Is the End Near for the Right-Wing's Vice Grip on U.S. Israeli Policy?

J-Street, vilified by the right and the Right Wing-Nut Christian dominionists who are trying to provoke Armageddon, the peace and reconciliation focused lobby for younger moderate to progressive American Jews goes center stage with Obama's National Security Advisor giving the keynote. Yes, things not the same in the relationship between Israel and the US today. No more Israeli and Iranian spies sneaking around the White House.

Image via Wikipedia

This week, retired Marine Corps Gen. Jim Jones, Barack Obama's national security adviser, will keynote the inaugural J Street Conference, billed as a gathering of "progressive pro-Israel, pro-peace" activists.

The event marks the emergence of the moderate Jewish advocacy group that aspires to be a counterweight to the voices of the traditionally hawkish "pro-Israel" lobby in Washington.

The White House's decision last week to send Jones to address the event was a small move that might have a significant impact on the overheated politics of the Middle East.

In the months before, a full-throated "swift boat" campaign had been launched against J Street in an attempt to vilify and delegitimize the group as belonging to the fringe, despite its advocacy of a moderate, or at most slightly left-of center, approach to U.S. policy in the Middle East.

The conservative media offered a steady drumbeat of dubious charges, and a campaign had been under way to warn members of Congress away from the event. And it appeared to be having some impact as several members of Congress pulled out of the conference in the weeks leading up to the event (a total of 10 reportedly dropped out, according to reports, but not all in response to outside pressure).

It was an attempt to nip J Street in the bud and preserve the hegemony established lobbying groups like American Israel Public Affairs Committee have long enjoyed in the halls of Congress.

At stake was not only the definition of what it means to be "pro-Israel" -- long synonymous with supporting the more hawkish end of Israel's political spectrum (despite American Jews' general tendency to lean left) -- but also, and more importantly, the ability of established lobbying groups to claim to speak for the American Jewish community as a whole.

More via Is the End Near for the Right-Wing's Vice Grip on U.S. Israeli Policy? | | AlterNet.

Related articles by Zemanta

• J Street as Jewish Political Cover for Obama and Democrats (usnews.com)


• Who speaks now for America's Jews? (guardian.co.uk)


• Whose Israel is It? (tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com)


• J Street Conference To Open Amid Controversy (huffingtonpost.com)


• Anti-Aipac? (news.bbc.co.uk)


• Obama To Jewish Leaders: The Pressure Will Continue (tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com)


• The liberal Jewish challenge (guardian.co.uk)


• J Street And World Order (tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com)


• Gallup: Jews Are Religious Group Most Supportive of Obama (usnews.com)

Where does the hatred come from?

It would appear that Homeland Security is promoting Islamo-phobia in it's recommended training for US Law Enforcement! Where is Obama? Is he just pretending to be Bush lite?

Image via Wikipedia

This fall, U.S. law enforcement personnel will have their final chance to take advantage of a rare opportunity. Participants will travel to Israel to receive “homeland security training,” but the counterterrorism briefings and martial arts practice sessions are only one part of the package. The program also includes visits to Christian religious sites in the Holy Land — an aspect likely to be especially attractive to Christian Zionists — along with other sites such as the Knesset and the Israeli “security fence”.

The Israel program is run by Security Solutions International (SSI), a group that has attracted controversy due to its ties to Islamophobic propaganda groups — as well as its apparent view that indoctrinating first responders with alarmist information about Islam is an essential part of counterterrorism training.

Most striking of all, the SSI Israel trip is funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. DHS’s funding of this venture is a concrete illustration of the ways that Islamophobic fringe groups have exploited the “global war on terror” for their own purposes.[..]So what does this training involve? In addition to martial arts demonstrations including “how to take down an armed suicide bomber”, meetings with Israeli security personnel, and a three-hour presentation on “suicide terror,” the itinerary also includes more tourist-oriented activities. Tourist excursions are both political visits to the Knesset, the West Bank “security barrier,” and southern Israeli towns that have been the target of rocket attacks from Gaza, and religious trips to Jerusalem’s Old City and to “some of Christianity’s holiest sites”.While this DHS-funded trip might already seem a bit odd — especially the emphasis on Christian religious sites during what is ostensibly a counterterrorism training program — things take a turn towards the bizarre in the section of the website advertising SSI’s two day presentations on “The Islamic Jihadist Threat”.

via LobeLog.com

Related articles by Zemanta

• Hamas asserts power in Gaza after al Qaeda clash (nationalpost.com)


• At Least 6 Die at Gaza Mosque in a Clash With Hamas (nytimes.com)


• Group Says Israel Plan to Cement Hold on Jerusalem (abcnews.go.com)

Fascist America: Are We There Yet?

Image via Wikipedia

Few people want to believe the direction politics have moved in the US. Perhaps it's the basic good of people that prevents them from easily accepting that some that they know do not serve their interests, in fact seek to take away their civil liberties. The lesson of history is difficult to follow. But we must understand. Fritz Stern pointed out the drift of the Bush administration in 2004. Sara Robinson continues the warning here. She also prescribes what we can do here.

Fascist America: Are We There Yet? | OurFuture.org.

What is fascism?
The word has been bandied about by so many people so wrongly for so long that, as Paxton points out, "Everybody is somebody else's fascist." Given that, I always like to start these conversations by revisiting Paxton's essential definition of the term:

"Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline."

Elsewhere, he refines this further as

"a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

.
Jonah Goldberg aside, that's a basic definition most legitimate scholars in the field can agree on, and the one I'll be referring to here.

From proto-fascism to the tipping point
According to Paxton, fascism unfolds in five stages. The first two are pretty solidly behind us -- and the third should be of particular interest to progressives right now.

In the first stage, a rural movement emerges to effect some kind of nationalist renewal (what Roger Griffin calls "palingenesis" -- a phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes). They come together to restore a broken social order, always drawing on themes of unity, order, and purity. Reason is rejected in favor of passionate emotion. The way the organizing story is told varies from country to country; but it's always rooted in the promise of restoring lost national pride by resurrecting the culture's traditional myths and values, and purging society of the toxic influence of the outsiders and intellectuals who are blamed for their current misery.

Fascism only grows in the disturbed soil of a mature democracy in crisis. Paxton suggests that the Ku Klux Klan, which formed in reaction to post-Civil War Reconstruction, may in fact be the first authentically fascist movement in modern times. Almost every major country in Europe sprouted a proto-fascist movement in the wretched years following WWI (when the Klan enjoyed a major resurgence here as well) -- but most of them stalled either at this first stage, or the next one.

As Rick Perlstein documented in his two books on Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, modern American conservatism was built on these same themes. From "Morning in America" to the Rapture-ready religious right to the white nationalism promoted by the GOP through various gradients of racist groups, it's easy to trace how American proto-fascism offered redemption from the upheavals of the 1960s by promising to restore the innocence of a traditional, white, Christian, male-dominated America. This vision has been so thoroughly embraced that the entire Republican party now openly defines itself along these lines. At this late stage, it's blatantly racist, sexist, repressed, exclusionary, and permanently addicted to the politics of fear and rage. Worse: it doesn't have a moment's shame about any of it. No apologies, to anyone. These same narrative threads have woven their way through every fascist movement in history.

In the second stage, fascist movements take root, turn into real political parties, and seize their seat at the table of power. Interestingly, in every case Paxton cites, the political base came from the rural, less-educated parts of the country; and almost all of them came to power very specifically by offering themselves as informal goon squads organized to intimidate farmworkers on behalf of the large landowners. The KKK disenfranchised black sharecroppers and set itself up as the enforcement wing of Jim Crow. The Italian Squadristi and the German Brownshirts made their bones breaking up farmers' strikes. And these days, GOP-sanctioned anti-immigrant groups make life hell for Hispanic agricultural workers in the US. As violence against random Hispanics (citizens and otherwise) increases, the right-wing goon squads are getting basic training that, if the pattern holds, they may eventually use to intimidate the rest of us.

Paxton wrote that succeeding at the second stage "depends on certain relatively precise conditions: the weakness of a liberal state, whose inadequacies condemn the nation to disorder, decline, or humiliation; and political deadlock because the Right, the heir to power but unable to continue to wield it alone, refuses to accept a growing Left as a legitimate governing partner." He further noted that Hitler and Mussolini both took power under these same circumstances: "deadlock of constitutional government (produced in part by the polarization that the fascists abetted); conservative leaders who felt threatened by the loss of their capacity to keep the population under control at a moment of massive popular mobilization; an advancing Left; and conservative leaders who refused to work with that Left and who felt unable to continue to govern against the Left without further reinforcement."

And more ominously: "The most important variables...are the conservative elites' willingness to work with the fascists (along with a reciprocal flexibility on the part of the fascist leaders) and the depth of the crisis that induces them to cooperate."

That description sounds eerily like the dire straits our Congressional Republicans find themselves in right now. Though the GOP has been humiliated, rejected, and reduced to rump status by a series of epic national catastrophes mostly of its own making, its leadership can't even imagine governing cooperatively with the newly mobilized and ascendant Democrats. Lacking legitimate routes back to power, their last hope is to invest the hardcore remainder of their base with an undeserved legitimacy, recruit them as shock troops, and overthrow American democracy by force. If they can't win elections or policy fights, they're more than willing to take it to the streets, and seize power by bullying Americans into silence and complicity.

When that unholy alliance is made, the third stage -- the transition to full-fledged government fascism -- begins.

The third stage: being there
All through the Bush years, progressive right-wing watchers refused to call it "fascism" because, though we kept looking, we never saw clear signs of a deliberate, committed institutional partnership forming between America's conservative elites and its emerging homegrown brownshirt horde. We caught tantalizing signs of brief flirtations -- passing political alliances, money passing hands, far-right moonbat talking points flying out of the mouths of "mainstream" conservative leaders. But it was all circumstantial, and fairly transitory. The two sides kept a discreet distance from each other, at least in public. What went on behind closed doors, we could only guess. They certainly didn't act like a married couple.

Now, the guessing game is over. We know beyond doubt that the Teabag movement was created out of whole cloth by astroturf groups like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips' Americans for Prosperity, with massive media help from FOX News. We see the Birther fracas -- the kind of urban myth-making that should have never made it out of the pages of the National Enquirer -- being openly ratified by Congressional Republicans. We've seen Armey's own professionally-produced field manual that carefully instructs conservative goon squads in the fine art of disrupting the democratic governing process -- and the film of public officials being terrorized and threatened to the point where some of them required armed escorts to leave the building. We've seen Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to "a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress."

This is the sign we were waiting for -- the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America's conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country's legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America's streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won't do their political or economic bidding.

This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins. It's also our very last chance to stop it.

The fail-safe point
According to Paxton, the forging of this third-stage alliance is the make-or-break moment -- and the worst part of it is that by the time you've arrived at that point, it's probably too late to stop it. From here, it escalates, as minor thuggery turns into beatings, killings, and systematic tagging of certain groups for elimination, all directed by people at the very top of the power structure. After Labor Day, when Democratic senators and representatives go back to Washington, the mobs now being created to harass them will remain to run the same tactics -- escalated and perfected with each new use -- against anyone in town whose color, religion, or politics they don't like. In some places, they're already making notes and taking names.

Where's the danger line? Paxton offers three quick questions that point us straight at it:

1. Are [neo- or protofascisms] becoming rooted as parties that represent major interests and feelings and wield major influence on the political scene?

2. Is the economic or constitutional system in a state of blockage apparently insoluble by existing authorities?

3. Is a rapid political mobilization threatening to escape the control of traditional elites, to the point where they would be tempted to look for tough helpers in order to stay in charge?

By my reckoning, we're three for three. That's too close. Way too close.

The Road Ahead
History tells us that once this alliance catalyzes and makes a successful bid for power, there's no way off this ride. As Dave Neiwert wrote in his recent book, The Eliminationists, "if we can only identify fascism in its mature form—the goose-stepping brownshirts, the full-fledged use of violence and intimidation tactics, the mass rallies—then it will be far too late to stop it." Paxton (who presciently warned that "An authentic popular fascism in the United States would be pious and anti-Black") agrees that if a corporate/brownshirt alliance gets a toehold -- as ours is now scrambling to do -- it can very quickly rise to power and destroy the last vestiges of democratic government. Once they start racking up wins, the country will be doomed to take the whole ugly trip through the last two stages, with no turnoffs or pit stops between now and the end.

What awaits us? In stage four, as the duo assumes full control of the country, power struggles emerge between the brownshirt-bred party faithful and the institutions of the conservative elites -- church, military, professions, and business. The character of the regime is determined by who gets the upper hand. If the party members (who gained power through street thuggery) win, an authoritarian police state may well follow. If the conservatives can get them back under control, a more traditional theocracy, corporatocracy, or military regime can re-emerge over time. But in neither case will the results resemble the democracy that this alliance overthrew.

Paxton characterizes stage five as "radicalization or entropy." Radicalization is likely if the new regime scores a big military victory, which consolidates its power and whets its appetite for expansion and large-scale social engineering. (See: Germany) In the absence of a radicalizing event, entropy may set in, as the state gets lost in its own purposes and degenerates into incoherence. (See: Italy)

It's so easy right now to look at the melee on the right and discount it as pure political theater of the most absurdly ridiculous kind. It's a freaking puppet show. These people can't be serious. Sure, they're angry -- but they're also a minority, out of power and reduced to throwing tantrums. Grown-ups need to worry about them about as much as you'd worry about a furious five-year-old threatening to hold her breath until she turned blue.

Unfortunately, all the noise and bluster actually obscures the danger. These people are as serious as a lynch mob, and have already taken the first steps toward becoming one. And they're going to walk taller and louder and prouder now that their bumbling efforts at civil disobedience are being committed with the full sanction and support of the country's most powerful people, who are cynically using them in a last-ditch effort to save their own places of profit and prestige.

We've arrived. We are now parked on the exact spot where our best experts tell us full-blown fascism is born. Every day that the conservatives in Congress, the right-wing talking heads, and their noisy minions are allowed to hold up our ability to govern the country is another day we're slowly creeping across the final line beyond which, history tells us, no country has ever been able to return.

How do we pull back? That's my next post.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Clyburn: Town Hall Protests Like Horrid Anti-Civil Rights Demonstrations (huffingtonpost.com)


• Leahy To GOP: "Stop The Racial Politics" On Sotomayor (huffingtonpost.com)


• The Real Republicans: The Case for Moderates, Liberal, and Pragmatic Conservatives in Our Party part 5 (themoderatevoice.com)


• Right-wing claim that "La Raza = the Klan" insults not just Latinos, but the Klan's many victims (crooksandliars.com)


• Paul Krugman On 'Republican Death Trip': This Opposition Cannot Be Appeased (huffingtonpost.com)


• THE GOP base vs the NRSC, redux (washingtonmonthly.com)


• Fascist America II: The Last Turnoff (seminal.firedoglake.com)

Is Obama devotee of monkey-god idol?

The Right Wingnuts at Worldnetdaily.com have no shame.

A group of Hindus in India have presented Sen. Barack Obama's campaign with a two-foot Hindu monkey-god idol after hearing the candidate carries a smaller version of the Lord Hanuman good-luck charm with him as he vies for the presidency.


Earlier this week, according to reports in India, Obama representative Carolyn Sauvage-Mar accepted the gold-plated statue, promising to pass it on to the candidate after is it sanctified through ritual Hindu prayers.


"The idol is being presented to Obama as he is reported to be a Lord Hanuman devotee and carries with him a locket of the monkey god along with other good luck charms," reported the Times of India.


An hour-long prayer meeting to sanctify the idol was conducted by Congress party leader Brijmohan Bhama and temple priests.


"Obama has deep faith in Lord Hanuman, and that is why we are presenting an idol of Hanuman to him," said Bhama.

Ayatollah Huckabee Condemns US Constitution with new Fatwa

Informed Comment

Mike Huckabee says he wants to amend the US constitution to bring it into line with the divinely revealed law of the living God:

"I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that's what we need to do -- to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view."

Huckabee the Wacko Right WingNut

Informed Comment

Mike Huckabee is a smooth-talking, fanatical country preacher who has learned to make himself likeable on camera but who spews all kinds of hateful nonsense when among like-minded devotees.


The dark side of Huckabee, the anti-science and anti-gay side of Huckabee, and the anti-Palestinian genocidal side of Huckabee, are all more more dangerous than the incompetent fool side of Huckabee, but the latter is pretty dangerous, too.


The incompetent fool side was on full display in his remarks, apparently provoked by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, about the alleged threat of illegal Pakistani immigration into the United States. He actually thundered about 660 persons, claiming that the Pakistanis came right after Latinos in the ranks of illegals. He also seemed to think that building a wall around Mexico would keep out Pakistanis (the illegals among whom likely mostly just overstayed their visas and landed at LaGuardia).


[..]Huckabee's first response to Benazir's assassination was to ask whether "martial law" would be "lifted." Martial law had not been declared, rather a constitutionally permissible "state of emergency" had been declared by Musharraf. He lifted it some time before Huckabee's remark.


Huckabee is a narrow-minded, bigotted and ignorant person, and I am quite sure that the American people have had enough of that sort of thing in the White House for a while. On the other hand, I certainly hope that he emerges as the Republican standard-bearer, because I think any Democratic candidate could make mincemeat of him once his bizarre views become public.

Huckabee: A Wife Should Graciously Submit

Daily Kos

Huckabee's opinion on gay marriage is out there, but we should also be publicizing Huckabee's opinions on heterosexual marriage. Specifically, what he believes about a women's role in a marriage.


In August of 1998, Huckabee was one of 131 signatories to a full page USA Today Ad which declared: "I affirm the statement on the family issued by the 1998 Southern Baptist Convention." What was in the family statement from the SBC? "A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ."


The ad wasn't just a blanket, "we support the SBC statement," but rather highlighted details. The ad Huckabee signed specifically said of the SBC family statement: "You are right because you called wives to graciously submit to their husband's sacrificial leadership."


Add "graciously submit" to his "Take back the nation for Christ" statement, and if the media does its job, he's well on his way to being toast.

Huckabee Is a Liar, A Christian Right Wingnut

Clearly, Huckabee intervened to get a convicted rapist released. After all the victim was a relation to Clinton and the Parole Board were Democrat appointees. Except DuMond was guilty and after Huckabee got him released, he went on to rape and murder another woman.
Meanwhile, Huckabee insists he had nothing to do with getting him released. The parole board members disagree.
Also in this article is a story that Huckabee advocated interning AIDs victims and called homosexuals dangerous.
New York Times

As new polls highlight Mike Huckabee’s ascent in the Republican presidential field, he is drawing new scrutiny of his record in Arkansas, particularly his actions in the release of a convicted rapist who went on to murder a woman and his response to a questionnaire in which he said people with AIDS should be quarantined.


Two former parole board members in Arkansas said yesterday that as governor, Mr. Huckabee met with the board in 1996 to lobby them to release the convicted rapist, Wayne DuMond, whose case was championed by evangelical Christians. “He expressed his concerns about DuMond’s guilt,” said Deborah Suttlar, a former parole board member. “He felt he deserved to be released.”


Mr. DuMond later went on to murder a Missouri woman after his parole. He died in prison of natural causes in 2005.


Mr. Huckabee, a former Southern Baptist pastor, has denied that he had any involvement in Mr. DuMond’s release, pointing out that he had refused to commute the sentence and that the parole board freed him. But The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that three of the seven members of the parole board said Mr. Huckabee had pressured them, echoing earlier reporting by The Arkansas Times and other local news media.


[..]Highlighting the new scrutiny of Mr. Huckabee’s record, The Associated Press revealed yesterday that as a candidate for the United States Senate in 1992, Mr. Huckabee said in a response in a 229-question survey that he believed that AIDS patients should be isolated from the public and that homosexuality was an “aberrant, unnatural and sinful lifestyle” that posed a “dangerous public risk.”


[..]Mr. DuMond was convicted in the 1984 rape of a teenager who was a distant cousin of Bill Clinton, then the governor of Arkansas. While he was out on bail awaiting trial, Mr. DuMond said men forced his way into his home and castrated him, but the authorities said they thought he might have castrated himself in a play for sympathy. He was sentenced to life in prison.


Mr. Clinton’s successor, Jim Guy Tucker, found the sentence excessive and cut it to 39 ½ years, making Mr. DuMond eligible for parole.


While Mr. DuMond was in prison, the Rev. Jay D. Cole, a Baptist pastor and friend of Mr. Huckabee’s, ministered to him, and the inmate later said he had found God. Mr. Cole said yesterday that he asked Mr. Huckabee to look into the case. “I think Mike was very torn about the whole thing,” Mr. Cole said. “I feel he felt an innocent man was in prison, or if not, he had been in prison too long. But he didn’t come out and say that.”


Nevertheless, soon after taking office, Mr. Huckabee met in October 1996 with members of the parole board, all of whom had been appointed by his Democratic predecessors. Mr. DuMond’s case, with its twists and turns — including a $110,000 judgment against a sheriff who kept Mr. DuMond’s testicles in a jar on his desk — had become something of a celebrated cause among conservative activists, who charged that Mr. Clinton’s relation to the victim had led to Mr. DuMond’s being railroaded.


The parole board meetings are public, but after Mr. Huckabee arrived, the board chairman closed the meeting to everyone except board members. What happened next is in dispute.


A request for a pardon was being considered at that point by Mr. Huckabee, who came out in favor of it. That caused an outcry among some, including the rape victim, who went to his office to ask him to change his mind. Mr. Huckabee later denied Mr. DuMond clemency, but wrote a letter to him. “Dear Wayne,” he wrote. “My desire is that you be released from prison. I feel that parole is the best way for your reintroduction to society to take place.”


When Mr. Huckabee met with the parole board, according to Ms. Suttlar and Charles Chastain, another board member, he said he wanted to talk to them about a specific case and raised the issue of Mr. DuMond unprompted. “I’ve looked into this a good bit,” Mr. Chastain recalled Mr. Huckabee saying to them. “I feel he may just be a fellow from the wrong side of the tracks and gotten a raw deal.” Ms. Suttlar yesterday accused Mr. Huckabee of compromising “the integrity of the parole board.” She was somewhat more lenient in an interview with The Associated Press in 2001, when she said the pressure from Mr. Huckabee “was not coercion, it was an implied thing.”

A Sad and Scary Day for the World

There are some days that I'm afraid that a clash of civilizations can't be avoided. Today is one of those days. I'm profoundly sad and angry that anyone would dare stoke the fires of religious intolerance, especially from a country that has in it's Bill of Rights freedom of religion.
Yet, an entire political party panders to religious hatred. Worse yet, Democratic candidates kowtow to the Israeli lobby, the source of tremendous acrimony towards the west. The world is truly insane.
CNN.com

Hundreds of angry protesters, some waving ceremonial swords from trucks equipped with loud speakers, gathered Friday outside the presidential palace to denounce a teacher whose class named a teddy bear "Mohammed" -- some calling for her execution.


The protesters, which witnesses said numbered close to 1,000, swore to fight in the name of their prophet.


Gillian Gibbons, 54, was given 15 days in jail late Thursday after she was convicted of insulting religion. She was cleared of charges of inciting hatred and showing contempt for religious beliefs, her lawyer, Ali Ajeb, said.


Ajeb said they planned to appeal the sentence, which begins from the date she was detained, Nov. 25. Including Friday, she has 10 more days in jail.


British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said he was "extremely disappointed" that the charges were not dismissed.


The demonstration began around 2.30 p.m. (6a ET) as worshippers spilled out of mosques in the capital after Friday prayers. They marched to the palace, which is on the same street as Unity High School, where Gibbons taught grade school students. Those who named the bear were 7 years old.


A heavy police presence was maintained outside the school, but no demonstrators were there. Armed with swords and sticks, the protesters shouted: "By soul, by blood, I will fight for the Prophet Mohammad. Western journalists who attempted to talk to the protesters were ushered away by men in plain clothes. Gibbons is being held in a women's prison in the Omdurman district of Khartoum, and she will be deported at the end of her prison term, British consular officials told CNN.

Huckabee Is a Racist

There is something very scary about the Christian Right wing. They have managed to incorporate Christian Theocracy, Social Darwinism, racisim, anti-abortionists, and pro-rich financial policies into a package largely bought by blue collar voters. If there is an anti-Christ. It will emerge from this unholy coalition. Huckabee pitches to lead these extremists into the White House again.
CNN.com

Speaking before a gathering of Christian conservative voters, GOP presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee said legalized abortion in the United States was a holocaust.


"Sometimes we talk about why we're importing so many people in our workforce," the former Arkansas governor said. "It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973."

Guiliani, the Rapture Candidate

Not surprisingly, Pat Robertson the Republican candidate most likely to bring him the rapture he dreams and speaks about. World War III including Iran is Robertson's most fervent wish. This wacko thinks he'll go straight to heaven.
New York Times Blog

The televangelist Pat Robertson endorsed Rudolph W. Giuliani today at the National Press Club in Washington, providing the former New York City Mayor with a big symbolic boost as he tries to allay the concerns of Christian conservatives about his candidacy.


The endorsement by Mr. Robertson could have some impact because of Mr. Robertson’s clout through the Christian Broadcasting Network, where Mr. Giuliani can deliver a central argument of his candidacy: that the threat of terrorism is too important and should outweigh voters’ concerns about his stand on abortion.


[..]To me, the overriding issue before the American people is the defense of our population from the blood lust of Islamic terrorists.

Papal Meddling in Politics: Voting, Abortion, and Worthiness to Receive Holy Communion

Papal Letter

• Regarding the grave sin of abortion or euthanasia, when a person’s formal cooperation becomes manifest (understood, in the case of a Catholic politician, as his consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws), his Pastor should meet with him, instructing him about the Church’s teaching, informing him that he is not to present himself for Holy Communion until he brings to an end the objective situation of sin, and warning him that he will otherwise be denied the Eucharist.


• When "these precautionary measures have not had their effect or in which they were not possible," and the person in question, with obstinate persistence, still presents himself to receive the Holy Eucharist, "the minister of Holy Communion must refuse to distribute it" (cf. Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts Declaration "Holy Communion and Divorced, Civilly Remarried Catholics" [2002], nos. 3-4). This decision, properly speaking, is not a sanction or a penalty. Nor is the minister of Holy Communion passing judgment on the person’s subjective guilt, but rather is reacting to the person’s public unworthiness to receive Holy Communion due to an objective situation of sin.


• A Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil, and so unworthy to present himself for Holy Communion, if he were to deliberately vote for a candidate precisely because of the candidate’s permissive stand on abortion and/or euthanasia. When a Catholic does not share a candidate’s stand in favour of abortion and/or euthanasia, but votes for that candidate for other reasons, it is considered remote material cooperation, which can be permitted in the presence of proportionate reasons.

Building God's (Christian) Army

AlterNet

At Speicher base in Iraq, U.S. Army Spec. Jeremy Hall got permission from a chaplain in August to post fliers announcing a meeting for atheists and other nonbelievers. When the group gathered, Specialist Hall alleges, his Army major supervisor disrupted the meeting and threatened to retaliate against him, including blocking his reenlistment in the Army.


Months earlier, Hall charges, he had been publicly berated by a staff sergeant for not agreeing to join in a Thanksgiving Day prayer.


On Sept. 17, the soldier and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) filed suit against Army Maj. Freddy Welborn and US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, charging violations of Hall's constitutional rights, including being forced to submit to a religious test to qualify as a soldier.


The MRFF plans more lawsuits in coming weeks, says Michael "Mikey" Weinstein, who founded the military watchdog group in 2005. The aim is "to show there is a pattern and practice of constitutionally impermissible promotions of religious beliefs within the Department of Defense."


For Mr. Weinstein -- a former Air Force judge advocate and assistant counsel in the Reagan White House -- more is involved than isolated cases of discrimination. He charges that several incidents in recent years -- and more than 5,000 complaints his group has received from active-duty and retired military personnel -- point to a growing willingness inside the military to support a particular brand of Christianity and to permit improper evangelizing in the ranks. More than 95 percent of those complaints come from other Christians, he says.

Bill Maher on Neocon Think Tanks

Thanks to PoliticsPlus

Christian Coalition Applauds Pandering McCain

Think Progress€™

In a recent interview with Beliefnet, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) claimed "€œthe Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation,"€ and suggested religious candidates that don't share his faith should be viewed skeptically. €œMcCain was raised Episcopalian and currently attends a Baptist church in Arizona.
Beliefnet columnist David Kuo said McCain was "€œpandering to what he thinks the Christian conservative community wants to hear"€ and predicted he would “have a lot of explaining to do about this interview.
Several religious groups have condemned McCain'™s remarks. The Anti-Defamation League is calling on him to "œreconsider and withdraw" the comments. The American Jewish Committee said McCain'™s attempts to impose religious tests for public office "€œputs the very character of our country at stake."€ James Zogby, head of the Arab American Institute, called called McCain "€œCheney without the nuance."


But there'™s at least one religious group that is proudly backing McCain's religious bigotry. In a press release, the Christian Coalition, an organization founded by Pat Robertson,€” said McCain may win the presidency with his "œAmerica is a Christian Nation" comment.

The religious right's political power ebbs

McClatchy Washington Bureau

Palm Sunday two years ago was a glorious day for Christian conservatives. A president who'd proclaimed Jesus his favorite philosopher was racing back from vacation to sign a bill rushed through a compliant Congress at their bidding — a last-minute gamble to keep alive a severely brain-damaged woman in Florida. That, however, was the peak of the Christian conservatives' political power.


Today, their nearly three-decade-long ascendance in the Republican Party is over. Their loyalties and priorities are in flux, the organizations that gave them political muscle are in disarray, the high-profile preachers who led them to influence through the 1980s and 1990s are being replaced by a new generation that's less interested in their agenda and their hold on politics and the 2008 Republican presidential nomination is in doubt.


"Less than four years after declarations that the Religious Right had taken over the Republican Party, these social conservatives seem almost powerless to influence its nomination process," said W. James Antle III, an editor at the American Spectator magazine who's written extensively about religious conservatives. "They have the numbers. They have the capability. What they don't have is unity or any institutional leverage."


The Religious Right never had absolute power in the Republican Party. It never got the Republican president and Republican Congress to pursue a constitutional amendment banning abortion, for example. But it did have enormous clout in party politics and a big voice in policy, and it's lost much of both heading into 2008. In the presidential campaign, for example, candidate Rudy Giuliani consistently leads national polls of likely Republican voters despite his support for abortion rights and gay rights, not to mention his three marriages.


Fred Thompson boasts of a strong voting record against abortion, yet he admitted recently that he doesn't go to church regularly and wouldn't support a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage because he'd rather leave it to the states. "He is apparently the Great Hope that burns in the breasts of many conservative Christians," social conservative James Dobson said sarcastically in an e-mail to fellow conservatives. "Well, not for me, my brothers. Not for me." Yet Thompson's support as measured by polls nationally and in the early voting states apparently hasn't suffered.


And all of the top Republican candidates felt free to skip a values forum in Florida organized by some of the country's top social conservatives, including Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation, Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum and Don Wildmon of the American Family Association.


The candidates will appear at a similar values voters gathering in Washington, D.C., but the snub of such high-profile social conservatives in a politically important state such as Florida would have been unlikely in the 1980s or 1990s. "None of these candidates are ignoring conservative Christians," said John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron, "but they're not giving them as much attention as occurred in past elections. … There is at least the perception that these voters don't have the influence they once had."


In church, the generation of politically active, high profile evangelists such as Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell is giving way to new preachers such as Joel Osteen and Rick Warren, who shun partisan politics or are willing to embrace Democrats. Warren, for example, hosted Democratic Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois at his California mega-church. He cites AIDS, poverty and illiteracy as top issues, not gay marriage or abortion.


In elections, the organizations that once gave political focus to Christian conservatives and turned their passions into votes have splintered or disappeared. The biggest of them all, the Christian Coalition, is a shell of its former self. Its budget has crashed from a 1996 peak of $26 million to about $1 million. Its new director wants to expand to issues besides abortion and marriage. And state chapters in Alabama, Georgia, Iowa and Ohio have parted ways with the group they think is now too liberal.


Keith Appell, a Republican strategist, thinks that social conservatives appear less influential only because they're divided over the 2008 candidates and have lost the megaphone they once had in strong groups and high-profile leaders. "There's a leadership vacuum that has not been filled," Appell said. "The longer it goes unfilled, the more the perception increases that their influence has decreased."

The Constitution Party Seeks to Dismantle Our Form of Government

AlterNet

Ousted Alabama judge Roy Moore is waging war on church-state separation -- and you won't believe the far-out folks who are helping him.


Most lawyers and other Americans, says Roy Moore, don't understand the First Amendment's church-state provisions because they've "been indoctrinated in something that is not true."


Speaking at a "God & Country Patriotic Celebration & Conference" in Maryland in July, Moore claimed law professors and judges are leading people astray.


[...]Just before the Fourth of July, he wound up as the main attraction at a Religious Right gathering in Severn, Md., where he and a string of far-right activists peddled "Christian nation" rhetoric, bashed Islam, belittled American culture and the federal government and displayed an alarming affinity for the neo-Confederate states' rights cause.


On the conference's first day during a panel discussion dubbed "The Myth of Separation of Church and State," Moore said, "I didn't come to my understanding of separation of church and state out of study or my intellectual ability, which is limited. I came through it out of experience."


Moore then elaborated on the lengthy court battles over his efforts to display the Ten Commandments in government buildings. He is best known -- and loved by the Religious Right -- for his defense of a large granite Commandments monument he placed in the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building.


Americans United for Separation of Church and State and its allies challenged the religious display in federal court. Moore lost at all levels of the federal judiciary, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review his case. Moore defied court orders to remove the 2.5-ton monument, and in 2003 he was ejected from the state supreme court.


The "God & Country" conferees in Severn celebrated Moore's actions as heroic. The other speakers, including a fiery Maryland state legislator, a disgraced former military chaplain and a law professor dressed as a Christian crusader knight, argued that the nation's founders were deeply religious men who did not intend for church and state to be separate. America, they said, is morally bankrupt thanks to a list of usual suspects, such as gays, secularists, Hollywood and liberal politicians.


One of the conference's primary sponsors was Michael Peroutka, a Pasadena, Md., attorney who ran for president on the U.S. Constitution Party ticket in 2004. The party advocates for an extremely weak central government and a society governed by biblical law. So, beyond celebrating Moore as a Christian martyr of sorts, an anti-government sentiment was also easily discernable among the speakers and audience.


[...]"We have a republic, and the source of authority in that republic is God," said Peroutka. "A revolution has happened in America. It has happened over the past 150 years. Evolution is at the bottom of it, and some very un-American people have been and are behind it. The purpose of the revolution," he continued, "is to stop you from being able to think and believe like an American any more .... It's been a calculated and evil anti-God, anti-Christian revolution."


[...]Islam is a threat to Christianity, according to conference speaker John Eidsmoe. Eidsmoe, a retired Montgomery, Ala., law professor, spoke while dressed in a medieval crusader get-up, including chain mail and a sword. He lauded the Crusades as effectively ensuring that not all Europe would today be Muslim.


[...]"In the 20th century, I believe God used the American empire to defeat Nazism and then to defeat Communism," Eidsmoe claimed. "And in the 21st century, maybe He will use the American empire to defeat Islam."


[...]For all the talk of patriotism -- indeed, the conference was touted as a "patriotic celebration" -- the American flag was not visible on Gladway Farm during the tribute to Moore. Instead, the ceremony took place under three flags -- Maryland's, the Alabama state flag and a Confederate flag. (It was the Confederate national flag, not the more familiar Confederate battle flag.)


The display isn't surprising. According to the Web site of Jews on First, Peroutka has links to the neo-Confederate League of the South. The League, a secessionist group that seeks a "free and independent Southern republic," endorsed Peroutka's presidential candidacy, and he was a keynote speaker at the organization's 2006 convention in Chattanooga.


Church-state separationists say the radical views promulgated by Moore, Peroutka and other Religious Right activists must be closely monitored and countered by those who value religious liberty.


Said Americans United's Lynn, "If these folks had their way, the Bill of Rights would be a thing of the past. We must make sure that Americans are aware of their extreme agenda and see to it that they don't succeed."

Diary of a Christian Terrorist

Here is a profile of a student at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. While I'm sure that University officials will disavow any knowledge of his actions. Here is a good example of what sort of Right Wing Christian terrorists are being produced in the Bible belt today.
AlterNet

Visitors to Mark David Uhl's Myspace page will quickly learn that Uhl is a student at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, that he is a devoted Christian, that his name means "Mighty Warrior" -- and that he likes Will Smith's saccharine tear-up-the-club track, "Switch." Uhl reveals his career ambitions on his page as well: "I will join the Army as an officer after college." Already, Uhl was preparing in Liberty's ROTC program.


Uhl waited until he was offline, however, to reveal his plot to kill the family of itinerant Calvinist provocateur Fred Phelps (famous for their "Fag Troops" rallies outside soldiers' funerals). The Phelpses planned to protest Falwell's funeral, a bizarre stunt designed to highlight Falwell's somehow insufficiently draconian attitude towards homosexuals. Uhl made several bombs and allegedly told a family member he planned to use them to attack the Phelps family.


He was arrested soon after and charged with manufacturing explosives. On the surface, Uhl appears to be the latest version of Virginia Tech rampage killer (and "Richard McBeef" author) Cho Seung-Hui. Indeed, both Uhl and Cho were alienated young men who conceived or carried out campaigns of mass murder on college campuses.


But there is a crucial difference between Uhl and Cho: while Cho's motives remain a source of intense debate, Uhl was an a devout evangelical Christian who advocated religious violence in the name of American nationalism. Uhl's blog, featured on his Myspace page, offers a window into the political underpinnings of his bomb plot. In one post, Uhl implores Christians to die on the battlefield for "Uncle Sam." He justifies his call to arms by quoting several Biblical passages and reminding his readers that the "gift of God" is eternal life.


"Christians, we have been given life after death and we should help others receive it and not sit here in our big buildings and sing to ourselves so we can go home and feel good about ourselves," Uhl writes. "Christians, fear of death, fear of death. The fear of death shows you don't believe."


Uhl concludes, "God needs soldiers to fight so his children may live free. Are you afraid??? I'm not. SEND ME!!! "

The Pope Rewrites History, Condemns Marxism and Unbridled Capitalism

All religions at one time or another have rewritten history in hopes of containing dissent. Benedict, showing his colors as the "Inquisition Pope" rewrites the history of the European invasion of the New World. In a what appears to be an endorsement of the blatantly racist "The White Man's Burden" first expressed in a poem by the English poet Rudyard Kipling. "At face value it appears to be a rhetorical command to white men to colonize and rule people of other nations for their own benefit (both the people and the duty may be seen as representing the "burden" of the title), and because of this has become symbolic of Eurocentrism."
I'm sure the people of Montezuma's empire would see it differently. Cortez imposed Christianity in the context of a blood bath and theft of gold and other treasures of the Aztec empire.
Telegraph

Pope Benedict XVI condemned globalization and Marxism as the causes of many of Latin America’s ills on the final day of his trip to Brazil, and lamented the wide gap between the region’s small elite and its poor masses.


“The Marxist system, where it found its way into government, not only left a sad heritage of economic and ecological destruction, but also a painful destruction of the human spirit,” the pope told a bishops’ conference on Sunday before flying back to Rome after a five-day visit to the country with the largest Catholic population in the world.


Benedict also lashed out at unbridled capitalism and globalization. He warned the two could give “rise to a worrying degradation of personal dignity through drugs, alcohol and deceptive illusions of happiness.”


The pope did not name any countries in his criticism of capitalism and Marxism, but Latin America has become deeply divided in recent years amid a sharp tilt to the left - with the election of leftist leaders in Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua and the re-election of President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.


Marxism also still influences some grassroots Catholic activists in Latin America, remnants of the liberation theology movement Benedict moved to crush when he was a cardinal.


Liberation theology holds that the Christian faith should be reinterpreted specifically to deliver oppressed people from injustice.


Touching on a sensitive historical episode, Benedict said Latin American Indians had been “silently longing” to become Christians when Spanish and Portuguese conquerors took over their native lands centuries ago.


“In effect, the proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture,” he said.


Many Indians, however, say the conquest of Latin America by Catholic Spaniards and Portuguese lead to misery, enslavement and death.

Stoking the Fires of Domestic Terrorism

AlterNet: Blogs: PEEK: Attempted Abortion Clinic Bombing, and Hate Speech From The Right
One of the methods by which ordinary humans can be conditioned to carry out acts of mass violence, explains James Waller, is simple: acculturation, and conditioning. Mass violence becomes easier to perpetrate when it is directly against vilified, demonized, dehumanized groups within society. Hate speech, that vilifies societal groups, from random individuals certainly does damage, but when individuals, such as Ann Coulter, are given the ability to broadcast hate speech on a massive scale, the societal damage is proportionately greater and perhaps categorically different as well, because Coulter routinely speaks at events sponsored by large organizations with constituencies, arguably, in the millions: James Dobson's Focus On The Family, and Tony Perkins' Family Research Council, for example.
Fredrick Clarkson
Speaking at the recent Reclaiming America for Christ conference, (televangelist D. James Kennedy's annual political rally), Ann Coulter not only repeated her now infamous anti-gay slur to the Christian group, but she declared that she can "understand" the assassination of doctors who perform legal abortions.
Digby, on Hullaballoo
Perkins offered up the story of Phineas, grandson of Moses’ brother Aaron, from Numbers 25. Phineas was rewarded by God with an “everlasting priesthood” for killing an Israelite and his Midian lover because God had forbidden the mixing of the men of Israel with the women of that tribe.
The story is, essentially, the vindication of the criminalization of “miscegenation” — a sentiment consistent with Perkins’ past courting of such racist groups as the Ku Klux Klan and the Council of Conservative Citizens, America’s largest white supremacist organization, according to journalist Max Blumenthal. (Perkins bought, on behalf of political client Senator Woody Jenkins, a phone-bank list from former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke.)