Author: Papa Giorgio

The State of the Black Family (Nicholas Kristof) | Armstrong & Getty

Published by Papa Giorgio
  • Among the many wise things said by the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was that you are entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts. — Thomas Sowell

Armstrong & Getty read from honest lefty New York Times contributor regarding the state of the [esp.] black family. The article’s author is Nicholas Kristof, and the title is “The One Privilege Liberals Ignore” (link to the article – reproduced below in appendix). Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell, as well as Larry Elder and Walter Williams have been talking about this for many decades. So Kristof is standing on the vapors of giants.

THOMAS SOWELL: His 1982 book Race and Economics mentions Moynihan’s report, and in 1998 he asserted that the report “may have been the last honest government report on race.” In 2015 Sowell argued that time had proved correct Moynihan’s core idea that African-American poverty was less a result of racism and more a result of single-parent families: “One key fact that keeps getting ignored is that the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits every year since 1994.”

SOME OF MY VIDEO UPLOADS:

  • Larry Elder Quotes Obama on Fatherless Homes (YOUTUBE | Uploaded November 26, 2014)
  • Fatherless Homes and Poverty – Europe and America: Larry Elder and Thomas Sowell (YOUTUBE  | Uploaded September 21, 2016)
  • Fatherless (Black) Homes in Milwaukee – 85% (YOUTUBE | Uploaded June 26, 2017) – the percentages is more now. Sadly.
  • Fatherless Homes The Problem – Denzel Washington (YOUTUBE | Uploaded April 4, 2018)
  • Boys Need Fathers – Warren Farrell (YOUTUBE | Uploaded March 4, 2019)

Fatherless Homes The Problem – Denzel Washington

(Uploaded April 4, 2018)

SOME ARTICLES:

  • Fatherless Households: A National Crisis (Larry Elder, CREATORS | October 2020)
  • To Truly Reduce Racial Disparities, We Must Acknowledge Black Fathers Matter (FEDERALIST | June 2020)
  • The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies: Rejecting the Moynihan report caused untold, needless misery (CITY JOURNAL | Summer 2005)
  • How Much Does Politics Count? (Walter Willaims, CREATORS SYNDICATE | November 2006)
  • Random thoughts (Thomas Sowell, WAYBACKMACHINE | April 1999)

The below is taken from Walter Williams “Race and Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination?”

[The source I got this from mislabeled/lost a few footnotes. So, a couple numbered referenced footnotes notes may be placed a sentence or two too early or late. I could correct it, however, I am not digging through thousands of books to find my copy.]

While material poverty in its historical or global form is nonexistent in the U.S., what I call behavioral poverty has skyrocketed. Female-headed households increased from 18 percent of the black population in 1950 to well over 68 percent by 2000.[5] As of 2002, 53 percent of black children lived in single-parent households, compared to 20 percent for whites.[6] As of 2006, roughly 45 percent of blacks fifteen or older had never been married, in addition to 17 percent who had been divorced or widowed; that contrasts with only 27 percent of whites fifteen and older never married and 16 percent divorced or widowed.[7]

Some argue that today’s weak black-family structure is a “legacy” of slavery. Such an explanation loses credibility when one examines evidence from the past. Even during slavery, where marriage was forbidden, most black

children lived in biological two-parent families. One study of nineteenth-century slave families found that in as many as three-fourths of them, all the children had the same mother and father.[8] In New York City, in 1925, 85 percent of kin-related black households were two-parent households.[9] In fact, “Five in six children under the age of six lived with both parents.” [10]

A study of 1880 family structure in Philadelphia shows that threequarters of all black families were nuclear (composed of two parents and children). What is significant, given today’s arguments that slavery and discrimination decimated the black family, is the fact that years ago there were only slight differences in family structure between racial groups. The percentages of nuclear families were: black (75.2 percent), Irish (82.2), German (84.5), and native white American (73.1).[11] Only one-quarter of black families were headed by females. Female-headed families among Irish, German, and native white Americans averaged 11 percent.

Also significant was the fact that, in 1847, just one of ten Philadelphia blacks had been born in slavery. However, those ex-slave families were more likely than free-born blacks to be two-parent families.[12] Theodore Hershberg found that 90 percent of households in which the head purchased his freedom included two parents. He found that those households existed 80 percent of time among ex-slaves in general and 77 percent of the time among free-born blacks.[13] Historian Herbert Gutman found, in analyzing data on families in Harlem between 1905 and 1925, that only 3 percent of all families “were headed by a woman under thirty.”[14]

Thomas Sowell reported that, “Going back a hundred years, when blacks were just one generation out of slavery, we find that census data of that era showed that a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults. This fact remained true in every census from 1890 to 1940.”[15]

Coupled with a dramatic breakdown in the black-family structure has been an astonishing growth in the rate of illegitimacy. The black rate was only 19 percent in 1940, but skyrocketed in the late 1960s, reaching 49 percent in 1975.[16] As of 2000, black illegitimacy stood at 68 percent and in some cities over 80 percent.[17] High illegitimacy rates not only spell poverty and dependency but also contribute to the social pathology seen in many black communities: high incidences of adolescent violence and predatory sex, and as sociologist Charles Murray has noted, a community not unlike that portrayed in Lord of the Flies.[18]

Several studies point to welfare programs as a major contributor to several aspects of behavioral poverty. One of these early studies was the Seattle/Denver Income Maintenance Experiment, also known as the “SIME/DIME” study. Among its findings: for each dollar increase in welfare payment, low-income persons reduced labor earning by eighty cents.[19] Using 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data, Ann Hill and June O’Neill found that a 50 percent increase in the monthly value of welfare benefits led to a 43 percent increase in the number of out of wedlock births.[20]

FOOTNOTES

  1. cdc.gov/nchs/data/statab/t001x17.pdf. See also Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 222; and June O’Neill, “The Changing Status of Black Americans;’ The American Enterprise, vol. 3, no. 5 (September/ October 1992): 72.
  2. Census Bureau, “Marital Status and Living Arrangements,” Current Population Survey (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, March 1998 Update), Series P-1, 20-514.
  3. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, Series P-20, no. 468 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1992), vi, cited in Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 80.
  4. Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom: 1750-1925 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 10.
  5. The Black Family, ix.
  6. , xix.
  7. Frank F. Furstenberg Jr., Theodore Hershberg, and John Modell, “The Origins of the Female-Headed Black Family: The Impact of the Urban Experience,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History VI:2 (1975): 211-233. Originally published in Kenneth L. Kusmer, ed., From Reconstruction to the Great Migration, 1877-1917, vol. 4, part II, (NewYork: Garland Publishing, 1991), 72-96.
  8. “The Origins,” 180.
  9. Theodore Hershberg, “Free Blacks in Antebellum Philadelphia: A Study of Ex-Slaves, Freeborn, and Socioeconomic Decline,” Journal of Social History 5:2 (1971-72): 194.
  10. Gutman, The Black Family, 449-56.
  11. Sowell, The Vision, 81. Prior to 1890, this question was not included in the census.
  12. Rector, “Why Expanding Welfare Will Not Help the Poor,” (lecture no. 450, The Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C., 1993), 6.
  13. National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics Report, vol. 50, no. 5 (Hyattsville, Md.: 2002), 49.
  14. Charles Murray, “The Coming White Underclass,” The Wall Street Journal, October 29,1993.
  15. Gregory B. Christensen and Walter E. Williams, “Welfare Family Cohesiveness and Out of Wedlock Birth,” The American Family and the State, ed. Joseph Peden and Fred Glahe (San Francisco: Pacific Institute for Public Policy Research, 1986), 398.
  16. Anne Hill and June O’Neill, “Underclass Behavior in the United States: Measurement and Analysis of Determinants,” cited in Rector, “Why Expanding Welfare,” 6.

Here are some similar — more recent stats:

Fatherlessness is the root issue beneath so many ills that plague society today. Statistically speaking, a child who grows up without a father in the home is more likely to experience homelessness, commit crime, serve time in prison, abuse drugs, drop out of school, be obese, suffer from poverty, and so much more. And the United States has the highest share of single parenting in the world. How did we get here, and is there anything that can be done to reverse this trend? PragerU personality Amala Ekpunobi breaks it down.

A police officer and a protestor teach two young men that there is a better way than rioting. Black America needs fathers and good role models. Broken homes lead to broken communities. Larry Elder takes over from there:

APPENDIX | NYT’s Article

The One Privilege Liberals Ignore

Sept. 13, 2023 | Nicholas Kristof

American liberals have led the campaign to reduce child poverty since Franklin Roosevelt, and it’s a proud legacy. But we have long had a blind spot.

We are often reluctant to acknowledge one of the significant drivers of child poverty — the widespread breakdown of family — for fear that to do so would be patronizing or racist. It’s an issue largely for working-class whites, Blacks and Hispanics, albeit most prevalent among African Americans. But just as you can’t have a serious conversation about poverty without discussing race, you also can’t engage unless you consider single-parent households. After all:

  • Families headed by single mothers are five times as likely to live in poverty as married-couple families.
  • Children in single-mother homes are less likely to graduate from high school or earn a college degree. They are more likely to become single parents themselves, perpetuating the cycle.
  • Almost 30 percent of American children now live with a single parent or with no parent at all. One reason for the sensitivities is large racial disparities: Single parenting is less common in white and Asian households, but only 38 percent of Black children live with married parents.

“The data present some uncomfortable realities,” writes Melissa S. Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland, in an important book on this topic to be published next week. “Two-parent families are beneficial for children,” she adds. “Places that have more two-parent families have higher rates of upward mobility. Not talking about these facts is counterproductive.”

We liberals often perceive the world through prisms of privilege, but we rarely discuss one of the most important privileges of all — and it’s the title of Kearney’s book, “The Two-Parent Privilege.”

Let me interrupt this column with a shower of caveats. Many children raised in part by single moms do extraordinarily well; one was a two-term president in the 1990s and another served two terms until 2017. And I think the big driver for the rise in single-parent households is bad decisions by policymakers that led to mass incarceration and a collapse of earnings for working-class men.

Yet this is still so wrenching to discuss.

That goes back to 1965, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a prescient report about the decline of marriage among Black Americans. Moynihan, who himself had been raised mostly in poverty by a single mother, warned that family breakdown would exacerbate social problems, but he was denounced by liberals for racism and victim-blaming.

Scholars ran for cover. It helped greatly that the eminent African American sociologist William Julius Wilson of Harvard later conducted research in this area and praised Moynihan’s work as “prophetic.” But even today there is a deep discomfort in liberal circles about acknowledging these realities.

A scholarly organization in the field published a call in 2021 to “dismantle family privilege” (such as championing two-parent families), which it warned was embedded in “white supremacist society.” And while 91 percent of college-educated conservatives agree that “children are better off if they have married parents,” only 30 percent of college-educated liberals agree, according to a report to be released next week by the Institute for Family Studies.

In fact, children simply do better on average in school and typically earn more in adulthood if they have married parents, and this is particularly true of boys. It doesn’t seem to matter if the two parents are a mom and dad or a same-sex couple.

One advantage of a two-parent family is simply a function of arithmetic: Two parents can earn two incomes, meaning less poverty.

Two-parent households seem to benefit not just their own kids but the neighborhood as well. Harvard’s Opportunity Insights group found that upward mobility was more likely for Black boys in neighborhoods with a higher share of Black dads living with their children.

One stunning and depressing gauge of racial inequity in the United States: The study found that 62 percent of white children live in low-poverty areas with fathers present in most homes, while only 4 percent of Black children do.

The collapse of marriage has happened mostly among less-educated Americans, including those who are white, Black or Hispanic. While many college graduates in theory embrace all kinds of family relationships, they remain traditional in their personal behaviors, mostly having children after marriage and raising their own kids in two-parent households. Brad Wilcox, a sociologist and family expert at the University of Virginia, calls this “talk left, walk right.”

The United States is an outlier in family breakdown. A Pew study of 130 countries found that American children were more likely to live with a single parent than those of any other nation. Conservatives sometimes argue that increases in welfare benefits undermined marriage, but this appears not to be a major factor — partly because European countries have both stronger social welfare programs and more two-parent families.

The proposed solutions from conservatives, such as marriage promotion efforts tried under the George W. Bush administration, likewise have had little impact. What does appear to strengthen marriage is lifting earnings of low-education men. This makes them more “marriageable,” researchers find.

Lifting earnings is where liberals have the solutions: strengthened labor unions, community college support, skills training initiatives such as high school career academies and groups that provide technical training like Per Scholas.

The breakdown of family primarily among low-income Americans may be uncomfortable to talk about, but it is part of the apparatus of inequality in the United States. It doesn’t help when we avert our eyes, ignore the data and deny the existence of two-parent privilege.

The Left Calls the GOP Fascist (Lol)

Published by Papa Giorgio

This is from a guy involved in a conspiracy org, so I will not mention him… but I do have a broad disclaimer of sorts:

  • While I like their rants (Paul Watson, Mark Dice, and others) and these commentaries hold much truth in them, I do wish to caution you… he is part of Info Wars/Prison Planet and Summit News network of yahoos, a crazy conspiracy arm of Alex Jones shite. Also, I bet if I talked to him he would reveal some pretty-crazy conspiratorial beliefs that would naturally undermine and be at-odds-with some of his rants. Just to be clear, I do not endorse these people or orgs.

1-minute video:

This is a good fit with my following posts (Oldest to Newest):

BBC Admits Hamas Used Shifa Hospital As An Operations Base

Published by Papa Giorgio

The BBC and other MSM outlets have been horrible on their reporting of many topics during this newer war between Islamic-Nazis and Israel. Here is the BBC [finally] admitting that there was a Hamas command center underneath the Shifa Hospital – as Israel originally reported by the IDF.

BBC Finally Admits Hamas Used People in Shifa Hospital as Human Shields

The NEW YORK SUN has an excellent article detailing some of the past claims which are ignored presently:

As Evidence Mounts of Hamas Using Shifa Hospital as a Military Base, Human Rights Groups Turn Sullenly Silent  

…..A Dutch journalist who reported from Gaza and a British doctor who worked at Al Shifa hospital have both corroborated IDF claims. The doctor told a reporter from France 24 news that there was a section of the hospital leading to the basement that he was instructed not to go near or he’d “be in danger of being shot.”

The doctor added that “there were dodgy non-medical characters going in and out all the time,” and that discussion of this was made in “hushed tones about which Hamas was discussed. You know, people were genuinely fearful.”

In 2014, the Washington Post also reported that Al Shifa hospital had become “a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.”

“This was not a secret. This was an open secret,” a human rights advocate and executive director of UN Watch, Hillel Neuer, tells the Sun. “Certainly all the international organizations that have a constant presence on the ground knew about it.”  

Organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the World Health Organization, and committees within the United Nations, though, are not convinced — or at least won’t say so publicly now. This matters because, while Israel can win this war militarily, the war for international public support is a major challenge, and Hamas knows how to fight this battle. This is evident in protests on college campuses and in the streets across the United States and in European capitals.

It’s also evident in statements from these groups. “Amnesty International has so far not seen any credible evidence to support Israel’s claim that al-Shifa is housing a military command center — and indeed Israel has repeatedly failed to produce any evidence to substantiate this claim,” the executive director of Amnesty International USA, Paul O’Brien, tells the Sun in a statement.

“In their stated intent to use all means to destroy Hamas, Israeli forces have shown a shocking disregard for civilian lives,” Mr. O’Brien says. “These unlawful attacks, including indiscriminate attacks that caused mass civilian casualties, must be investigated as war crimes.”

This contrasts sharply with Amnesty International reports released in 2007 and 2015, in which the organization describes Hamas using Al Shifa hospital for interrogations, torture, and launching attacks. The harsh condemnation of Israel also contrasts to the language Mr. O’Brien uses to condemn Hamas’s terrorist attacks on October 7.

“The abduction of civilians and hostage-taking and deliberate attacks on civilians are prohibited by international law and can constitute war crimes,” Mr. O’Brien says.

“Can constitute war crimes” doesn’t have the force of Israel “must be investigated for war crimes.” Amnesty International’s X feed displays the same imbalance: for every 10 posts on Israel’s “chilling indifference to the catastrophic toll on civilians,” there is maybe one post about the hostages Hamas is still holding.

Human Rights Watch is also not ready to say whether Hamas used Al Shifa hospital as an operations base. This contrasts to 2007, when Human Rights Watch released a report that details Hamas’s use of hospitals in its battle with Fatah.

“Human Rights Watch takes seriously allegations by Israeli authorities that armed groups are operating inside or below hospitals. We are not, however, in a position to corroborate these claims presently,” the Israel and Palestine director of the Middle East division of Human Rights Watch, Omar Shakir, tells the Sun.

“If accurate, the use of medical facilities by Palestinian armed groups for military operations is alarming and violates the laws of war,” Mr. Shakir says. Yet he adds, “Attacks on hospitals being used to commit ‘acts harmful to the enemy’ are still unlawful if indiscriminate or disproportionate.”

The United Nations declined to comment about Hamas’s use of Al Shifa hospital but directed the Sun to a World Health Organization press conference held Friday. When asked at this press conference whether Hamas used Al Shifa as a base, the executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Program, Michael Ryan, said that his team’s focus was solely on doctors and evacuating patients.…..

(Read It All)

Other noteworthy articles are below:

Videos: Inside The Hamas Shifa Hospital Underground Command Center

  • …Behind the hatch door that was breached, war rooms, an air-conditioned living room and hiding place, as well as toilets and a kitchen for extended stays were discovered. [….]the images suggest that the labyrinthine tunnels were used not just for transporting materials or people, but as something of an extended-stay base. The Israel Defense Forces referred to it as “Hamas’ underground city.”…. (LEGAL INSURRECTION)

Media Minimize Evidence of Hamas Activity in Gaza’s Shifa Hospital

  • …[by] minimizing the evidence by suggesting that what Israel has exposed is not enough or fake, while relying on the denials of a deceitful terror organization, is nothing less than a complete ethical and journalistic collapse.” (HONEST REPORTING)

BBC Says Israel Targeted Hospital Staff, Forced To Apologize (Again)

  • On Wednesday [15th of November, 2023], the globally influential BBC was forced to apologize yet again for an anti-Israel smear from one of its anchors. This time, the BBC accused Israel of intentionally targeting Al-Shifa Hospital staff and Arab speakers during its operations in Gaza, which was exactly the opposite of what the cited Reuters report said. (NEWSBUSTERS)

FLASHBACK: Media Mislabels LaRouche Activists Right-Wing

Published by Papa Giorgio

(A GOOD PORTION OF THIS DATES FROM 2010)

(BTW, Lyndon LaRouche died in February 2019 at 96-years old.) This is the political cult I always forget about, Lyndon LaRouche (pronounced le-ru). She won her candidacy even with the fact that “during the campaign, she was photographed carrying an oversized portrait of the President with a Hitler-style mustache penciled on his lip.” Remember the news broadcasts on the poster with Obama and a Hitler mustache? Well, all the posters that say this on them:

OBAMA NAZI SIGNS

Life is truly stranger than fiction. Not only does this picture show Kesha Rogers holding the Obama/Hitler sign, but it even says it is paid for by her campaign on the bottom (click to enlarge):


“Houston, We Have A Problem”
is so appropriate

This story (the LaRouche movement and recent political activity) is an old one… one that I commented on quite a while ago. These person’s even visited my old job once (Whole Foods). 

NAZI OBAMA @DEMOCRAT CAMPAIGN

Here is the BREITBART post on her:

…the state-run media won’t run this photo.

They won’t publish this photo because it doesn’t fit their narrative. Remember last year when the Democratic-Media Complex reported that the tea party protesters were waving Obama-Hitler signs? What the media purposely omitted from their stories was the fact that the protesters waving these astroturfed Obama-Hitler signs were radical left-wing extremists. They were radical activists from the LaRouche organization. But, this didn’t fit the state-run media’s narrative that tea party activists were radicals and racists so they omitted this from their reports.

Earlier this year, the corrupt media and prominent democrats continued to smear tea party activists by reporting that the conservative protesters on Capitol Hill harassed Black Caucus members, called them the n-word, and spit at these Dems as they paraded though the tea party crowd on their way to ram nationalized health care through Congress. This was a lie. It never happened as video later revealed. However, the corrupt national media never retracted their story nor did they apologize despite the overwhelming amount of evidence that proved their racist accusations were complete fiction.

That’s why the media won’t show this photo of Democrat Kesha Rogers. It doesn’t fit their narrative.

Kesha won her primary last week. This Texas Democrat wants to impeach Obama and “take our troops out of the war zone and put them into space.” This makes about as much sense as the Obama-Pelosi “spend your way to wealth” plan, only not as dangerous. Don’t look for the media to give this Texas loon much attention in the months ahead.

Could you imagine the outrage if this was at a Tea Party? And if it is, it is because of a LaRouchite! Do you not know who Lyndon Lerouche is, there is a good WIKI ARTICLE on him. Here is the HOTAIR’s dig on this story:

The nominee for the Texas’ CD-22 has publicly called for Barack Obama’s impeachment and wants to abolish the UN.  Democrats would have a field day making Kesha Rogers the face of the Republican Party across the entire nation … if it weren’t for the fact that Rogers is a Democrat (TIME MAGAZINE):

South Carolina’s unexpected Democratic nominee for the US Senate, mystery man Alvin Greene, says he wants to play golf with Barack Obama. But in Texas, another surprise Democratic primary winner, congressional nominee Kesha Rogers, wants to impeach the President. So while South Carolina party officials are still unsure of what to do about Greene’s success at the ballot box, Texas Democrats have no such reservations — they wasted little time in casting Rogers into exile and offering no support or recognition of her campaign to win what once was Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s old seat.

Rogers, 33, told TIME she is a “full time political activist” in the Lyndon LaRouche Youth Movement, a recruiting arm of the LaRouche political organization that is active on many college campuses. The LYM espouses LaRouche opposition to free trade and “globalism” (the UN, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund) and it also calls for a return to a humanist classical education, emphasizing the works of Plato and Leibnitz. On her professional looking campaign website, kesharogers.com, she touts the LaRouche political philosophy — a mix of support for the economic policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the impeachment of President Obama — and calls Obama a “London and Wall Street backed puppet” whose policies will destroy the Democratic Party.

Well, maybe Texas Democrats in the 22nd district just got fooled from another Greene-like stealth candidacy.  I’m sure they didn’t hear about Rogers’ nutty, LaRouchian politics before casting their ballots.  Rogers probably got listed first on the ballot, right?  Actually she was, but that’s not why she won:

Unlike South Carolina’s Greene, Rogers ran a high profile campaign, staking out a corner on a major intersection in the district to appear almost daily with a large sign: “Save NASA. Impeach Obama.” She garnered 7,467 votes, 53% of the vote, in a three way race that included a local information systems analyst Doug Blatt, who gained endorsements from local Democratic clubs and labor groups, and Freddie John Weider Jr., a preacher and onetime Libertarian candidate; Blatt came in second with 28% of the vote and Weider won 20%.

Now Democrats have refused to provide her any support, Time reports, accusing her of racism because of her connection to the LaRouche movement — which is an interesting allegation, considering that Rogers is African-American.  Maybe someone should have looked at her picture before leaping immediately to the race-baiting smear.  They would have been better off questioning her sanity…..

…(read more)…

Here is Kesha being interviewed by “LaRouche TV.”

MORE EXAMPLES OF SIGNS

The below signs are from the Democratic Linden LaRouche camp. There was one photo that made it into the mainstream media that was at times cropped so you wouldn’t see the race of the young man, but as you can see, the guy holding this sign up is a young black man:

Kesha is in a political cult, and putting a LaRouchite into office, considering their across the board acceptance of just about every conspiracy theory available, is an option I will campaign against. There is also concerted cultish aspects of brainwashing as well. The reason you here this push to support NASA is that the LaRouchite’s want to (or wanted to) have a permanent colony on Mars by 2025, this is now pushed back to 2027. 

One thing I wish to supplant is the idea that this is some sort of “Right Wing” group.

LAROUCHE PRESIDENTIAL RUNS

NEWSBUSTERS “busted” this liberal myth when they pointed out the following:

….For written at the poster’s bottom is the web address “LaRouchePAC.com,” the political action committee website for Communist and perpetual Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche.

No right-winger he. And neither he nor his acolytes are likely ones to be “stoked by the provocative megaphone of Rush Limbaugh.” In fact (from Wikipedia):

In 1979, LaRouche formed a Political Action Committee called the National Democratic Policy Committee (NDPC). LaRouche has run for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States seven times, beginning in 1980….

…(read more)…

CROOKS & LIARS

I think the mainstream media and bloggers who think themselves erudite enough to broadly claim political affiliation of this movement, should think twice. For instance, CROOKS & LIARS (a Leftist site) said this after showing Bill O’Reilly’s comments on it (sorry for the cuss word, typical though of the Left) [I combined this old Bill O’Reilly with two other videos]:

Crooks & Liars “did an interesting thing the day after last night,” they lied about the LaRouche’ites!

Bill O’Reilly did an interesting thing last night when he reran that footage of Barney Frank castigating that woman carrying an Obama-as-Hitler sign at his town-hall meeting on health care: He completely omitted the fact that the woman who Frank was castigating was in fact a member of the FAR-RIGHT Lyndon Larouche cult.

All O’Reilly could muster was to mention that the woman was “a political activist.” But that’s like calling a Great White Shark a fish.

No, right-wingers like O’Reilly have been eagerly airbrushing out the existence of right-wing extremists from their worldview for some time now, embodied by their reaction to that DHS bulletin. But it’s getting harder and harder to do all the time now.

Because, as we’ve noted, the far-right extremists are bubbling up everywhere in supposedly mainstream conservative circles these days — particularly at the tea parties and their associated health-care protests.

Most recently, it turns out that the guys who brought those guns to a health-care forum in Arizona in fact were longtime members of the old Arizona Vipers Militia. These were characters who, prior to their arrests in 1996, had stockpiled close to 2,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate and conducted field training exercises, practiced bomb-making, and trained with illegal automatic weapons.

Now, all the Fox talkers have been in heavy denial about extremists showing up for their tea-party protests, even making a regular joke out of it by asking the protesters they have on their show if they’re Klan members and the like.

But it’s becoming clearer all the time that, while not everyone at these events is an extremist, the percentages of them keep going up and up. And with them, so does the threat to public safety.

AGAIN:

  • He completely omitted the fact that the woman who Frank was castigating was in fact a member of the FAR-RIGHT Lyndon Larouche cult.

(*Annoying Buzzer Noise*) Nope, this needs a rewrite. 

The medias lack of care for the LaRouchites showing up at meetings with Obama/Hitler signs is pointed out by the WEEKLY STANDARD as well:

CNN’s Larry King showed the above video of Barney Frank laying the smack down on a woman at a townhall meeting who compared Obama to Hitler. CNN left out the fact that this woman is a Lyndon LaRouche Democrat.

[….]

No one disputes that LaRouchites are on the fringe — but it’s indisputable that they are fringe Democrats. They oppose Obamacare because they want a single-payer plan.

While Nancy Pelosi and liberal talk-show host Bill Press have been smearing protesters as fascists and Nazis, left-wing bloggers have been attacking protesters for comparing Obama to Hitler. It seems townhall attendees just can’t win….

AGAIN, RAN 8-TIMES AS LEFTY

Lyndon LaRouche Presidential/political runs:

  • LaRouche was a presidential candidate from 1976 to 2004. He campaigned for one such election while serving his sentence for fraudulence. He had run once for his ‘US Labor Party’ and seven times for the ‘Democratic Party.’ (THE FAMOUS PEOPLE)

Some “Right-Wing” guy? Ran first for a self made Marxist Organization, then seven more times as a Democrat.

FASCIST? OR SOCIALIST?

Ideological Swings:

In 1977-78, LaRouche initiated an ideological change, an evolution from “socialism” to “nationalism”, well documented by Denis King and Chip Berlet.

This “evolution” was marked by a radical re-definition of “Fascism”. To this purpose he wrote in 1977 “What Actually Is Fascism?” where he said:

“The Nazi propaganda emphasis on “Krupp steel” and other symbols of industrial development points up the fact that to rule Germany the Nazis were obliged to play upon the deep desire for industrial and technological progress within even the ranks of numerous layers of nominal Nazi supporters and party members. There was a profound discrepancy between the systematic destruction of industry and the labor force under Schacht and the nationalist impulses of important varieties of German citizens who went over to support of the Nazis largely on the basis of hatred of Versailles and a commitment to restoration of Germany’s industrial progress.” “In short, all of those features of Nazi Germany’s policy which are generally attributed to fascism are not the ideological excretion of a fascist “sociological phenomenon” but are properly termed Schachtianism in its natural course and consequences. The essence of fascism, if we mean by fascism the deprecated features of the Nazi order, is Schachtian economics.”

In other words there are “good” and “bad” Nazis:

“The majority of Nazi supporters were not fascists, but nationalists.”

and consequentially:

“What is to be stressed most emphatically in this connection is the fallacy of the “conservatism tends to fascism” argument.”

To confirm his ideological move from “socialism” to “nationalism”, he wrote that year:

“I never had the conception of founding a “true Marxist” association. […] We have never been Marxists, except as regarding Marx as the highest preceding advancement of essential human knowledge. […] More profoundly, as we change we do not change.”

contradicting himself from what he wrote a year earlier:

“Labor Committee and allied Communist forces within the capitalist sector generally are working overnight, constantly, to bring into being a new Marxist International throughout the capitalist sector.” 

when he wanted to establish “socialism” world-wide:

“The important point to be added to that, is that such a form of society is within reach during this century. We have before us the immediate need and possibility to establish an intermediate form of society known as workers’ government, out of which in approximately a generation’ s time, an actual socialist form of human existence can emerge.”

LaRouche redefined Marxism from a “higher”, philosophical standpoint; “higher” Marxism meant “good” industrial Capitalism, Marx and Benjamin Franklin were said to share the same, common ancestry and philosophical outlook: Plato’s Republic, trying to combine “socialism” (Soviet Republics) and… the Republican party! ({“republican” in LaRouche’s code-words, meaning Plato’s “Republic”).

In his “Creating a Republican Labor Party” pamphlet, LaRouche wrote:

“The republican party is thousands of years old. It is traced in terms of formal historical knowledge available to us today to the writings of Plato and Plato’s Academy at Athens, and to Alexander the Great’s city-building policies.”

The “new” Karl Marx was redefined in “The Karl Marx Karl Marx Did Not Know” (Fall 1977).

His 1980 U.S. presidential election was based on an alliance between “labor” (socialist) forces and “republican” (nationalist) forces and geopolitically between the “East” (USSR) and the “West”.

This ideological and philosophical reshaping can be measured with help of three key-documents during that period: 1/ “The Case of Walter Lippmann” (May 1977), 2/ “Two Tactics of the Inner PCI” (April 1978) and 3/ “The Secret Known Only to the Inner Elites” (May-June 1978). This last document is still considered by the LaRouchies as the real founding document of LaRouche’s Organisation.

In this 1977 revisionist document “What Actually Is Fascism?” he explained that “Fascism” was in fact synonymous with… “financial austerity” imposed by Hjalmar Schacht, a “cannibalization” of the German economy which led to Hitler’s war!

Capitalism therefore still leads to Fascism/Imperialism…

The “real enemy” is still “Capitalism” or rather “Capitalists”, not Fascists who are victims of these “Capitalists”.

But who was Schacht? What really happened to the German economy under his influence? Why does LaRouche focuses exclusively on somebody who was a German financial expert and Minister of Economics from 1935 until 1937 only (and who began to lose power after the implementation of the Four Year Plan in 1936 by Hermann Göring which put Germany on the brink of bankruptcy)?

Because by reducing “nazism” only to one single cause: “Hjalmar Schacht”, it is more convenient to re-write History. Forget about Hitler’s and the Nazis’ open intentions to start a war against their neighbors from the onset…\\ LaRouche only needs to claim Hjalmar Schacht was a “British agent”, an “environmentalist” or a “Jewish protege” and then, LaRouche could conclude that “Nazism” was an “ecologist”, a “British” or a “Jewish” conspiracy (and vice-versa)! Consequently, any economic policy or economist or politician could be labeled as “schachtian” or “nazi”!…

SOME HISTORY ON WHO JOINED FASCIST MOVEMENT

…on March 23, 1919, one of the most famous socialists in Italy founded a new party, the Fasci di Combattimento, a term that means “fascist combat squad.” This was the first official fascist party and thus its founding represents the true birth of fascism. By the same token, this man was the first fascist. The term “fascism” can be traced back to 1914, when he founded the Fasci Rivoluzionari d’Azione Internazionalista, a political movement whose members called them­selves fascisti or fascists.

In 1914, this founding father of fascism was, together with Vladimir Lenin of Russia, Rosa Luxemburg of Germany, and Antonio Gramsci of Italy, one of the best known Marxists in the world. His fellow Marx­ists and socialists recognized him as a great leader of socialism. His decision to become a fascist was controversial, yet he received congratu­lations from Lenin who continued to regard him as a faithful revolution­ary socialist. And this is how he saw himself.

That same year, because of his support for Italian involvement in World War I, he would be expelled from the Italian Socialist Party for “heresy,” but this does not mean he ceased to be a socialist. It was common practice for socialist parties to expel dissenting fellow social­ists for breaking on some fine point with the party line. This party reject insisted that he had been kicked out for making “a revision of socialism from the revolutionary point of view.” For the rest of his life—right until his lifeless body was displayed in a town square in Milan—he upheld the central tenets of socialism which he saw as best reflected in fascism.

Who, then, was this man? He was the future leader of fascist Italy, the one whom Italians called Il Duce, Benito Mussolini.

Mussolini’s socialist credentials were impeccable. He had been raised in a socialist family and made a public declaration in 1901, at the age of eighteen, of his convictions. By twenty-one, he was an orthodox Marx­ist familiar not only with the writings of Marx and Engels but also of many of the most influential German, Italian, and French Marxists of the fin de siecle period. Like other orthodox Marxists, Mussolini rejected religious faith and authored anti-Catholic pamphlets repudiating his native Catholicism.

Mussolini embarked on an active career as a writer, editor, and political organizer. Exiled to Switzerland between 1902 and 1904, he collaborated with the Italian Socialist Party weekly issued there and also wrote for Il Proletario, a socialist weekly published in New York. In 1909 Mussolini made another foreign sojourn to Trento—then part of Austria-Hungary—where he worked for the socialist party and edited its news­paper. Returning the next year to his hometown of Forli, he edited the weekly socialist publication La Lotta di Classe (The Class War). He wrote so widely on Marxism, socialist theory, and contemporary politics that his output now fills seven volumes.

Mussolini wasn’t just an intellectual; he organized workers’ strikes on behalf of the socialist movement both inside and outside of Italy and was twice jailed for his activism. In 1912, Mussolini was recognized as a socialist leader at the Socialist Congress at Reggio Emilia and was appointed to the Italian Socialist Party’s board of directors. That same year, at the age of twenty-nine, he became editor of Avanti!, the official publication of the party.

From the point of view of the progressive narrative—a narrative I began to challenge in the previous chapter—Mussolini’s shift from Marxian socialism to fascism must come as a huge surprise. In the pro­gressive paradigm, Marxian socialism is the left end of the spectrum and fascism is the right end of the spectrum. Progressive incredulity becomes even greater when we see that Mussolini wasn’t just any socialist; he was the recognized head of the socialist movement in Italy. Moreover, he didn’t just climb aboard the fascist bandwagon; he created it.

Today we think of fascism’s most famous representative as Adolf Hitler. Yet as I mentioned earlier, Hitler didn’t consider himself a fascist. Rather, he saw himself as a National Socialist. The two ideologies are related in that they are both based on collectivism and centralized state power. They emerge, one might say, from a common point of origin. Yet they are also distinct; fascism, for instance, had no intrinsic connection with anti-Semitism in the way that National Socialism did.

In any event, Hitler was an obscure local organizer in Germany when Mussolini came to power and, following his famous March on Rome, established the world’s first fascist regime in Italy in 1922. Hitler greatly admired Mussolini and aspired to become like him. Mussolini, Hitler said, was “the leading statesman in the world, to whom none may even remotely compare himself.” Hitler modeled his failed Munich Putsch in November 1923 on Mussolini’s successful March on Rome.

When Hitler first came to power he kept a bust of Mussolini in his office and one German observer termed him “Germany’s Mussolini.” Yet later, when the two men first met, Mussolini was not very impressed by Hitler. Mussolini became more respectful after 1939 when Hitler conquered Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Norway, and France. Hitler continued to uphold Mussolini as “that unparalleled statesman” and “one of the Caesars” and confessed that without Italian fascism there would not have been a German National Socialism: “The brown shirt would probably not have existed without the black shirt.”

Hitler was, like Mussolini, a man of the Left. Hitler too was a social­ist and a labor leader who founded the German Socialist Workers’ Party with a platform very similar to that of Mussolini’s fascist party. Yet Hitler came to power in the 1930s while Mussolini ruled through most of the 1920s. Mussolini was, during those years, much more famous than Hitler. He was recognized as the founding father of fascism. So any account of the origin of fascism must focus not on Hitler but on Mus­solini. Mussolini is the original and prototypical fascist.

From Socialism to Fascism

So how—to return to the progressive paradigm—do progressives account for Mussolini’s conversion from socialism to fascism, or more precisely for Mussolini’s simultaneous embrace of both? The problem is further deepened by the fact that Mussolini was not alone. Hundreds of leading socialists, initially in Italy but subsequently in Germany, France, and other countries, also became fascists. In fact, I will go further to say that all the leading figures in the founding of fascism were men of the Left. “The first fascists,” Anthony James Gregor tells us, “were almost all Marxists.”

I will cite a few examples. Jean Allemane, famous for his role in the Dreyfus case, one of the great figures of French socialism, became a fascist later in life. So did the socialist Georges Valois. Marcel Deat, the founder of the Parti Socialiste de France, eventually quit and started a pro-fascist party in 1936. Later, he became a Nazi collaborator during the Vichy regime. Vacques Doriot a French communist, moved his Parti Populaire Francais into the fascist camp.

The Belgian socialist theoretician Henri de Man transitioned to becoming a fascist theoretician. In England. Oswald Mosley, a socialist and Labor Party Member of Parliament, eventually broke with the Labor Party because he found it insufficiently radical. He later founded the British Union of Fascists and became the country’s leading Nazi sympa­thizer. In Germany, the socialist playwright Gerhart Hauptmann embraced Hitler and produced plays during the Third Reich. After the war, he became a communist and staged his productions in Soviet-dominated East Berlin

In Italy, philosopher Giovanni Gentile moved from Marxism to fas­cism, as did a host of Italian labor organizers: Ottavio Dinale, Tullio Masotti, Carlo Silvestri, and Umberto Pasella. The socialist writer Agos­tino Lanzillo joined Mussolini’s parliament as a member of the fascist party Nicola Bombacci, one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, became Mussolini’s top adviser in Salo. Gentile’s disciple Ugo Spirito, who also served Mussolini at Salo, moved from Marxism to fascism and then back to Marxism. Like Hauptmann, Spirito became a communist sympathizer after World War II and called for a new “syn­thesis” between communism and fascism.

Others who made the same journey from socialism to fascism will be named in this chapter, and one thing that will become very clear is that these are not “conversion” stories. These men didn’t “switch” from socialism to fascism. Rather, they became fascists in the same way that Russian socialists became Leninist Bolsheviks. Like their Russian coun­terparts, these socialists believed themselves to be growing into fascism, maturing into fascism, because they saw fascism as the most well thought out, practical form of socialism for the new century.

Progressivism simply cannot account for the easy traffic from social­ism to fascism. Consequently, progressives typically maintain complete silence about this whole historical relationship which is deeply embar­rassing to them. In all the articles comparing Trump to Mussolini I searched in vain for references to Mussolini’s erstwhile Marxism and lifelong attachment to socialism. Either from ignorance or from design, these references are missing.

Progressive biographical accounts that cannot avoid Mussolini’s socialist past nevertheless turn around and accuse Mussolini—as the Socialist Party of Italy did in 1914—of “selling out” to fascism for money and power. Other accounts contend that whatever Mussolini’s original convictions, the very fact that his fascists later battled the Marxists and traditional socialists clearly shows that Mussolini did not remain a social­ist or a man of the Left.

But these explanations make no sense. When Mussolini “sold out” he became an outcast. He had neither money nor power. Nor did any of the first fascists embrace fascism for this reason. Rather, they became fascists because they saw fascism as the only way to rescue socialism and make it viable. In other words, their defection was within socialism—they sought to create a new type of socialism that would actually draw a mass following and produce the workers’ revolution that Marx antic­ipated and hoped for.

Vicious fights among socialist and leftist factions are a recognized feature of the history of socialism. In Russia, for example, there were bloody confrontations between the rival Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Later the Bolsheviks split into Leninists and Trotskyites, and Trotsky ended up dead on Lenin’s orders. These were all men of the Left. What these bloody rivalries prove is that the worst splits and conflicts some­times arise among people who are ideologically very similar and differ on relatively small—though not small to them—points of doctrine.

In this chapter I will trace the development of fascism by showing precisely how it grew out of a doctrinal division within the community of Marxian socialists. In short, I will prove that fascism is exclusively a product of the Left. This is not a case of leftists who moved right. On the contrary, the fascists were on the left end of the socialist movement. They saw themselves not as jettisoning Marxism but as saving it from obsolescence. From their perspective, Marxism and socialism were too inert and needed to be adjusted leftward. In other words, they viewed fascism as more revolutionary than traditional socialism.

[….]

Mussolini didn’t believe in race and he wasn’t initially a nationalist; rather, he was a revolutionary syndicalist. The term syndicalism refers to the associations or syndicates to which workers belonged. These were autonomous workers organizations that resembled unions, but they were not unions because the syndicates were organized regionally rather than by corporation or occupation. As dedicated Marxists, the revolutionary syndicalists agreed with Marx that class associations were primary, and that they must be the organizing principle of socialist revolution.

Very much in keeping with this class emphasis that was so central to Marx, the syndicalists, strongly influenced by Sorel, sought to rally the labor syndicates through a general strike that would overthrow the ruling class and establish socialism in Italy. This is what made them “revolutionary.” They intended to foment revolution, not wait for it to happen. They were considered the smartest, most dedicated people in the Italian Socialist Party and they occupied the left wing of the party.

The big names in revolutionary syndicalism were Giuseppe Prezzolini, Angelo O. Olivetti, Arturo Labriola, Filippo Corridoni, Paolo Orano, Michele Bianchi, and Sergio Panunzio. Most of them were writ­ers or labor organizers. All of them were socialists, and shortly all of them would be camelascists, even though Labriola opposed Mussolini’s regime when it came to power and Corridoni, who was killed in World War I, didn’t live to see it.

Mussolini was their acknowledged leader. He knew them well and conspired with them at meetings and rallies. He read their books and articles and published in their magazines like the Avanguardia Socialista, founded by Laboriola, which was the leading journal of syndicalist thought. Mussolini also reviewed and published the leading syndicalists in his own socialist publications.

Like all revolutionary socialists, the syndicalists had little faith in democratic parliamentary procedures and, consistent with Sorel and Lenin, they sought a charismatic leader who would inspire the workers to action. Mussolini, more than anyone else, fit their prescription. Mus­solini was the one who led the syndicalists into a union with the nation­alists in order to form the new socialist hybrid called fascism in Italy and (with some modifications) National Socialism in Germany.

The syndicalists organized three general strikes in Italy in 1904, 1911, and 1913. Mussolini supported the strikes. The 1904 strike began in Milan and spread across the country. Five million workers walked off their jobs. The nation was paralyzed: there was no public transportation, and no one could buy anything. Even so, the strike ended without caus­ing either the fall of the government or the installation of socialism.

Dinesh D’Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the NAZI Roots of the American Left (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2017), 65-70, 82-83.

 

Occult, Anti-Christian Roots of Freemasonry

Published by Papa Giorgio

MAIN POINT OF THE BELOW IN ONE SENTENCE:

  • The serpent of the garden is consistently portrayed as one day defeating the God of the Bible in Masonic literature.

John Weldon lists five ways in which Freemasonry fosters occultic involvement among its members (via EQUIP.ORG):

  • First, Freemasonry supports the now-popular New Age dictum that man houses within himself unlimited power that can be unlocked using specific procedures.
  • Second, Freemasonry espouses a philosophy and a system of symbols which bear a striking resemblance to many of the occultic arts — for example kabbalism, Rosicrucianism, and hermetic philosophy.
  • Third, Freemasonry encourages its members to discover the deeper significance (or “esoteric truths”) lying beneath its ceremonies and symbols.
  • Fourth, Freemasonry promotes the development of altered states of consciousness, an exercise rooted in mysticism.
  • Finally, a number of Masons regard their organization as the vehicle that will lead the world into an age of occultic enlightenment.

In that same article linked above, Hank Hanegraaff askes: “Why are so many Masons unaware of this side of Freemasonry?” His answer?

The reason is that a large portion of Masons seldom strive to advance beyond the initial ranks or degrees offered within their organization. But as one progresses to higher degrees, more and more details about the underlying foundations of Masonic ideology are gradually revealed, including its occultic dimensions. It is therefore imperative that we warn others about the dangers brewing beneath the surface of the Masonic Lodge. 

In my copy of Morals and Dogma this was in the back of this copy…. upper Masons signing the back of the Morals and Dogma signifying they have read it:

Though Freemasons claim otherwise, Freemasonry and Christianity are incompatible:

By taking the Masonic oaths, the Mason is swearing to uphold Masonry and its teachings. Swearing to uphold Masonic oaths is sinful, unscriptural and should not be part of the Christian’s life for the following reasons

  1. They make a Christian man swear by God to doctrines which God has pronounced false and sinful. For example, Masonry teaches a universalist doctrine of “the Fatherhood of God” (John 8:42)
  2. The Christian man is made to swear his acceptance of the lie that salvation, the reward of Heaven, can be gained by main’s good works (Ephesians 2:8-9)
  3. The Christian man swears to accept and promote the Masonic lie that Jesus is just one of many equally revered prohets in the world. He does this when agreeing that all religions can lead a man to God (Acts 4:12; Philippians 2:9-11; Colossians 1:16-18)
  4. The Christian man swears he will remain silent in the Lodge and not talk of Christ when God commands every Christian to be a witness (Matthew 28:19)
  5. The Christian man swears that he is approaching the Lodge while he is in spiritual ignorance and moral darkness, when the Bible says that Christians are children of light and are indwelt by the Light of the world (John 8:12; Ephesians 5:8)
  6. By taking the Masonic oath, the Christian is guilty of taking the name of the Lord is vain, because he has sworn unlawfully to things God has forbidden him to swear to. God says He will not leave such a person unpunished (Exodus 20:7)
  7. The Christian falsely swears that the God of the Bible is equally present in all religions (1 Timothy 2:5-6)
  8. The Christian falsely swears to the teaching that true worship can be offered in to Lodge to God without the mediatorship of Jesus (Hebrews 9:14)
  9. By swearing the Masonic oath, Christians are perpetuating a false gospel to other Lodge members who look only to the gospel of Masonry to get them to Heaven (Galatians 1:6-8)
  10. The Christian’s spirit, mind and body are the temple of the Holy Spirit, “bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). By taking the Masonic obligations he could be agreeing to allow the pollution of his mind and spirit by pagan religion or even occult practices.

John Ankerberg and John Weldon, Encyclopedia of Cults and New Religions (Eugene, Or: Harvest House Publishers,  1999), 255-256. (Via APOLOGETICS INDEX)

See more from John Weldon (PDF).

And, I note the “Masonic” view of Jesus is very Gnostic-like when in a conversation with actor Michael Berryman. I posted the full conversation here. In that long exchange Freemasonry came up. Here is what I noted then:

7. What “is” Freemasonry?

Below/right is a scan from page 567 of my copy of Morals and Dogma. What you have here is an example of Gnostic thinking on spirit-material dualism; Freemasons are merely modern day Gnostics. Roles are reversed in comparison to how historic Christianity has viewed them since its inception. I will explain, but first look at page 567 (click on it to enlarge):

So let’s get into the meat of the matter. Gnostic thinking is a combination of Judaism, Platonism, Zoroastrianism, and Christianity. (By-the-by, the below is much to do with a professor’s input I had, Dr. Wayne House.)

Judaism – early Gnostics followed the thinking of Marcian, and Marcian taught that the God of the Old Testament was a demiurge. A demiurge would be what we would typically call the “devil.” Since anything 100% spirit is “good,” anything material is “bad.” So the God of the Old Testament created the world, which is material, and so this God is the Gnostic’s mortal enemy (pun intended). So Judaic thought and Judaism’s God is what Gnostics are “fighting” against. This is Judaism’s contribution.

Platonism – plutonic thought is basically the codifying of Hindu thinking into Grecian thought. He taught that innate ideas (that is: existing in one from birth; inborn; native) were the ideas the mind beheld in the world of pure Forms before birth. This world, then, is but a shadow of reality… pure spirit. This is Platonic contribution to Gnostic thinking.

An aside here for clarity of thought. Platonic thinking shares a point in common with Gnostic thinking, so you could be a Platonist and not a Gnostic. You couldn’t be, however, a Gnostic without being a Platonist. This is important because many “scholars” get this concept mixed up when describing the points of contact between Gnostic thinking and Christianity. Okay, on we go.

Zoroastrianism – Zoroastic thought has contributed what is called ethical dualism. It has said that there is a battle between good and evil, light and dark. Its addition to this is that anything material in nature is evil, and anything spiritual is good.

Christianity – Christian theology provided a “vehicle” in which to express the above. It is then, the “vehicle of expression” for Gnostics. Jesus becomes the way in which they Gnostics explain the working of impersonal deity in human existence and the offering of salvation through secret knowledge, or, Gnosis. Gnosis means knowledge of spiritual matters; mystical knowledge.

Gnostic’s, then, only have a complete “system of thought” when they combine all four of these major aspects into their thinking. If their thinking were to lack any one of these, they would cease to be Gnostic. The combining of the major aspects of these four lines thought, then, make up the Gnostic “worldview.” What do Gnostics believe then? I will explain a bit more in this crude drawing taken during notes from a class at seminary. one should note as well that “Eon” should be spelled “Aeon.”:

Much like Eastern philosophy, there is an impersonal spirit which is 100% spirit. Brahma as it is referred to in Hindu thought. Out of this impersonal force emanated “Eons.” These Eons were 99.9% spirit and .01% material, to put it layman terms. (Also, the percentages are not to explain exactly what Gnostic’s believe, I am just using these numbers as examples to get the analogy across.) These less impersonal, or more corrupted Eons, created other Eons who themselves were more deficient in their spirit/matter balance. Until finally you have very “diluted” beings. One diluted being — referred to as a “Demiurge,” what we would sometimes call the “Devil” — created our world. He also created smaller more diluted beings called “Archons.” These archons would be what we view as demons; Gnostics would say Paul referred to them in Ephesians 6:12 when he said:

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

Jesus comes into the picture as an Aeon who has a higher percentage of spirit left and sneaks past the demiurge and the archons and enters our world. He is “born,” not physically, but is an ethereal image of mankind (hard to explain) to point the way to a saving knowledge that is secret or hidden.

Freemasons are the most modern day representation of Gnostics; they have symbols that as you climb to higher degrees become clearer in their real meaning and are explained more-so as you climb this “knowledge ladder.” Secret handshakes, elaborate rituals and secrecy until finally at the 33rd-degree you are presented with a true understanding (a Gnostic one) of reality and “God.”

From three separate Mason’s saying each part of the name of God, “Ja-bul-on,” to the meaning of the dot or “G” in the square and compass symbol. All these serve as layers for the initiates to come to realize that this material world is evil.

The Gnostics and hence, Masons, believe that there is a war going on with the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament. As this thinking has progressed throughout history it has adopted other philosophies and has become more and more convoluted in its history and thinking. The New Age, much of your occultism, cults, and even Christianity (Trinity Broadcasting Network for instance) has been influenced by this thinking in one way or another. From Madam Blavatsky and her influence on Germany’s occultism that led to the Aryan philosophy of Hitler to Benny Hinn’s healing crusades.

All sorts of writers, especially conspiratorial writers, have had a plethora of facts to misuse and misrepresent and to twist to their own agendas. Their agenda have resulted in many people believing that “secret societies” control both parties and were behind the Twin Towers so they could implement a world government. This view that combines, “sun” worship from the ancient Egyptians to the Illuminate, from the Knights Templars and Rosicrucians, to today’s Skull and Bones and Council on Foreign Relations ~ is defunct mainly due to the lack of understanding gnosis and the philosophy that has driven it.

(Read More)

In an article by Dave Hunt preserved over at The John Ankerberg Show, we read a great short expose of the occultic roots of Freemasonry:

The Occult Influence In Freemasonry

Occultism has gained a new respectability both in the world and the church through its acceptance and promotion by numerous business and civic leaders and pastors. Among the latter, none was more influential than Norman Vincent Peale. A prolific and popular “Christian” author, Peale’s writings have introduced millions in the world and church to the occult. There are at least two sources of Peale’s occultism: the writings of occultist Flo­rence Scovel Shinn, and Freemasonry.

A 33rd degree Mason, Peale was pictured on the cover of the Masonic magazine, New Age.[1] He was inducted into the Scottish Rite [Masonic] Hall of Honor on September 30,1991, and his portrait now hangs in the Washington DC Masonic Temple.[2] He was often held up by Masons as an example of Masonic character. Yet instead of honestly acknowl­edging the truth about Masonry, Peale perpetuated its deceits.

According to its own documents, Masonry involves occultism. Its influence permeates both the world and the church. Although many professing Christians are Masons, Masonry is an anti-Christian religious cult rooted in paganism. Masonry contains much of the mysti­cism of Hinduism and Buddhism, and is Luciferian. Yet Peale declared, “I have never seen the slightest word or expression [in Masonic rituals] that is anything a Christian could not endorse.”[3]

Such an obviously false statement sheds further light upon Peale’s perversion of Chris­tianity. No one who has reached the 33rd degree could be so ignorant. Declarations by Masonic authorities expose Peale’s dishonesty on that subject. Albert G. Mackey, coauthor of Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, is one of Masonry’s highest authorities. In Manual of the Lodge, Mackey traces Masonic teaching back to “the ancient rites and mysteries practiced in the very bosom of pagan darkness….”[4]

Albert Pike, Sovereign Grand Commander of the Southern Supreme Council of Scottish Rite Freemasonry in the USA, was “an honorary member of almost every Supreme Council in the world.”[5] He authored Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry for the Supreme Council of the Thirty-Third Degree, which was published by its authority. This compendium of official Masonic lore traces Masonry to Hinduism, Bud­dhism, Zoroastrianism, and other Eastern religions. In that volume Pike declared:

Masonry, like… all the Mysteries, Hermeticism and Alchemy, conceals its secrets from all except the Adepts and Sages, or the Elect, and uses false explanations and misinterpretations of its symbols to mislead those who deserve only to be misled….[6]

Part of the symbols are displayed [in the Blue Degrees] to the Initiate [Mason], but he is intentionally misled by false interpretations. It is not intended that he shall understand them, but… that he shall imagine he understands them.[7]

Secrecy and occultism go hand in hand. At the heart of Masonry is a secret Luciferian doctrine which a Mason comes to understand only when he reaches the higher levels. Manly Palmer Hall, another of the greatest authorities on Masonry, writes, “When the Ma­son… has learned the mystery of his Craft, the seething energies of Lucifer are in his hands….”[8]Nevertheless, Masonry is highly respected in today’s world and Masons constitute a high percentage of those in leadership both in the world and in the church.

Those who deny that Jesus is the only Christ and that He came once-and-for-all in the flesh have embraced the spirit of Antichrist (1 John 4:1-3). Such is the teaching of Eastern mysticism and the mind science cults: that Jesus had attained to the state of “Christ con­sciousness” available to all mankind. Masonry declares the same:

Jesus of Nazareth had attained a level of consciousness, of perfection, that has been called by various names: cosmic consciousness, soul regeneration, philosophic initiation, spiritual illumination, Brahmic Splendor, Christ-consciousness.[9]

FOOTNOTES

[1] For many years the magazine of Scottish Rite Freemasonry in the United States was called New Age. That title accurately described Masonic beliefs and rites. In order to hide that fact (because the truth about the New Age is becoming known), the name has been changed to Scottish Rite of Freemasonry Southern Jurisdiction USA, or The Scottish Rite Journal.

[2] Scottish Rite Journal, May 1992.

[3] The Miami Herald, July 28, 1995, p. 1F.

[4] Albert G. Mackey, Manual of the Lodge (Macoy and Sickles, 1802), p. 96.

[5] Albert G. Mackey, 33rd degree, and Charles T. McClenachan, 33rd degree, Encyclopedia of Free­masonry (The Masonic History Company, 1921), revised ed., vol. II, p. 564.

[6] Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (Su­preme Council of the Thirty-Third Degree, 1964), pp. 104-05.

[7] Ibid., p. 819.

[8] Manly Palmer Hall, The Lost Keys of Freemasonry (Macoy Publishing, 1976), p. 48.

[9] Lynn F. Perkins, The Meaning of Masonry (CSA Press, 1971), p. 32.

The Evils of Freemasonry – A Christian Perspective

Masonry… Occultic? / Albert Pike, The Root!

In any religious – philosophical – political system of belief, or trust, one must always go to the root (source) of the particular structured belief.  Almost always a person[s]. Whether it be the political wrangling behind Russia (Marx), or, Jehovah Witnesses (Charles Russel), Christianity (Jesus).  We must always get to the bottom of the basic philosophical construct, always. In the case of modern Masonry, we find a man by the name of Albert Pike. Although many Masons deny knowing him, upper Masons highly revere him.  I will give a few modern examples of this reverence before we get into what he believed.

In the Short Talk Bulletin, which was reprinted in 1988 by the Masonic Service Association of the United States, this was said about Albert Pike:

“He was the Master genius of Masonry in America, both as scholar and artist.  No other mind of equal power ever toiled so long in the service of the Craft in the New World.  No other has left a nobler fame in our annals.”  Speaking of Pike’s book, Morals and Dogma, this booklet maintains that it is: “… a huge manual for the instruction of the [Scottish] Rite…  It ought to be revised… since it is too valuable to be left in so cumbersome o form, containing as it does much of the best Masonic thinking and writing in our literature.”  The booklet continues: “No purer, nobler man has stood at the alter of Freemasonry or left his story in our traditions.  He was the most eminent mason in the world….  Nor will our craft ever permit to grow dim the memory of that stately, wise, and gracious teacher….”

The following praise is even more recent – this time coming from the head of the Southern Jurisdiction of Masonry, C. Fred Kleinknecht, who is the Sovereign Grand Commander.  In the January 1989 issue of The New Age magazine (an official publication of the Supreme Council of the Thirty-Third and Last Degree, Southern Jurisdiction), Kleinknecht mentioned that the “apex of our teachings has been the rituals of our degrees and Morals and Dogma….”

By the way, Pike wrote some and rewrote others of all the rituals from the 4th through the 33rd degrees.  In the November 1992 issue of The Scottish Rite Journal (known as The New Age from 1903 until 1990), Kleinknecht again heaps praise on Pike and his book.  He brags:

“Correctly understood, Albert Pike’s Morals and Dogma provides our Brethren a stimulus to thought, a source of inspiration, and even an aid to Scottish Rite growth.  Pike’s great work is not the book of an hour, a decade, or a century. It is a book for all time….  Abandon Morals and Dogma?  Never!”

Who Is The Light

Let’s switch gears and talk about what the end of the Masons journey entails for him and his understanding.  Albert Pike in Morals and Dogma had this to say – (paying attention to the original capitalization’s from hear-on out):

“And the Mason is familiar with these doctrines…that the Supreme Being is a centre [center] of Light whose rays or emanations pervade the Universe; for that is the Light for which all Masonic journeys are a search, and of which the sun and moon in our Lodges are only emblems.”

Notice that Mr. Pike says that this light-bringer is a god; in fact, he capitalizes the “s” and the “b” in “Supreme Being.”  He further deifies “Light” by capitalizing the letter “l”. And then he added these thoughts about the nature of this “Light:” “Behold, it said, the light, which emanates from an immense centre [center] of Light, that spreads everywhere its benevolent rays; so do the spirits of Light emanate from the Divine Light.”

The Royal Masonic Cyclopedia, written in 1877, said this after the entry: Sons of Light: “Masons by their tenure are necessarily Sons of Light, and are so accepted even by their opponents, who are Sons of Darkness.”

Albert Mackey wrote these comments in his Encyclopedia of Masonry (which was published by The Masonic History Company, an official Masonic Co.):

“Freemasons are emphatically called the ‘sons of light,’ because they are, or at least are entitled to be, in possession of the true meaning of the symbol.  Light is an important word in the Masonic system. It conveys a far more recondite [defined as being beyond the grasp of the ordinary mind] meaning that it is believed to possess by the generality of readers….  It contains within itself a far more abstruse allusion to the very essence of Speculative Masonry.”

Perhaps the very reason that the Masons conceal a great truth in the word “light,” or “Light,” can be best summarized in this single statement of Albert Pike in his book Morals and Dogma: “…  Light will finally overcome Darkness.”

Lucifer is the Light

So if the student of esoteric knowledge wishes to understand the language, it becomes important to determine, if possible who the “light-bearer” is. And the student can know for certain who that is, because one of the greatest seekers of light has told the world.  That writer is Albert Pike, a Mason, and he has described whom this individual is in his book entitled Morals and Dogma.  Mr. Pike identified the “Light-bearer” on page 321 of that book.  “Lucifer, the Light-bearer!  Lucifer, the Son of the Morning!  Is it he who bears the Light…?  Doubt it not!”

Albert Pike has admitted that the Masons seek Light!  He has now admitted that the “Light-bearer” is Lucifer!  The Masons ask for “Light” from the “Light-bearer,” Lucifer.

However, Mr. Pike is not the only Mason who has admitted that in easily understandable language.  Another Masonic writer is Manly P. Hall who has said the same in his book The Lost Keys of Freemasonry.  This book has been included in a “list of the best Masonic books available” in a Masonic magazine called The Royal Arch Mason, an official Masonic publication. The list says that “it [the list] is the finest basic library available to Freemasons.”  The Masonic Lodge for reading and understanding its philosophy has approved this book.  Page 48 of the book says this:

“When the Mason learns the key to the warrior on the block is the proper application of the dynamo of living power, he has learned the mystery of his Craft. The seething energies of Lucifer are in his hands [the Master Mason’s hands] and before he may step upward he must prove his ability to properly apply energy.”

How does Scottish Rite Masonry feel about Manly Hall?  You can judge for yourself from the following obituary notice that appeared in the November 1990 issue of The Scottish Rite Journal:

“Illustrious Manly Palmer Hall, often called ‘Masonry’s greatest philosopher,’ departed his earthly labors peacefully in his sleep on August 7, 1990, in Los Angeles, California….  Brother Hall… devoted his life to lecturing, teaching, editing, and writing on all aspects of Freemasonry….  He is best known for writing The Lost Keys of Freemasonry (1923), The Dionysian Artificers (1926), Masonic Orders of Fraternity (1950), and of course, his monumental Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic history, philosophy and related subjects….  Brother Hall… received the Scottish Rite’s highest honor, the Grand Cross in 1985 because of his exceptional contributions to Freemasonry, the Scottish Rite, and the public good.  Like Grand Commander Albert Pike before him, Hall did not teach a new doctrine but was an ambassador of an ageless tradition of wisdom that entrenches us to this day….  The world is a far better place because of Manly Palmer Hall, and we are better persons for having known him and his work.”

Page 287 of Morals and Dogma Pike states:

“You see, my brother, what is the meaning of Masonic ‘Light.’  You see why the East of the Lodge, where the initial letter of the name of the Deity overhangs the Master, is the place of Light… it is that light, the true knowledge of Deity [in-other-words, the truth that Lucifer is god!] the eternal Good,…”

How can Lucifer be good?  I do not want to go in depth about the switched roles of the God of the Bible and Lucifer, the Masonic god.  Nevertheless, I will let Mr. Pike explain it a bit before we move on.  Page 567 of Morals and Dogma says this:

“To prevent the light from escaping at once, the Demons forbade Adam to eat the fruit of ‘knowledge of good and evil,’ by which he would have known the Empire of Light and that of Darkness.  He obeyed; an Angel of Light induced him to transgress, and gave him the means of victory; but the Demons created Eve…”

Everyone knows that the God of the Judeo-Christian faith is the one who created Eve and forbade Adam to eat. In Pike’s dictates though, Lucifer is the hero of the plot.  The serpent of the garden is consistently portrayed as one day defeating the God of the Bible in Masonic literature.

Judge Rejects Attempt to Remove Trump From Colorado Ballot

Published by Papa Giorgio

THE FEDERALIST has an article again noting what my last three topics (first, second, and third posts) regarding the issue are: “the President is not included in the 14th Amendment.”

The Minnesota Supreme Court and the Michigan Court of Claims threw out challenges attempting to strike former President Donald Trump’s name from 2024 presidential primary election ballots. However, the courts left open the possibility of his removal from general presidential election ballots. Similar cases are pending across the country, and a decision is expected to be made today in a Colorado lawsuit.

The lawsuits, brought by leftist activist organizations, argue that because Trump was giving a speech to his supporters near the White House while protesters flooded the Capitol in a supposed “insurrection” on Jan. 6, 2021, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifies him from appearing on ballots.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment reads:

“No person shall … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States … who, having previously taken an oath … as an officer of the United States … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

There are several issues with the lawsuits attempting to brazenly interfere in the next presidential election, starting with the fact that Trump did not “engage in an insurrection or rebellion.” No federal court has convicted Trump of such a thing. Moreover, the Senate acquitted Trump of the second impeachment resolution, which charged him with “Incitement of Insurrection.”

According to Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, there is also “a serious question of whether the disqualification provision of Section 3 even still exists as a constitutional matter.” As Spakovsky explained, “Section 3 gives Congress the ability to remove the disqualification provision and void Section 3 by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress,” and in 1872 and 1898, “Congress did just that” by passing two Amnesty Acts.

In Minnesota, the state Supreme Court refused to even consider Trump’s removal from the general election ballots because the issue is “neither ripe, nor is it ‘about to occur.’” Indeed, no one technically knows whether Trump will win the Republican primary and therefore be eligible to appear on general election ballots.

As for the primary election, the court concluded Section 3 is irrelevant. “[T]his is an internal party election to serve internal party purposes,” stated the court, “And there is no state statute that prohibits a major political party from placing on the presidential nomination primary ballot, or sending delegates to the national convention supporting, a candidate who is ineligible to hold office.”

However, the court did leave open the possibility of Trump’s disqualification in the general election if he wins the primary.

In Michigan, state Court of Claims Judge James Redford ruled that Trump could not be removed from primary ballots because the primaries are an internal political party affair. Like in Minnesota, Redford left the door open for Trump’s removal from the general election, but he also strongly suggested that no court can rule on Trump’s eligibility in the general election because that decision should be left up to Congress.

“The questions involved are by their nature political,” Redford wrote. “It takes the decision of whether there was a rebellion or insurrection and whether or not someone participated in it from the Congress, a body made up of elected representatives of the people of every state in the nation, and gives it to but one single judicial officer, a person who no matter how well intentioned, evenhanded, fair and learned, cannot in any manner or form possibly embody the represented qualities of every citizen of the nation—as does the House of Representatives and the Senate.”

[….]

Legal experts predict that this boldest ploy yet to interfere in a presidential election will likely reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

JUST THE NEWS notes the same at the end of their article: “Activist group Free Speech for People has since asked the Wolverine State’s top bench to intervene.”

RED STATE shows the Judge involved believes Trump met the rules for the 14th, but that the 14th doesn’t apply to the President:

There’s a new decision among the cases making their way through the nation’s judicial system that seek to bar former President Donald Trump from 2024 presidential ballots by using section three of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution — but it’s complicated. So bear with me.

Let’s start with the basics of what Colorado District Judge Sarah B. Wallace wrote in her ruling: First, she rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that the 14th Amendment was intended to be read as the President of the United States is ““an officer of the United States.” Judge Wallace decided that by finding that “Section 3 did not include the presidential oath in that category.”

The clause does not explicitly name the presidency, so that question hinged on whether the president was included in the category “officer of the United States.”

The complication comes in after that. Yes, in the end, the decision by this state judge is that this cannot be used to keep the former president off Colorado’s ballot. But that wasn’t all that she determined in her ruling — and this part will likely please the leftists and Never Trump antagonists:

With his actions before and during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Judge Sarah B. Wallace ruled, Mr. Trump engaged in insurrection against the Constitution, an offense that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — which was ratified in 1868 to keep former Confederates out of the government — deems disqualifying for people who previously took an oath to support the Constitution.

In other words, she said Trump “incited” the people who took part in entering the Capitol.

[….]

This isn’t over, in other words, and it’s believed that the Colorado case will likely end up at the Supreme Court……

Muslim Goes Silent When He Has To Admit Allah’s a Pedophile

Published by Papa Giorgio

I say Allah is a pedophile IF the Qur’an is the word of Allah, sent word for word and preserved perfectly by the perfect man [obviously a false god].

I found this video pretty amazing. Firstly, I dig the patience GodLogic has. But the main thing about this video is that when the Muslim goes silent he is testifying to the conscience the Real God has placed in us — and by doing so, he is showing that “Allah” is not God, but an evil creation of the groupthink of Islam inspired by demons. When the truth comes in, the cover up begins. The long silence proves this:

  • For His invisible attributes, that is, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what He has made. As a result, people are without excuse. (Romans 1:20)

Thirdly, the funny line in the video is this: “No Hitta – No Iddah” You will see what I mean. This seems long and drawn out, but it is not if you understand what is going on.

Israel and The End Times Prophecies of Ezekiel 38-39

Published by Papa Giorgio

Israel faces war both in the North and South, and in this conflict antisemitism is on the rise in every nation. Alliances with Iran and Russia a few years ago unthinkable are now iron clad. Many in Israel and around the world are looking at the prophecies of Ezekiel 38-39 and asking are we in this war or in the precursor to these end times events? Dr. Erez Soref and Dr. Golan Broshi dive into the scripture and the events of our days and seek to answer where we are in this prophetic time.

The Nazi Nuremberg Case For Hamas

Published by Papa Giorgio
  • Nuremberg enforced a fundamental distinction. All civilian lives are equal, but not so all ways of taking them. The deliberate and purposeful killing of civilians is a crime; not so the taking of civilian lives that is undesired, unintended, but unavoidable. (Martin Kramer)

EXCELLENT READ, I suggest reading it in it’s entirety: The Nazi Case For Hamas

I am a historian (like Khalidi), interested in the origins of ideas and arguments. It turns out that Khalidi’s premier talking point has a very specific genesis.

It figured in the case for the defense in the Einsatzgruppen Trial, conducted by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal from late 1947 to the spring of 1948. The Einsatzgruppen were the paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany, which carried out mass murder by shooting in Nazi-occupied Europe. They destroyed well over a million Jews, and two million people all told. After the war, their surviving senior commanders were put on trial at Nuremberg, charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes.

The chief defendant, SS-Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf, had been commander of Einsatzgruppe D, which carried out mass murders in Moldova, southern Ukraine, and the Caucasus. An economist and father of five, he had supervised the killing of 90,000 Jews. Ohlendorf imagined that he had a moral conscience. The killers under his command, he told a U.S. Army prosecutor, were prohibited from using infants for target practice, or smashing their heads against trees.

During trial testimony, the prosecutor pressed Ohlendorf: “You were going out to shoot down defenseless people. Now, didn’t the question of the morality of that enter your mind?” Ohlendorf referred to the Allied bombings of Germany as a context:

I am not in a position to isolate this occurrence from the occurrences of 1943, 1944, and 1945 where with my own hands I took children and women out of the burning asphalt myself, and with my own hands I took big blocks of stone from the stomachs of pregnant women; and with my own eyes I saw 60,000 people die within 24 hours.

A judge immediately pointed out that his own killing spree preceded those bombings. But this would become known as the “Dresden defense,” to which Ohlendorf resorted still another time, in this exchange:

Ohlendorf: I have seen very many children killed in this war through air attacks, for the security of other nations, and orders were carried out to bomb, no matter whether many children were killed or not.

Q: Now, I think we are getting somewhere, Mr. Ohlendorf. You saw German children killed by Allied bombers and that is what you are referring to?

Ohlendorf: Yes, I have seen it.

Q: Do you attempt to draw a moral comparison between the bomber who drops bombs hoping that it will not kill children and yourself who shot children deliberately? Is that a fair moral comparison ?

Ohlendorf: I cannot imagine that those planes which systematically covered a city that was a fortified city, square meter for square meter, with incendiaries and explosive bombs and again with phosphorus bombs, and this done from block to block, and then as I have seen it in Dresden likewise the squares where the civilian population had fled to—that these men could possibly hope not to kill any civilian population, and no children.

Ohlendorf thought this defense so powerful that he invoked it yet another time:

The fact that individual men killed civilians face to face is looked upon as terrible and is pictured as specially gruesome because the order was clearly given to kill these people; but I cannot morally evaluate a deed any better, a deed which makes it possible, by pushing a button, to kill a much larger number of civilians, men, women, and children.

(The chief prosecutor, an American, called this particular iteration “exactly what a fanatical pseudo-intellectual SS-man might well believe.”)

At Nuremberg, this sort of tu quoque defense (“I shouldn’t be punished because they did it too”) wasn’t admissible. Still, in the verdict of the Einsatzgruppen Trial, the judges chose to refute it. “It was submitted,” the judges wrote, “that the defendants must be exonerated from the charge of killing civilian populations since every Allied nation brought about the death of noncombatants through the instrumentality of bombing.” The judges would have none of it:

A city is bombed for tactical purposes… it inevitably happens that nonmilitary persons are killed. This is an incident, a grave incident to be sure, but an unavoidable corollary of battle action. The civilians are not individualized. The bomb falls, it is aimed at the railroad yards, houses along the tracks are hit and many of their occupants killed. But that is entirely different, both in fact and in law, from an armed force marching up to these same railroad tracks, entering those houses abutting thereon, dragging out the men, women and children and shooting them.

The tribunal sentenced Ohlendorf to death. He was hanged in June 1951.

 

Jesus vs Muhammad | Jordan Peterson

Published by Papa Giorgio

“All of the nine founders of religion, with the exception of Jesus Christ, are reported in their respective sacred scriptures as having passed through a preliminary period of uncertainty, or of searching for religious light. All the founders of the non-Christian religions evinced inconsistencies in their personal character; some of them altered their practical policies under change of circumstances. Jesus Christ alone is reported as having had a consistent God-consciousness, a consistent character himself, and a consistent program for his religion.”

Robert Hume, The World’s Living Religions (New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959), 285-286.

SEE MY PDF: “MUHAMMAD vs. JESUS“

MUHAMMAD

MUHAMMAD – Ordered his followers, as well as personally participating in, both digging their graves and cutting the throats of between 600-to-900 men, women, and children. Jews. Some of the women and children were taken as property. He was a military tactician that lied and told others to use deception that ultimately led to the death of many people (taqiyya): The word “Taqiyya” literally means: “Concealing, precaution, guarding.”

  • In the West, what is said and done more or less corresponds to the intentions of the speaker and the doer. Liars and cheats abound, of course, but generally they can go only so far before being caught out in the contractual relationships of their society. Lying and cheating in the Arab world is not really a moral matter but a method of safeguarding honor and status, avoiding shame, and at all times exploiting possibilities, for those with the wits for it, deftly and expeditiously to convert shame into honor on their own account, and vice versa for their opponents. If honor so demands, lies and cheating may become absolute imperatives. In Shia practice, a man is allowed what is called “precautionary dissimulation,” a recognition that truth may be impossible in some contexts.
  • Pierre Bourdieu, the French social anthropologist, has pointed out that no dishonor attaches to such primary transactions as selling short weight, deceiving anyone about quality, quantity or kind of goods, cheating at gambling, and bearing false witness. The doer of these things is merely quicker off the mark than the next fellow; owing him nothing, he is not to be blamed for taking what he can.[1]

Islamic ethics include deceiving the Kafir. The doctrine of deception is found in the Sunna and the Koran. The Arabic name for sacred deception is called taqiyya.

We never see any depictions of Muhammad with children, we just know that he most likely acquired a child bride at age six and consummated that “marriage” when she was nine[2]  — he was a pedophile in other words. While the Qu’ran states that a follower of this book should have no more than 4 wives, we know of course that he had many more, about 5 more in fact. And “Just War Theory” cannot apply to Muhammad and Muslim’s since when he said:

“I have been ordered by Allah to fight against people until they testify that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that Muhammad is Allah’s Apostle and offer prayers perfectly and give the obligatory charity…then they will save their lives and property from me” (Sahih Muslim 1.24).

He ordered his followers to raid caravans, “This is the caravan of the Quraysh possessing wealth. It is likely that Allah may give it to you as booty.”[3] As he was dying, he said these now famous words, “I have been made victorious with terror.”[4]

Many more examples could be provided! Even when it comes to “salvation,” the most ardent/obedient Muslim still leaves his or her entrance into “heaven” is, in the end, an impersonal act of arbitrary divine power.… no story of love and sacrifice or assurance is provided.

[1] David Pryce-Jones, The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs (Chicago, IL: Ivan R, Dee Publishers, 2009), 4, 38.

[2] Bukhari, vol. 5, book 63, no. 3896; cf. Bukhari, vol. 7, book 67, no. 5158.

[3] Ibn Sa’d, Kitab Al-Tabaqat Al-Kabir, translated by S. Moinul Haq and H. K. Ghazanfar, vol. 2 (Kitab Bhavan, n.d.), 9.

[4] Muhammed Ibn Ismaiel Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari: The Translation of the Meanings, translated by Muhammad M. Khan, vol. 4, bk. 56, no. 2977 (Darussalam, 1997).

I was reading through some passages in the Quran not too long ago and came across Quran chapter 79, verse 42. I immediately noticed how similar this verse in the Quran is to Mark 13:31-32 … So, I started to do some more research on who Muhammad REALLY thought he was compared to Jesus. The findings are quite shocking!

JESUS

JESUS – When Peter struck off the ear of the soldier, healed it. Christ said if his followers were of any other kingdom, they would fight to get him off the cross. He also told Peter if he lived by the sword, he would die by it.; Christ invited and used children as examples of how Jewish adults should view their faith… something culturally radical – inviting children into an inner-circle of a group of status-oriented men such as the Pharisees was unheard of. Especially saying to them their faith must be similar; Jesus, and thusly us, can access true love because the Triune God has eternally loved (The Father loves the Son, etc. ~ unlike the Unitarian God of Islam).

Love between us then has roots in our Creator… [examples]:

  1. my wife and I for instance, as well as family,
  2. the love in community/Body of Christ,
  3. love for our enemies, …etc…

…has eternal foundations in God; This love from God towards us has caused a Sacrifice to ensure our salvation (John 3:16-17; 5:25; 6:47). Jesus said as well that he has “spoken openly to the world… always teaching in synagogues or at the temple, where all the Jews come together. ‘I said nothing in secret’” (John 18:20). The Bible also states that God cannot lie (Numbers 23:19; Titus 1:2; Hebrews 6:18) … and Jesus is God in orthodoxy (i.e., Jesus cannot lie). The love of Christ and the relationship he offers is bar-none the center piece of our faith… something the Muslim does not have. Which is why the Church evolved because they have a point of reference in Christ to come back to. In Matthew chapter 5 we find Jesus’ teaching and commending us to the following:

THE BEATITUDES | BELIEVERS ARE SALT AND LIGHT | CHRIST FULFILLS THE LAW | MURDER BEGINS IN THE HEART | ADULTERY BEGINS IN THE HEART | DIVORCE PRACTICES CENSURED | TELL THE TRUTH | GO THE SECOND MILE | LOVE YOUR ENEMIES

Muhammad would never be able to speak of these things that Christ did in the record of Matthew. Which is why whenever given the chance I say to a Muslim I pray they emulate Jesus’ life and follow Him rather than Muhammad. I wish Muhammad had read and followed Jesus’ teachings as well.

This is a segment of a Muslim caller into the Michael Medved Show and both Mosab Yousef and Michael Medved respond. Yousef compares Christians to Muhammad, the caller compares Muslims to Christians:

AQUINAS THOUGHTS ON MUHAMMAD

St. Thomas Aquinas is one of the most prolific thinkers in Western history; his words should not be taken lightly, regardless of your cultural/religious background. Subscribe now to stay updated with excellent content.

BREITBART has a neat story about Aquinas and his views on Islam… here is a portion of it:

…In one of his most significant works, the voluminous Summa contra gentiles, which Aquinas wrote between 1258 and 1264 AD, the scholar argued for the truth of Christianity against other belief systems, including Islam.

Aquinas contrasts the spread of Christianity with that of Islam, arguing that much of Christianity’s early success stemmed from widespread belief in the miracles of Jesus, whereas the spread of Islam was worked through the promise of sensual pleasures and the violence of the sword.

Mohammad, Aquinas wrote, “seduced the people by promises of carnal pleasure to which the concupiscence of the flesh goads us. His teaching also contained precepts that were in conformity with his promises, and he gave free rein to carnal pleasure.”

Such an offer, Aquinas contended, appealed to a certain type of person of limited virtue and wisdom.

“In all this, as is not unexpected, he was obeyed by carnal men,” he wrote. “As for proofs of the truth of his doctrine, he brought forward only such as could be grasped by the natural ability of anyone with a very modest wisdom. Indeed, the truths that he taught he mingled with many fables and with doctrines of the greatest falsity.”

Because of the weakness of Islam’s contentions, Aquinas argued, “no wise men, men trained in things divine and human, believed in him from the beginning.” Instead, those who believed in him “were brutal men and desert wanderers, utterly ignorant of all divine teaching, through whose numbers Muhammad forced others to become his followers by the violence of his arms.”

Islam’s violent methods of propagation were especially unconvincing to Aquinas, since he found that the use of such force does not prove the truth of one’s claims, and are the means typically used by evil men.

“Mohammad said that he was sent in the power of his arms,” Aquinas wrote, “which are signs not lacking even to robbers and tyrants.”

At the time Aquinas was writing, Islam was generally considered a Christian heresy, since it drew so heavily on Christian texts and beliefs. Aquinas wrote that Mohammed “perverts almost all the testimonies of the Old and New Testaments by making them into fabrications of his own, as can be seen by anyone who examines his law.”

According to the noted historian Hilaire Belloc, Islam “began as a heresy, not as a new religion. It was not a pagan contrast with the Church; it was not an alien enemy. It was a perversion of Christian doctrine. Its vitality and endurance soon gave it the appearance of a new religion, but those who were contemporary with its rise saw it for what it was—not a denial, but an adaptation and a misuse, of the Christian thing.”…

MUCH MORE

Here are some ways to deal with Muslim apologists questioning Jesus’ Divinity:

(Above) Nabeel Qureshi, a former Muslim, answers a question from a faithful Muslim about how Jesus could have both a Divine (God) nature and a human nature without confusion or contradiction. See more from Nabeel HERE  (He has passed away)

Nabeel is battling stomach cancer, so any prayers would be a gracious help.

Here is a more in-depth presentation dealing with how the question is typically raised.

Muslims around the world are being trained to ask Christians, “Where did Jesus say, ‘I am God, worship me,’ in those exact words?” However, if Muslims are suggesting that Jesus could only claim to be God by uttering a specific sentence, we may reply by asking, “Where did Jesus say, ‘I am only a prophet, don’t worship me,’ in those exact words?” The unreasonable demand for a particular statement, if applied consistently, would thus force Muslims to reject their own view!

Fortunately, we have a simple way to examine what Jesus said about himself. According to both the Bible and the Qur’an, there are certain claims that only God can truly make. For instance, God alone can correctly state that he created the universe. Of course, a mere human being can pronounce the words, “I created the universe,” but the statement would be false coming from anyone other than God.

Hence, if Jesus said things that can only truly be said by God, we must conclude that Jesus claimed to be God. Interestingly, Jews, Christians, and Muslims agree on many of the claims that cannot be properly made by (or about) mere human beings. In this video, we consider several examples of such claims.

For more on the deity of Christ, watch these videos by David Wood:

Among the major differences between Islam and Christianity is that of the character and nature of God as understood by the Bible and the Qur’an. For the Bible, Yahweh is a relational God, a God who appears to his people throughout the Old Testament, who took on flesh in the incarnation of Jesus Christ in the New Testament, and who will be present, the Bible claims, in heaven with us once again: “For now we see through a glass, darkly,” wrote the apostle Paul; “but then face to face.” [76] This is very different from Allah in the Qur’an, a God who is distant and remote, transcendent and lofty, who does not deign to step down into his creation, and is not present in Paradise. As Muslim theologian Isma’il al Faruqi writes:

Allah does not reveal Himself to anyone in any way. Allah reveals only his will… Allah does not reveal himself to anyone… that is the great difference between Christianity and Islam.[77]

Central, too, to the Christian understanding of God is that Yahweh is loving; indeed, the Bible goes as far as to boldly make the claim that God is love,[78] the one whose character and nature define what love actually is. You will commonly hear people opine that all religions teach that God is love, but this is simply not true – for instance, nowhere does the Qur’an claim that “Allah is love.”[79]

Finally, at the heart of Christianity stands the belief that, in Jesus, God has experienced suffering, paying the price of the cross in order to reconcile humanity to himself. Now atheists may choose to dismiss, laugh at, or even scoff at that claim, but it is a claim unique to Christianity.[80] It is certainly not an idea found in Islam, where the Qur’an goes as far as to deny that the historical event of Jesus’ crucifixion ever happened.

It has long fascinated me that when Christianity talks about the cross and the suffering of God, it is doing something quite startling, namely reversing the traffic pattern of every other religion, world view, and belief system. All other religions of which I am aware tend to work in one of three basic ways: they claim that if you know the right things, do the right things, or experience the right things, then you will achieve paradise, nirvana, wisdom, a higher state of consciousness, good teeth — whatever it is you are looking for. Islam adopts this model (“Keep the commandments”), as does, incidentally, the New Atheism, whose message is that if you think the right way — think good, secular, scientific thoughts — you’ll be one of the smart ones, one of the brights,[81] one of the elite, the elect.

[76] 1 Corinthians 13:12 (KJV).

[77] Isma’il al Faruqi, Christian Mission and Islamic Da’wah: Proceedings of the Chambésy Dialogue Consultation, Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 1982, pp. 47-48.

[78] 1 John 4:16.

[79]  And many Muslim theologians argue that Muslims should not use the word “love” when talking about Allah; see e.g. Murad Wilfried Hofmann, “Differences between the Muslim and the Christian Concept of Divine Love” in 14th General Conference of the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, Amman, Jordan, 2007. See also Gordon Nickel, “The Language of Love in Qur’an and Gospel” in Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala and Angel Urban, (eds), Sacred Text: Explorations in Lexicography, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2009, pp. 223-248.

[80] If you wish to understand this idea (which, whatever you make of it, is the central claim at the heart of Christianity), a great place to start is John Stott, The Cross of Christ, Leicester: IVP, 2006.

[81] A nauseatingly self-congratulatory term coined by some of the New Atheists to mark themselves off from the rest of the world, whom they clearly perceive as dimwits. See Daniel Dennett, “The Bright Stuff“, The New York Times, 12 July 2003.

Andy Banister, The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist: Or, The Dreadful Consequences of Bad Arguments (Oxford, England: Monarch Books, 2015), 62-63.

I am not a fan of the show… I think it is borderline blasphemous; but was listening to him (Neil Saavedra, AKA, “Jesus Christ”) on the way to get coffee for the wife and I while we were watching the niece. I enjoyed the call. I may start listening and uploading stuff like it in the future. BUT KNOW that a dude who responds like Jesus, is, …well… creepy and again ~ borderline blasphemous in my mind.

“Muhammad” Talks to “Jesus Christ”

I am not a fan of the show… I think it is borderline blasphemous; but was listening to him (Neil Saavedra, AKA, “Jesus Christ”) on the way to get coffee for the wife and I while we were watching the niece. I enjoyed the call. I may start listening and uploading stuff like it in the future. BUT KNOW that a dude who responds like Jesus, is, …well… creepy and again ~ borderline blasphemous in my mind.