus. Carter, who is still a State Police officer, said many people in society today simply do not want to be confronted with the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. “The cross reveals man at his worst. People don’t want to look in the mirror and say, ‘I’m just an old rotten sinner.’ When you preach a precept like that, that bothers people,” he said. “So what do we do? Well, let’s [quieten] people and let’s let the Christian crowd be quiet because we don’t want to hear that we serve a righteous and holy God, we don’t want to hear there’s judgment coming, we don’t want to hear that there was a man who died for my sins.” To underline the animosity, a State Senate panel later killed a bill which would have prohibited State Police officials from restricting prayers by volunteer chaplains in this way.

Teachers have also been fired and students expelled for mentioning God in the classroom or praying before sporting events. Judges have also been removed from the bench because they portrayed the Ten Commandments in the courtroom or in front of the courthouse. “The 9th Circuit Court agreed with one angry atheist that the two words ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance are unconstitutional and forbade schools in nine Western states to let kids say it as we all have since 1954,” veteran actor Pat Boone recently protested. “That odious verdict was reversed, but the battle goes on. The American Civil Liberties Union is intimidating cities, counties and states to remove all crosses and scriptures and Christian emblems from buildings everywhere in the country. While school boards and the NEA are falling all over themselves to teach grade school kids about sex, make condoms available to teens and mandate courses that validate homosexuality - all the while seeking to assure that nobody mentions Jesus or God, these same powerful folks make accommodations for Muslim students, providing prayer rooms and ‘time outs’ so they can practice their religion! More and more schools, bowing to pressure, are adding courses for American Christian kids to ‘learn more about Islam’.”

Even the U.S. military has declared war on Christ. Chaplain Gordon James Klingenschmitt was honourably but involuntarily discharged from the Navy after facing court-martial for praying “in Jesus name” in uniform. Chief of Chaplains Rear-Admiral Louis Iasiello had advised him in writing that “any chaplain’s continued insistence on ending public prayers ‘in Jesus’ name’…could reasonably tend to denigrate those with different forms of faith.” Klingenschmitt was subsequently vindicated by Congress in 2006.

Hellish legislation

A major part of the drive to eradicate Christianity from the public square, the blasphemous desire to blot out the name before which “every knee should bow” [Phil. 2:10] portends the coming storm.

“As a former Navy Chaplain who was punished (in writing, three times) for quoting the Bible in chapel during optionally-attended worship, I know exactly how they’ll come after us,” warns Klingenschmitt. “The enemies of religious liberty will simply declare certain gospel phrases ‘hateful’ and ‘offensive’ like my commanding officer who punished me for quoting John 3:36 in chapel, and was supported by government lawyers for ‘protecting’ easily offended listeners from the ‘offensive’ gospel of salvation through Jesus Christ. This year I’ve already been falsely accused of ‘inciting violence’ because I quoted verbatim from Psalm 109 in my public prayers, (for which secular activist Mikey Weinstein literally requested an FBI investigation against me!).”

Under President Obama this oppression is set to escalate, with global ramifications. Several months ago, Texas Republican Louie Gohmert, a former judge, warned that the “hate crimes” legislation reintroduced in the U.S. House could potentially lead to the arrest of Christian pastors who speak out against sexual immorality. Despite the existence of laws in all 50 states which already punish violent crime, the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act (H.R. 1913) would add “sexual orientation” to the list of categories covered under federal hate crime law (race, religion, class, gender or disability), defining “intimidation” so broadly that priests, ministers, rabbis, or imams could be charged with encouraging or inducing a “hate crime” if they preach against homosexuality. “Every preacher of the gospel, unless you cut out parts of it; every imam who mentions anything with regard to sexual immorality - they could be pursued, and in other countries they have been,” said Gohmert. “I was talking to a guy from Norway who was telling me that people are even afraid to say Mary was a virgin, because just bringing up sexuality at all can raise problems with law enforcement” [OneNewsNow, 13/4/09].

On 29 April, without a squeak from the U.S. Bishops conference (which did not even list the event on its webpage), the hellish H.R. 1913 subsequently passed the House of Representatives by a 249-175 margin. Since H.R. 1913 protects special groups from “hate” it effectively outlaws the thoughts of American citizens rather than their criminal actions, so that very soon their thoughts or opinions will be considered as much a factor as the nature of their acts in prosecuting a crime.

It gets even more devilish in the detail. The Democrat LGBT-friendly Judiciary Committee rejected every Republican amendment to this dangerous bill. This included specific rejection of an amendment to exclude paedophiles from being protected by the bill’s undefined term “sexual orientation” (which, as the bill currently stands, would include up to 547 deviant “sexual orientations” listed by the American Psychiatric Association, so that every sexual perversion imaginable, including such delights as sodomy, paedophilia, incest, bestiality and necrophilia, could claim protection under H.R. 1913). They also ensured that an additional sentence would be given to someone who assaults a homosexual - but not to a paedophile who molested a child.

On 16 July, despite massive Christian/conservative protests, the upper house version of H.R. 1913 (S. 909) passed the Senate 63-28 with five Republican senators joining virtually all of the Democrats in support. There was no floor debate and only a token Senate Committee hearing with witnesses stacked 4 to 2 against conservatives. It was rushed through with such unseemly haste to guarantee Obama’s final signature at the earliest possible moment.

The great pressure applied by the Christian protestors to liberal Senators facing imminent elections did pay off, however. As reported by Reverend Ted Pike: “Senator Sam Brownback submitted an amendment which would include in the hate bill the most specific statement (part of the “Religious Freedom Act,” passed in 1993 by Congress 97-3) that only speech that threatens imminent incitement of violence will be punishable under the hate bill. Speech that falls short of such actual incitement will be protected.” Passed overwhelmingly 78-13 as an amendment to a defense bill, it must first be reconciled with the House version before being sent to President Obama. Nonetheless, Pike claims approval of Brownback’s amendment as “a great victory. …. Most Senate Democrats were clearly eager to mollify, to some degree, the overwhelming anger at the hate bill from their constituents this week. Their House counterparts, under far less pressure eleven weeks ago, would never have made such a concession. Inclusion of Brownback’s amendment should help safeguard free speech from the pulpit or airwaves, except in the cases of the most blatant, immediate incitement to violence.”

It was a close run thing. Yet the bill still creates unequal justice for victims of crime, stigmatizes disapproval of homosexual conduct as a form of “hate” and starts a slippery slope toward further restrictions. Moreover, Congress has voted on this issue nine times in the past 12 years, so America’s radical left clearly will not rest until they obtain their goal: a bill that lays the legal foundation and framework to investigate, prosecute and persecute anyone at all whose actions are based upon and reflect Christian truths.

In Britain, a similar victory involving prejudicial “hate” legislation tailored for the Muslim and homosexual lobbies was challenged within a year. In 2008, after a great struggle, Labour was forced to include a free speech clause. Subsequently, stealth legislation in the form of clause 61 of the Coroners and Justice Bill has been used in an attempt to remove that protection for those who express views on sexual ethics. This would open up opportunities for police to investigate, interrogate, prosecute and imprison Christians simply for holding a viewpoint unacceptable to the State. As the present writer informed his local MP, clause 61would effectively outlaw Christian Order.

To cite just one among endless British examples which precisely mirror the American experience in this regard, the Christian Institute recently reported that “police officers told an open-air preacher in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, it is a criminal offence to identify homosexuality as a ‘sin.’ They said this to Andy Robertson, an evangelist with the Open Air Mission, even though he had never mentioned homosexuality in his preaching. He was recording his preaching because the local council had been making allegations about the content of his message. His conversation with police officers was caught on video-tape. Mr Robertson’s case, and others like it, shows that we need to keep a free speech protection in the ‘homophobic hatred’ law. The protection makes it clear that criticising homosexual conduct shouldn’t be, in itself, a crime. But the Government wants to remove it.”

On 9 July 2009, during impassioned debate in the House of Lords on the question of whether clause 61 should remain a part of the Coroners and Justice Bill, or whether the “Waddington amendment” that protects free speech should instead be retained in the Public Order Act 1986, Lord Kingsland insisted that clause 61 was an “abuse of the legislative procedure” since the Government had accepted the free speech clause last year. Lord Waddington himself asked Lord Bach, who championed the clause, “How on earth can the noble Lord have the cheek” to say that the Government had said they would revisit the issue? (Answer: the radical left has endless cheek since the imposition of ideology, not defence of democracy, is its raison d’être.)

In the end, the Waddington amendment was passed by 186 votes to 133, almost quadruple its previous margin of victory. (It is also noteworthy that twenty Labour Peers defied their whip and that intense lobbying by Christian forces saw the Liberal Democrat three-line whip dropped at the last minute.) 

So, while Dr James Dobson righteously rails against the “utter evil” coming out of the U.S. Congress, it is in fact spewing out of legislatures everywhere as the anti-Christian temper rises inexorably. That legislation intended to curb hatefulness is being promoted by a blind hatred of Christianity is not only ironic but clearly signalled, since removing free speech protection denies basic human rights laid down in numerous documents usually revered as articles of faith by the liberal elite!

Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights states: “everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include a freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority….”. Articles 18 and 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights also state: “everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right includes freedom… and …alone or in community with others and in public or private to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance”; and “everyone has the freedom of opinion and expression, this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media…”.

Scandinavia and Canada have led the way in ripping up these erstwhile sacrosanct articles to crush the Christians.

In Sweden, Pastor Ake Green received a one-month jail sentence last year under a Swedish “hate crimes” law that forbids criticism of those who participate in homosexual behaviour. Although the Goeta Appeals Court later overturned the decision, the government wanted blood. In shocking testimony to the malign spirit driving hate crimes, it demanded that the pastor be punished, appealing the case to the Swedish Supreme Court. Providentially, the Court ruled the law unconstitutional.

In Canada, the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal forbade evangelical pastor Stephen Boisson from expressing his moral opposition to homosexuality. The tribunal also ordered Boisson to pay $5,000 “damages for pain and suffering” and apologize to the “human rights” activist who filed the complaint. His crime? In 2002, he wrote a letter to the editor of his local newspaper denouncing the homosexual agenda as “wicked” and stating that: “Children as young as five and six years of age are being subjected to psychologically and physiologically damaging pro-homosexual literature and guidance in the public school system; all under the fraudulent guise of equal rights.” The Stalinist government tribunal ordered Boisson to “cease publishing in newspapers, by email, on the radio, in public speeches, or on the internet, in future, disparaging remarks about gays and homosexuals.”

The Jewish nexus

There is no overstating the case. “The Government had better start building more prison space for Christian and moral conservatives generally,” The Church of England Newspaper recently opined. Why are we surprised? As Pastor Ted Pike reminds us: “Jesus spoke of the era we may soon enter, when Christians are universally hated (Mark 13:13), free speech is dead and all who speak the truth are imprisoned or killed. He said the time is coming ‘when no man can work’ and encourages us to work ‘while it is yet day’ (John 9:4).”

Reporting from Rome, where he works to defend and promote Church teaching on extra ecclesiam nulla salus, layman Lionel Andrades also senses that “A time is coming when many Catholics will be arrested for their religious beliefs, some will be called to witness with their life.” In Italy, he says, aggressive Anti-Semitic legislation is already on the books, targeting Catholic doctrine and waiting to be implemented at a politically opportune moment. Once Obama has signed the American law the Jewish Left are committed to pushing for the enactment of the Italian law.

This is the all-important tie-in: the liberal Jewish cabal which boasts of having been “a pioneer in advocating for [American] hate crime legislation” for nearly 30 years, and having led the push for H.R. 1913 “for more than ten years,” is also the force behind the Italian legislation and the architect of hate laws worldwide.

Referred to disdainfully by level-headed Jews as the Holocaust Industry, it is fronted by the iniquitous Anti-Defamation League branch of the masonic B’nai B’rith (which calls itself the “body and soul of the Jewish world” and “a synonym for organized Jewry”). Effectively an arm of Mossad, the Jewish secret service, the ADL is described by Jewish journalist Robert I. Friedman as “the largest private spy agency in America... working behind the scenes to stifle intellectual freedom.” Libertarian Socialist Noam Chomsky calls it “...one of the ugliest, most powerful pressure groups in the U.S...[committed to using] any technique, however dishonest and disgraceful, in order to defame and silence and destroy anybody who dares to criticize the Holy State (‘Israel’).” Possessing untold numbers of secret files on Israeli critics, it claims the right to “investigate” and “probe into their private lives.” Yet despite its subversive activities, which include smearing and blackmailing opponents and illegally obtaining government and police records and handing them over to the Israeli government, the ADL has escaped criminal prosecution. Clearly, it acts with the consent of U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials.

The ADL’s brutal sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut approach to hate crime enforcement precisely mirrors that of its Israeli masters, whose recent bestial retribution against Gaza was decried by Avi Shlaim, the Professor of International Relations at Oxford and a former Israeli soldier, as not so much an eye for an eye as “an eye for an eyelash.” Hence the furious pursuit and insane punishments meted out to Holocaust deniers, even by way of their extradition to Germany or Austria while passing through Europe! This was recently attempted via an EU arrest warrant executed at Heathrow airport in respect of Australian citizen Frederick Töben. Yet even British journalist and author Melanie Phillips, a Jew who considers Holocaust denial “a modern form of Jew hatred,” is adamant that criminalising such denial and allowing the extradition of people from countries where it is not a criminal act to those where it is are both dangerous threats to our liberties which she cannot possibly support.

As further testimony to this frightening power and reach, consider the U.S. State Department’s Office of Global Anti-Semitism. A construct and creature of ADL/B’nai B’rith, its 2008 report to Congress caricatures the New Testament as a hate-filled document and defines Bible-believing Christians as “classic anti-Semites.” This reflects the view of ADL boss Abe Foxman, accorded one of Italy’s highest honours at the request of Silvio Berlusconi, who says New Testament Christianity is the seminal cause of anti-Semitism and Jewish suffering over the past 2000 years. In other words, Catholic evangelism to Jews is anti-Semitism and Catholicism leads to the Holocaust: an absurdity widely held by Jews.

The ADL website carries a report of a 2004 Roman conference on “Anti-Semitism - A Threat to Democracy.” Among the speakers was European Commissioner for Freedom, Security and Justice, Franco Frattini, who said that “Europe has the right, and perhaps the duty, to propose to members a common base ... to strike at and punish racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism.” Mr. Frattini declared: “Europe can, with unity, approve a common European rule which will ... oblige all countries to adopt a law.” The conference was addressed by leading Italian politicians and judges as well as foreign ambassadors and dignitaries. Sessions included: “Monitoring Anti-Semitism” and “Government and International Responses to Anti-Semitism.”

Lionel Andrades explains the real and present dangers:

The Anti-Semitism law includes guilt by association. If someone is declared an anti-Semite and you help him you can also be charged as racist. The aim is to create hate and to isolate a person from employment, food and housing because of his beliefs/thoughts. It is a racist law which says that the Catholic Church is inadequate, inferior and cannot be expressed in its present form as regards Jewish conversion. The Chief Rabbi of Israel wants all these teachings changed. Or the Catholic Church could face a severe persecution. Catholics are being told by Rabbis and the Jewish Left press here to give up their belief that homosexuality is a mortal sin and that outside the Catholic Church there is no salvation. This means Judaism is not a path to salvation per se and that Jews ordinarily need to enter the Catholic Church to avoid Hell. This could be considered Anti-Semitism and a priest so preaching could lose his job as a professor of Canon Law at a Pontifical University. If the Rector continued to hire him the Jewish Left could target the University with court cases.

Hence the fierce opposition of the secular Jewish lobby to the beatification of Pope Pius XII, who naturally taught that the Church is the Ark of Salvation which all must enter to save their souls (extraordinary means of salvation notwithstanding). Speaking at a Vatican bookstore in Rome on 19 June, Jesuit Father Peter Gumpel said Pope Benedict has not signed the decree recognizing the heroic virtues of Pius XII because the usual suspects (World Jewish Congress, ADL/B’nai B’rith et. al.) have told him “loud and clear” that “if you do the least thing in favour of the cause of Pius XII, relations between the Catholic Church and the Jews are definitively and permanently compromised.”

And so what? Who cares?! George Bush had more chance of winning over Ahmadinejad than the Pope has of placating these impossible creatures. Perhaps those ADL/Mossad files crammed with compromising details on Catholic churchmen high and low, which might accidentally find their way to the New York Times, are the key to this debilitating ecumenical charade?

Whatever, Rome should call their bluff and deal instead with Rabbis like Daniel Lappin, who has warned Christians to open their eyes and realize that they “are under relentless attack” from “Secular Judaism” and the powerful Jewish Left who promote homosexuality, same-sex marriage, pornography, abortion, media corruption of our morals, removal of public symbols of Christianity, as well as wars in the Mideast in defense of Israel - anything to weaken Christian America. The sensible Rabbi understands the suicidal nature of this push, declaring that ADL/B’nai B’rith is stimulating a surge of anti-semitism throughout the world by its arrogance and anti-Christian abrasiveness. Thus, on behalf of Judaism, he has awarded Abe Foxman “Our Own Worst Enemy Award”!

Pat Buchanan noted that leading Jewish neo-conservative Irving Kristol said the same thing over a decade ago, “warning his kinsmen and co-religionists not to antagonize a huge friendly Christian majority by using the courts to de-Christianize the country. Jews who wish to maintain their separate and unique religious and ethnic character ought not be in the vanguard of those seeking to prevent Christians from maintaining the Christian character of their country, said Kristol. He added pungently: ‘One can easily understand the attractiveness of this vision to Jews. What is less easy to understand is the chutzpah of American Jews in publicly embracing this dual vision. Such arrogance is, I would suggest, a particularly Jewish form of political stupidity.’ Kristol subtly titled his piece, ‘On the Political Stupidity of the Jews’.”

Christian cleansing

By looking to sign off his fascist hate/thought crime bill as a matter of urgency, therefore, President Obama signals two things. Firstly, his fervent desire to grant Jews, Muslims and sexual deviants special victim status and thereby to destroy free speech and equality before the law in America. Secondly, his determination to up the ADL Christian persecution worldwide by emboldening other national legislatures to follow suit. Nor is he averse to publicly stating this dual intention.

“At the international level,” he boasted while proclaiming June 2009 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month, “I have joined efforts at the United Nations to decriminalize homosexuality around the world. Here at home, I continue to support measures… [which] include enhancing hate crimes laws… [and] ensuring adoption rights… I call upon the people of the United States to turn back discrimination and prejudice everywhere it exists… [since] there are still fellow citizens… who still hold fast to worn arguments and old attitudes.”

In the wake of the financial meltdown there has been much talk about a world in “transition.” The new President is viewed by euphoric liberals as the breakthrough marking the Great Leap Forward they have long awaited: the transitional trigger, if you like, to finish off once and for all the tottering Christian West whose “worn arguments and old attitudes” have long hindered the realization of their godless socio-economic and political fantasies. As Mr Obama declared to the deviants assembled in the White House East Room on 29 June to launch LGBT Pride Month: “I suspect that by the time this administration is over, I think you guys will have pretty good feelings about the Obama administration. […] And I want you to know that in this task I will not only be your friend, I will continue to be an ally and a champion and a President who fights with you and for you.”

In that room he was addressing notorious sodomite activists. Like Frank Kameny, who says “gay is godly” (although he is an atheist), refers to Christians as “Christianofascists,” and considers bestiality acceptable “as long as the animal doesn’t mind.” But he might have been addressing the Socialist International schemers, the billionaire abortion franchisers, the snout-in-trough global warming scammers, and every other self-serving liberal constituency he represents at home and abroad. Just as the White House website announced on day one of his presidency, however, by proclaiming himself “an ally and a champion” of sexual perversion (and therefore of porn-addiction, lying, adultery, tax-cheating and all immoral and changeable behaviour) he was simply declaring war on Christ, His followers, His Law and His Teaching Church. This is the “common (Socialist) ground” he shares with the secular Jews over and above their geo-political differences.

It is a truly apocalyptic project. But this is lost amid a popular culture dominated by nihilistic rock stars and TV talking heads like Madonna (“I don’t like that word, ‘religion’”), Elton John (“I would ban religion completely, it turns people into really hateful lemmings and it’s not really compassionate”), Peter Jennings (“I don’t want to be identified as someone who, at any given moment of their life, gets down to his knees and seeks whatever”) and Katie Couric (“You can understand how people would hear some of these things [the idea of a community based on Catholic values] and be like, wow, this is really infringing on civil liberties and freedom of speech and right to privacy and all sorts of basic tenets that this country was founded on”). 

With 25% of Americans gaining knowledge about politics from entertainment shows which trumpet such views, the relentless drip-feed is absorbed by the masses as the anti-gospel truth. In 2006, when aggressive lesbian TV personality Rosie O’Donnell howled that “Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam,” she did so to loud applause which reflected burgeoning antagonism far beyond a manic studio audience.

Of course, unravelling the Christian fabric of Western nations owes less to the vicious sniping of atheistic celebrities and more to the hedonistic culture they personify. As a co-architect of that culture, Communist sexologist William Reich explained in 1933: “You aren’t going to debate people away from the existence of God. But what we found was that if you get people involved in deviant sexual behaviour, the whole idea of God just disappears automatically.” Nonetheless, verbal propaganda is a major part of the process, constantly assuring a pliable populace that “Christianity is a religion for losers,” as media magnate Ted Turner so graciously spat, and that the Crucifixion story has a “baleful history,” as the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer wrote in tracing that Christian history to Auschwitz.

Never mind, as Pat Buchanan once replied, that the Crucifixion gave mankind salvation, the opening of the gates of heaven, Western civilization, the greatest art, architecture, music, painting, sculpture, cathedrals and churches in history, the idea that all men are children of God and that each has an innate worth and dignity, which puts limits on the power of any state - and an end to slavery. No Cross, no Christianity. No Christianity, no West. No West, no freedom, no human rights, no America, no Europe, no Britain.

With no idea of where our civilization and culture came from and viewing license as liberty, the self-destruction proceeds apace. The global tumult and Obama’s ascendancy provide the impetus, cover and opportunity to turn the Socialist screw. “There is no god and there is no soul,” wrote the father of Western pedagogy, John Dewey. “Hence, there is no need for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is dead and buried. There is no room for fixed and natural law or permanent moral absolutes.”

This is precisely the diabolic nub of the Obama Transition: the worldwide escalation of the mainstream Christian persecution kick-started by the likes of Dewey and William Reich and already far advanced. Everything else - every liberal agenda item pursued within the monolithic tax-and-spend Socialism embodied by Obama, with its attendant corruption and control - is geared to this ongoing and overarching aim: to cleanse the public square of Christian input and influence.

“Rightwing Extremism”

Fuelling the legislative attacks to help achieve this cleansing is the defamation of Christians in all powerful celluloid. The prime-time BBC police drama Hunter, for example,which has portrayed the UK pro-life movement as a Christian conspiracy of middle-class professionals prepared to kidnap and kill children in order to further their anti-abortion objectives.

In America, Protestant evangelicals understandably alarmed by the simultaneous arrival of Barack and economic cataclysm are being wildly caricatured as food- and gun-hoarding End Timers. Certainly, their sola scriptura interpretations and regular failed predictions undermine the credibility of the Christian message. Still, an irrational fear of Second Coming adherents is being pumped up as never before. “The evaporation of four million [Christians] who believe in this **** [the Second Coming of Christ] would leave the world an instantly better place,” snarls Romanian-born American novelist Andrei Codrescu, encapsulating the liberal consensus.

Typically specious is a new documentary called Waiting for Armageddon which “explores evangelical prophecy beliefs, and concludes that they may threaten world peace and international stability” [Newsmax Magazine, April 2009]. An involuntary “star” of the film is leading evangelical Thomas Ice, Ph.D., who preaches “pre-Tribulation dispensationalism” (the belief that before the Last Days of death and destruction Christ will gather his followers and “rapture” them up to heaven to save them from harm). “They titled it as if we just can’t wait for Armageddon,” he complained. “And we never talk about waiting for Armageddon. We talk about waiting for Jesus.” In the past 10 years, Ice says, secular progressives have begun systematically “fear-mongering” about Christians and their beliefs. “Rosie O’Donnell already said we’re more dangerous than Muslim terrorists, even though we haven’t blown up anything that I’ve ever heard of.” He attributes the secular attacks on faith to “an epistemological self-consciousness on the other side, that somehow what we believe is a challenge to them making the world safe for their unbelief.”

Tim LaHaye, another noted pre-Trib preacher and “rapture” specialist, concurs. “The one thing that the seculars hate more than anything else is Christians,” he said. “You see that in our newspapers today. It indicates that they don’t trust Christians. They hate Christians. They want to stamp us out and keep us out of the public schools. Well, Christians started public schools.”

He might have added that surveys consistently indicate that about 80 per cent of Americans identify themselves as Christian, of whom an overwhelming 79 per cent believe in the Second Coming, according to the Pew Research Center. Furthermore, various polls show that between 20-25 per cent believe that Christ will return in their current generation.

As Ice and LeHaye allude, this all poses a rather large “problem” for secular authorities harbouring such visceral hatred of Christianity, as revealed in a recent report from Department of Homeland Security [DHS] officials. Titled Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment, it lists people with pro-life and anti-gay “marriage” views as among those posing a potential threat to the country:

In an intelligence assessment issued to law enforcement last week, Homeland Security officials said there was no specific information about an attack in the works by right-wing extremists. But the agency warns that an extended economic downturn with real estate foreclosures, unemployment, and an inability to obtain credit could foster an environment for extremists to recruit members who may not have been supportive of these causes in the past. ... The report says right-wing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily “hate-oriented” and those that are mainly anti-government, rejecting federal authority in favour of state or local authority or rejecting government authority entirely. According to the Homeland Security document, right-wing extremism ‘may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as abortion or immigration.’ The report goes on to say that ‘many right-wing extremists are antagonistic toward the new presidential administration and its perceived stance on a range of issues, including immigration and citizenship, the expansion of social programs to minorities, and restrictions on firearms ownership and use.’ The Homeland Security report also makes reference to the rise of right-wing extremism in the 1990s and says factors which enhanced the movement were opposition to things such as abortion and same-sex ‘marriage.’ It also says ‘antigovernment conspiracy theories and ‘end times’ prophecies could motivate extremist individuals and groups to stockpile food, ammunition, and weapons.’ [AP, 15/4/09]

It later transpired that this “security assessment” had followed hot on the heels of an earlier “Domestic Extremism Lexicon” issued in late March by the Office of Intelligence and Analysis. The Washington Times described it as a veritable dictionary “listing definitions for key terms and phrases used by Homeland Security analysts ‘that addresses the nature and scope of the threat that domestic, non-Islamic extremism poses to the United States’.”

Under the listing “antiabortion extremism,” the Lexicon describes a group of individuals who advocate “violence against providers of abortion-related services.” Some of these individuals “cite various racist and anti-Semitic beliefs to justify their criminal activities.” The recent killing of abortionist George Tiller appears to vindicate this pro-life scaremongering. It provides the excuse government needs, warned Fr Frank Pavone of Priests for Life, to “reach too far in clamping down on First Amendment [free speech] activity against abortion,” despite the fact that “those who kill abortionists are always disconnected from pro-life organisations.”

“Let the outcry against Tiller’s murder be loud and clear, and let the outcry against the murders he committed - and that other abortionists commit - be loud and clear as well,” said Fr Pavone. He urged pro-lifers to call evil “by its proper name” and not be intimidated into silence since “the babies who are being killed need to be defended now.” (Underlining this urgency, a surgeon once wrote to Cardinal O’Brien of Edinburgh: “I feel powerless to halt the carnage, and there is nothing more heartbreaking than seeing little arms and legs being sucked down a glass tube and binned for the sake of someone’s lifestyle.”)

The Domestic Extremism Lexicon “is not, nor was it ever, in operational use,” assured a Homeland Security jobsworth, ignoring its consonance with their subsequent April report - which “assessment” also demonises returning war veterans. Having put their lives on the line for their country in Iraq and Afghanistan, they are demonised as possessing “combat skills and experience that are attractive to rightwing extremists….”

The Obama White House is worried because since November 2008 more than 7 million people have applied for criminal background checks in order to buy weapons. And as far as it is concerned, buying guns equals “weapons stockpiling,” buying ammo equals “hoarding of ammunition,” and expressing concern about Congress passing gun control legislation qualifies one as part of an “extremist group.”

In the event, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano issued a token apology to complaining veterans. But none was forthcoming for pro-lifers and the rest. The Thomas More Law Center, a national not-for-profit public interest law firm based in in Michigan, stated in response: “Why has Janet Napolitano diverted public attention from the real acts of terrorism in our country, which she now refers to as “man-caused disasters”? And why is she so willing to use the word ‘terrorist’ to describe law-abiding Americans? The truth is that Janet Napolitano is threatening Americans who disagree with the policies of the Obama administration to ‘Shut Up or else’.”

Just to recap: this would not only include citizens who oppose abortion and sodomitical “marriage” but those who oppose such things as the policies of President Obama regarding immigration, citizenship and the expansion of social programs, restrictions on firearms ownership, one world government, or who are upset with the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs to China and India.

“Indeed this is the first step toward tyranny,” says the Law Center. “Clearly, Napolitano’s Assessment will be used as a tool to stifle political opposition and opinions and will give a pretext for opponents holding opposing views to report them to the police as rightwing extremists and potential terrorists. You can imagine what happens then.”

Despotic trend

It is already happening. “Just a couple weeks ago in San Diego,” reported Pat Boone in a recent call to arms, “misguided police threatened to arrest Christians who were conducting Bible studies in their home! Only a local uproar by Christians and local officials saved the day.” As well as German authorities snatching homeschooled children from their parents and forcing such families to flee the country, we know, too, that British police are knocking on doors to interrogate law abiding Christian commentators and pensioners, denounced by government officials and anonymous complainants as “homophobic” [CO, Feb. 2005, pp. 32-34].

This is the dictatorial trend across the West. In the U.S. the writing has been emblazoned on the Democratic wall for a long time. In April 1994, Bill Clinton was openly talking down liberty. “When we got organized as a country,” he explained, “... we wrote a fairly radical [U.S.] Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, ... so a lot of people say there’s too much personal freedom .... When personal freedom’s being abused, you have to move to limit it.”

Today, this Democratic line is encouraged at State level by DHS-sponsored “Fusion Centers” which disseminate reports along the lines of Secretary Napolitano’s “security assessment.” In February 2009, one of these Fusion Centers, the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC) issued the MIAC Strategic Report: The Modern Militia Movement. This horrific “law enforcement sensitive” secret police report categorises citizens as being potential violence-prone “militia members” if they oppose any of the following: Gun Control, the Income Tax, the United Nations, the Ammunition and Accountability Act, the New World Order, the violation of Posse Comitatus [which limits the use of the Armed Forces to enforce the law], a possible Constitutional Convention, Abortion, the Federal Reserve, illegal immigration, the North American Union and Radio Frequency Identification [tags for identifying and tracking people]. 

Outrageous and ludicrous, of course. Yet the report was signed off by the Governor, the Director of the Missouri Department of Public Safety and the Missouri State Highway Patrol and distributed to law enforcement officials across the state of Missouri. It was not until the State government was flooded with protests that they finally withdrew the document.

Post-facto political skin-saving, however, cannot hide the calculation and menace of Obama and Janet Napolitano, whose Rightwing Extremism report is even more disturbing than it appears, for several reasons.

Firstly, as with its hastily withdrawn Lexicon, the DHS never intended the public to see the “security assessment.” It was a secret. Speaking on FOX News, Judge Andrew Napolitano (no relation to Janet) said: “The document itself cautions the reader that the document is ‘not to be released to the public, the media, or other personnel who do not have a valid need-to-know without prior approval’ of the DHS. The document refers to itself as one of a series of intelligence assessments intended to ‘deter, prevent, preempt, or respond to terrorist attacks against the United States’.”

Secondly, the portion of the assessment that was leaked is only a summary. The bulk of it remains classified. Commented Judge Napolitano: “The summary (unclassified) document is terrifying. One can only imagine what is contained in the classified version. ... The document also informs the reader that Big Brother is watching both public and private behaviour.... My guess is that the sentiments revealed in the report I read are the tip of an iceberg that the DHS would prefer to keep submerged until it needs to reveal it. This iceberg is the heavy hand of government with large and awful eyes, in whose heart there is no love for freedom, and on whose face there is no smile.”

Thirdly, and most decisively, the assessment reflects Barack Obama’s stated disdain for the ordinary Americans he slandered on the campaign trail. At an April 2008 California fund-raiser, where his mask momentarily slipped to reveal his unsmiling face, he referred to these “bitter” people from small towns who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” (The same types who constitute the “vast right wing conspiracy!” of Hillary Clinton’s fevered imagination, and the “forces of conservatism” so despised by Tony Blair.) The DHS assessment, in other words, is simply Obama’s response to these God-fearing obstacles to his radical agenda.

Even his own people are getting jumpy about his agenda. A DHS request for funding for the National Applications Office (NAO), which coordinates the use of satellite imagery for domestic surveillance, is strongly opposed by Democratic Californian congresswoman Jane Harman, chair of the House Homeland Security Committee’s intelligence and terrorism risk assessment subcommittee. In a speech in the House on 4 June, submitting a bill that would direct Napolitano to close the NAO, Harman said:

Imagine, for a moment, what it would be like if one of these satellites were directed on your neighbourhood or home, a school or place of worship - and without an adequate legal framework or operating procedures in place for regulating their use. I daresay the reaction might be that Big Brother has finally arrived and the black helicopters can’t be far behind.

No need to surmise: in 1993 David Koresh and his Branch Davidians experienced both firsthand! Choppers shot up their water tanks (hitting a 60-year-old man through a window in the process) during a military assault against the unarmed women and children in their ‘separatist Christian’ compound at Waco. The few survivors said their 50 days of torture also included acid-gas bombs, water deprivation, tanks, snipers and “psy-ops” (psychological operations involving blaring music and noise designed to cause sleep deprivation and drive the enemy insane). Seventy-six people died including 20 children and two pregnant women.

Crisis and opportunity

This kind of chilling overkill and the Harman intervention itself both signal that it is not “right wing extremism” but self-preservation in defence of priceless liberty to speak out and act against the endemic nihilism, political correctness and increasing state control of daily life. In a post-9/11 world prey to security scares (many of them genuine, of course) creeping fascism has become an ever present danger under governments of all stripes, demanding “eternal vigilance” as never before.

These threats are hidden beneath all kinds of disarming legislation. The 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act [HIPAA], to cite just one shocking example. It is being used by the U.S. government to secretly record and store the thoughts of military families who seek free counselling provided by the global consulting giant Ceridian, through its government subcontract Military One Source.

S.H. Pearson, a writer and wife of a serviceman in Iraq, was to learn that her supposedly confidential chat with a Military One Source official was actually “an official psychiatric record that is filed under the iron-clad rigors of the HIPAA Law. ... According to another Military One Source counselor that night, I had been entered into their database under the heading of ‘mental health counselling.’ ... I learned later, during an energetic research session, that all conversations with military members and their families are documented by Military One Source counselors. This is done via note-taking while military personnel or their loved ones spill their guts about whatever is on their mind. These clandestine notes are then entered into a HIPAA-compliant database as an official record. After that they may as well be in Fort Knox. ... When I asked his manager what had been written about me in their database, he refused to say. When I asked for the physical location of their offices, they would not say. ... I was hoodwinked into a measure of candor for government thought surveillance purposes. They are acutely concerned about military sentiments. These are turbulent times. So offering this free counseling service is a ploy for accessing those sentiments. If they could send a tiny drone into our heads that would report back to them, I’m sure they would do it. But they don’t have that technology yet so they have to depend on Military One Source. In my case, my words were secretly recorded, assessed, weighed, judged and officially filed all without my knowledge from a man who told me that he would do no such thing” [AmericaFreePress.net].

Close attention and objection from the American public, therefore, is wholly warranted. Already, says Tom Minnery of the influential Focus on the Family, “There is rising concern over the economy and national security, as well as downright open alarm at the leftist drift of our national government in the Obama era.” Writer and documentary film-maker Ben Stein, for one, sees arbitrary, contradictory and illegal use of presidential power in the bank and automobile industry bail-outs, such as: protecting Wall Street “card sharps” and paying off their massive speculative debts, on the one hand, while publicly humiliating and firing the CEO of General Motors, on the other. Similarly, nearly $200 billion was handed over to insurance giant AIG without it ever producing one line of the analysis requested by a sceptical House Finance Committee to prove its claim that the failure of AIG posed a “systemic risk” to the financial system. “Where is the legal justification or even rational justification here?” queries Stein. “Where is law? Where is the outrage that this government is operating with compulsion and power without sanction of law?”

“Government, beyond any other entity, is dangerous,” and a president operating outside Constitutional restraints and throwing his weight around, even to firing the CEO of a private company, “is more than a little frightening,” says Stein. A report in the Wall Street Journal of 16 July indicates that Democrats, too, are increasingly angered by Obama’s abuse of presidential power. The “signing statement” declarations he is issuing with Congressional bills presented to him, which statements give his interpretation of those laws, are effectively overturning their decisions (as with his recent undoing of restrictions which the House - by a vote of 492-2 - placed on his $108 billion loan guarantees to the International Monetary Fund). President Bush issued “signing statements” constantly, infuriating the Democrats. Obama had pledged not to do so, telling the Boston Globe a presidential signing statement would be “a clear abuse of power” if used “as a license to evade laws that the president does not like.” Democrats are now surprised by this totally unsurprising turn of events: a compulsive liar not keeping his word. They are concerned. So they should be.

As a measure of how fast events can unfold, the Reichstag fire should burn brightly in American minds. On February 27, 1933 word spread in Germany that the Reichstag (national parliament) building, was on fire. The next day, with people scared and thus much more willing to surrender their liberties in return for “security,” a decree was issued entitled, “For the Protection of the People and the State.” Justified as a “defensive measure against Communist acts of violence endangering the state,” the decree suspended the constitutional guarantees pertaining to civil liberties.

There is no exaggeration in viewing the fiercely ideological Obama White House in this light. Old-fashioned confiscatory Socialism naturally lends itself to fascistic Socialism. While Barack’s record predicts that he will go for the jugular now that he has the power and convenient crises to hand. The combination of human misery set off by the financial collapse and endless opportunities for mass control thrown up by the “war on terror,” not to mention apocalyptic Green hype, is a perfect storm in the hands of a neo-Marxist trained to rub emotions raw and manipulate them. It will fuel his passive-aggressive Alinskyite approach to deconstructing society and invest it with dreadful potential.

The fear-mongering component of his inaugural address began this manipulative process of radical change. “Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred,” he warned. “Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost, jobs shed, businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly, our schools fail too many, and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.”

At the same time, President Obama will be pushed even further to the Left by his corrupt cadre of Clintonite retreads. Advisers like his Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel. Part of the Chicago effluent which initially flowed into Washington with Bill Clinton, Emanuel made mega-millions along the way, including “at least $320,000 for a 14-month stint at Freddie Mac [courtesy of his criminal buddy Bill] that required little effort” [Chicago Tribune, 26/3/09]. “You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste,” said Emanuel recently, “it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid.”

In a January 2009 interview on CNBC, Henry Kissinger was more specific. “The president-elect is coming into office at a moment when there is upheaval in many parts of the world simultaneously,” said Kissinger. “He can give new impetus to American foreign policy partly because the reception of him is so extraordinary around the world. I think his task will be to develop an overall strategy for America in this period when, really, a new world order can be created. It’s a great opportunity, it isn’t just a crisis.”

Talk about alarm bells and red flags!

Alinskyism as Volunteerism

This explains why Americans are now reacting even more keenly than usual to bills such as H.R. 645. Introduced quietly into the House of Representatives by the Democrats without media attention but reported in early February 2009 by the independent World Net Daily, it calls for the Secretary of Homeland Security, the conspiratorial Janet Napolitano, to establish, at a start-up cost of nearly $400 million, no fewer than six national emergency detention centres for coralling civilians - presumably pro-life and anti-sodomy “right-wing extremists” - on military installations. “The bill also appears to expand the president’s emergency power,” noted WND, “much as the executive order signed by President Bush on May 9, 2007, that gave the president the authority to declare an emergency and take over the direction of all federal, state, local, territorial and tribal governments without even consulting Congress.”

Per usual, it is “the broad specifications of the bill’s language” (e.g. ‘To meet other appropriate needs, as defined by the secretary of homeland security’) which contributes to concern that “the stated ‘national emergency’ purpose could be utilized by the Secretary of Homeland Security to include any kind of situation the government wants to contain or otherwise control.”

Any doubts about the certainty of such sinister manipulation are dispelled by the naked aggression of Alcee Hastings, the very Democrat who introduced the bill. Hastings created controversy during the 2008 presidential campaign with his provocative comments concerning the Republican vice-presidential candidate: “If Sarah Palin isn’t enough of a reason for you to get over whatever your problem is with Barack Obama, then you damn well had better pay attention. Anybody toting guns and stripping moose don’t care too much about what they do with Jews and blacks. So, you just think this through.” So spat Hastings with all the vitriol of Jeremiah Wright extolling his Black Values System.

In the same vein, Obama has proposed a ‘youth corps’ requiring all students from secondary school to college to participate in community service programmes. The original announcement on his official website late last year provoked an outcry from bloggers after which the wording was softened. Predictably, however, a WND report of 19 March 2009 detailed bill H.R. 1388, Obama’s coercive $6 billion programme which reauthorizes earlier volunteer and community services programs but includes “new programs and studies”:

The U.S. House of Representatives has approved a plan to set up a new “volunteer corps” and consider whether “a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people” should be developed. The legislation also refers to “uniforms” that would be worn by the “volunteers” and the “need” for a “public service academy, a 4-year institution” to “focus on training” future “public sector leaders.” The training, apparently, would occur at “campuses.”

[...] Many, however, are raising concerns that the program, which is intended to include 250,000 “volunteers,” is the beginning of what President Obama called his “National Civilian Security Force” in a speech last year in which he urged creating an organization as big and well-funded as the U.S. military. He has declined since then to elaborate. WND reported when a copy of the speech provided online apparently was edited to exclude Obama’s specific references to the new force.

The new bill specifically references the possibilities “if all individuals in the United States were expected to perform national service or were required to perform a certain amount of national service.” Such new requirements perhaps, the legislation notes, “would strengthen the social fabric of the Nation and overcome civic challenges by bringing together people from diverse economic, ethnic, and educational backgrounds.” No one, apparently with the exception of infants, would be excluded.

At least some of this would sound reasonable to British readers, as a way of taming out-of-control youths, especially when unemployment in the 18 to 24-year old bracket is rising twice as fast as the average rate, and with one in three teenagers leaving school at 16 for work unable to secure a job. Most would probably back Gordon Brown’s £146 million National Youth Service plan involving all teenagers performing at least 50 hours of community service by the time they are 19, on courses lasting between 14 and 22 weeks. To be launched in September and to become a compulsory part of the National Curriculum if Labour is re-elected, it builds on the contentious citizenship classes already introduced by Labour.

Metropolitan Police deputy commissioner Alf Hitchcock also called last year for a non-military form of National Service to curb the rising tide of fatal stabbings and give youngsters “a sense of responsibility and achievement and some discipline.” A YouGov poll of 2,270 people found that two-thirds backed the idea of compulsory citizenship work, especially in view of their fears about rioting and unrest during the recession.

This is all perfectly understandable. But with Obama, nothing is ever quite what it seems. Commenting on his bill, Canada Free Press nailed its Alinsky origins and deceptive, collectivist intent:

“Volunteerism” that kept America running since the days of its founding [would be] wiped out with the stroke of a pen. It becomes forced labour and like the practice of another era, presses American citizens of all ages and creeds, unknowingly into military service. On paper, H.R. 1388 is the “Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act”; the more innocuous sounding “The Give Act,” for short. The Give Act puts the finishing touches to Public Allies New Leadership for New Times, modelled after Saul Alinsky’s “Peoples Organizations” and operating under Michelle Obama. Michelle was also a pioneer in the social entrepreneur movement - leaders who create new approaches and organize to provide new solutions to social problems. Like most things Saul Alinsky, H.R. 1388 sounds noble in stating why wide-sweeping change is necessary. H.R. 1388 goes straight to the heart of volunteerism in America, impacting everything from the lemonade stands of neighbourhood children, to the residents of senior citizens homes. … The Give Act puts tow-headed school children and silver-haired seniors in the official uniform of the new State, and encompasses every walk of life in main-street America. Whether you are young or old, or firmly believe that volunteering means you are offering your time to the good of community work, you will be pressed into Obama’s National Civilian Community Corps. 

Realistic response

Press-ganged from a young age, in fact, with other portions of the Bill referring to a “service learning” plan forming “a mandatory part of the curriculum in all of the secondary schools served by the local educational agency,” and “volunteers” being “grouped together as appropriate in campuses for operational, support, and boarding purposes. The Corps campus for a unit shall be in a facility or central location established as the operational headquarters and boarding place for the unit. … There shall be a superintendent for each camp.”

“This is the equivalent of brown shirts,” said Resistnet.com. While a web forum participant asked the obvious question: “I wonder what’s going to happen to those who refused to ‘volunteer.’ Maybe they will be put into a different ‘campus.’ I guess we will soon find out.” The Albany Insanity blog also queried: “What gives the government the right to require individuals to give three years service under the guise of ‘volunteer’ service? It talks about uniforms and ‘camps.’ They revise the word ‘camps’ and call it ‘campus’.” In addition, it noted, such work forces would be used for “pressing national and local challenges” that apparently could range from weather disasters to economic uncertainty. Officials at a Republican website further stressed this stealthy reach, through the bill’s authorisation for the funding of an Education Corps, Healthy Futures Corps, Clean Energy Corps, Veterans’ Corps and Opportunity Corps.

Formal announcements about the plan suggested something far different, highlighting uncontroversial provisions buried deep in the 200 pages of legislation approved in the House 321-105, with mostly Republican opposition. However, considering Janet Napolitano’s Homeland Security “assessment” and what we know about Obama - who originally flagged this development during a Colorado Springs campaign speech in which he spoke of a civilian security force as big and well-funded as the military - the above reaction is hardly hyperventilating overstatement by “right wing extremists.” Rather, it reveals a mature and realistic awareness all too lacking among complacent Europeans. Inured to Big Brother encroachments, they easily forget the misery endured by millions of people only 20 years ago and just hundreds of miles away: coerced, bullied, terrorised and murdered in the Communist attempt to create more perfect people through new economic conditions of fairness and equality.

In American, on the contrary, concern is resonating everywhere. A website run by non-partisan organisation Oath Keepers, for example, invites fellow soldiers and peace keepers to pledge to refuse illegal orders - including “state of emergency” orders that could include disarming or detaining American citizens. It collected more than 100,00 visitors in a little over a week and receives hundreds of emails daily.

It proved a timely campaign in light of a planned four-day Army National Guard training exercise on the streets of a rural Iowa town of 443 people. This mock “invasion” would have seen troops taking over the town to search door-to-door (in consenting households) for a suspected weapons dealer. Also involving overhead supervision from a Blackhawk helicopter, road blocks, vehicle searches and crowd-control measures etc., the exercise was cancelled after reports triggered a public outcry last February.

As reported by WND on 17 March, it was this and similar recent events which accelerated the Oath Keepers’ effort to remind military members their oath of allegiance is to the U.S. Constitution, not a particular president. Noting that the U.S. was launched as a natural law republic whose founders recognized all rights as coming from God, not the government, the organisation seeks “to teach them more about what they swore to defend so they will be better able to see when an order violates the Constitution and the rights of the people, and is thus unlawful.” It believes this review must be done immediately so that soldiers have an opportunity to decide what is right and wrong and then to “steel their resolve to take a stand and do the right thing, whatever the cost.”

Among other things, the soldiers are pledging “NOT” to obey orders: “to conduct warrantless searches of the American people, their homes, vehicles, papers, or effects”; “to detain American citizens as ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ or to subject them to trial by military tribunal”; “to impose martial law or a ‘state of emergency’ on a state, or to enter with force into a state, without the express consent and invitation of that state’s legislature and governor”; “to invade and subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty and declares the national government to be in violation of the compact by which that state entered the Union”; “to force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext.”; “to confiscate the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies, under any emergency pretext whatsoever”; “which infringe on the right of the people to free speech, to peaceably assemble, and to petition their government for a redress of grievances.”

Notre Dame crackdown

The manner in which pro-lifers were treated during Obama’s Notre Dame visit in May speaks to the urgency of these pledges. Peaceful protesters, clerical and lay, were identified and harassed, including eighty-year-old Father Norm Weslin, founder of “Lambs for Christ,” who was arrested, handcuffed and dragged off to jail on a stretcher. Obama supporters were left alone.

One private despatch tells the story: “Approximately 100 people ended up milling around in the same area as my friends, some much closer to the street within the forbidden 50 foot zone. But the only individual singled out was a woman holding a sign that said, ‘Shame on Notre Dame!’ The officer spoke into his phone and a minute later she was surrounded by cops and summarily arrested, handcuffed, hauled off, and charged with criminal trespass. Those bearing signs of approval were unmolested. If this isn’t a first amendment violation and a case of false arrest I don’t know what is. The Department of Homeland Security may have pulled their ‘right-wing extremist’ report, but it’s clear that pro-lifers are in the sites of law enforcement who will use any pretext to shut them up. The deputies in this case acted like little brownshirts I’m sad to say.”

Commented another Indiana resident: “Our local government in the area of Notre Dame is acting as if they worked for tyrants like Stalin, Hitler and also Castro. Where is freedom of expression? Where is freedom of religion? All those people handcuffed and dragged away in South Bend in the name of defending their religious beliefs and to have it happen here in the United States.”

Ominously, the crackdown was led by Notre Dame itself and cheered on by very many who were delighted to see their fellow Catholics so treated. Their mindset was articulated by disaffected “liberal Catholic” writers, like Boston Globe columnist James Carroll.

A former Catholic priest turned Vietnam antiwar activist and now a scholar-in-residence at Suffolk University, Carroll identifies purveyors of absolute truth with suicide bombers, conflating Catholic orthodoxy with bloodshed. In a recent essay (which reflects the contents of his clearly mistitled book Practicing Catholic), Carroll declares that “Notre Dame University has found the truest Catholic response to the world’s present moment: its brave decision to honor President Barack Obama.” In contrast, “Those Catholics who regard a moderate progressive like Barack Obama as the enemy... have embraced a spirit of sectarian intolerance... adding fuel to the spreading fire of religious contempt for those who depart from rigidly defined orthodoxies. They are resurrecting the lost cause of religion’s war against modernity - a war of words that folds neatly into the new centuries war of weapons.”

“Catholic fundamentalists in the U.S. are far from being terrorists,” he reluctantly concedes, “but an exclusionary, intolerant, militant true belief is on display this week in their rallying to denounce President Obama in Indiana.” Equating this righteous, law-abiding, peaceful Catholic protest with Islamic and other “fundamentalisms” which “thrive wherever there is violent conflict,” he emphasises: “it is dangerous.”

We then learn, dear CO reader, that Public Enemy #1 is us.

“In contemporary Roman Catholicism, whose deep traditions include the very intellectual innovations that gave rise to modernity,” he explains, “Catholic fundamentalists are more likely to be called ‘traditionalists.’[...] In nothing more than its emphasis on a rigorous and comprehensive sexual ethic - anti-feminist, radically pro-life, contemptuous of homosexuality - does this brand of Catholicism echo a broader fundamentalism.” Furthermore, after the “liberalising Second Vatican Council, Catholic traditionalists, with their attachment to the Latin Mass, fiddle-back vestments, clerical supremacy, and the entire culture of the Counter-Reformation, were rebels.... Today, as indicated by Pope Benedict’s lifting of that [SSPX] excommunication, the Vatican is the sponsor of such anti-liberal rebels.”

No, James Carroll did not write Janet Napolitano’s incendiary “security assessment.” Nor did he script Obama’s ‘bibles and guns’ denunciation of ordinary Americans. But he might well have done. For Carroll and his ilk (which includes the 50% of Catholics who supported Notre Dame’s decision to honour Obama, according to a Pew poll) the arrest and jailing of orthodox Catholics presents no difficulty, being a reasonable response to the “irrationality” of such “fundamentalists” who, Carroll insists, “undermine global peace, not through political intention, but deeply felt religious conviction.”

The real threat here, of course, is Enlightenment junkie James Carroll. He not only personifies Blessed Pius IX’s summary declaration that “Liberal Catholics are the worst enemies of the Church,” his Obama worship imperils the freedoms which the Oath Keepers are pledging to protect. Yet he would deride their pledges just as surely as he would mock St Pius X’s Anti-Modernist Oath. And so the testimonial posted by an active duty Army soldier on the Oath Keeper website would alarm rather than console him. “I want you guys to know I’m with you 100 percent and so are a lot of my fellow soldiers,” he wrote. “These kinds of discussions go on between us often, and we all know that we did not swear an oath to any politician (of either party). And just for the record not me or anyone else in my platoon would ever follow an order to disarm the American people.”

The polar opposite of globalist Carroll, patriotic Oath Keepers state: “We do feel in our hearts that this effort has the potential to change history for the better and to forestall or even prevent this nation from ever experiencing the horrors that plagued so many other nations in the 20th Century. We are convinced that it is not too late, that there can be a turning of the tide.” A spokesman for Oath Keepers stressed that its effort is not a response to President Obama or his policies since the accumulation of power in the executive branch in recent years has been alarming. But in keeping with the theme of this essay, their fears crystallized when Obama took office and suddenly had access to that accumulated power. That, he said, is a “powder-keg.”

“Dangerous times”

True, more obvious contenders for “powder-keg” status spring to mind. Two nuclear powers confronting each other over Kashmir, perhaps, while Islamic terrorists spread unchecked through one of them. As economies nosedive and the pain deepens, however, powder-keg situations are brewing everywhere.

The reality is that we still wallow in unchartered waters. The vast reservoir of toxic sub-prime debt which burst the credit bubble continues to slosh around the financial system. Bank losses on loans to stricken consumers continue to pile up. J.P. Morgan for one has more than doubled the amount set aside for soured loans to £6 billion.

Reflecting on his estimate of a 1-2 per cent fall in world growth this year, the president of the World Bank said: “We haven’t seen numbers like that since World War II, which really means since the Thirties. So these are serious and dangerous times.” Harvard historian Niall Ferguson concurs. “Economic volatility, plus ethnic disintegration, plus an empire in decline: That combination is about the most lethal in geopolitics,” he writes. “We now have all three.” In that light, the Economic Intelligence Unit has warned that over the next two years bouts of social unrest are likely to disrupt economies and topple governments. It named 95 countries as being at high or very high risk.

In the East, a totalitarian response will naturally ensue. “The Kremlin is acutely aware that civil unrest in Russia could trigger the country’s disintegration,” reported Foreign Policy magazine. It was describing the response of Russian bureaucrats to the brutal violence employed by Kremlin troops against jobless protesters in Vladivostok last December. When the media failed to report the clashes, the rage of protesters turned against the entire political system. “Whether the current Kremlin is prepared to open fire on its own people is unclear. What’s even less clear is whether Russia’s police or military would obey orders to shoot if they were given,” mused Foreign Policy after the Vladivostok clash sparked an online debate in the chat room of Russia’s Interior Ministry. One post read: “Dear colleagues, Russia is at a crucial junction. An economic catastrophe is coming.... People’s patience is coming to an end.... Are we going to be the attack dogs of this regime?” Another member replied: “I will never shoot at my own people.” The ministry hurriedly closed down the forum. 

This scenario underlines the Oath Keepers’ dutiful concern. The least hint of trouble could throw up still further threats to freedom of assembly and speech as Socialistic governments react, accelerating from social engineering and the suppression of conscientious objection to the exercise of raw power. The outrage that swept the U.S. over the AIG scandal, when executives of the insurance giant collected more than £118 billion in bonuses following a £121 billion taxpayer bailout, is a portent. “It’s a mob effect. It’s putting people’s lives in danger,” said one senior AIG executive. “It’s going to blow up. I have a horrible, horrible, horrible feeling that his is going to end badly,” said a manager at the trading division that brought AIG to the brink of collapse.

It hardly matters that bankers on Wall Street or in the City of London are scapegoats for politicians and central bankers seeking to distract attention from their major responsibility for the crisis. When massive Third World tent cities with no water supply or proper sanitation are springing up in places like Sacramento, to accommodate the rising homeless among the 80,000 people losing their jobs every month, easy targets will do and mob violence is certainly possible. 

Britain

In previous years, the Economic Intelligence Unit would almost automatically rate western Europe as “low risk.” Yet it has now rated the UK’s risk as “moderate.” This is understandable given the financially perilous state of contemporary Britain. Next year public borrowing will amount to 10 per cent of the entire national output as the total (official) debt passes £1 trillion.

Despite Alistair Darling’s optimistic talk of recovery by year’s end, the Daily Mail’s wise City editor Alex Brummer considers that “the underpinnings of the economy are now so weakened that it would only need some unexpected event - a further big bank collapse, for instance - push it over the edge.” In February, a private equity boss told City luncheon guests that he fears “a far greater financial crisis” leading to civil unrest.

Such is the dictatorial and dissolute state of the country it would not take much to set things off.

A major contributor to the slow burning fuse of societal tension is the staggering 3,609 new offences (at last count) introduced by Labour since 1997. These are enforced by a highly politicised and bureaucratised constabulary, increasingly perceived as being on the streets to serve the State rather than us, as well as as local council functionaries utilizing anti-terrorist powers to snoop on ratepayers - to ensure their compliance with every conceivable petty regulation, from putting out their rubbish bin on the wrong day to dog fouling. Despite repeated condemnations of such practices by the Chief Surveillance Commissioner, most recently in mid-July, public authorities undertook nearly 10,000 direct surveillance operations last year using tracking devices and private investigators, while police and security services undertook 71 such operations every day.

With the trustworthiness of the State at a low ebb, a disturbing level of political correctness enforced with the dogmatic zeal of a secular inquisition is also destroying the trust essential to personal relationships. The police “hate crime” division positively encourages anonymous tip-offs by members of designated groups against those whose opinions offend them, while the most innocuous banter or perfectly civil private conversation in the workplace is now policed by the “equality and diversity” zealots with job-threatening consequences. Even families are affected when children are invited by energy companies to report on parents, relatives and friends who commit “climate crimes” like leaving TV sets on.

Melanie Phillips writes that this combination of lunacy and coercion is fast turning Britain “into a nightmare straight out of the pages of George Orwell or Franz Kafka.” The question is: will the multiple frustrations, worries and inequities of a prolonged recession converge with this repression of civil liberties and the fracturing of social bonds, to set off an explosive reaction against the smug political and bureaucratic elite?

Living in a quasi-Stasi state and treated with utter contempt by corrupt politicians, feeding off their taxes at the Westminster trough before disappearing into gold-plated retirement, the depth of public resentment cannot be overstated. Warnings last year of a “white collar recession” have eventuated with a vengeance. Negative equity (where your mortgage is higher than the value of your house) is rampant and unemployment is spiralling into the millions with thousands losing their jobs on a daily basis. Jobcentres and Citizens Advice Bureaus report huge increases in the number of “distressed middle classes, professional people who had not ever thought there would be a problem – people who wouldn’t come and see us unless they were desperate.”

In early March, 3,000 people queued at a Zoo in Warwickshire for only 150 jobs paying as little as £6 per hour. The traffic was piled up for two miles in either direction. Staggered by the unprecedented turn up, the Zoo’s marketing executive said: “We have had people turning up who were on quite good salaries and some with degrees who are so desperate for work that they will do anything.” The lethal combination of job losses and falling house values has also seen a big rise in the number of middle-class workers filing for bankruptcy.

The 1968 riots which started in France and spread to many countries, including Britain, were led by protesting student sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie. This time around it may be the middle classes themselves who take to the streets, provoking unintended consequences they themselves recognise with trepidation. An opinion poll conducted by YouGov for Prospect magazine among 2,270 people uncovered widespread concern that jobless teenagers and twenty-somethings could be roped into protests by troublemakers. More than a third feared riots similar to those experienced in Greece last December. They are right to be concerned. The pool of flammable human material has increased hugely since ’68 due to the lawless underclass of broken families, crime, drugs, gangs and unspeakable violence created by the Government, whose failed education and welfare systems have widened the social divide and poverty gap to Victorian levels while rewarding immoral and feckless behaviour.

The figures tell the story. The number of idle young people with time on their hands - i.e. not in employment, education or training - has soared to 857,000 as of December 2008, and is set to rocket further as the recession deepens. Consequently, crime among teenagers has been surging over the past three years. Figures from the Youth Justice Board put the total number of offences by 10-17 year-olds in 2007/08 at 277,986 - more than one every two minutes! Violent offences against the person carried out by girls in that age group has increased from 6,000 in 2001 to almost 23,000 last year. Even more telling, the number of children convicted for violently attacking police officers has also increased by more than 40% in only five years, with six attacks on police every day during 2007.

On it goes. Britain’s rate of violent crimes now outstrips that of America and every other nation in the EU. Attacks have nearly doubled since Tony Blair arrived in 1997 with his trite slogan: “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.” An international survey conducted by the EU Commission found that Britain now has more than 1.15 million killings, knife attacks, shootings and other assaults every year: 2,034 attacks and threatened assaults for every 100,000 citizens. This compares with 504 per 100,000 citizens in France, 262 in Germany, 225 in Spain, 235 in Italy and 161 in Poland. So Britons are four times more likely to be victims of violent attacks than people in France and eight times more likely to be assaulted than Germans [International Express, 7/7/09].

If the recession does not light this smouldering touch paper, it seems only a matter of time before something does. In the meantime, on 23 February, Superintendent David Hartshorn, who heads Scotland Yard’s public order unit, announced that with “the downturn in the economy, unemployment [and] repossessions,” officers are preparing for a “summer of rage” as victims of the credit crunch take to the streets to demonstrate against bonus-paying banks, which have become “viable targets” for troublemakers who could “hijack” events “and turn that into disorder.”

Although demonstrations and police shootings on an Iranian scale are hardly likely, symptomatic of the simmering rage is reaction to Sir Fred Goodwin, former head of the Royal Bank of Scotland and the most notorious face of the disgraced banking sector. Goodwin destroyed the once prestigious RBS while living high on the hog, recording losses of £24.1 billion in 2008, the biggest British corporate loss in history, and then walked away with a massive pay-off and pension as the government (taxpayer) took a 68% stake in the bank at a cost of £20 billion. Up to 30,000 employees could lose their jobs as the bank restructures in wake of the losses. Currently holed-up in a luxury villa on the French Riviera, Goodwin is believed to have taken his two children out of school temporarily last year due to fears for their safety. Last March his Edinburgh house and his car were also vandalised by a group who warned: “Bank bosses should be jailed. This is just the beginning.”

Local residents in his plush street were unmoved by this descent to thuggery. “Sympathy?” responded one woman. “Exactly the opposite. If I was him I would have refused to have all this money and I would be mortified at what had happened to the bank. I think it’s wrong, but I can understand if you lose your job and everything and your ex-boss caused a problem. He is getting millions which he doesn’t need.” Another added: “I’m surprised that nothing has happened sooner as there has been so much publicity. I feel sorry for his family but I think people’s emotions are running very high in today’s environment.”

Righteous outrage over the institutionally corrupt Westminster expenses system, under which MPs have claimed £93 million for bogus “second homes” and car journeys alone, has heightened this exasperation. A recent letter to the press complained that “the contemptuous betrayal of honest, decent, hard-working people has become so patent that it can no longer be tolerated. It is time for a middle-class revolution - and it won’t just be the aristocrats in the tumbrils this time.” The writer was not myopically fixated on bankers but aiming more sensibly at the venal political power-brokers and the underclass they have created, both squeezing the life out of the middle-classes.

Putting aside the contrived anti-Capitalist G20 protests in London, the high emotion which flared around Britain early this year in co-ordinated protests against foreigners taking jobs from unemployed locals is a more troubling indicator. The walkouts and protests at refineries and power stations were generally peaceful but the anger expressed by desperate British workers was perfectly rational and, understandably, militant.

“We’re here because we’re fighting for our livelihoods,” said an unemployed steel worker from Chesterfield with 30 years experience. “Everybody is worried about the future and about how they’re going to support their families... [to] bring in workers from Italy - in the current economic climate - just beggars belief. Something has to be done.” Wisely, foreign workers at the troubled refineries are now protected by high security fences and 24-hour patrols.

In a recent Home Office study 69% of voters across the political spectrum described immigration as either a “big problem” or a “very big problem,” listing the burden on public service and pressure on jobs as their main concerns. “The stakes could not be higher,” declared Labour MP Frank Field, furious with his own party for having “contemptuously brushed aside worries expressed by a tiny handful of its MPs that nine out of ten [of the 3 million jobs created since 1997] have gone to foreign workers. Make no mistake,” he warned. “The men and women on the picket line are not just fighting for their jobs, they are also asserting their national identity.” [Mail on Sunday, 1/2/09]

Europe

There is similar aggravation and strife across Europe.

The French, of course, who love a riot, are leading from the front. Three million took to the streets in late March to protest Mr Sarkozy’s handling of the financial crisis. A wave of French factory closures and mass layoffs causing extreme hardship for millions have also led to several managers, including the CEO of Sony France, being kidnapped and held for periods of time by militant unionists. “This kind of action is the only negotiating tool we have,” they insisted. In mid-April, French fisherman also bared their militant teeth, wreaking havoc on both sides of the Channel during a violent blockade of ferry ports in protest at EU fishing quotas which threatened their livelihoods.

Former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has warned of a rising “revolutionary risk” in France. But rather than a revolutionary atmosphere, French commentators speak of a brewing “defiance” of the middle classes desperate to protect their existing rights. This latent “radical energy” already on display in large protest marches could explode if the situation hits rock bottom and the middle class makes common cause against the despised national elite with a jobless working class stripped of all social assistance, and a rising underclass who have nothing to lose anyway.

Next door, the neo-Nazis are exploiting the record number of young Germans facing a bleak future as the economy contracts and the number of unemployed, already over 3.5 million, continues to rise. Although the far more thrifty Germans (very few of whom even own credit cards) are not yet reduced to printing money like the British and Americans, experts fear the worsening conditions are worryingly similar to those of the late 1920s and early 1930s when the savings of the middle classes were wiped out, investment fell, businesses collapsed, unemployment rose and the Reichsmark became worthless amid hyperinflation. Viewed as the salvific answer to this misery, Hitler and his Third Reich were voted in.

If it could happen once it could happen again. In early February, nearly 7,000 neo-Nazis, turned up in Dresden to “honour German patriots” on the anniversary of the 1945 Allied bombings which killed 25,000 residents - almost double the turnout last year. Fascist attacks on immigrants, anti-Nazi activists and Jewish sites are growing. A former senior member of the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party, Uwe Luthardt, told Der Spiegel that the organization preys on the gullible and the weak who seek, as he did, a restoration of some mythical glory to Germany while finding scapegoats for the economic misery. Funded by old Nazis living in South America who donate to the NPD via shell companies, as well as through proceeds from skinhead music concerts, Luthardt said: “The simple aim is the restoration of the Reich in which a new stormtrooper organization takes revenge on anyone who disagrees with them. In Jena in East Germany in the NPD HQ there are a load of SS pictures in the cellar. And there’s a room with weapons. The basic concept the NPD talks about is, ‘Let’s kick out all the foreigners, then the Germans will have jobs again’.”

Elsewhere, a summary report by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Daily Telegraph [18/1/09] confirmed that “a great ring of EU states stretching from Eastern Europe down across Mare Nostrum to the Celtic fringe are either in a 1930s depression already or soon will be. Greece’s social fabric is unravelling before the pain begins, which bodes ill. Each is a victim of ill-judged economic policies foisted upon them by elites in thrall to Europe’s monetary project - either in EMU or preparing to join - and each is trapped.” He continued:

This week, Riga’s cobbled streets became a war zone. Protesters armed with blocks of ice smashed up Latvia’s finance ministry. Hundreds tried to force their way into the legislature, enraged by austerity cuts. “Trust in the statconinte’s authority and officials has fallen catastrophically,” said President Valdis Zatlers, who called for the dissolution of parliament. In Lithuania, riot police fired rubber-bullets on a trade union march. Dogs chased stragglers into the Vilnia river. A demonstration outside Bulgaria’s parliament in Sofia turned violent on Wednesday.

Spain lost a million jobs in 2008. Madrid is bracing for 16pc unemployment by year’s end. Private economists fear 25pc before it is over. Spain’s wage inflation has priced the workforce out of Europe’s markets. EMU logic is wage deflation for year after year. With Spain’s high debt levels, this is impossible. Either Mr Zapatero stops the madness, or Spanish democracy will stop him. The left wing of his PSOE party is already peeling off, just as the French left is peeling off to fight “l’euro dictature capitaliste.” Italy’s treasury awaits each bond auction with dread, wondering if can offload €200bn of debt this year… The debt compound noose is tightening around Rome’s throat. Italian journalists have begun to talk of Europe’s ‘Tequila Crisis’ - a new twist. They mean that capital flight from Club Med could set off an unstoppable process.

Fixed exchange systems - and EMU is just a glorified version - rupture suddenly. Things can seem eerily calm for a long time. Politicians swear by the parity. Remember John Major’s ‘soft-option’ defiance days before the ERM blew apart in 1992? Or Philip Snowden’s defence of sterling before a Royal Navy mutiny forced Britain off the Gold Standard in 1931. Don’t expect tremors before an earthquake - and there is no fault line of greater historic violence than the crunching plates where Latin Europe meets Teutonia. Traders suspect that investors are dumping their Club Med and Irish debt immediately on the European Central Bank in ‘repo’ actions. In other words, the ECB is already providing a stealth bail-out for Europe’s governments - though secrecy veils all. An EU debt union is being created, in breach of EU law. Liabilities are being shifted quietly on to German taxpayers. What happens when Germany’s hard-working citizens find out?

As for Ireland, it may not be long before Garda dogs imitate their Lithuanian cousins by chasing Irish protesters into the Liffey. Leading Irish economist David McWilliams believes the European Monetary Union straightjacket is preventing the country from mimicking Britain’s ability to let sterling fall (so that the debt problem becomes someone else’s) thus turning Ireland “into a large debt-repayment machine.” The government is facing spending commitments in the coming year of €55 billion while its revenues have collapsed to just €35 billion or less. As a result, in March, U.S. debt ratings agency Standard and Poor stripped the country of its cherished AAA rating on government debt - signalling to international markets that Ireland might default.

With almost two-thirds of the Irish annual budget spent on public sector pay and social welfare (compared to half of Britain’s annual spending), and the Irish government even more in thrall to the unions than British Labour, the Cowen government responded by raising extra money through increased taxation of high earners rather than cutting the obscenely bloated public sector. This bleak outlook could see Ireland, rather than a basket-case country like Spain, win the dubious privilege of setting off the default dominoes throughout Europe.

Socialist cement

Despite all this and such massive, ineradicable corruption that auditors have refused to sign off the EU accounts for 14 consecutive years, Obama wants to emulate the European Union! We have seen how rapidly he is moving American governance “towards a European-style model,” as EU Commission president Barroso proudly declared. It is logical. His lifelong formation by the Left, especially the Chicago affiliates of the radical Socialist International which groomed him for the presidency, as set out in Part I, both dictates and demands his ideological alliance with the EU-brand of champagne socialism championed by New Labour.

Aping every destructive British policy, Obama’s rampant tax-raising (not least his regressive Green tax on the poor which will cost every struggling family over $3,000 a year in higher energy prices) and his colossal increases in federal government spending (with a second “stimulus” already mooted) will penalise small businesses which create most new jobs, while driving millions of jobs overseas. Years of internalising the anti-capitalist - “racist competitive society” - ravings of Jeremiah Wright and his Black Value System has rendered a truly Christian notion of “profit-motive” as the key to “incentive,” “motivation” and “cost-savings” completely foreign to the core beliefs of multi-millionaire Barack. The fact that at least half of government spending is routinely wasted has no place in the thinking of Obama and his EU brethren, who inevitably view the government as the best way to solve problems; for whom an issue is always best resolved by a meeting rather than a simple phone call; where five meetings are always better than one; and where employees are paid regardless of whether their enterprise makes a profit.

“The truth is that many of those senior civil servants, parliamentarians, local government bosses and others who feel underpaid on their generous packages would sink without trace if they had to manage a business through the recession,” said Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman Vince Cable recently, commenting on the £1.2 trillion pound bill facing taxpayers to fund the pension scheme enjoyed by 6.4 million state workers - equivalent to 85% of the UK’s economic output and £20,000 for every man, woman and child. The prominent British-North American Committee which published this staggering figure in early July believes public-sector costs in the UK - as a percentage of economic output - were three times higher than in Canada or the U.S.

At his present rate of spending Obama will rapidly narrow this gap. His corrosive mentality was revealed in his celebrated 12 October 2008 comment about “spreading the wealth around,” in response to an Ohio resident complaining about his punitive small business tax policy. This echoed his 6 September 2001 radio interview in which he expressed regret that the Supreme Court hadn’t engaged in wealth redistribution. “If you talk to [investor]Warren [Buffet],” he re-emphasised during the election campaign, “he’ll tell you ... let the market work... and then just tax the heck out of people at the end and just redistribute it. That way you’re not impeding, and you’re achieving equity on the back end.”

All polls show that the overwhelming majority of Americans of every income and age bracket and political group profoundly disagree with this notion (84% to 13% in a June 2008 Gallup Poll), preferring government to focus on improving overall economic conditions and the jobs situation in the U.S., as opposed to taking steps to distribute wealth more evenly among Americans. So why did they vote in a man who promotes Socialist “redistribution” as an article of faith? Perhaps six-time Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas [1884-1968] best explained this anomaly when he said: “The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But under the name of Liberalism, they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without knowing how it happened.”

If ever there was a man to consolidate that insidious process in the same way that New Labour set out to cement Socialism by EU statute (with EU President Blair as the probable pièce de résistance) it is surely Barack Obama. Political psychologist Stanley Renshon observed that he has a “unique ability to offer doctrinaire liberal positions in a way that avoids the stridency of many recent Democratic candidates.” Even more, he offers them like “a new world prophet forecasting a spiritual and political awakening.” As at the climax to his speech claiming victory in his quest for the Democratic Party’s nomination. “I am absolutely certain that generations from now,” he crooned, “we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal...”

Hypnotised by such turgid rhetoric, the American populace needs to snap out of it before it succumbs to EU-style welfarism run by the Socialist International and its globalist clique. They need to embrace the healthy, patriotic scepticism promoted by the Oath Keepers. Jonah Goldberg, author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, truly states: “[Those] who lose their scepticism of government activism invariably fall into the trap of saying ‘me too’ to whatever happens to be the political fad of the day, and hence wind up getting pulled in a direction not of their own choosing.” In this context, writing in the 30 January National Review Online, he goes on to warn the U.S. of what is in store if they choose the British path:

By American conservative standards, Britain is a horror show, or, put more constructively, a canary in the coal mine. “Reforms” that would result in bloody protest in America are newspaper filler here. Just in the last week, British papers have been full of stories about a policeman who used Britain’s omnipresent security cameras to monitor his cheating wife. They are supposed to be used as part of the criminalization of eating while you drive. The government is seeking the ability to disseminate health, tax, and other personal records to whatever agencies, public or private, it chooses. A new pilot program has officials knocking on doors to make sure citizens are managing their leftovers properly. Of course, Britain’s socialized medicine churns out a new cautionary tale every day. Meanwhile, a new study has found that in much of England, 60 percent to 70 percent of economic output comes directly from the government.

It didn’t happen overnight. This is merely one small slice of a parade of horribles, stretching back decades, that could only have been allowed to march for so long because parties from both left and right happily saluted and applauded the growth of the state from the reviewing stand. Many Tories will tell you that a generous welfare state is necessary to maintain a sense of national community and cohesion. The only problem is that there’s no evidence the ever-rising tide of nanny-statism has done anything but erode the shores of British resolve. Meanwhile, Obama’s stimulus plan appears to be little more than an effort to catch up with the British parade. It would cost more than the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined, while stimulating little other than his administration’s ambitions to get its fingers deeper into everything from higher education to health care, expanding entitlements and making any future restraints on spending seem like severe “cuts.”

The dispiriting nightmare of modern Britain after a dozen years of Leftist deconstruction appalls even Labour diehards like backbencher Frank Field. Originally charged by Blair to think the unthinkable in terms of welfare reform, he was summarily sacked for doing just that and, thereby, threatening the status quo. In one of his many outspoken protests, Field asserted last February that the £75 billion spent by Gordon Brown on his beloved New Deal jobs scheme and the related tax credit system had been all but a waste of money. The overall waste under Brown and Blair has been calculated at around 15 times that amount - over £1 trillion!

Government ineptitude on this scale requires a Soviet-like system run by time-serving political drones: much like the regime described in the diaries of former Labour minister Chris Mullin. His important and wonderfully dry chronicle of service under Blair is one long echo of political life behind the Iron Curtain: the mechanical signing of piles of documents, the wearisome, empty speeches at futile conferences, the growing scorn of officials who think he doesn’t work hard enough - but work at what? he ponders. He doesn’t really do anything anyway. Confirming our June/July 2008 analysis, Mullins also complains about the vulgarity of the Labour propaganda machine, the unelected Blair coterie in Downing Street so immensely more powerful than almost any Minister, and the monstrous, brain-numbing jargon designed to conceal the emptiness of so much of the New Labour project. [A View From The Foothills, Profile Books, 2009]

New World Order

This is the purposeful, quickening trajectory under Obama: root and branch Socialist corruption of the American socio-political system without which the hallowed New World Order can never reach its tyrannical end. Henry Kissinger is urging Obama to advance towards that goal by way of “creative diplomacy” on the pretext of curbing “chaos” (never mind that much of the “chaos” is actually democratic reaction to an epochal crisis engineered by the despotic elite he personifies!).

Catholic author Michael O’Brien explains that the Kissinger plea “can only mean an imposed top-down global social-political revolution. In other words, solutions would then come from a reigning authority over all nations putting aside individual conscience and principles of national self-determination.”

(Hence: Obama’s Supreme Court appointee Sonia Sotomayor, a fierce advocate of subordinating the U.S. Supreme Court to the opinions of foreign courts; Obama’s Cap-and-Trade carbon tax, which Al Gore recently said will usher in “global governance”; the sovereignty-crushing EU as the continental political template; the UN as the global administrative template; the Obama-Socialist International-EU-UN nexus.)

“In all likelihood,” says O’Brien, “Kissinger and like-minded globalists, see the present world configuration as a creative disintegration which would usher in a new form of world government. In such a situation, management by crisis overrides authentic exercise of human freedom and responsibility.”

(i.e. One big opportunity to persecute Christians in general and Catholics in particular, with a view to eradicating their obstructive moral benchmarks - or “small-mindedness, prejudice, bigotry and worn out dogmas” as Obama puts it.)

And yet, O’Brien concludes, “A true and healthy order in the human community can only arise from an internal revolution of the moral order. It cannot be imposed without imposing greater ills.”

(Thus, with the Christians eliminated as a moral force, the state accrues further power to control the resulting “chaos” in a self-righteous, self-fulfilling globalist circle.)

Monsignor Michel Schooyans, a leading analyst of the New World Order, further warns that “In the case of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, this is also a matter of promoting one and only one religious confession, which a universal, global political power would impose on the entire world ....”

(Indicative of this push is the “naming ceremony” introduced by some British councils in 2000. Promoted as a non-religious “state baptism” and featuring “guide parents” in lieu of godparents, it was the brainchild of Blair’s Home Secretary, Jack Straw.)

Speaking at the plenary assembly of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences in early May, on the theme “Catholic social teaching and human rights,” Msgr Schooyans went on:

In fact, Tony Blair’s project extends and amplifies the United Religions Initiative, which appeared several years ago. It also extends the Global Ethic Declaration, one of the main proponents of which is Hans Küng [see CO, Dec. 1997 and Jan. 1998]. This plan cannot be realized except at the price of the sacrifice of religious freedom, of the imposition of a “politically correct” interpretation of the Sacred Scriptures, and of the sabotage of the natural foundations of law. Machiavelli had recommended that religion be used for political purposes ...

(...) So now we are back in the time of Hobbes, if not of Cromwell: it is civil power that defines what one must believe. Religion is emptied of its distinctive content, its doctrine; nothing remains but a residue of morality, as defined by the Leviathan. It is not said that one must deny God, but from now on God has nothing to do with the history of men and their rights: it is a return to Deism. God is replaced by the Leviathan. It is up to this to define, if it wishes, a civil religion. It is up to this to interpret, if and how it wishes, the religious texts. The question of the truth of religion no longer has any relevance. Religious texts, in particular the biblical ones, must be understood in their purely “metaphorical” sense; this is what Hobbes recommends (III, XXXVI). At the most, only the Leviathan can interpret the Scriptures. Religious institutions must also be reformed to adapt them to the changes. Some religious figures must be taken hostage and made to approve the new secularized “faith,” that of the “civil partnership.”

What the analysis of Barack Obama’s decisions and Tony Blair’s project reveals is that an alliance is coming between two converging intentions, one aimed at subjugating law and the other at subjugating religion. This is the new version of the two-headed eagle. Law and religion are exploited to “legitimize” anything at all.

This twofold exploitation is deadly for the human community. This is what emerges from the various experiences that have taken place in the context of the nanny state. This, by virtue of wanting to please individuals, has multiplied subjective “rights” of attribution, for example in the areas of divorce, sexuality, the family, population, etc. But by doing this, the nanny state has created countless problems that it is incapable of resolving. With the extension of these “rights” of attribution on a worldwide scale, the problems of instability and marginalization are increased to such an extent that no world government will be able to solve them.

(..... ) Through these channels, and with the support of the Blairs, the president-jurist Obama is preparing to launch a new American messianism, in a totally secularized form. He is supported in this by his faithful colleague, a presumed candidate for the presidency of the European Union. The supreme will of the president of the United States will ratify the law of nations and the law concerning relations among nations. In his footsteps, the “Thirty-Nine Articles” of the new religion will be promulgated by his British colleague.

From the summit of this pyramid, the will of the Prince is destined to circulate through the international channels of the UN to the individual national channels. In perspective, this process, as can be guessed, extinguishes the authority of the national parliaments, abolishes the authority of the executive branch, and ruins the independence of judicial power. These are the reasons why, in Obama’s thinking, an international criminal court should have a larger role, and must be armed in order to coerce the recalcitrants - for example, the Catholics - who reject this view of power and law, of law as a servant of power. How can one not see this blinding truth: that we are witnessing the emergence of an unprecedented form of political-legal terrorism?

Fanning the flames

While still a Cardinal, Pope Benedict, denounced the “new world order” as more or less a culmination of Marxism, stating that a Christian is “obliged to protest” against it. His new encyclical Caritas in Veritate [“Love in Truth”] on social and economic matters can be viewed in that light.

Released just prior to the 8-10 July G8 meeting of world leaders in Italy, the encyclical is the latest of his many constructive protests against the global scheming of these and all the self-servers currently running the world from East to West. As far back as 1985 during a symposium on the Church and economics he had warned that a decline in ethics “can actually cause the laws of the market to collapse.” While last October he reminded them that “money vanishes, it is nothing,” and that “the only solid reality is the word of God.”

In his encyclical, therefore, the Holy Father returns to this theme, effectively calling for an ethical capitalism: “Financiers must rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity.”

Stating that the current economic crisis is “clear proof” of “pernicious effects of sin” in the economy, he finds at the root of the meltdown three false convictions: that man is self-sufficient, that he can “successfully eliminate the evil present in history by his own action alone” and that the economy must be shielded from any moral influences. The Pope confirms that “Profit is useful if it serves as a means toward an end. [But] once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty.” He writes:

The conviction that the economy must be autonomous, that it must be shielded from ‘influences’ of a moral character, has led man to abuse the economic process in a thoroughly destructive way. In the long term, these convictions have led to economic, social and political systems that trample upon personal and social freedom and are therefore unable to deliver the justice that they promise.

That the same political and financial elites he is addressing are trampling upon the personal and social freedoms of his Christian flock - seeking to shut them out before shutting them up altogether - is hardly lost on the German Pope; he has seen it all before in his youth. But the fact that they will certainly ignore him and go their own godless way cannot absolve the Vicar of Christ from his responsibility of speaking truth to power: part of his “supreme duty: to proclaim Christ to all peoples” (as his predecessor taught). In Caritas in Veritate, Benedict does this admirably - up to a problematic point.

In light of the Vatican’s witless assessment and futile courting of Obama, the Holy Father’s call in paragraph 67 for a new supranational body to control financial excesses smacks, at best, of similar wishful thinking.

It is one thing to accept government intervention “in correcting errors and malfunctions” in the economy and to revise national regulatory frameworks in the light of the crisis. It is quite another to proclaim “an urgent need of a true world political authority” whose task would be “to manage the global economy.”

In the first place, considering the catastrophic failure of battalions of financial regulators to spot and blow the whistle on the credit bubble behind the crisis, many experts consider further layers of regulation a destructive knee-jerk reaction. Secondly, any such authority will be run by the same omnipotent network of amoral, filthy rich aliens who caused our present woes.

A devastating analysis in Rolling Stone magazine by Matt Taibbi identifies these as the Goldman Sachs financiers; Machiavellian manipulators of the world economy whose fingerprints have been on almost everything bad that has happened since the financial crisis unfolded. With the help of U.S. taxpayer billions handed over by its former employees - men like like Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Bush’s Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson - the Goldmanites have rebounded from the financial collapse they precipitated to continue making obscene amounts of money, handing out record bonuses to its staff in July, while re-establishing their power over the American and global elite.

With Goldman alumni heading key government policy-making and private sector posts across the world, including central banks, stock exchanges and the World Bank, Taibbi describes the firm as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jabbing its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” In which case it will surely wrap its tentacles around a new global regulator and negate any prospect of meaningful reform. Indeed, Goldmanite Mario Draghi, president of Italy’s central bank, is first in line to head such a body. 

Perhaps Benedict has adopted the dismissive attitude of Britain’s Chancellor Alistair Darling? Queried by a Conservative MP about his idea of giving European banking regulators power over British companies, Darling replied with a yawn: “We shouldn’t get too hung up on the theology of these things.” Or maybe the Holy Father was impressed with Gordon Brown’s call for a new world order based on the “deep moral sense” shared by all faiths. Quoting scripture to a congregation of 2,000 souls at St Paul’s cathedral on 31 March, he used the word “global” 29 times in his oration, urging people to unite to forge a new “global society.”

When Popes start drifting into economic and political alignment with grossly incompetent neo-Marxist hypocrites like Alistair and the sociopathic Gordon, we need to take stock: to realize that a papal nod and wink to global consolidation - presented as a fait accompli - is a gift to proponents of the New World Order. It only fans the flames of their intrinsically anti-Catholic project, with papal appeals to truth, charity and subsidiarity laughed to scorn in the process of turning the crisis to centralizing advantage.

In May, the elite Bilderberg powerbrokers met to discuss the financial crisis and tailor their one world government designs accordingly. A lengthy BBC Radio report on this typically secretive, high security conference duly noted that the Bilderberg is “far more important [influential in government and business] than the G8.” Indeed. And how their Machiavellian supranational hearts must have leapt when the Pope called for a “world political authority” to be “regulated by law,” “universally recognized” and “vested with the effective power to ensure security for all, regard for justice, and respect for rights.” Kissinger could not have put it better himself. Nor could he improve on Benedict’s insistence that such a sovereignty-crushing monolith “would have to have the authority to ensure compliance with its decisions from all parties, and also with the coordinated measures adopted in various international forums.”

Affiliates of the Socialist International reacted immediately. German Chancellor Angela Merkel who had recently rebuked the Pope over his handling of the Bishop Williamson affair suddenly praised his prophetic vision: “Pope Benedict has encouraged the state leaders to create rules so that this sort of worldwide economic crisis isn’t repeated. I also saw this as an order to work toward a social market economy in the world.” To be directed, of course, by “a UN Economic Council” to mirror the Security Council. In other words, a world economy managed by the same tax-and-spend Socialists who have left socio-economic disasters in their wake for decades!

The old priapic perjurer Bill Clinton is unusual in this regard. He brought down the deficit, cut wasteful government spending and saved taxpayers billions by signing off tough welfare reforms which led to a 65% fall in welfare cases, reducing dependent families from 5 million to fewer than 2 million in just a decade. He is the fiscally conservative “Democratic Socialist” exception who proves the ruinous rule: as confirmed by the out-of-control Barack Obama (already making major buyers of US debt, like China, dangerously nervous about the value of the dollar and the safety of their investment) and amply demonstrated by the history of British Labour.

Playing to their core constituency, which always wants a spending party in good times or bad, most of the six Labour administrations since the party first came to power in 1924 have fallen due to economic weakness. Two of them had to devalue the pound (in 1949 and 1967) while Chancellor Denis Healey (who said he would “tax the rich until they squealed”) was forced to go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund in 1976 and subject the country to IMF demands for massive public spending cuts in order to save the UK from bankruptcy.

True to this inglorious history, the Institute for Fiscal Studies now forecasts that filling the black hole of New Labour’s record debt burden will take until 2032. And the IMF is once more so alarmed by the “dramatic deterioration” in Britain’s public finances that it is warning of a possible collapse in sterling if public spending is not cut. Furthermore, the National Audit Office has refused to sign off six sets of Whitehall accounts due to the massive fraud and errors in benefits payments (over 16% of transactions). Worse still, the NAO  could not approve the Treasury’s books for only the second time in 350 years due to its spending £24 billion more last year than Parliament had authorized. It is particularly concerned about the open-ended risk to taxpayers of underwriting the “bad loans” of Lloyds and the Royal Bank of Scotland (a scheme neither scrutinised nor approved by Parliament).

Yet despite these warnings and the worst slump in government revenues since the 1920s (£32 billion last year) Mr Brown still denies the scale of the problem and Labour continues its criminally wasteful 12 year splurge. (The cost of its army of spin doctors alone leaping 43% last year to £540 million, in order to advertise and market its nanny-state campaigns to tackle smoking and climate change).

Debt, big spending and incompetence are also the DNA of British Labour’s Australian cousin, personified by Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who is calling for a new era  of “social capitalism” involving heavy government intervention and regulation. An insipid mini-Blair full of delusory self-regard, empty gesture politics, cringeing soundbites and cynical spin, he also flaunts the same oxymoronic “Christian Socialist” pretensions (except that he went the other way, discarding his Catholic faith to join the Anglican circus).

On cue, Mr Rudd shared Ms Merkel’s delight. After the obligatory photo-op with the Holy Father he somehow kept a straight face while recommending that “all political leaders should take seriously and examine” the encyclical. This from a man who within eighteen months of attaining office turned the zero national debt and tens of billions of dollars of government surplus he inherited from his conservative predecessors into a $315 billion debt and a $57 billion budget deficit! Breaking one major election promise after another in the process and putting his country’s triple-A credit rating under pressure. 

The ferociously ambitious Rudd also likes to strut the world stage with a Blairite eye to post-office spoils, advocating an Asia-Pacific “community” [read: “Union”] while looking to raise Australia’s [read: his] profile by pushing for an Aussie seat on the UN Security Council. He does this through expensive PR gimmicks which have already cost the taxpayer nearly $50 million. This included $11.5 million to install an ambassador at the Vatican, when Australia’s Catholics were quite content with their ambassador to Ireland and the Holy See making regular trips from Dublin to Rome to attend to the minuscule duties involved.

The point is this: papal advocacy of any global mechanism is just a lucrative window of opportunity for these grasping “social marketers”: adept at marketing themselves and filling their boots at everyone else’s expense without any regard for Christian principles. 

Benedict’s additional call in para. 67 for a reform of the United Nations alongside that of economic institutions and international finance will also appeal to the One World Religion initiatives promoted by Israeli Zionists, no friends of the Catholic Church.

On his visit to the Holy Land last May, the Holy Father endured addresses by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel (“one of the most corrupt religious establishments in Western democracies,” claims American Rabbi Irwin Kula). During these talks, Chief Rabbi Metzger falsely declared that the Church has “decided to stop all missionary activity among Jews.” In the next breath, he asked the Pope to “set aside one day a year to speak out not only against anti-Semitism, but also in favour of the Jewish people - to be a tongue of blessing”! In addition to this perverse request, for the Church to promote Judaism instead of converting Jews, there were other impertinent demands, such as the identification of all those Jews baptized during the war and raised as Catholics! But Metzger also repeated his past calls for “a type of United Nations for religions, where representatives of all religions can sit around one table and talk.” I’ll bet, with Rabbi Metzger directing a one-way dialogue “in favour of the Jewish people,” over and against the anti-Semitic “hate crimes” of Catholic teaching and evangelization!

The Metzger proposal is effectively the “alternative Holy See” sought by the UN abortion-population control lobby and reported in the October 2000 edition of Inside the Vatican [ITV]. A fierce opponent of the Vatican’s permanent observer status at the UN, the goal of this nefarious lobby “seems to be to construct another voice with moral and religious credibility to act as a foil to the Holy See, effectively cancelling it out by voting ‘correctly’ on ‘new world order’ agendas.” Speaking to ITV about the Millennium Peace Summit held at UN headquarters between 23-31 August 2000, which hosted 1,000 of the world’s religious leaders, Austin Ruse of C-Fam explained that “The stated purpose of this summit is to set up an advisory council of religious and spiritual leaders to advise the UN. The real purpose is to set up a body to supplant the views of orthodox people, whether they be Christians, Muslims or Jews… I think they want inter-governmental status, which means they could actually negotiate UN documents.”

Echoing Metzger’s fear of Christian evangelization to the Jews, literature surrounding the Peace Summit called for the condemnation of “proselytizing” and “fundamentalism” while giving no definition of how those terms were understood by the authors. By past UN conference standards, however, ITV surmised that “those terms could include anyone who held to the basic orthodoxy of their faith’s truth claims. Anyone believing that abortion or marriage between two members of the same sex should not be condoned could fall under those categories. Moreover, a Buddhist master received a standing ovation for expressing a widely held view at the summit when he condemned all attempts at religious conversion.”

As ITV notes, the Vatican “sees more annoyance than danger at these strange UN conferences.” Complacency masquerading as faith? Within the curia, perhaps. Benedict, though, is a student of the New World Order and a trenchant critic of the pragmatic/soulless “new man” it is shaping. So he knows better: that his conciliatory encyclical, embracing globalism, will be co-opted by our Socialist enemies to negate the God-given mission of the Catholic Church to win each and every soul for Christ. He understands. Doesn’t he?!

Rudderless Church

Beyond the economic collapse and the self-defeating supranationalism of Caritas in Veritate, however, is something far more fundamental: the ever deepening crisis in the Church. Amid constant talk about contempt for politicians and bankers we neglect the widespread disdain for our own Shepherds.

All the papal critiques and ethical appeals to the worldlings count for nothing when the hypocrisy, arrogance, dishonesty and delusion of the secular leaders are mirrored by our own: bishops who care nothing for the Church or her traditions, for all the sacrifices of those who went before them; prelates who continue to oversee the stagnation/disintegration of local Churches, condoning heresy and heterodoxy while paying lip service to orthodoxy; career clerics who care for nobody but number one.

Even while we delight in the liturgical restoration under Benedict, even as we laud his determination to rescue the Society of St Pius X from its unsustainable isolation - to help him launch the long-awaited, long-term restoration of Catholic faith and tradition - the “episcopal problem” remains a festering sore on the Body of Christ.

On the one hand, Benedict understands and wishes to redress the damage caused by “light touch” regulation that filled government coffers but stoked the amorality which crippled the financial system. On the other, he retains the “light touch” papal governance which has fostered episcopal wickedness for forty years and emptied local Churches worldwide. If the Vicar of Christ prefers global financial intervention to national episcopal intervention there is not much we can do about it, of course. But as long as post-conciliar pontiffs maintain this self-destructive kid-glove policy, even to cosseting the easiest disciplinary targets instead of making an example of them, we have no chance whatsoever of re-establishing a robust Church to meet the coming storm.

Men of the Catholic calibre of Archbishop Raymond Burke, the no-nonsense head of the Apostolic Signatura, the Church’s Supreme Court in Rome, are like gold nuggets in a sea of mud. Yet without a huge increase in such uncompromising Shepherds to implement and oversee the wholesale reform the Holy Father is initiating, the Church is sunk. In 2005, just before his election, Benedict spoke with urgency of the Church as a “boat on the point of sinking, a boat taking in water on all sides.” Yes, Holy Father, because she is rudderless! And if she sinks, the West goes down too: its corroded Catholic foundations already buckling under the pagan weight of political correctness.

Despite superficial appearances, Evangelical Protestantism cannot and will not shore up those foundations. American Christian writer Michael Spencer says Evangelicalism is “bloated and hyper-inflated” and about half of evangelical churches will die off in the next 25 to 30 years due to generational reasons or because their members become more attracted to a secular version of life. In a column for The Christian Science Monitor, Spencer wrote: “We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we’ve spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it.”

His commentary highlights two key, yet contradictory points. Firstly, as at Lepanto (1570) and Vienna (1683) when only the Church stood between Western freedom and Islamic enslavement, everything depends on Catholic resistance. And yet, secondly, he describes precisely our own downward spiral - under faithless local hierarchies!

Papal dereliction

Even Bishop Patrick O’Donoghue of Lancaster has publicly pondered the local deafening silence which greeted his otherwise universally praised Fit for Mission catechetical document; an ice-cold non-reaction from his episcopal brethren which speaks to the recalcitrant Modernist hegemony in England and Wales.

Of such men Our Lord said: “Isaiah’s prophecy is fulfilled in them, which says: ‘You shall indeed hear but not understand you shall indeed look but never see. Gross is the heart of this people, they will hardly hear with their ears, they have closed their eyes’...” [Matt. 13:10-17]. Just as Bishop O’Donoghue’s eyes and ears have belatedly opened to this stark episcopal reality, however, the Holy Father’s appointment of Archbishop Vincent Nichols to Westminster has once again confirmed the hierarchy in its blindness and incomprehension.

An assembly-line product of the Archbishop Worlock-Cardinal Hume school of compromise and capitulation, Nichols has a long history of speaking out of both sides of his mouth. Indeed, this defining trait kick-started his episcopal career. As Rector of Upholland Northern Institute he twice invited the notorious heretic and Humanae Vitae dissident Charles Curran to conduct its Annual Summer Schools. Yet he gave a one-off orthodox sermon on contraception in Liverpool Cathedral which was orchestrated by his mentor Worlock to boost his profile and set him on the road to Westminster.

Notoriously ambitious, one diocesan bishop told the Daily Mail: “He could do with learning a little humility.” Several other prelates penned an unprecedented letter to the Nuncio last March in a bid to thwart his appointment, warning of his “divisive” nature. The pristine truth of Christ-like divisiveness, however, is not in him.

An ally of radical feminists, he typically dissembled in declaring his adherence to Church teaching prohibiting women priests - “at the moment.” He baldly lied to a press conference, insisting that the rampant liturgical abuses listed in a 1997 Vatican Instruction “do not exist here.” When challenged by a leading catechist he would not even confirm that Catholic truth trumped the false episcopal unity upholding catechetical texts strewn with errors! Indeed his leadership of the corrupting Catholic Education Service [CES] alone disqualifies him as a sure guide in faith and morals.

This was confirmed during the nationwide battle in the late 90s to maintain a statutory prohibition against the teaching of homosexuality to children. Like the Anglican vicar he is, Nichols sold out with a compromising nod to “stable relationships,” thenceforth deemed a legitimate phrase for use in Catholic schools. Ten years on, the insidious phrase is now used in perverted context by Marriage Care, its Chief Executive Terry Prendergast last month assuring the pseudo-Catholic sodomites and lesbians of Quest that they can “lay equal claim to their married heterosexual counterparts when bringing up children in stable relationships.” The sitting president of Marriage Care is Vincent Nichols.

Apropos the pastoral care of homosexuals, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith categorically stated in 1986 that “All support should be withdrawn from any organizations which seek to undermine the teaching of the Church.” Yet Terry Prendergast will continue to accept parish and diocesan funding for Marriage Care, despite freely addressing dissident homosexual groups and providing them with spurious advice which confirms them in their gravely sinful (and often deadly) addiction. He will also persist in scandalising the Catholic faithful by publicly criticising Church “rules” on sex and marriage while vehemently denying that the “teaching Church” and the “pastoral Church” are one and the same thing. He will do all this since he knows Archbishop Nichols will not react, being up to his complicit neck in the manifold corporate sins of the hierarchy, not least their homosexual agenda [cf. “Infiltration and Blackmail” and “The Quest Rehabilitation”, CO, Nov. 2007; “Sacrilege in Soho”, June/July 2006].

Consistent with accommodating dissident “gays” on his Birmingham premises, he is said to have already assured the militant Quest homosexuals they are safe on his Westminster watch. Certainly he will not rebuke Bishop John Arnold, his Westminster Chancellor and Vicar General, for advertising sacrilegious Masses conducted by militant sodomites in The Westminster Record. Nor will he undertake the elementary task of removing the pro-homosexual Tablet from scandalous sale in his new cathedral.

The personification of Isaiah’s prophesy as recalled by Jesus, Archbishop Nichols is not bothered by Mr Prendergast or Bishop Arnold or the anti-Catholic bile spewed forth by The Tablet - just as Rome is clearly not bothered by him. Even his cocky belief that he had Westminster sewn up in 2000 only annoyed them sufficiently to park him in Birmingham for a few years. Subsequently, neither his explicit sex education for infants, nor newspaper headlines about his scandalous caravan holidays with a nun, nor his giving succour to radical sodomites in contravention of the 1986 CDF warning prevented his further step up to Westminster.

Impressionable traditionalists and neo-cons have since waxed lyrical about irrelevancies: like the Archbishop’s use of “gorgeous vestments” and his preference for using Westminster cathedral’s high altar (albeit versus populum). His institution of traditional devotions for the Year of the Priest has gone down well, as also his protests against secularisation and the homosexual advance.

But what about the sickening duplicity? As CES chief he systematically secularised Catholic kids for years! His Nihil Obstat even adorns the manual accompanying A Time to Embrace, a disgusting “gay” propaganda video. Produced for Catholic schools on behalf of the Bishops Conference of England and Wales, it clearly implies that homosexual “love” between an older man and a teenage boy is morally equivalent to heterosexual love. Birmingham teens are groomed for this spurious filth through his sex-ed programme All that I Am, whichcalls for detailed drawings of anatomical parts and discussion of terms like “copulate” and “ejaculate” at 9 years of age! So much for the latency period and the virtues. Liturgical lip-service and orthodox platitudes can never restore childhood innocence so blithely shredded.

This is the prelate Benedict has entrusted with leading the English fight against the homosexual onslaught and government plans to mandate compulsory sex-education in primary schools. Across the pond, meanwhile, another showpiece of papal dereliction has seen the disgraced former Archbishop of Milwaukee rise from recent obscurity to scandalise the Church anew.

Rather than depose Rembert Weakland as soon as his double life of prelate and sodomitical predator was exposed back in 2002 (when details of a $450,000 pay-off to one of his ‘conquests’ became public knowledge) John Paul II allowed him to step down. Pope Benedict, in turn, let the sleeping dog lie. Now Rembert has awoken to bite the complicit hand which still feeds him. In his autobiography, A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church: Memoirs of a Catholic Archbishop, released in June, he blames the Church for his woes. It seems that Catholic teaching on homosexuality, not his addiction to it, provoked the blackmail which finally undid him.

Shouting his love of vice from the rooftops as never before, he told the New York Times in a promotional interview that the Church should approve “physical, genital expression” of same-sex partners. The Times surely delighted in pointing out that this interview took place in the “Archbishop Weakland Center, which houses the archdiocesan cathedral offices in downtown Milwaukee.” As Catholic World Report editor George Neumayr wrote: “This small snapshot of episcopal decadence - an openly “gay” bishop spouting heresy while sitting in a diocesan office still named in his honor - would be amusing if it weren’t so sad and scandalous.”

The biggest scandal, however, is the singular lack of Vatican leadership flagged by Rembert’s re-emergence and layman Neumayr having to call for authorities to “suspend Weakland’s faculties.” Since the Milwaukee faithful spent the best part of 30 years begging Rome to do just that - to act against his unspeakable perversions of Catholic faith and life - we can forgive their gales of derisive laughter at Neumayr’s suggestion. Still, it is never too late. The soothing sight of the “Degradation of a Bishop” (Degradatio ab ordine pontificali) stripping Weakland of his episcopal office (a dramatic ceremony detailed in our November 2005 edition) would be some small recompense for their decades of suffering.

And ours! Each and every one of us has earned a piece of that belated satisfaction. Indeed the world at large deserves some recompense for the papal complicity in this episcopal Fifth Column because its corrupting impact reaches far beyond the Church, even to succouring our two key antagonists.

In the process of gutting the local Body of Christ from head to toe without a papal murmur, Cardinals Hume and Murphy O’Connor indulged the sacrilegious Blair, encouraging his dangerous anti-Catholic delusions [see “Comic” O’Blair: The Catholic Convert from Hell,” CO, June/July 2008]. The late Cardinal Bernadin of Chicago also left his political mark. A sexual pervert, Bernadin treated Rome with contempt without fear of sanction. He not only laced the American hierarchy with his dissolute brethren, sowing the seeds of the sexual abuse crisis [see “Bernadin’s Boys,” CO, Jan. 2002], his devilish “seamless garment”/“common ground” approach to social justice issues universally undermined the pro-life movement. Along the way, it turns out that he was also molding the thoughts of one Barack Hussein Obama, who revealed just prior to his recent Vatican visit that he had been profoundly influenced by Bernadin ever since they met during his community organiser days. It shows.

In God we trust

“The stars are aligned as never before, and the most important thing is we can get started,” exclaimed the President of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change in a letter to Foreign Policy. Brimming with newfound confidence, she lauded the impetus Obama has given the Green subset of the new Red dawn. “We may well discover,” she enthused, rallying the partisans, “that we can move much further and much faster than we ever thought possible.” Comrade Brown shares her optimism. “I think a new world order is emerging,” he announced following the G20 summit, “and with it the foundations of a new and progressive era of international cooperation.”

As argued in this treatise and forewarned by Msgr Schooyans, these are the black clouds gathering across the horizon, menacing humanity with “an unprecedented form of political-legal terrorism.” They demand a courageous Catholic response under virile, steadfast, inspirational leadership. A contradictory, cart-before-horse papal policy does not serve this purpose. How can one seriously tout the life-saving, world-redeeming reform of the Church, while continuing both to tolerate and promote the very Modernist prelates who provoked that reform in the first place?

As ever, God is testing faith and resolve to their outer limits. Betrayed on all sides, the Psalmist cried: “Give judgement for me, O God, and decide my cause against an unholy people: from unjust and deceitful men deliver me” [Ps. 42]. It is the cry of the moment from Catholic laymen and secular citizens alike. Surrounded by endemic corruption, injustice and deceit, their trust is shattered.

And so, amid the troubles of the world we are left, like the Psalmist, to “trust in God”; to lift up our hearts in praise and petition, urging the Master of the harvest to send us labourers: a Pope Saint, first and foremost, who will appoint the courageous bishops we so sorely lack but desperately need. The Lord will hear and respond because He looks upon us and his heart is once more “moved with pity” for His “sheep without a shepherd” [Mk 6:30-34].

His Justice unfailing, His Mercy unceasing, His Love everlasting - in this Eternal Shepherd alone we trust. For the rulers of this world pass, and all their dark utopian designs with them:

Put not your trust in princes, in man in whom there is no salvation. When his spirit departs, he returns to his earth, and on that day his plans perish. [Ps. 146:3]

THE OBAMA TRANSITION – PART I

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